Martha has raised awareness of the honeybee's plight, notably through the 2009 BBC 4 programme 'Who Killed the Honey Bee?'

How do you tell if your bees need feeding over the winter?

The books tell you to heft the hive and if it feels light, then consider a feed. Like much of the technical advice doled out,  this is easier said than done and after a fair bit of hefting, I  couldn't really make up my mind so I decided to play it safe.

I put some pieces of fondant - sugar candy - in the holes on the crown board which sits on top of the frames which contain the bees. This is also an old beekeeping tradition whereby the bees are given a little Christmas present of candy. This solid form of sugar is easier for the bees to take in during the winter than the syrup form which has to be evaporated by the bees flapping their wings.

I also had a less pleasant chore. You may remember that last year one of my brood boxes got infected by wax moth. Their larvae create a horrible kind of fluff which spreads all over the frames. This was a pretty bad infestation so I put off  cleaning the frames of all the wax but I have run out of excuses. 

This is a big step because the bees have done a lot of work to create all those wax hexagons but in the end I didn't want to risk infecting my other hives. I have saved some of the frames which didn't look too bad and I am hoping a good frost will finish off the moth eggs.

The next step was to sterilise the frames with a blow torch. Very satisfying - they are not just for creme brûlée you know!

The cartoon above is another from John Goodison's Small World series.

In fact minutes later I saw a wasp flying around the bedroom and realised that I had been stung.  I took great pleasure in swatting it but days later the swelling is still there.

On a happier note I thought I would post a list of my favourite bee books as you may have some reading time over the holidays.

Ted Hooper's Guide to Bees and Honey - this is the bible though rather severe in tone.

Collins Beekeepers Bible - beautifully produced with all sorts of information.

The Hive by Bee Wilson - with that name, I guess she had to write the book. A wonderful history of man's obsession with bees over time.

A World Without Bees by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum which spells out the crisis affecting the bee population. They have also written a lovely guide Bees in the City The urban beekeepers' handbook.

For complete beginners I recommend Bees at the Bottom of the Garden which I was given a few years back and relish its simplicity.

On a more scientific front, Honeybee Democracy is a fascinating account by an American professor of biology of how the hive makes collective decisions.

For bees in literature,  go to Vergil's Georgics, Cato on Agriculture and Sylvia Plath.

The cartoon above is another from John Goodison's Small World series.

My photographic skills aren't up to capturing it but if you look very, very closely you can see one crawling in.

And quite right I haven't put a mouseguard on yet nor wire meshing to guard against green woodpeckers.

So many predators, so little time.

 It was a glorious sunny weekend so we went out for a long cycle ride. At a local farmers' market, I had a chat with a beekeeper who told me he was worried about the mild weather. The trouble is that bees think it's spring and fly out looking for flowers. There are barely any in bloom so they come back hungry and eat up their stores.

After the Market, I went back home and checked on my hive. Yes, they were all out enjoying the sunshine and ignored all my pleas to go back to bed. At this time of year, they should be all snug in a big ball of brood, not gadding about. Well, it  looks like I will have to feed them up with sugar fondant before very long.

The other big news in my life is that The World at One has been extended by 15 minutes. My colleague Eddie Mair, the PM presenter speculated that I would fill the extra time with bee stories - and then played a clip of me presenting with a loud buzzing in the background.

The illustration above is how one listener imagined the scene!

I thought I would just update you on what's been happening with my bees. I lost one colony this year to wasps and the brood frames became infected with wax moth.

The other colony was always much stronger and I have made all the preparations for winter. It has a much larger brood as the queen has laid in a super as well as the brood box itself. This is known as brood and a half. There is also a super filled with honey on top so I hope there are plenty of stores for the winter. The books always say just "heft" the hives go see how heavy they are and whether the bees need more feeding but as usual I find that very hard to gauge.

Anyway my plan this year is to follow Bill Turnbull's advice and to feed them with some sugar fondant during the course of the winter. I really hope they survive.

The rest of the work involves putting all the equipment away in our shed and making sure that this giant stack is mouse proof. Last year they feasted on my frames as they like the wax.  Bee work certainly isn't worry free!

I hate wasps. Yes, yes, I know they are pollinators and as vital to the natural world as bees BUT this is the second time they have attacked my hives and now it's personal.  

It all began this year when my bee mentor Jan went to inspect her hive which is next to mine in the garden and discovered a wasps' nest underneath it. They had robbed out her colony and left it so weak that there was an infestation of revolting wax moth inside.

I asked a friend to destroy the wasps nest and he went on a night time mission to make sure they were all inside. Then I went to inspect the hives and discovered that my beautiful good natured New Zealand/Italian bees (see previous blogs) had all gone and had been replaced by wasps and a few stray bees from another hive.

The last time this happened my husband said I had been Bee-reaved. He'd better not try that again or he will join the wasps on my hit list.

Luckily my fierce bees have survived and have plenty of stores so fingers crossed, they will survive the winter.

But while I pottered around with other stuff, the bees discovered their lost supers which were rapidly covered again. Back to Square One. In fact it encouraged a positive orgy of robbing which is very dangerous at this time of year as it can encourage strange bees or wasps to attack hives for honey.

I am also worried about my Number One hive with the lovely mild mannered Italian bees (see previous blogs). They are vastly depleted in number which means there must have been a swarm while I was away on holiday. I can see some larvae there but they could be left over from the old queen. So when I inspect the colony again this weekend, I really hope I see signs of the new queen laying otherwise I am in real trouble. I shall also start feeding the colonies up for the weekend and begin my varroa control which means leaving a sticky pad of Apiguard for the bees to walk across. Otherwise there will be no smug photo next summer.   

Of course the overall problems for bees do continue as the latest figures from the BBKA show with 13 per cent of colonies dying out. You can find out more about the underlying causes by watching my programme Who Killed The Honey Bee? which is still on the BBC iPlayer.

This has been an amazing spring for bees. Both my colonies are now huge and last weekend I decided that it was time to extract some honey.

This is never simple. As Virgil put it in the Georgics:

I know I have droned on (sorry for pun) about the trials and tribulations of beekeeping over the past year but here is another one. You wouldn't think that storing equipment would cause too much trouble but it does.

It is time to get my bee blog out of hibernation.

Sorry for the long pause but not a lot happens over the winter months. That is apart from anxiety and fretful pacing to the bottom of the garden to see if there are any sightings of bees.

After their big autumn feed of syrup, the bees cluster together for warmth  in a big ball in the brood box. They occasionally venture out on a sunny day to, as the text books put it, to defecate. This winter was so cold that I didn't see them at all and really began to worry that both of my colonies had died out. This has happened in past years and it is really depressing. 

So one sunny Saturday I went to have a look and was rewarded by the sight of bees flying in and out of one of my hives. These are the ones laid by my Queen-by-post, an Italian/New Zealand mix. Regular readers will know that they are my favourites, light yellow in colour and very docile. There wasn't a peep out of the other hive though and I feared the worst. It was still too cold to open up to check though.

Last weekend I thought I could take the risk. So with my heart in my mouth,  I took off the roof and looked through the holes in the crown board.

Yes, hallelujah, the bees were there. I did my own version of the waggle dance in celebration. 

So both hives have survived the winter.There is still grave danger though of starvation until spring flowers start to bloom so I have put some fondant on top - like the icing which bakers use. That is better for the bees this time of year as they don't have to evaporate water as they do with syrup.

But for the time being, I am a very happy beekeeper.

Martha's article from the Evening Standard

In front of me were 14 jars of pure pleasure with colours ranging from the palest straw to deep amber. You could imagine it almost as an art installation: the areas of London represented through their honey. Samples had been garnered from deepest Peckham, high on Hampstead Heath, from the rooftops of the Royal Festival Hall and both Tates.

I imagined the park beds of lupins, window boxes of geraniums, borders of lavender all over the capital which have been providing bees with vital nectar and pollen. In the countryside you get honey which comes from one particular flower — such as heather honey from the Yorkshire moors. I have tasted lovely wild thyme honey in Greece and some gathered from lemon blossom in Italy, but London honey is special because it comes from a huge variety of flowers in gardens all over the city. What's more, unlike in the countryside, there are few pesticides — London honey is very pure.

Beekeeping has become incredibly popular in the capital. In the centre of London alone there are 180 beekeepers. The north London group has closed its doors to new members until 2011 as they don't have the resources to mentor more novices. The publicity about the threat to the honey bee has stirred lots of people, myself included, to take up this absorbing hobby and recent reports claim the urban beekeeping boom is reversing any decline in the wider bee population.

But not everyone is happy about that. John Chapple, president of the London Beekeepers' Association, who keeps four hives at Buckingham Palace, told me this week that there simply aren't enough flowers in London to sustain any more colonies of bees.

Nevertheless Capital Bee has just been set up, a campaign supported by the Mayor which promotes community beekeeping in London. In December it will hold its first summit, with talks on the issues facing bees, and the economic and environmental benefits of community beekeeping in the city.

Chapple has been told by the charity behind Capital Bee, Sustain, that Boris Johnson plans to fund 50 more hives on community food-growing spaces around the capital. Chapple calls this an “ill-thought-out idea”, just as he also does not support the beekeeper training part of the Co-op's £500,000 Plan Bee project launched in 2009, which also funds bee research and encourages the planting of bee-friendly wildflowers. Plan Bee has so far put 24 London candidates through its training programme. A further 20 have taken a beekeeping taster course and the classroom sessions have been oversubscribed.

“It's out of touch with what's needed,” says Chapple. “People need to grow plants and look after what bees really need. It's the in-thing to throw money at beekeeping but too many people are jumping on the bandwagon.”

Indeed, recent figures from the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA) show a 50 per cent increase in the number of UK bee colonies in the past six months, with 3.5 million pounds of honey harvested this summer by amateur beekeepers and the highest yields in the South-East.

But while for some this may look like too many hives, according to the BBKA this year's honey production is worth £200 million to the agricultural economy due to the value of commercial crops that benefit from bee pollination. And, according to Capital Bee, since most of the crops that we rely on for food supplies are bee-pollinated, an effort to increase the bee population is essential to secure global food supplies.

For Chapple, the key in London is that park keepers avoid hybrid plants which are no good for bees and return to more traditional borders. 

I was interested to hear his advice on how to judge different kinds of honey: the key qualities for a technical honey judge are aroma, viscosity and clarity. Being more of an amateur, I decided to concentrate purely on flavour.

For me, this tasting was a bittersweet experience. For the first time since I began keeping honey seven years ago I was unable to harvest any honey myself this summer. Last year I had two thriving colonies but both came a cropper.

The first hive was robbed by wasps in search of food late in the season after most of the fruit had gone. They killed all the bees. The second hive seemed to be thriving. On bright winter days I would watch the bees flying around and so assumed all was well. But when we opened the hive in spring, there was no brood — eggs — which meant my queen had gone.

I made several panicky phone calls to see if I could buy a new queen but it was too early in the season for an English one. After much research I managed to track down an imported queen which was an Italian-New Zealand cross. She arrived by post in a little yellow cage surrounded by attendant bees. The entrance was barred by a block of sugar which my bees ate their way through and so learned to get used to the scent of the new queen.

I don't know whether it's the Italian or the New Zealand genes but she's been a delight, laying the most mild-mannered bees you can imagine. 

There is an adage in beekeeping: in the first year you get either bees or honey, so I decided to let them keep all the stores for themselves to get through the winter. By next summer let's hope my bees are buzzing with the sweet smell of success.

The British Beekeepers' Association is running a scheme called adoptahive.com — there's absolutely no risk of being stung!

Sticky and sweet: Martha's guide to the tastiest honey in town

My own stores are running dangerously low so I was delighted when the Standard asked me to taste a variety of London honeys. I began with the great institutions that have hives on their roofs.

The Royal Festival Hall hive is shaped like its building and I enjoyed the rich flavour of its honey (3/5). Tate Modern's jar (4/5) was superior to that of its sister, Tate Britain (2/5), which was bland, unlike the contents of its often controversial gallery.

Next, the city's green spaces. The honey from Regent's Park had a strange aroma — cat's wee — but the taste was pleasant, with a touch of lilac (3/5). An expert said there could have been ivy flowers around: these have a bitter smell, which mellows over time. English Wildflower Honey from Hampstead Heath was darker than many and had an interesting, almost maple syrup flavour (4/5).

From south of the Thames I tried Wandsworth Floral Honey, which was disappointing, with a straightforward taste (2/5). However I really enjoyed the Kennington jar, which smelt and tasted of jasmine flowers, beautifully fresh (4/5). And Walworth Garden Farm (4/5), too, had an intriguing blend of flavours.

North of the river, Tufnell Park honey had a touch of fudge (3/5). The jar from King's Cross luckily lacked any whiff of canal and had its own distinctive flavour (4/5).

Those that failed to inspire were Fortnums, Nunhead and Wimbledon (2/5).

My favourite came as a surprise. It was from Peckham, with a wonderful creamy flavour, almost like Scottish tablet/toffee, with subtle underlying scents of different flowers. Could there be a secret wildflower meadow in Peckham? Produced by the Kairos Community Trust, the honey is not on sale yet but is made by a project that helps people suffering with drug and alcohol addiction (5/5).

 I was also working with my bees this weekend without any mishaps, thank goodness. They are all fed with lots of syrup for the winter (forty pounds of sugar per hive) and treated for varroa with thymol. 

I got some excellent advice from one beekeeper who's been doing it for fifty years. I met him when I opened a new training apiary in Barsham in Suffolk. I especially enjoyed meeting the junior beekeepers. The Waveney Beekeeping Group are going to run training courses and breed new colonies for all those people who are keen to join this eccentric fraternity.

This is the time of the year when if you are lucky enough, then you can harvest some honey. Sadly that joy is not for me this summer. To recap, one of my colonies was robbed out by wasps last year so I have replaced it with a swarm bought from my mentor. They are extremely fierce and I am thinking about giving them a new queen.

Anyway I haven't had a chance to check my bees for a while as I have been away. When I opened them up, I was rather depreesed. All the stores of honey in the supers (boxes) above the brood box had gone.. So what's happened? Could the wasps have penetrated my Maginot line of traps around the hives? Or could the bad weather have meant the bees have had to consume the honey themselves? Either way it leaves both colonies in a precarious shape for the winter. I have started feeding them with sugar syrup today and have my fingers crossed.

I have also put a little  box of thymol in each hive to try to protect them against the dreaded varroa mite, the main parasite which attacks the honey bee.

Above, Martha feeding her bees sugar syrup for the winter.

I am a long way from my bees, travelling on a train down the Hudson River towards New York City. I have been staying with friends in the Catskill mountains. My limbs are still aching from a five mile hike. I talked a lot about my hives and my friends expressed interest in keeping bees themselves.

But then we discovered that beekeeping in the Catskills is a very different proposition from England. The problem is bears! I always thought their love of honey is fictional along the lines of Winnie the Pooh's yearning for "a little something". But bears will do anything for honey. Here beekeepers have tried solar wires to keep them out. Powered by the sun, these give out an electric shock when touched. However the bears are prepared to suffer that pain in order to reach the honey. The only deterrent is a large dog.

Back home my bees aren't facing such dramatic threats although one colony has suffered a bit of robbing. When I get back, I will start treating for Varroa, the horrible mites which attack bees. Then I will begin feeding them with sugar syrup for the winter. I don't think there will be any honey for me this year though. I can join those frustrated bears.

I had a social engagement this week which may seem rather strange to people outside the beekeeping world. We went to visit friends for lunch. So far, so normal. Delicious tapas. Then after lunch we all changed into our veils to have a good old snoop around our host's hives. He's certainly a much tidier beekeeper than me,  as my other half kept saying in an annoying kind of way.

My own (little) colonies are thriving. No 1 hive which was restocked by eggs laid by  Queen-bee-by-post is full of the most lovely, docile, light coloured bees. I have now put a super on top so they can spread out and store some honey. No 2 hive's bees are a lot more ferocious - they're from a swarm but they too have a super.

There is an adage that in the first year you get bees or honey but not both. Even if my bees do fill a super with honey, I will have the dilemma of whether to extract it which is extremely tempting as it will come from wildflowers rather than rape which is more viscous and doesn't have such a delicate flavour. Or should I leave it as stores for the bees to help them through the winter? Their own honey would be more nutritious than any sugar syrup I could provide. But what if I feel like a little something, as Winnie the Pooh might say?

PS. John Everett from Applebee Aviary near Norwich has told me that this year has been a record for him - averaging 66lb honey per colony!

(The photo above shows Martha's calm Italian bees.)

It does take some commitment to leave the Sunday papers behind and to  rise out of the deckchair in order to put on your beekeeping outfit. But the work had to be done so on the hottest day of the year, I wore black jeans and a long sleeved T shirt under my baggy white trousers and beekeeping top with veil. It was like a sauna underneath.

I first checked the hive with my Queen-by-Post. She's laying well but there's still not many stores of honey after a difficult spring so I put on a feeder of syrup. These bees are very light in colour! And then onto my new acquisition. A friend has sold me a swarm so that I can have a backup hive. This colony is also doing well but it's still small so I can't imagine getting any honey this year.

I have also laid homemade wasp traps around the garden - jam jars with a hole in the lid, filled with water and jam. Having lost a whole colony to wasps last year, I am taking no chances!

This beekeeping lark sure is a rollercoaster. One moment I was celebrating my bees' survival through the winter. The next my spirits were dashed when I realised that they had no queen. She must have died over the winter as there were no eggs in the hive. I made a panicky call to the British Beekeepers Association and to Thorne's, the bee suppliers. It was too early in the year to get a mated queen in this country so I was put in touch with Peter Kemble who imports them - a New Zealand Italian mix! But how would I get my queen? Amazingly they come by post in a little yellow plastic case with attendants. The entrance is blocked by candy which is eaten by the hive bees. By the time they have released her, they are used to her smell and so won't kill her.

Spring is always a nerve wracking time for beekeepers. I have been very disappointed in the past to find a hive filled with dead bees after the winter. My husband once made a cruel joke as I stared sadly at their little corpses "I suppose you are Bee-Reaved now."