In an unlikely tale of rivers of honey, we recently stumbled across two extraordinary beekeepers. One of them is Dave Flanagan. These days, he runs 40 or so hives to pollinate almonds as a sideline business and says full-time beekeeping as a way of making a living, and not living at home, is for the birds. The other beekeeper is Stringy Hughston, of whom we know little except from some encounters by Des, and from what Dave has told Alan about him.

Stringy ran an amazing enterprise of some 2,400 tripled hives – hives with