Land of Cows and Bees… 🐝 🐝

My brother always joked with me that the promised land - a land flowing with milk and honey - must also surely be a land full of cows and bees! Well, it’s quite common to find cows filling the roads here when we’re on our way to work and now it seems it’s the time for bees!

I must admit I do find a lot of pleasure in watching the natural world around us here in Zambia. Whether it’s the huge number of stars i get to see most nights while taking the dog out, or the beautiful birds that as a child I only saw in cages (blue wax bills and yellow canaries), or even the huge moles people sometimes seem to catch👇🏻, it’s all quite amazing.

Recently, we found a squirrel in our garden who had made its home in one of the trees👇🏻The girls quickly called him BananaChip because he looked far more yellow than uk squirrels and we weren’t actually sure whether he might in fact be a chipmunk. Anyway, he loved taunting our dog and Bobby had spent hours and hours barking and scratching a fallen log which BananaChip (as well as lots of lizards etc) sometimes hide inside.

Then just over a week ago we suddenly found BananaChip’s home was swarming with bees...

and despite our efforts to tempt the bees into a hive👇🏻we put next to the tree, hoping of course for honey, in the end we had to smoke the bees out and quickly fill the entrances to BananaChip’s former home with mud 😢 Poor thing!

Still, today we were pleasantly surprised to find another tree, just up on the hillside by our house, full of delicious honeycomb!

I’ve had honey straight from the comb before but only today did I realise you can just eat the whole thing!👇🏻You can spread the honey including the honeycomb on toast, drop it into hot drinks and the natural wax just melts away 😋.