A honey harvest in the Fevered Sleep office, 2017.
Photo by Amelia Ideh
We’ve been keeping bees since 2010. At the moment, they live on an allotment site in Hackney, London, on the edge of the River Lea, where they forage on the fruit and vegetable flowers on the allotment, in all the local gardens, and in the meadows and wetlands of the Lee Valley Park.
Over the last few years, there’s been a real rise in awareness about the importance of pollinator insects like honeybees to our ecosystems, and we’ve heard about many of the challenges that bees are currently facing, be it from pesticide use on agricultural land, to new predators moving north as the climate warms.
Our approach to beekeeping is very hands off. Unlike humans, bees have been around for hundreds of millions of years, so we reckon we don’t need to do much to help them, other than provide them with good quality hives, and support their fight against parasites and predators on the odd occasion when they might need some help.
We harvest the honey every year, and feed them with sweet sugar syrup in return (which we even scent with essential oils) so that they have plenty of food to see them through the winter.
We usually have a few jars of honey for sale, and everything we make from selling the honey helps cover the costs of giving a home to the bees. Like all city honeys, it has a really delicious, complex flavour. Sweet art.
