25/05/2006 14:24:46
The New Boy
They had a marvellous time on those. Instead of buzzing from floret to floret, as they had to do with the hawthorn, the bees would get on to a poppy, scuff furiously on the stamens like a puppy scuffing on a doormat… this filled the bags on their back legs like an automatic hopper and in no time at all the bee was off again. Burgundy all over where it had been burrowing in the stamens, and with two little bags of burgundy pollen slung beneath it like bombs beneath a plane.
It was fascinating to watch. I might even have become a beekeeper myself if at that point Charles hadn’t got himself stung. Not when he was up at the hive, either, when in any case he’d have had his veil on, but while he was standing at quite a distance, interestedly watching them work. A guard bee apparently got suspicious of him and came down to warn him off. Then it got tangled in his hair, stung him on the head when it couldn’t get out again – and the first I knew was his charging down through the orchard yelling for me to help him. That was sooner said than done. The bee was still buzzing madly in his hair. I didn’t want to touch it. So I did the only thing I could think of and banged him on the head.
It despatched the bee all right. According to Charles it nearly despatched him as well. I hit him so hard I drove the sting right into his head, he said. The bee was on the front of his head when I hit it and the sting, when I found it, was at the back, but he always insisted I’d banged it in.
Anyway, I removed the sting, he had a bit of a swelling on his head but it wasn’t much… There was nothing to it when you got used to it, he assured me, with the confidence of somebody who, after trembling for days, has just plucked up courage to be vaccinated.
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25/05/2006 14:24:46
Doreen Tovey
He didn’t say that the next time he was stung. This was some weeks later, during which time he’d acquired a better bee-veil, never went into the or chard without it, and had become quite adept at putting on supers. These are the boxes, containing frames, which one puts on a hive for the bees to fill with honey. You take off the roof, give the bees a puff of smoke to keep them quiet, bung on the super and Bob’s your Uncle.
Unfortunately the time comes when you have to take the supers off again and this isn’t nearly so easy. The bees have a habit of fastening everything down with a kind of glue they make called propolis, and unless one remembers to put vaseline on the edges of the supers first – which Charles didn’t – you have to prise them apart with a thing like a crowbar. Charles, too, was proposing to take off several supers. He’d gone up the previous night and found the landing-board of the hive inches deep in bees. When he looked inside the roof he found them inches deep in there, too. He thought they were getting ready to swarm, which was something he wanted to avoid. So he rang a bee-keeping friend who advised him to put in another half brood box. That would keep them quiet, said his friend.
They wouldn’t swarm with extra room to breed in.
The snag to that was that the brood box is at the very bottom of the beehive, under the supers, which meant taking all the supers off first. Anyway, up went Charles next morning with his smoke-gun, his bee-veil and the newly-prepared brood box, and I was in the garden getting new potatoes for lunch, and everything was beautifully quiet and peaceful until I suddenly heard Charles once more running and shouting for help.
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25/05/2006 14:24:46
The New Boy
It wasn’t just one bee this time. They were after him, when he shot out of the orchard, like a par ticularly violent eruption of Vesuvius. I rushed to the kitchen, got a bucket of water, dashed valiantly back to throw it over him – only to be deterred by the realisation that a bucket of water wasn’t going to make much impression on that lot, and then they’d be after me… Charles was yelling in anguish
‘Light some cardboard!’ (Cardboard being the stuff one burns m the smoke-gun, but where to find any, and how to light it quickly when I got it, I just couldn’t think.) What I did was to crumple some newspapers, pile them on the lawn against the wall, light them and call to Charles to run down the lane and hang over the wall. He did, and the wall protected him from the flames, and the smoke drove off the angry bees… We weren’t out of the wood even yet, though.
I got him into the kitchen and extracted the stings. Ten on one wrist where his glove had slipped when the smoke-gun failed, four on the other wrist and one on each of his knees, where he’d gone up in his oldest gardening trousers with holes in them. And while he was saying he felt queer but he really must go back, he’d left the hive in pieces all over the ground, there was a tap at the front door and there, when I answered it, was one of our neighbours, particularly renowned for her politeness, saying she was awfully sorry to trouble us, but one of our bees had stung her.
On her head, she said. As she was coming round the corner. Please would I mind getting it out?
She has thick hair. I couldn’t find the blasted thing. I rushed indoors again, grabbed a towel from the bathroom, rushed back out, rubbed her head madly till the bee fell 78
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Doreen Tovey
out, got out the sting and bunged on the mixture of bicarb.
and water I’d been putting on Charles…
Sorry I couldn’t stop, I said, but we were in a bit of a flap at the moment. So she went off, and Charles came round the corner saying he Must get back to his Bees, and then
– honestly it was just like something out of Greek tragedy
– he suddenly sagged at the knees and collapsed clean out on the doorstep.
It was the concentrated effect of the bee-stings, of course.
It affects some people more than others. I hadn’t been stung myself but I was pretty well in a coma, too, by that time. I helped him up – for some reason having it in my mind that I must get him round to the kitchen, though why I can’t imagine… and there we were staggering round the outside of the cottage like a pair of wounded comrades… A fat lot of good it did when we got to the kitchen, too, because Charles immediately said ‘Uuuuh’ and fainted again, right by the side of the refrigerator.
I got him into an armchair in the living-room with his feet up and gave him some whisky. It wasn’t, I knew, very good for his ulcer, but I remembered reading once that they give cowboys whisky for rattlesnake bite, and somewhere I’d also read that bee-stings are akin to snake venom. Charles’s ulcer won, however, and he immediately announced that he felt sick. So I dumped a bucket beside him, moved Annabel from where she was grazing in the lane, checked that the car windows were up because the cats were sleeping in it and by this time the garden was full of bad-tempered bees, and fled to do Charles’s other behest, which was to find somebody to put the hive together again.
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25/05/2006 14:24:46
The New Boy
I made three attempts before I found someone. Charles’s friend was out. Another bee-keeper I rang didn’t have a car
– at least, he said he didn’t. The man who eventually came turned out to be the chairman of the local bee-keeping association, and from the twitch on his lips when he saw Charles laid out in the chair with the bucket at his side and heard the; story of his misadventures we were obviously going to be the subject, in the not too distant future, of a pretty effective lecture on How Not To Be A Beekeeper.
Even more so, I reckoned, when he came back and announced that the bees hadn’t been going to swarm, there were no signs at all of any queen cells and how, he enquired (having picked it up on his way back from the beehive and realised that that was the cause of the trouble) did Charles light his smoke-gun?