Stickiness in the bedroom

When Mr H. got home last Thursday he went upstairs to fetch something, and came down holding one of his socks in his hand... "There is something sticky on the floor in the bedroom...." he said.  Hmmm, now that is not a phrase anyone wants to hear!!   but no-one had been in the bedroom since he left, unless they had sneaked past me somehow.  The only thing we could think of was honey, but it didn't smell of anything and our honey it quite..well..smelly.  But then he also found it dripping down a black wool coat of mine hanging on the door, and it was honey without a doubt!

Yes we keep a couple of colonies of bees, and today's lesson is: Do not store full jars of honey somewhere that gets very warm - like the loft. 

We normally store it in the spare room, but earlier this year we were doing some building work in there so must have put the honey in the loft then.  Earlier in September he discovered that where it had got hot, the honey had bubbled up in the jars and was leaking out, lovely! So he brought it all downstairs, put batches of it in the oven on a low heat until the bubbles came to the top and could be scooped out. No problem; it's amazing what you can do to honey and have no effect on it's palatability whatsoever. We thought that was that.

But no.

Now, firstly bear in mind that we live in an old-ish cottage, built sometime in the 19th century; nothing in it is hermetically sealed. The cardboard box the jars were stored in was pretty sticky as you can imagine, but now we realise that the leaked honey had dripped: through the box - onto the loft floor beams - into the lath and plaster bedroom ceiling - onto and around a beam that runs along the ceiling - along under the anaglypta paper covering the beam - until it found a gap (or 3) and dripped onto the bedroom floor.

Mr H. went up into the loft and there was no sign of anything at all, it was dry.  But when on Sunday it was still dripping in the bedroom, we decided the only action was to strip the anaglypta off the beam and put down stuff on the floor to catch the remainder of the honey.

It's a good thing the bedroom is on our list for overhaul at some point, and that we hadn't already done it!