Bee Quest

by Dave Goulson

  At around this time Chris and I were collecting second-hand books to sell on a stall at an upcoming school fete – although I can’t recall, I imagine that my father volunteered us for this task as I can’t imagine my brother or I ever volunteering to go door-to-door in the village with a wheelbarrow, collecting unwanted books. However, as it turned out, it had unexpected benefits; amongst the piles of yellowing romance novels and endless Agatha Christie murder mysteries, I found a small book called simply Explosives. You can imagine my excitement at opening this treasure and discovering it contained details of how to make a multitude of highly dangerous, sometimes unstable compounds. It was disappointing that most of the instructions required reagents that were unavailable to a boy of twelve; for example, it was clear from the outset that I would never find a way to get hold of the necessary quantities of concentrated acids required to make TNT. However, the recipe for gunpowder looked tantalisingly possible. Gunpowder, or black powder as it is cryptically known to aficionados, contains just three ingredients: sulphur, charcoal and potassium nitrate. My children’s chemistry set contained sulphur, and charcoal was easy enough, although grinding barbecue charcoal to the required powder was a messy process. That left only potassium nitrate. The book explained that there are significant quantities of potassium nitrate in pigeon excrement, and that extraction was possible with care. It took some time to locate a pigeon fancier in the village, but eventually, by dint of a lot of furtive peering over garden fences, we spotted a pigeon loft complete with cooing occupants. If we had possessed any common sense, we would have simply knocked on the door of the house and asked for some pigeon droppings – I suspect that the owner would have been happy to give us some, so long as we gave a vaguely plausible explanation – but we feared that the owner might rumble our true intentions. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems unlikely that they would have jumped to the conclusion that we wanted the droppings so that we could make a bomb, but in our paranoid imagination this seemed a real possibility. Anyway, once we had decided against the direct approach a covert night-time operation seemed the obvious alternative. My mate Dave (one of the many) and I snuck into the garden one dark evening and were relieved to find the loft unlocked – pigeon rustling and dung theft presumably being rare occurrences in rural Shropshire at the time. It was messy and extremely smelly work scraping up the droppings into a carrier bag in the pitch black – we dared not turn on a torch – and the pigeons started to make a racket, nervously flapping about and splattering us with droppings from above, so we made a hasty retreat, satisfied with our haul. I have often wondered if the pigeon fancier noticed that someone had mysteriously cleaned out his pigeons in the middle of the night.

  The next day we set about extracting the potassium nitrate. The book didn’t explain how to do this, which was an unfortunate oversight on the part of the author. We knew it to be water soluble, so using our rudimentary knowledge of chemistry we figured that we should be able to rinse the potassium nitrate from the faeces, sieve out the solids, and then extract the chemical from the resulting solution. At the bottom of my garden we mixed the droppings into a bucket of warm water, and then sieved out the lumps using an old tea towel. It was pretty unpleasant work. We ended up with a bucket of extremely smelly, pale brownish liquid. We decided that all we then needed to do was drive off the water by boiling the liquid for a while, which should hopefully leave us with something that was mostly potassium nitrate. I started this process in an old pan on the kitchen stove, but predictably and understandably my mum immediately evicted us from the house. Luckily I had previously rigged up a Bunsen burner to an old camping-gas cylinder in the shed, so we resorted to that. It took hours, and as the liquid thickened the stench became ever more horrendous, but eventually the pan’s contents had boiled down to a sticky brown mess. It didn’t look much like potassium nitrate, which we knew was supposed to be a white crystalline solid, but we hoped that it might do the job.

  We carefully mixed the brown goo with sulphur and charcoal in the allotted proportions. The resulting mess was an interesting greenish black paste. We took a small portion, placed it on the bottom of an upturned tin can, and I gingerly applied a match, my heart hammering with excitement. The match stuttered, the powder spluttered, and then … nothing. I tried again and again but it was hopeless. Clearly there was not as much potassium nitrate in pigeon dung as we had hoped, or perhaps our extraction method was ineffective, or maybe they were just the wrong type of pigeons.

  A little research revealed that potassium nitrate was sometimes sold as a garden fertiliser. In fact, a small gardening shop close to my school in Newport turned out to stock it, along with a range of other desirable chemicals, but all were kept on a high shelf behind the counter. My friends and I surreptitiously checked them out while pretending to browse the packs of vegetable seeds. Eventually I plucked up the courage to try to buy some, certain that the shopkeeper would suspect my true purpose. He was an elderly, grey-haired man with a stern air, and he immediately started quizzing me as to what I wanted it for. I went bright red with embarrassment – I’ve always been a hopelessly unconvincing liar – and stammered that it was for an experiment for school, to see how potassium nitrate affected how well plants grew. My friends had formed a phalanx behind me for moral support, and the bolder ones chipped in various additions, including something about a school competition to see who could grow the biggest vegetables. It was vaguely plausible, though unlikely, but I stubbornly stuck to my guns as he cross-questioned me, and eventually he reluctantly brought down a two-pound box from the shelf. I’m sure he knew we were up to no good, but he couldn’t prove it and perhaps he was glad to sell something, for the shop was always very quiet. I handed over my money, grabbed the box, and we sped off before he could change his mind.

  Gunpowder proved to be tremendous fun. It didn’t explode but it burned ferociously, emitting clouds of sulphurous smoke, the evocative smell of fireworks on a cold November night. We experimented with different proportions of the ingredients, setting off small piles on a piece of slate at the bottom of the garden where the prying eyes of parents were unlikely to notice us. As we honed the mixture it burned ever faster and lighting it with a match often resulted in singed fingers, so we worked out how to make fuses from twists of loo paper soaked in potassium-nitrate solution and then dried out. We experimented with adding other chemicals from our chemistry sets to try to change the colours of the flame or the smoke, and we packed tubes of cardboard with gunpowder with various additions to produce our own primitive fireworks. They were all pretty hopeless compared to professional fireworks, but as with all things home-made they were somehow a lot more satisfying than the bought variety.

  My friend Dave came up with an alternative pyrotechnic formula, based on sodium chlorate weedkiller mixed with sugar, and we vied with each other to produce the best fireworks. We spent weeks trying to create rockets that would actually take off, though we never got the hang of this – the highest we ever managed to get one to go was about four feet into the air, before it flipped over and hurtled to the ground. Our garden lawns became pocked with brown scorch-marks from our many failed launch attempts.

  Although the powders we created were highly inflammable, they did not actually explode, which was something of a disappointment. Eventually we discovered that the only way to create explosions was to seal the powder inside a more or less airtight container, and then light it. This of course is tricky, for how do you light something once you have sealed it in a container, and how do you do so while maintaining a safe distance so as not to get blown up? My book, Explosives, was little help on this point. After a lot of discussions, trials and errors, Dave and I found the answer, in the form of the old-fashioned disposable flash cubes used in photography. Younger readers may be surprised to hear that it wasn’t so long ago that cameras didn’t come with a flash as standard, but instead had a mounting point for a disposable plastic flash cube which contained four one-use bulbs. Each time you took a
picture, the forward-pointing bulb would burn white hot and self-destruct, producing enough light to take a single photograph. You would then rotate the cube a quarter-turn to ready the next bulb for action. Amazingly, the only power needed to make one of these bulbs fry itself was a normal 1.5 volt AA battery.

  We found that these bulbs, once carefully dissected out of the plastic casing, would readily light my gunpowder or Dave’s weedkiller mix. So we made thick tubes of cardboard and filled them with our pyrotechnic powder along with a flash bulb attached to two thin wires that led out of the tube. We sealed the tubes up with layers and layers of gaffer tape. All we then needed to do was attach the wires to the terminals of a battery and, hey presto, BANG! The tubes would fly apart with an ear-splitting crack, leaving only a few smoking remains. It was brilliant fun, and before long we moved on to using copper pipes to get a bigger bang – these really made the earth shake when they went off, leaving scraps of twisted metal lying around. To ensure that we were at a safe distance, we rigged up the battery with an old-fashioned alarm clock, with a wire pushed through a hole drilled in the glass face making contact with the minute hand when it reached the vertical. In this way we could set the bombs off with a delay of up to about fifty-five minutes, and then sit and watch them go off on cue from a few hundred yards away. We had lots of fun with these homemade pipe bombs, planting them in holes in trees, crevices in the rock wall of a local abandoned quarry, and once in holes in the brick wall of a crumbling, abandoned farm building. They weren’t particularly powerful, but would usually blast a few bits of wood or rock or brick up into the air. On one occasion we even put one in the local canal, having seen dynamite fishing on the television. The blast didn’t kill any fish, but it produced a satisfying eruption of water.

  Bomb making might not seem the safest of activities for young teenagers to be engaged in, and I would absolutely not encourage such things, but it was relatively harmless compared to our tampering with the local electricity supply. On one ill-fated Sunday morning when I was thirteen, my friends Matt and Tug (Tim) and I were messing around in my garden with a piece of old, rusty barbed wire we had acquired from somewhere. It was a couple of yards long, and made an interesting whistling noise when whirled around enthusiastically above one’s head. However, this didn’t keep us interested for long and so for some reason I decided to whirl it round and then attempt to throw it from the garden, across the road in front of our house, and into the field beyond. I hadn’t noticed the electrical cables strung from telegraph post to telegraph post along the street. The barbed wire hit one, snagged, and swung around to contact a second cable at which point there was a loud bang, a shower of orange sparks, and two pieces of barbed wire fell to the ground. On closer inspection we discovered that the wire had melted right through in the middle, and was still glowing red hot on the pavement. Presumably the high voltage electricity shorting through the barbed wire had been too much for it. This was brilliant sport, and of course we wanted to do it again.

  It dawned on us that it might be wise to find somewhere a little more secluded – my front lawn not being the most discreet of locations. So we wandered off towards the edge of the village, searching for some more barbed wire as we went, since the pieces we now had were too short. It took a while to find any, but eventually we found an old coil of surplus wire attached to a fence post in the corner of a field, and by dint of a lot of bending the wire backwards and forwards we managed to break off a piece. We took it with us and headed off up the nearest lane, beyond the last house, until we found some more overhead cables. With hindsight, we should perhaps have noticed that these cables were higher than the ones outside my house, and mulled upon the significance of that fact. We ought also to have noticed that they were somewhat thicker, but what with them being so high this wasn’t all that obvious. Regardless of such subtleties, we set about hoiking our piece of barbed wire at the cables. Because of their height, this was much more difficult than with the cables by my house. We took it in turns, whirling the wire around our heads and launching it skywards. Every now and then the wire would hit one cable and fall back without effect. It took us nearly two hours before, as luck would have it, it was I that finally managed to get the barbed wire to snag one cable, spin, and touch a second. What happened next is indelibly etched into my memory. There was a deafening bang and a white flash that resembled lightning. One of us shouted ‘RUN!’ – it may have been me, or it may have been all of us simultaneously. We fled. As we pelted towards the village, I glanced back to see the two overhead cables fall to the ground, thrashing and sparking as they did so. This was not quite what we had intended.

  We ran back to my house, which happened to be the nearest, and we hid in the garden shed. We sat on the piles of second-hand romance novels left over from the school fete, pondering our next move. We knew this was bad, and could not see much chance of escaping major trouble. We’d spent so long in the lane by the power lines that at least a dozen cars had passed by that morning, and in our small village everybody knew everybody; it wouldn’t take long for someone to work out who the culprits were. Eventually we decided that there was nothing for it but for each of us to go home and confess. With my stomach in my boots I walked in through the back door of our house to find my mum in an uncharacteristically bad mood. She’d been in the middle of roasting a big joint for Sunday lunch, and there had been a power cut. There was no gas in the village, so every Sunday lunch had been cooking in an electric oven. Now, all over the village, half-cooked chickens and sides of beef were slowly cooling. In the two village pubs, the Lion and the Lamb, dozens of Sunday lunches would never now be properly cooked. In the late 1970s power cuts were quite common, but they were usually at night and there was usually a warning in advance. On this occasion, of course, there had been no warning.

  This was something I hadn’t anticipated, and I ran outside again without saying a word to my mum; Tug and Matt were still within sight, since each had been walking rather reluctantly and hence slowly in opposite directions towards their respective homes. I called them back and told them what had happened. It was much worse than bad. This was a disaster on a biblical scale. We hid back in the shed. Matt suggested, without conviction, that perhaps the power cut was a coincidence. We knew it wasn’t. In fact, as it subsequently turned out, we had by chance hit upon the 11,000-volt power lines that were the sole power source to the village. It took most of the rest of the day for an emergency team from the electricity board to repair them. My friends and I were still sitting in the gloom of the shed when the local policeman arrived in his Mini police car. He was not particularly well disposed to us since a couple of years earlier he had caught us taking potshots at his geese with our home-made catapults (which he had confiscated and incinerated), so he delighted in carting us off to the tiny police station in nearby Newport.

  In the end, we got off with a small fine and slapped wrists. The worst of it for me was the embarrassment caused to my dad, who as a local schoolteacher saw himself as a pillar of the community. Naturally enough, he was mortified to have his son hauled in front of the magistrates. To make matters worse, the headmaster of his school also lived in our village and had lost his Sunday lunch on that fateful day.

  Of course I’m not advocating that children be allowed to go around blowing up farm buildings and sabotaging power lines, or for that matter collecting birds’ eggs. Some of the many things that we did were highly dangerous and idiotic. However, I am not sure that I would have become a scientist as an adult if I had not been able to indulge at least some of these youthful enthusiasms in the ways that I did. Perhaps my parents were too tolerant, and probably also somewhat naïve, but I am enormously grateful that they gave me as much slack as they did (though perhaps some words of wisdom about the dangers of high-voltage electricity might have come in handy). I try to let my own boys, now five, twelve and fourteen years old, have enough freedom to learn for themselves. I wince when I see them swinging from branches near the tops of tall trees, and pe
rhaps I shouldn’t let the five-year-old play with my axe or my hammer drill, but at the time of writing they have so far all survived. I’ve bought them ingredients for home-made fireworks, although I try to keep an eye on what they are up to and have ruled out pipe bombs as a step too far. They too haven’t yet got a rocket to take off, and our lawn bears numerous scorch-marks from their unsuccessful launch attempts. I’ve also tried to give them every chance to engage with the natural world. We are lucky, for we live in the weald of rural Sussex, surrounded by woods, pasture and streams, which they can explore in relative safety – the biggest dangers they are likely to encounter are themselves. In the summer, we go down to our little farm in the deepest, darkest French countryside where they can run amok. I don’t know whether they will follow me in studying natural history, but at least they have had ample opportunity to fall in love with nature. My eldest, Finn, can now identify most wildflowers, and Jedd has become an adept insect photographer. Seth, the youngest, simply wants to catch everything, put it in a Tupperware container, and watch it – he is very much still in his bug period, long may it last. I am sure that they will do their best to champion nature’s cause in the future.