Its not about the honey...
I know it’s nowhere near Spring, but I can see snowdrops beginning to push their way through the lawn and it is the time of year when a young man’s thoughts turn to beekeeping.
Many people have the recurring dream through their life that they’re stuck in an exam and don’t know any of the answers, or have been propelled onto stage without the first idea of what they’re going to say.
I still wake up worrying about my bees.
I haven’t kept bees since the 1990s, but there’s always the thought I should take it up again. And for those curious to find out more about the noble hobby of beekeeping , they can do no better than pick up the small National Trust Beekeeping book by ‘Andrew Davies’. The errant use of grammar and syntax is uncannily like the prose appearing on these pages.
In early January there is still the prospect of more cold weather to come and the fear of all beekeepers is that their bees are going to run out of stores, i.e. the honey they collected in the summer, which the crafty beekeeper has replaced with the more mundane sugar solution.
Added to that bees don’t like damp conditions and have to get out every so often on cleansing flights. And if it’s cold they can’t get out. Or if they misjudge it, they get too cold while they’re out and die where they come to rest. Beekeepers are told that you should never open up a hive if it is less than 10C because the loss of the core heat can be disastrous. You will find bees flying in colder temperatures than that, but usually only on sunny days.
So for the beekeeper, January and February are anxious months where you go down the garden to have a look at your hive(s) and check the flightboard. On a sunny day of say, 9C, a few hardly souls might venture out to see what’s going on.
If it’s 10C and no-one’s coming out, you begin to worry, 12 or 13C and the anxiety really piles on.
By the time the crocuses have appeared they should be coming out to collect the new pollen (protein), even though they will have stored a certain amount over winter. On bright spring days it can turn cold really quickly and I would lurk round the hives watching them all coming back in, like some Battle of Britain wing commander making sure all his boys got back.
Occasionally there would be some who would arrive back with pollen on their legs but were just too weak to make it back up the flightboard. (Now, this is just between us, I would never proffer this information in front of other beekeepers) And I would get a small stick, get them to crawl onto it, and then poke them through the mouseguard into the hive.
Now it may well be that they still died, and then this gave another unfortunate bee the task of removing the dead bee from the hive, but I couldn’t bear to see them fail so close to home.
It is this ebb and flow of bees in and out of the hive, the gradual increase in flights as colony numbers build up through the year that I miss about beekeeping. The management and the mismanagement. And whenever we get to this time of the year and the weather is mild I wonder ‘would they be flying?’.
When I started beekeeping in 1990 it certainly wasn’t the popular hobby it is now, and the attraction for me was not the honey or the opportunity to make bizarrely shaped candles, but the things the bees did. They constantly amaze you.
And they would love this garden…
