Oh how we laughed, but not last...
This Sunday’s hive check was golden. The sun shone, the wind slowed to a soft occasional lift, and I used lavender in the smoker which we all seemed to enjoy. The bees hummed with a discernible timbre of Glastonbury. We were all feeling mellow. Even when I gently eased out our single frame of pure honey comb, they almost merrily waved ascent “yeah, take it, fill your boots…” We were all in love. The new queen (Mrs Mallow) unfazed, waggled at me, paused, pivoted and sashayed along frame number two. I blew her a kiss….
Stripped back down to shorts and a T shirt and still humming, I joined my family to collect windfalls and scabby apples that didn’t quite pass fruit bowl muster. We were due to take them to a friend’s house for communal juicing and bottling. Enveloped in the heady perfume of ripened fruit it was a moment of sensuous indulgence. Our hands smelled of apples. As we finished filling up boxes I took my husband for a stroll down to the bees, just to check out the entrance, where earlier little wasps had been dive bombing to gain access to the stores of honey. See those two little words, ‘wasps’ and ‘honey’… add to that, that we’d been picking apples where wasps were also feasting and you maybe able to guess a little of what I should’ve seen coming….But no, I was still humming…
To the bees’ heightened senses, on guard for wasps, we must’ve seemed and smelled like two of the hugest robbers they’d ever spotted. Once alerted one hurled itself at Marc, who with much arm flailing managed to distract her. Another, like some demented wasp seeking missile, decided that I was ‘the one’ and became hellbent on attacking me.
I ran. Bloody hell, I really ran. I zig zagged, looped and flapped through the long grass, up the field and still she hung to my scent, and I swear I could almost here a mocking refrain of the tune we’d been humming in such harmony only an hour before!
With her deranged buzzing literally at my ear I realised only one option was available. I tore up the last bit of the field, cleared the steps and in one fumbling blind move I lifted the cover and dove fully clothed into the ice cold silence of the pool.
I emerged; no one was humming anymore. I laughed with relief and clambered out. But as I started to pull off shoes and empty out water I heard the weak but persistent replay of ‘our’ tune haltingly strike up, getting louder and louder with every second. I ripped off my t shirt, certain she was stuck in a pocket of air, and found her pinned by her stinger to the collar like some forlorn and ragged brooch.
Quickly I put her out of her misery. I felt completely rotten. Lesson learnt.
Yield To The Night (Also titled The Blonde Sinner!)
Alternative title: why choose the easy route, when there’s a whole slippery K2 you could scale instead …
This bee keeping journey has taken a WHOLE new twist. It’s found a mountain range and decided to don crampons, helmet and axe, and climb, rather than journey smoothly around and onwards. Here’s me holding on the coat tails of mother nature’s billowing and omnipresent cloak, eyes tight shut, hoping things will play out to a happy end, in spite of my good but ultimately misguided intentions.
The story so far…
The Old queen flew and took half the workers,
The remaining workers, jobless and bored filled the entire brood box with honey,
We all waited, and waited…. no new brood appeared; workers kicked around, guzzling nectar and honey like a bunch of daytime drunks waiting for the next lockdown,
We introduced a new beautiful, curvaceous Slovanian queen… they all seemed to fall in love with her (we certainly did!)
New little eggs appeared, slowly filling up the emptied brood frames; we got excited! (no Slovenian queen spotted but slight niggling doubt pushed aside as, hey, there’s new eggs, so she’s surely just hiding…)
And then this….
A couple weeks ago I strolled down for my weekly ‘hello and how are you?’ taking in the warm dried hay, the scent of mallow and a blue sky decorated with swooping, feeding swallows… all very halcyon, tranquil in heart and mind. Flipping over and zipping up the hood of my bee suit and giving a gentle huff of the smoker I began to remove the layers of the hive down to brood chambers. No Slovenian queen to be seen anywhere.
Feeling somewhat unsettled, I did one more search…and there, sauntering around on frame no. 2, was a HUGE bottomed queen, blonde, brassy, beautiful and a worker bee’s equivalent to Diana Dors.
Oh you fickle worker bees! Stroking, fluffing, feeding this swaggering new queen.
And OH you murderous tart! Why didn’t you show yourself earlier?! AND WHERE DID YOU HIDE THE BODY?
It’s been 2 weeks since I found the new queen, and we’ve both calmed down a bit now, she and I. She’s busy laying, and to be honest I’m just wholly relieved that she’s there. In terms of the dark fist fight that I missed, the strongest queen won. So I’m thankful that I have such a tough young queen, because she’s the one who’s going to take the brood through the approaching cooler seasons.
Meanwhile, my crampons and helmet have been removed, but left nearby… just in case.