A Job for All Seasons

by Phyllida Barstow

  The next excitement was the arrival of our new colony’s nucleus. Their travelling-box was prominently marked LIVE BEES, THIS WAY UP, and emitted a low hum. The carrier placed it on the kitchen table very gently, and with equal care Duff carried it out to the sheltered corner where the hive awaited its inhabitants, and for a time we all stood round admiring it, screwing up our nerve to open the hinged lid. It was a warm, still, summer morning, perfect for bee-handling, but for some reason we found it difficult to get started.

  ‘Better tog up,’ I suggested nervously.

  I, at least, felt bolder when we were both dressed from head to toe in thick snowy suits, elasticated at wrists and ankle, gumboots, long gloves and veiled hats. With some difficulty, Duff lit the smoker and when it was going satisfactorily he unscrewed the box’s fastening, puffed some smoke into the gauze cover of the lid, and gently eased it open.

  The hum grew momentarily louder, then settled back to its low key. One by one, he lifted out the four frames smothered in yellow-banded golden bees, and hung them in the prepared broodchamber. Inevitably some fell back into the travelling-box during this operation, so he tipped it upside down over the newly installed frames and gave it a sharp tap to dislodge any lingerers before replacing the lid.

  By this time, the note of the buzzing was steadily rising and some militant-looking bees were circling both us and the hive. Despite full protection, I expected at any moment to feel a stab of pain, but the smoke had worked its magic and we completed the operation without being stung.

  A few days later, the queen arrived by airmail, correctly stamped and labelled. Her ingenious little cage was carved from a solid block of wood a few inches in length, with a gauze-covered airhole, and each end sealed with a plug of hard sugar candy. These were in order to prevent the workers attacking and killing her as an intruder: by the time they had nibbled through the candy, they would be accustomed to her smell and treat her as one of themselves.

  Or nearly. Even I could see that she didn’t look like a worker bee. She was longer, slimmer; her wings were folded flatter, and the enlarged abdomen which contained uncounted thousands of eggs stretched from behind her second pair of legs to the tip of her tail. With growing confidence I dressed again from head to foot in protective gear, lit the smoker, and opened the hive to install her among her subjects.

  We had been warned that the colony would need support during its first season, and fed it religiously throughout the summer with the prescribed syrup – 2lbs sugar dissolved in 1 pint of water. Sure enough, when we opened the ‘super,’ or top storey of the hive in late July, only a few of the combs were full and capped, so we limited ourselves to taking a single one, just to prove that the whole enterprise was worthwhile.

  The following season, however, we had a bumper crop: thirty-odd pounds of the most delicate pale, fragrant honey imaginable, tasting of flowers and trees, clover and lime-blossom, which filled every jampot in the house. Duff commissioned an artist to design an elegant label, and I, at least, began to consider myself quite an old hand at the bee-keeping game.

  At this stage of the saga, I was the principal apiarist, since Alice’s interest had waned as soon as the class’s project was finished. I read bee-keeping magazines, joined the local association and attended its lectures. As time went on and nothing serious went wrong, my initial fear was replaced by a somewhat gung-ho confidence which soon descended into carelessness.

  One sultry afternoon in July, I went to carry out a routine inspection, dressed as usual in hat and veil, white suit and gloves, and carrying the smoker, but quite forgot that I was wearing sandals rather than rubber boots. All was quiet as I approached the hive from behind, removed the lid, and placed the whole top storey – the ‘super’ – on top of it in order to peer into the brood chamber itself.

  The normal buzzing went up a couple of notes, and bees poured out of the open top to see what I was up to, but within the veil I felt perfectly secure and carried on inspecting the combs until a sudden sharp pain in the instep alerted me to danger. Glancing down, I saw with horror that I seemed to be wearing thick fur boots. Moving boots. With unerring precision, the bees had recognised my one vulnerable point, and settled there in their thousands in order to sting the intruder to death.

  I banged the lid back on the hive any old how, and ran for the house, kicking frantically to dislodge my attackers.

  ‘Don’t bring them into the house!’ called Nannie, yanking the children into the nursery and slamming the door. A moment later her hand came out again, holding a can of aerosol wasp-killer, and this I sprayed lavishly at my feet and legs, until all the poor brave bees lay in drifts on the kitchen floor. Already the elasticated hems of my suit were cutting into my legs as they swelled. By the time I had stripped it off both feet and legs were swollen like bolsters, red and shiny and speckled with the little black lances of bee-stings, my whole body felt on fire and my heart was hammering as if it would choke me.

  Too late I remembered my father’s face and neck turning a terrifying purple as he flung himself fully dressed into a cold bath after a mere wasp-sting, and my sister Miranda’s near-panic when she forded a Spanish river on a horse and found ranks of hives lined up on the farther bank. Plainly I had inherited the same allergy.

  ‘Don’t let this happen again,’ said the doctor, pumping in drugs. ‘Anaphylactic shock can kill you once you’ve become sensitised to whatever causes it.’

  So bang went my career as a hands-on apiarist, and Duff bravely took charge of the bees from that day on, while I watched from a safe distance and dished out advice. He, too, was stung from time to time but fortunately reacted much less violently. He also took the sensible step of recruiting help in the form of Bill, a neighbour’s gardener, a thin, saturnine, former Navy cook whose family had kept bees for generations. Cursing steadily, he would handle swarms with only a wisp of veiling for protection.

  ‘Think I ’ad injection then,’ he would say, slapping unconcernedly. His sangfroid made the whole business of being stung seem much less of a drama.

  A perennial problem for the bee-keeper is swarming. This strange instinct kicks in when the colony feels itself overcrowded, or is upset by too much handling, or even because they fancy a new source of nectar and reckon that their existing territory is played out. Whatever the particular reason, the result is the same. The colony rears a new queen, who briskly kills off the occupants of all other queen cells, and the old one takes flight, accompanied by a large proportion of her subjects.

  Unless you see this happen, and track the swarm to the bush, fence-post, branch, or building on which it settles while sending out scouts to find a new permanent home, your colony is weakened by the loss of so many workers and foragers, and its honey harvest correspondingly reduced. Since this may happen several times during the summer, bee-keepers are always on the alert for signs of new queen cells in the brood chamber, and do their best to destroy them before they hatch.

  Capturing a swarm is an exciting business, demanding a cool head and steady hand. First you notice unusual activity round the hive, round which bees start to circle instead of flying directly to or from the flight board. As their numbers build up, normal buzzing becomes a muted roar until suddenly they form a dense cloud and, with unstoppable momentum, zoom away into the far blue yonder.

  Providing the bee-keeper actually sees them go, he can do his best to induce them to land by spraying them with water from a handy hose, or pursue them with a water-bucket and powerful syringe. Bill, our fearless guru, believed in the old-fashioned method of banging gongs and clashing saucepans, and it was a fine sight to see him chasing the swarm thus armed, leaping fences and crashing through brambles until his quarry settled into a gently-pulsing, heart-shaped lump with the queen closely protected at its centre.

  Where it settled dictated the next stage of the operation. So long as the swarm hung from a branch, bush, or anything else that could be shaken, it was a relatively simple matter to place a log-basket or a cardboard b
ox underneath and, with a sudden sharp tug, dislodge the whole slippery mass of bees into it. A few outliers might miss the receptacle, but so long as the queen was in it, the bulk of the swarm would remain with her.

  Less easy to manage was a swarm that attached itself to an upright post, window frame, or the trunk of a tree. Capturing this might involve delicately sweeping the bees into the box or skep with a soft brush; or, if their landing place had been a thick bush, puffing smoke beneath it to induce the bees to crawl upwards into the inverted box.

  Every case demanded a different approach, which lent the whole operation a thrillingly ad hoc flavour, and each captured swarm was a triumph of improvisation, nerve and determination. Once the bees were safely shut in their temporary prison, you had to wait until evening and then, while the light was still good enough, tip them on to a board propped against the hive, and watch for the queen as her workers escorted her home.

  So tightly did they cluster round her, however, that sometimes the only clue to her presence was a sort of rolling wave in the hundreds of insects crawling up the improvised ramp. Bill used to pick up handfuls, wherever the population was thickest, and spread them out, to see where they would try to cluster again, because that was where he would find the queen. Once spotted, she was quickly killed, whereupon the rest of the bees would calmly make their way into the hive again, to work for the young queen who had succeeded her.

  One very hot morning, while Duff was lecturing to members of the local Deer Society, who had formed a semicircle under our walnut tree, he noticed that the attention of the back rows seemed to be wandering. Afraid that he was boring them, he speeded up his discourse, skipping several interesting points, but still his audience seemed uneasy, turning their heads and looking nervously skywards.

  Then as the sky darkened and a low roar, as of an incoming plane, sent his audience scuttling towards the house, he saw a thick cloud of bees leave the hive and whirl around the walnut tree in ever-decreasing circles until it finally coalesced in a huge bulb-shaped lump on the branch from which Alice’s trapeze was suspended.

  However much he tried to persuade them that the bees were now no threat to them, there was no way of persuading the audience back to their seats, so the lecture was concluded indoors.

  Less than three feet or more than three miles is the rule of thumb for shifting hives, so our move from Oxfordshire to our new home in Gloucestershire presented the bees with no problems of orientation. Move the hive a mere five feet, however, and you are in trouble because the foragers will return and sit pathetically on the ground where the hive used to be until they die of cold and hunger.

  Thus when we were offered another hive complete with its colony by a friend who lived just a mile away, Duff had the ridiculous task of driving the whole caboodle to a garden five miles away, leaving it a couple of weeks until the bees were nicely settled and had forgotten their original home, and then scooping it up again at dusk and driving it back to our own orchard. During the second part of this operation, the lid became dislodged, allowing a number of bees to escape. Hastily switching on the blower of the air-conditioning to pin them to the back window, he hurtled along the narrow lanes and reached home unscathed, but it was an unnerving experience.

  In the new orchard, within easy range of the house, the two hives flourished and their occupants did a great job of fertilising the fruit trees. Unfortunately, however, it was near a field gate, and when I went to bring in my horse one evening I found him in a stupor, his pretty Araby face and neat muzzle so swollen that he looked like a cow, while his whole body was quilted with lumps.

  That cost £60-worth of antihistamine jabs, plus a week’s box rest before I dared put a saddle on him and girth it up, and this latest incident impelled us to move the hives away to our farthest boundary.

  Out of sight, out of mind. It became progressively more difficult to remember to visit the hives frequently, taking all the necessary equipment in a wheelbarrow, and gaps between inspections became longer. There is a kernel of truth in the Old Wives’ Dictum that you must tell your bees about any significant event in the family: Births, Deaths, Marriages and so on, because if you fail to keep them informed, they will leave you. As we grew gradually out of touch with our own colony, honey yields declined. We must have failed to see swarms leaving home, or to feed the bees at the right moment and, one year, after an unseasonably warm early spring, we discovered that one colony had perished and the other looked sickly, with only half a dozen frames still in use.

  Was it disease? Bees are prone to a number of killer ailments such as foul brood, when the combs turn black and soggy, or dysentery, which leaves the hive smeared with smelly brown fluid. Another major cause of ill-health is parasite attack, the most common being the varroa mite, and nosema apis, which attacks the wall of the stomach. To combat these pests, you are advised to hang a strip of insecticide-impregnated wax inside the hive, but so disgusting does it smell that it takes away all the pleasure from eating honey that has been made in close proximity to the chemical. So we left it out, and though the colony struggled on for another season, there was no surplus honey, nor did lavish winter feeding give it a noticeable boost.

  The final nail in the coffin of our honey-production was hammered home when our farming neighbours planted an extensive acreage of oilseed rape well within the foraging area of our worker bees.

  The sickly-sweet scent of the bright yellow flowers drew them like a magnet and the colony went into overdrive, filling frame after frame with a thick, gluey, white honey which set so hard, so quickly, that it was impossible to extract. Normally, after slicing off the wax capping, a few minutes of rapid spinning in the extractor would empty the frames and leave liquid honey to run out through the tap at the bottom. With rape honey, the frames came out of the extractor just as heavy as they had gone in. It was unshiftable, and our only means of harvesting it was to cut out chunks of comb, which wrecked the frames and was difficult to store.

  To add insult to injury, the honey itself had the same oversweet sickliness as the rape flowers. It tasted just like low-grade commercial honey – the kind they give racehorses – which is probably mass-produced from oilseed rape rather than blossom.

  We returned the mutilated frames for the bees to clean up, as usual, and agreed that while rape continues to attract sky-high subsidies, keeping bees in this neck of the woods is just not worth the effort involved.

  Nevertheless, as I am well aware, this is entirely the wrong attitude. Far from scrapping our beehives, we should be increasing them, encouraging the formation of new colonies and doing everything in our power to counter the alarming decline in England’s bee population. And not only England’s. All over the world colony collapse is a major headache for farmers and fruit-growers, yet it has generated few headlines and pitifully little research into its cause or causes.

  Without much hard evidence, the blame has been variously laid on pesticides, or monoculture, or parasites, but no scientific body seems to have seriously addressed the possibility that today’s bombardment of the world’s airwaves by signals from wireless networks, mobile phones, and computers have disrupted the bees’ delicate orientation system. When they leave the hive in search of pollen and nectar, they cannot find their way back, so starve to death.

  Even if this is the case, it is hard to imagine modern man giving up his love of instant communication for the sake of saving bees; but whenever I see teenagers strolling the streets with heads crooked to the side, prattling mindlessly into their fancy mobiles, I wonder how they will cope in twenty years’ time in a honey-less, fruit-less, veg-less world where Nature’s pollinators have been driven to the brink of extinction through the over-use of Facebook and Twitter.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tales from the Tackroom

  NO ONE COULD claim that horses are an economic asset to a smallholding. Even after the initial expense of buying them, to keep them shod, fed, groomed, equipped and healthy weighs heavily on the balance sheet, and makes
the yachtsman’s definition of his sport as standing under a shower ripping up £50 notes look downright penny-pinching.

  But who can put a price on pleasure? How can you measure beauty? What other animal can transform you from plodding earthling to son of the wind merely by allowing you upon its back? Such strength and speed, such versatility and goodwill! For never-diminishing enjoyment, interest and fun, the opportunity to keep a horse – or preferably two – is the greatest joy of living in the countryside.

  The well-worn cliché that there’s nothing so good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse is perfectly true though I would add that, given the disparity between the amount of time spent actually in the saddle and the amount spent looking after your horse, you must enjoy what comes with it just as much as riding itself. Ah, the joys of mucking out, clipping, and grooming! Oh, the pleasures of washing rugs and soaping saddles! I’m not joking: I love it all, and that is why very soon after moving out of London we set about building a stable and filling it.

  As well as costing a lot in money terms, there’s no denying that horses require considerable investment in time and effort. Even if you’ve got a field, water-trough and shelter, you can’t just turn out a pony and hope it will look after itself. So many things can go wrong that the owner’s ever-vigilant eye is essential. Though I like to think I keep my horses as economically as possible – own labour, own pasture – and have never been tempted by competition with its stern disciplines and astronomical costs, I still can’t face totting up with any degree of honesty exactly what I spend annually on matters connected with the stable – and that is before time is added to the account.

  The briefest inspection of the tack-room gives the game away. There, ranged on hooks, on shelves or in drawers, are so many relics and reminders of different horses we have owned, top-quality saddlery and clothing that were useful in their day and are still too good to throw out, but which, realistically, no one is likely to use again. In total they represent a really horrifying expenditure.