Making honey: Sweet things in life are hard won

Thomas Quigley and Mary O’Riordan show how much work the little bee puts into producing a single jar of your morning honey.

Producing honey is hard work — a bee makes just a 12th of a teaspoon in its lifetime; a one-pound jar represents the nectar from two million flowers. We’ve been collecting it for 10,000 years. It never goes off in its raw state, has supposed health benefits, tastes heavenly and was – until the discovery of sugar – our only sweetener.

Nowadays a wide range of honeys adorn our shops, supermarkets and farmers’ markets and the displays in specialist shops can be bewildering. In Ireland we don’t half get through honey: 5500 tonnes annually.