An apiary website where an empty shelf is information too
Beekeeping is the one food business where stock genuinely runs out — when the lime harvest is gone it is gone until next year, and a shop with every variety in stock twelve months a year is either buying it in or blending it. Instead of an "add to basket" button this site shows how many jars are left in the cellar, and keeps sold-out varieties on display with a note that they return next season. The second mechanism addresses the thing that makes customers return honey as spoiled: for each variety the page works out, from the harvest month and the server clock, when the jar will set — lime in December, buckwheat in February, spring blossom already crystallised. Because honey still liquid a year after harvest has either been decrystallised at a temperature that destroys its enzymes, or is not honey. The order calculator trims the number of jars to the stock and says so in a sentence rather than an error message; the form recalculates server-side and, for a sold-out variety, refuses the order rather than quietly shrinking it. The design is the only dark one in this set — honey glows against dark exactly as it does in a jar held to the light — and hexagons appear only where they mean something: as the clipped corners of the cards and the month marker. A section on what is happening in the apiary right now changes twelve times a year. What stays manual is a single line: the kilograms in the cellar after each sale.
