成人快手

It's been a bad summer for bees.听 Not that they need much sunshine, but there's not been enough sunny weather to help flowers produce any nectar, which they desperately need to make the thick, sugary, syrup we tend to spread on toast.

And the Buckfast Abbey bees are no exception.听

Resident dermatologist at Torbay Hospital and the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, Dr Dharfer Behnam, has been looking after bees at Buckfast since 2003.

Each year he takes a few weeks off and spends time with the bees, helping to increase the colonies without them swarming and leaving their hives.

The queen is slightly bigger than the drones.

His experience stems back 25 years to his early days as a medical student in Iraq, where he first began to develop his hobby.

He said he was just curious: "I mean it's like magic - this box, you put bees in with sweet material and you end up with honey."听

Coming from a scientific background, Dharfer wanted to find out more about nature.

"I got a hive of bees and in the first year I got 30 kilograms of honey which was very rewarding.

"Then I got more bees, read about them, researched their genetics and diseases and produced more honey."

But the invasion of his country put his beekeeping in Bhagdad on hold. With no one to look after the 250 colonies he had built up, the bees found new homes or died.

A shady wood where the queen bees are bred.

He said his bees were very clean, prolific and productive.

"I had some of the best bees in the Middle East and I was called the doctor who makes honey."

His interest in the Buckfast Bees stems from his dealings with the former bee-keeper there, Brother Adam, who travelled the world looking for the best bees to breed.

It was Brother Adam who put Buckfast Bees on the map.

Buckfast Bees are known to be good at collecting pollen.听 They're gentle, disease-resistant and not so likely to swarm.

Brother Adam kept working until he was 93 but his death in 1996 meant there was a place for another bee-keeper.

Dr Behnam moved to Devon with his family in 2003 and in a mutual arrangement took up his bee-keeping position at the Abbey.

Bees collect nectar and take it back to the hives.

He said: "Bees are like babies, if you don't take care of them they will die."

Behind most bee hives is a bee-keeper and Dharfer Behnam is too modest to admit the Buckfast Bees have benefited from his care and attention.听

He also knows that they would still be around even if he wasn't. "Bees have lived for hundreds of thousands of years, they can survive without human intervention.

"Every year it's like a cycle and I have to control it and at the end of the year I ask myself, what have I accomplished?"

The abbey sells the honey produced from its nine apiaries, spread across south Devon and has a fantastic machine which separates the golden liquid from its waxy enclosure, ready to put into jars.

But it's not about the amount of honey collected, for Dr Behnam - it's a challenge which he said is like scaling the highest of mountains: "It's like climbing Everest every year - it is a big task."