As I was walking back up from the garage with my hive tool, bee brush and a spare crown board, in preparation for taking the honey off the bees, I met a grass snake on the steps. It froze, and regarded me impassively, forked tongue flickering. I knew we had them in the garden, since I saw one in almost the same place a few years back, and once found a writhing mass of babies in the compost heap, along with the strange, leathery, discarded egg mass, like see-through bladderwrack. I watched it for a while, it watched me, and then I went back by another route, to leave it in peace. The next time I went round the corner of the house it had vanished.
They are slender snakes, with a bright yellow flash at the back of the head, and without an obvious zigzag pattern down the back like adders have. You could not easily confuse the two, unless you were frightened of snakes and ran away without stopping to have a look. The Systems Administrator is phobic about them, but luckily hasn't encountered one so far. They eat toads, unfortunately, but it still feels a privilege to have them in the garden. According to the BBC Nature website they are the only UK snake to lay eggs, and if the strategy of playing dead when confronted by a predator doesn't work, they spray a noxious substance from their anus. Just as well I didn't aggravate this one. They are protected in the UK under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and are a Priority Species in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan, but the Peoples' Trust for Endangered Species doesn't want to know if you find one, not like a stag beetle.
There were a fair few wasps in the apiary, and a hornet, and I knew I was going to have to be fast getting the supers off and away, and the roof back on the hive. Wasps are a plague to bees at this time of year. My beekeeping friend, the retired dentist, has just lost an entire colony to wasp attack. As I feared, there were quite a lot of bees in the two supers I wanted to take off. I put the clearer board on last Thursday, then had to go to work, and I remember my beekeeping tutor warning me that given more than a couple of days the bees were capable of finding their way back through the one-way passages in the clearer board and up into the honey.
I put both supers into the wheelbarrow, covered them with newspaper, got the lid straight back on the hive to keep the wasps out, and hurried away from the apiary. The bees didn't really follow me, apart from those accompanying the wheelbarrow. The golden bees are a good natured lot, and I hadn't opened up the brood box where the queen lives, so had barely triggered their defensive instincts. Once out of the immediate reach of the apiary I stopped, and shook each frame as hard as I could to dislodge some of the bees on it. Back at the house there were still plenty of bees, more than I would have liked, and I had to take the frames inside one at a time, after shaking them again. I piled the frames out of the top super on to baking trays, dumped three empty frames temporarily in the wheelbarrow, then shook the empty super vigorously, took it into the kitchen, transferred the second lot of frames into it, and retrieved the second super to hold the frames out of the first. After grabbing the last frames out of the wheelbarrow I quickly wheeled it to the other side of the garden, away from the front door.
There were a good fifteen or twenty bees in the kitchen. Honey bees are not too difficult to catch in a room during the day, since they are strongly attracted to the window. Put a glass over them, slide a stiff card in underneath, gently so that the bee can step over the moving edge, and only release the card once the glass is at the mouth of an open window. It was made more difficult today by the fact that I had to keep the window closed, only opening it very briefly to put the captive bees out, because otherwise more bees came in. I was left with one final bee that wouldn't land anywhere for very long, and on closer inspection turned out to be a wasp. I knocked that down with a towel, and squashed it. I kept my bee suit on for this stage, which may have been over-cautious, but I didn't know whether the bees would be getting irritated by then. By the time I'd got rid of the wasp I was extremely hot, what with the Aga churning away, and nowhere for the heat to go except the hall. I'd shut the door to the study because that had wasps in it, the sitting room because the SA had the door open for air, and the outer hall because that had bees in.
There were a lot more than fifteen or twenty bees outside the front door, and the SA looked genuinely anxious to see them all through the glass. Initially I thought they'd dissipate fairly quickly, but some drops of honey had spilt on the gravel, and the smell of it was keeping them swirling around. I became concerned in case they'd go back to the hive for reinforcements, and ended up suiting up again and going to play the hose over the gravel and doorstep for several minutes, to reduce the smell. I felt unkind watering the bees, but it was a hot day, so they'll have dried off again.
After all that I was ready to go through the normal process of cutting the cappings off, spinning the combs in the centrifuge, pouring the honey through a plastic filter into food buckets, and snapping the lids safely closed. None of the honey had set in the combs this time. I didn't think they'd be bringing in ultra-fast granulating honey at this stage of the year, but you never know, and having pans of mixed honey and wax melting on the Aga with so many wasps around would have been very tricky. By now the equipment is all washed up, the floor has been mopped, the worktops and table have been wiped (as have the doorknobs, chairs, and anything else I think I have touched). I have even rinsed some dribbles of honey off my wellington boots. We'll still be finding sticky places for days.
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