2021 SO FAR AT HIVE & KEEPER: MAKING A PROMISE

Dear Diary,

I’ve been ignoring you for too long. I just wanted to wait to tell you good news and here it is…

After a busy Christmas we were left with just a handful of jars in stock which was fab of course! Imagine my surprise though when I came head to head with a ramification of Covid that hadn’t even crossed my mind: forget cardboard packaging being hard to find as online shopping goes mad and Amazon corners the market; ‘my’ square glass jars were proving incredibly hard to find. The reason being that like cardboard, the demand for glass has also rocketed largely because of the glass phials that need to be made for the vaccines. So however fast our glass manufacturers were working, running huge furnaces 24 hours a day, there’s still only a limited capacity which means my square jars are in a queue and due to be made sometime in February (hopefully).

Thankfully the beekeeping network came to my aid with suggestions of where I might find the jars I needed. I seriously think I’ve got the very last square jars in the whole of the UK: just enough to get us back up and running and jarring again! It’s my first lesson in disaster planning, and a very uncomfortable one at that. I therefore promise Dear Diary to never allow myself to get in a situation like that again.