I went to check the bees this morning. The golden bees are still not trying to swarm, but still haven't finished capping their honey. I am chary of taking it too early, since if it still contains too much water it will ferment in storage. The other colonies looked happy enough, and I might as well start feeding them and get that finished before we go on holiday. Indeed, I bought some sugar later while I was in Tesco for just that purpose. Given that it looks as though I will get the honey from the golden bees, I thought I might as well offer some of the crop from the dark, buzzy ones for sale at the Chatto wildlife fair. If that had been all the honey I was going to get, I might have kept it for my own consumption and to give away.
I was looking forward to the wildlife fair, but have ended up having very little to do with it. The person organising our stand in the Show Secretary's absence received numerous offers of help, which is not always the case when putting on displays. I was not given a slot in the rota on the stand, but was supposed to be doing the first half of a talk about swarming, covering what a swarm is and why bees do it, before our General Secretary, who takes the calls from members of the public who have got a swarm and puts them in touch with a member who can help, talked about what to do if you do find a swarm of your bees on your property (make sure they are not wasps or bumble bees, call us, keep calm and carry on). The organisers were very slow in telling us what time our talk was due to be, before finally announcing today that they weren't having talks after all. The weather, apparently, was not conducive to talking. So I have ended up with no role at all, beyond popping round in the morning with a couple of cash boxes and getting some cheques countersigned in my capacity as Treasurer. Oh well, I could do with an extra day in the garden.
There is a wasp nest underground in the long border, underneath a sorry-looking Chaenomeles I moved last winter. It is right by where I want to plant some other things, but I can't dig there with a live and functioning wasp nest. I asked the Systems Administrator to get me some wasp nest killer on a run to the shops, but the foam sort we used successfully when we had a nest in the shed does not work on underground nests. You are supposed to enclose the nest completely in foam, but it is impossible to get more than about a cupful to go down the hole. After three or four treatments, at the end of which there were still wasps coming and going, I tried running the hose down the hole for a couple of hours to drown them out. Still wasps. I gave it another hour, and will have to see how it looks tomorrow. Maybe I need to get some powder. Maybe I need to be patient and just wait for them to die. I would, if I didn't want to work in that part of the bed.
There is a great passage in Michael Pollan's book Second Nature, which he wrote before becoming a food guru. He has gophers living in his garden, which he is initially indulgent towards, until he discovers quite how much damage a set of gophers can do in a garden. I know the feeling: twenty years ago I had a similar live-and-let-live attitude to rabbits, but no longer. His escalating efforts to see them off fail, and he realises he needs to reappraise his attitude to nature and man versus nature when he pours gasoline down the hole and sets light to it, and a great jet of flame shoots out of the burrow. I loved Second Nature, but neither of the people I have given it to have seemed so keen.
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