I’ve just finished bottling 30 jars of heather honey gathered from my bees on the North York Moors.

I take my hive up there each autumn when the nectar supply surrounding my gallery in Thixendale has waned.

Heather honey is a dark rich honey with a strong aromatic flavour. It is not to everyone’s liking, but I’m a big fan.

Like many things, success is weather dependent. The bees need warm sunny days to do well.

They had given me 90 jars of honey made from the nectar of oil seed rape that grows close to my gallery.

I had a swarm in early May, when the queen bee left to start a new colony taking with her a chunk of my bees. This is the peak time for swarms.

But before the queen sets off for pastures new, she always ensures the continuity of the colony that she leaves behind. She does this by laying an egg in a special queen cell, which the bees feed with the famous ‘royal jelly.’ Within six weeks the new queen was laying eggs and my bee stocks started to recover. By early August the hive was humming again. So I had high expectations of getting heather honey from the moors.

But on the morning I set off with my bees, the heavens opened. The rain was horizontal as I loaded the hive onto the trailer at dawn.

And it hadn’t abated when I, and a fellow bee-keeping friend who also leaves his hives on the moors each August, dropped off the bees. Nevertheless, we continued to cook our egg and bacon breakfast on a mini gas stove that we had brought with us.

In fact, it didn’t seem to stop raining for weeks. Some parts of the country reported the worst August rainfall in years.

One weekend I took some friends and their young daughter up to visit the hive. In spite of the strong winds forecasted, my wife, daughter and I decided to pack a picnic for our guests.

As we drove through Fadmoor the wind didn’t seem so bad, but by the time we got to the place where our bees were sited it was really gusting.

Only a few bees were flying. The majority were sheltering in the hive and so it wasn’t a good time to check on them. But then the sun came out so we settled down for our picnic lunch, sheltering behind a wall close to the hives.

Some bees had had the same idea as us and were using the shelter of the wall to fly along. The children loved watching them and a couple of exhausted bees even landed on our picnic rug.

The clouds were gathering and a storm threatened, but we donned our waterproofs and decided to take a short walk across the moors regardless.

The inevitable happened – a huge cloudburst – and we sheltered on the edge of a stream under large bracken fronds while the rain passed.

In weather like this, bees cannot fly, let alone gather nectar for honey. But they must have made the most of what little sunshine they got because, although not a huge bounty, I now have enough honey for myself and some for Christmas presents for friends and family, too.