Last week when Bryn opened the lid of the hive, the wax in the top layer was saffron yellow. It was rather eye popping, as we are used to seeing a characteristic white or pale yellow honeycomb. I wish I had taken a picture, but didn’t have my phone with me at the time.

Not sure what is causing the bright yellow wax, but many of the flowers blooming around the hive right now are yellow, including the arugula flowers, nasturtiums and zucchini.

The picture above shows arugula flowers in front of the water tanks. These attract a lot of bees. These flowers are very small and have very long stalks so are hard to capture with an autofocus iPhone. After spending about half an hour trying to take a picture of a bee on an arugula flower, I now have 387 pictures on my phone. This was probably the best one.

Nasturtiums, one of my favourites. We eat them in salads.

This is a female zucchini flower. This year I planted “black beauty” zucchinis again and right now the zucchinis are reaching their peak.

My guess is that zucchini pollen is staining the wax. Every morning there are three to six new male zucchini flowers blooming; every morning I pick them and store them in the fridge and then every few days I dip them in a light batter and fry them with sage leaves (below). Italian Secret Recipe. New family favourite. I don’t even care about the zucchinis anymore, I just want the flowers.