It exercised my legs, too. There I was, experiencing the old familiar feelings all over again. The apprehen sion when I saw him belting up the hillside towards the treeline. The chagrin when I chased him and he just beat me to it into the depths. The frus tration when I followed him and he nipped, quite deliberately, into a bramble patch where he knew I couldn’t follow. And the panic when I called him and there was nothing but silence.
There was also the heartfelt relief when, after ages of searching, calling and running madly up and down the lane to cover his possible exit points, there would be a plaintive little ‘Waaah’ from the interior, a scampering in 70
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 70
25/05/2006 14:24:45
Doreen Tovey
the undergrowth, and – safe after all from the foxes and badgers and dogs we’d imagined in wait at every turn – a smudge-nosed little white figure danced light-heartedly into the lane ahead of us. ‘Like Christmas with all the bells ringing’ was how Charles described the feeling.
My mind was now several worries ahead, however. How long, now that he’d discovered the woods behind us, would it be before he started venturing into our own wood across the lane in front of us? And from there up into the orchard, where Charles kept those blasted bees?
71
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 71
25/05/2006 14:24:45
EIGHT
When, two years previously, Charles said he was think ing of taking up bee-keeping, I said Oh No We Weren’t. We had enough problems with Annabel and the cats, I said, without adding bees to the mixture.
It was for his fruit trees, Charles explained. They needed cross-pollination.
They certainly needed something. We have nearly a hundred trees in the orchard – apples and pears, and plums and damsons and cherries. In spring it is a picture that would inspire the most hardened artist, what with the blossom, the butterflies and Annabel knee-deep in emerald grass
– but come the autumn we are always disappointed over the fruit. Due to the altitude, perhaps, or to the fact that the soil isn’t really suited to fruit growing, or that Charles encourages the birds and if they don’t eat the blossom they eat the fruit… ‘Lack of pollination,’ said Charles on this 72
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 72
25/05/2006 14:24:45
Doreen Tovey
occasion, showing me the bit in his fruit book where it said that bees could make a difference of as much as forty per cent in the size of a crop.
I couldn’t counter that, of course. And there is the fact that Charles likes honey and eats a pound to himself a week. So eventually I agreed to our having them. So long as they were kept right at the top of the orchard, I said, where they couldn’t sting me or the animals. And so long as I, personally, wasn’t expected to have anything to do with them.
Famous last words again, of course. The bees arrived one muddy day in February. The man from whom Charles had bought them — who assured him that he was giving up bee-keeping because he was going to live in town and not from any ulterior motive – came over to help with their installation. But the orchard is on a steeply sloping hillside, and a beehive with bees in it is very heavy – and, said their former owner, he’d nailed a piece of wood across their doorway to keep them in, but it would be just as well not to drop the hive, in case the roof came off… That was logical enough. So guess who had to tag along with the other two, supporting their ankles as they climbed so they wouldn’t slip, going up through the mud? Right in the position where, if they had slipped, twenty thousand bees would have landed on me like water tipped out of a bucket?
We got them installed without mishap, however, and next day Charles, immensely brave inside the rather derelict bee-veil he’d acquired along with the bees, took the wood off the doorway and waited for his bees to come out.
It was some days before they did. There has to be warmth in the sun before the bees start making their first flight after 73
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 73
25/05/2006 14:24:46
The New Boy
the winter, but eventually Charles came back to report that there were one or two out… and the next day one or two more… and a few days later that calamity had struck. There were a lot of dead bees outside the hive.
Things weren’t as bad as they looked, however. From reference to the bee book it seemed that it wasn’t due to any of the bee diseases but that they’d probably run out of food.
It was necessary to give them supplies at once – though not, I imagine, at quite the speed that Charles insisted on, where, sur rounded by unwashed breakfast dishes, I hastily made bee-candy while he stood by ready to rush it up to them the minute it cooled.
It cooled pretty fast, too. By the time I’d managed to pour three lots into saucers, the rest had set solid in the saucepan and it took me days to get it out.
Have you ever tasted bee candy? It looks exactly like white fudge. We liked it. Annabel liked it so much that, having been given some of the scrapings, she spent the rest of the morning lurking on the slope behind the kitchen window, licking her lips and looking in to see if we were making some more. Most important of all, the bees liked it. Charles put it, a cake at a time, in the top of the hive. It took them a week to get through the first cake. After that they ate it at such a rate that every couple of days, it seemed, I was making bee candy and chipping away at the saucepans.
Eventually I was able to change to bee syrup, how ever, which is far easier than making candy. Candy is for winter feeding – when the bees rarely come out at all and if you give them food with too much water content they foul the hive and die.
74
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 74
25/05/2006 14:24:46
Doreen Tovey
They were coming out now, though. First in their dozens, then in their hundreds, and finally, as the weather grew warmer and warmer, in their thousands. It was at this stage that Charles, who by this time had worn a well-defined path up the hillside to watch them, noticed a long black tail proceeding airily up it one morning. Solomon, going to See What Was Up At The Top. Fortunately it was a dull day for a change and the bees were staying indoors, because when Charles caught up with him, Solomon was rubbing his head against a corner of the beehive and purring. There wasn’t a bee in sight – but, said Charles, they were purring pretty loudly themselves, inside the hive. That was the next thing – rushing up the track after Solomon who, having never gone near that end of the orchard before, which was why we’d put the bees up there, now acted as if he were an electric tram, and up the trail to the hive was the only possible way he could go. Eventually he abandoned this in favour of a mouse hole by Annabel’s stable, however, and as Solomon had a one-track mind and we knew that mousewatching would now be the order of the day for weeks, we were able to relax a little.
All this time the bees were taking in the pol len, which they use in rearing their young. They carried willow pollen and hazel pollen and hawthorn pollen… I had to take Charles’s word for how marvellous it was to see them staggering manfully up the landing board with a fat little yellow bag on each hind leg. I still wouldn’t go near the hive myself.
When at last I did see them working at close quarters it was because the hawthorn was over, the elderflower wasn’t out yet, and to fill in time they started coming into the garden, on the Oriental poppies.
75
The New Boy_INSIDES.indd 75