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and the netting tucked into our sleeping bags we’d slept peacefully, secure and unstung.
It looked a bit peculiar, nevertheless – and it looked even more peculiar worn over a riding hat. Needs must when the devil drives the barrel organ, how ever, as Charles so often says. I didn’t want to get stung. I had a nasty feeling that if I wasn’t out there Charles would get stung himself.
And this was the only protection I could think of.
I also had it in mind to light a fire… in a bucket just inside the back gate this time, I thought… Charles might not make it, carrying the heavy supers, as far as the lower lawn… Which was why the occupants of a car going slowly up the lane a little later (a courting couple by the look of it, hunting for a place to park), happened with obvious aston-ishment on the edifying spectacle of me, wearing a riding hat with a meat-cover and mosquito net on top, crouched in the dusk over a bucket with holes in it, feeding a fire with damp hay and raising cloud upon cloud of smoke.
If they’d glanced up to the right of them (only they didn’t, they were too busy looking at me), they’d have seen another edifying sight. Charles coming down the opposite hillside, also wearing an old mackin tosh tied round the waist with string, on his head a big, box-framed veil that made him look like a man from Mars, and carrying a large square box wrapped carefully in a bath-towel. Another of my ideas, the bath-towel – to keep in any bees that hadn’t gone through the hatch. And, by George, it was a useful one. Under its covering of bath-towel the super was humming like Battersea Power Station.
There were only about a dozen in there, said Charles.
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managed to get back again. He’d only brought down one of the supers, though – he thought he’d leave the second one till tomorrow.
It was just as well he did. According to the in struction book one now removed the frames from the super (ten of them, hanging like photographic plates from a rack); gently brushed off any bees which remained on them; took off, with a knife dipped in hot water, the layer of beeswax which covered the comb; put the frames four at a time in a cylindrical extractor which looks like an ice cream churn; turned the handle steadily, and out flowed the honey like manna.
Gently brush off the bees, my foot. Charles’s dozen turned out to be about fifty. Creeping out of crevices, crawling menacingly over the frames, some still work ing with their heads stuck down in the combs. Try to brush that lot off gently and they came at us like a nest of scorpions… So there we were when the courting car came past again (either having failed to find a parking place or a bit apprehensive, perhaps, after what they thought they’d seen on the journey up), and this time they really had their money’s worth.
There were two of us there now, still in our arrest ing headgear, and the damp hay had dried out and was blazing up merrily like a Guy Fawkes bonfire. What Charles and I were actually doing, waving our arms above the flames and leaping like a couple of Dervishes, was passing the frames through the smoke to dislodge the bees and then jumping and ducking instinctively because, protected though we were, bees coming into the attack like rifle bullets are a bit unnerving in the dark. What they thought we were doing was another matter, but I bet their guesses didn’t include bee-keeping.
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We got rid of the bees at last, however, took the frames down to the kitchen and extracted the honey. Having said quite a lot about bees already I will forbear to describe that operation other than to say that we got honey all over the place (we had been warned that we would) and that it took us from nine at night until one o’clock next morning…
this included washing the doors, floor, walls and ourselves, of course, as well as actually extracting the honey… and that when we finished we had exactly twelve jars of the confounded stuff.
Charles said the bees must have been eating the honey and we really ought to have extracted it in August. He also said he thought he’d leave the second super – a full twenty-eight pounds there must be in that one until we came back, refreshed, from Provence.
Marvellous it was, knowing we weren’t going to have a repeat of that little performance before we went on holiday. Even more marvellous when, while we were actually on holiday, lying on a white-sanded beach beneath the pine trees, with the cicadas click ing happily behind us in the undergrowth and not a single bee in sight, Charles said he’d been thinking. If the bees felt that strongly about it, he said, he was going to let them keep that second super. It would save him feeding them, anyway, during the winter.
I felt as if I’d been reprieved. I swear even the hot Provençal sun shone suddenly brighter. A good five months before I need even think of bees – and maybe before the spring they’d have left home or died or something.
They didn’t. On all that honey they grew even stronger.
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propitious and ours were so hard at it that by February we were having to feed them again.
In March one repaid Charles by stinging him. Far from his resistance having built up, as he kept telling me it was bound to have done, he had in fact become sensitised to bee-stings and this fresh sting just added to his content of bee-venom. In no time his face was like a pumpkin and when he woke me around three o’clock next morning to say he felt peculiar, all I could say was that he looked it.
His eyes were sinister slits, his cheeks were huge rubber pouches, and his face and ears and neck were a blazing, fiery red.
That was an anxious night if ever there was one. I gave him aspirin, hoped for the best with his ulcer and waited with trepidation for the dawn. I also indulged in a soliloquy about Bees and Why We Had To Have Them and next morning Charles, with no more ado, was at the doctor’s.
‘ Do you have to go on keeping them?’ echoed the doctor and when Charles said Yes he did the doctor (obviously he’d met them like this before) sighed and wrote out a prescription. For tablets which Charles had to take for three weeks and they would then give him several months’
immunity.
He was a bit more cautious after this, nevertheless, not being anxious to put his immunity to the test – which was why he put off making an inspection of the hive and in June the bees duly swarmed.
Bees, who work strictly to rule, swarm only in the afternoon, so this must have started on the day when, with some friends who were calling on us on their way to Cornwall, we went over to see the lions at Longleat. It was 89
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a still, sunny, swelteringly hot day – just right for watching lions on a make-believe veldt. Little did we know, however, as we watched them sunbathing on their platforms, lying posed majestically in prides and once, to our delight, came across a huge black-maned male lying lazily on his side beneath a bush, not three feet away from our car, of the stirring events that were going on in our own private nature reserve at home in the Valley.
When bees swarm they pitch, with the migrating queen, on a nearby tree or similar object while the scouts go out to look for another home. Sometimes they find one quickly and the swarm is away within an hour. Sometimes they are rather more fussy and the swarm stays on its tree overnight.