This must have happened with us. It was around ten o’clock next morning when, still thinking of the lions, I went out into the garden – and I was never more surprised in my life than when I heard a noise like a giant humming top coming from over the hedge across the lane. I looked across to see what appeared to be a curtain of insects hovering in the air behind it – like gnats, only fifty times as frenzied; and then, even as I stared, unable to believe my eyes, the curtain was wafting away up the Valley like a water-spout, leaving behind it an abrupt, very noticeable silence.
Charles was aghast when I told him his bees had swarmed and we spent the rest of the day look ing for them. He searched in the woods while I, keeping my fingers crossed and hoping we wouldn’t find them, otherwise he’d have me up a tree or on somebody’s roof as sure as eggs were eggs, did my share of patrolling in the Valley. It was so very quiet. No sound of cars or people. It is of days and scenery like this that people think of when they dream of 90
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old-time England. Up the lane, in the garden of a ruined cottage, a woodpecker sat on a post he was inspecting for insects. A big green woodpecker with a vivid scarlet crown, unmoving and silent, so I shouldn’t see him as I passed.
The stream splashed among the kingcups, a cuckoo called in the drowsy distance, there were bees and other insects drinking at the water’s edge…
Bees drink in the ordered way they manage the rest of their existence. Always, according to the hive from which they come, from the same small stone or blade of grass. They sweep down, queue up on the landing stage, take in their quota of water and streak back, as if their lives depended on it, to the hive to which they belong. I watched them now with the eye of a Sherlock Holmes. Some, taking the water from a stone where the stream ran under our driveway, were zooming up, over the hedge and back to our own hive high in the orchard. Some, further up the Valley, were making for a different base… a fenced-in enclosure where another bee-keeper had some hives. Of our truant bees, ensconced by now somewhere deep in the forest, there was no sign at all. They’d be fetching water by now, of course – but from other springs out across the hills.
Eventually we gave up the search. I vastly relieved that we hadn’t found them, Charles sadly bemoaning their loss.
My sense of relief was slightly premature, however. A week later they swarmed again.
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I didn’t know it could happen. I really thought I was seeing things when I went out into the garden just after lunch and there they were at it again, whirling like inebriated Dervishes in exactly the self same spot.
This time they were coming in to settle, however, not taking off, as I’d seen them before. In a moment they were down and all was silence. You would never have known they were there. And what did I do now? I pondered perplexedly. Tell Charles and he’d go out and get stung? Or say nothing and, as we’d planned to do, go to town in peace?
Conscience wouldn’t let me do that, so I told Charles, helped him on with his veil and gloves, made sure his smoke-gun was lighted properly and the garden spray was working and, with a feeling of direly impending doom, watched him set forth into battle.
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The first sound that came over the hedge was a shout that he had found them. In an elder tree, he said; they couldn’t have been more access ible. The second sound was that of the garden spray hissing steadily. Charles was busy quieten-ing them. Unfortunately it seemed to annoy them instead, however, and the fountains of water I could see shooting high in the air were followed by an exclamation, and then clouds of agitated smoke.
Honestly, I said from my watching post down in the lane. First it was like a Firemen’s Benefit and now he was sending up Indian smoke signals. What on earth had he got up there? A hive of Black Widow spiders?
They were stroppy, said Charles, his voice muffled by his veil… but he thought he had them in hand. So much so that a few minutes later he asked for a box and a handbrush with which to gather them up. The idea is that one sweeps the swarm into the box, up-ends it on the ground to form a temporary hive and leaves it like that until sundown. Then, when all the bees are in for the night, one rehouses the swarm in a new hive, along with the queen, and presto the job is done.
That, at least, is how most people do it. Charles kept asking for another box… and then another one… and then another one… while I pitched them frenziedly over the hedge. It took him five large boxes to gather up his erring swarm. They kept rising up at him, he said.
At last the job was finished, however. Charles, unstung, was back in the cottage, triumphantly singing. Five boxes of bees were reposing in the orchard, waiting for the evening, when Charles would go up to re-hive them. How would they manage in five boxes, I asked, when the queen could be 93
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only in one? Charles said he hoped they would eventually find their way into her box. It would make things so much easier in the evening.
So, greatly relieved, with a feeling of Raiders Past, I went light-heartedly up to the farm to get some eggs en route for town. Some for Charles’s mother, some for my Aunt Louisa, leaving Charles to get changed and follow me up in the car.
I was quite a time at the farm, telling them about the swarm and how Charles had so cleverly captured it. I was rather surprised when I came out again and he wasn’t waiting at the gate. Not unduly so, however. Charles is pretty good at achieving hold-ups.
When I got back to the cottage, though, and there was the car still in the drive and no sign of him whatsoever, only a peculiarly brooding silence over the place, I began to feel tottery at the knees. He’d been to look at those bees and got stung, I thought, and now he was lying stretched out starkly in the cottage… He wasn’t inside the cottage so I next imagined him stretched out starkly in the car, He wasn’t (I could scarcely bring myself to look in it) there, so he must be lying stretched out over the hedge…
I was just, my world in pieces around me, about to go in and get the mosquito net and see if I could possibly drag him out (buried beneath crawling bees, I imagined him, and they’d undoubtedly get me as well and they wouldn’t find either of us for days) when I heard footsteps coming down the Valley. It was Charles.
Unstung, but mad as a hatter.
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‘What have you been doing?’ I called with re lief. ‘They got away,’ he shouted back. ‘They can’t have done,’ I said. But they had.
He’d just been opening the gates, said Charles, when he’d heard this sudden buzzing across the lane. He’d looked across, there they were all in the air, and before he could do anything they were away. They’d swooped low across the garden (Charles’s later interpretation was that they’d come down to say goodbye to him but at the time he’d leapt hastily into the car out of their reach); away up the Valley (by now Charles was out of the car and running after them); through the roof of the ruined cottage (he’d thought they were going to settle there, said Charles, but the darned things did a loop round the rafters and then zoomed out again); and away up over the hillside and into the forest.
We never found that lot either, but next day Charles got the bee-expert over and he went down through the hive. There were three more queens just ready to hatch, he reported; we’d have lost another two swarms if we hadn’t called him in. Bees do this, it seems, if the hive is exceptionally prolific.