From the bottom up, Charles informed him frailly. And of course it should have been from the top down, only Charles had acquired the smoke-gun along with the bees and there weren’t any instructions with it.
‘Better luck next time!’ said the expert as he went. Charles, when he’d gone, said there wasn’t going to be a next time.
The bees would have to go.
Bees definitely get a grip on one, however. By four o’clock, when Charles had recovered sufficiently to have a cup of tea, he’d decided to keep the bees to pollinate the fruit trees but not to go near them himself.
By six o’clock – well, he might occasionally go up and watch them, but he wouldn’t go near the hive. By seven o’clock he was going to take up bee-keeping properly again, but first he’d see his doctor, to make sure he wasn’t allergic.
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He didn’t, of course. By next day he was saying he’d never felt better in his life, the stings must have done him good. Which was why, the following day, there was such consternation when he got stung again.
A bee must have crawled up under his shirt while he was in the orchard watching them, got onto the waistband of his trousers, and then – a good ten minutes after he’d come safely down from the hive and was about to have a cup of tea – it fell down inside his trousers and stung him indignantly on the stomach.
He didn’t mention about bee stings being good for him then. ‘They’ve got me again!’ he was shouting as he came charging out of the kitchen. ‘Quick they’ve got me worse than ever!’ They hadn’t, actually. It was only one bee-sting.
It was just that it was in a tender spot. But with Charles leaping about and howling, and my being panic-stricken in case he was allergic and this sting might finish him off
– sometimes I felt really beleaguered.
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NINE
He survived all right, but there was still the honey to be extracted before we could consider the season safely over, and from what I could gather that was the trickiest job of the lot.
The procedure is that one goes out one night at dusk, removes the roof of the hive, lifts off (with a cloth over the top to stop the bees coming out) the super or supers from which one intends to take the honey and inserts, above the rest of the hive, a flat wooden cover with an escape hatch in it. One then replaces the supers and the roof and tiptoes away, the idea being that throughout the night the bees at work in the supers will make their way down through the escape hatch to the brood chamber. They cannot, theoretically, get back again, because it is a one- way-only escape hatch, and the following day one should, provided the bees have co-operated properly, be able to lift off the 82
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supers (empty now of bees and brimming, one hopes, with honey), carry them back to the house and extract the honey at leisure.
One snag we had been warned of by friends was to make sure we did the extracting in an absol utely bee-proof room.
And clear away every trace of the operation afterwards, they said, or the bees would be after us like hornets. They’d once done the extracting in their kitchen. They’d closed all the doors and windows, and those of the conservatory beyond the kitchen, and thought they were doubly safe. There was a small hole in a pane of the conservatory glass, however.
Only about an inch across, high up in a corner, but the bees had tracked it down like Apaches on the warpath. When they looked up from their extracting, said our friends, it was like being in an aquarium. There were thousands of bees in the conservatory, literally swimming past the kitchen window in shoals, looking angrily in at them and searching for a hole in that.
They coped all right, of course. They were prac tised bee-keepers. A sting or two meant nothing to them and their bees were quiet bees. Not at that immediate moment, perhaps, but it only needed a few puffs of smoke and the empty frames put out into the garden to placate them (the bees clean out every drip of honey then and take it back to the hive) and everything was back to normal.
With us, not only were we non-experienced bee-keepers (I, in fact, was still very firmly not a bee-keeper at all); but Charles was suspect of being allergic and we had the worst-tempered bees it was possible to have. This wasn’t just my opinion, either. Bees, it seems, differ in temperament according to their origin as surely as does the human race.
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Austrian and Caucasian bees, for instance, are as docile as it is possible for a bee to be; the Black, or English type, is a stolid worker and will go out on the dullest summer’s day… their docility couldn’t always be relied upon, said the reference book, but they had none of the wickedness of the Cyprian or Syrian varieties. At the debit end of the scale are the Cyprian and Syrian – and ours, it was obvious from the book (and wouldn’t you have bet on it?) were the Syrians. Striped black and yellow; working like mad when the sun came out but not, apparently, so keen to work on sunless days as the phlegmatic English Black (what scope, it occurred to us, for a student of environment and heredity!) and, unfortunately, very hasty-tempered, and difficult to handle.
The village, meanwhile, was watching our activi ties with interest. Miss Wellington telling us how she was looking forward to sampling some of our honey. Father Adams asking regularly how thic old stingers was gettin’ on then
– and proceeding, before we could tell him, to acquaint us with the latest hair-raising story about bee-keeping that he remem bered, had read about in the newspapers or (we sometimes suspected) invented.
When he read about somebody who’d been chased by a swarm, for instance, and had to take refuge in a telephone kiosk, he stumped down immediately to tell us. ‘Aint got no kiosks round these parts,’ he said to Charles. ‘Reckon thees’d have to keep on runnin’.’
Then he heard of a horse that had been stung on the rump and it bolted. ‘Thees’t want to watch out,’ he said portentously to me. At that time I was riding, two or three times a week, a horse called Rory whose owner 84
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didn’t have time to exercise him. He was undisciplined.
I hadn’t ridden much for years. All I needed to give me confidence was the thought of Rory being spurred on by a bee…
Something had to be done about the honey, though, if only for the sake of our amour propre around the village.
So one night in September, a week before we were due to go on holiday, Charles went up to insert the escape hatch in the hive. I waited in the lane with the garden spray at the ready. That, I’d read in the bee-book, was a help in deterring angry bees. Everything went all right on that occasion, however. Charles was quite exhilarated when he came back to report that they’d been buzzing all around him but he’d coped with them perfectly. Gave them a whiff or two of the old smoke, he said. No trouble at all putting the board in. He was really getting the hang of this bee-keeping business at last.
I wasn’t so certain, which was why the next evening, a few minutes after he went up to bring down the supers, I sallied forth myself. I was wearing trousers, gum boots, one of Charles’s old macintoshes tied round my waist with string (otherwise it was too loose and the bees could get up inside) and Charles’s thick winter gloves. I also had on my riding hat, which happens to be the only hat with a peak I possess – and, on top of that, a veil. Not a bee-keeper’s veil because, being determinedly not a bee-keeper, I didn’t have one. This was something I’d devised some years before, when we’d gone camping in the Camargue. A collapsible muslin meat-cover with a crinoline of mosquito netting sewn round it. We’d hung one each over our beds in the tent and with the meat-cover forming a dome overhead 85