I have just got back from a very interesting talk about bumblebees at the beekeepers' monthly meeting. I thought I was going to be late, having spent far too long beforehand faffing about in the kitchen, the way you do when you have plenty of time in hand, but when I arrived everybody was still standing in the car park, because the key holder had forgotten to come and unlock the hall, so the fact that I'd arrived at 7.30 pm on the dot for a meeting which was supposed to start at half past, and had still to unpack my box of library books, went unremarked in the general chaos.
The queen bee broods her first clutch of eggs, just like a bird. Who'd have thought it? Mated in the autumn, she survives the winter alone, and in spring finds herself a nest site. There she collects a ball of pollen almost as large as her own body, builds a little wax cup which she provisions with nectar to keep her going, lays her first eggs on the pollen mass, and sits on it for four or five days to keep it warm until the eggs hatch.
Meanwhile, I am grappling with the realisation that I have committed myself to doing four talks in the next month. Well, actually the next three weeks and two days. I am supposed to be talking to a garden club next Tuesday about beekeeping, including forage. I haven't written the talk yet, or jarred up any honey to sell. It requires no research as such, since I will only speak about things I already know, and I have done general beekeeping talks before, but not for some time, so I need to plan the running order and make a checklist of equipment to take. The beehive I want to use to show them what a hive looks like is currently in the apiary, I hope still sans bees, so I need to retrieve that as well.
Then at the weekend I'm due to do a talk on gardening for wildlife, specifically birds and insects, as part of the annual autumn jamboree at work. I'm doing it on Saturday and Sunday, so by Sunday I'll have had some practice, since at the moment I haven't written that one either, or worked out what props I'll need. I know pretty much what I want to say, so it is a question of preparing some bullet points to focus my mind so that I don't go rambling round in repetitive or disjointed circles.
Then I'm doing another gardening talk, this time on bulbs, to be done from slides. I have started preparing the slides, but not finished, so had better get my skates on. They are a nice group, whom I've spoken to several times before. When the organiser rang and asked me whether I could talk on bulbs I warned her that I was not a bulb specialist, and that the subtle differences between a hundred different sorts of snowdrop were not my forte, but it turned out that they wanted ideas on reliable bulbs to use in the garden throughout the year, apart from daffodils, which everybody already knows about. I do not possess a collection of bulb images, but if people don't want me to use their pictures they shouldn't put them on the internet. I wouldn't risk it with a website, but a one-off performance in a village hall should be fine. The main limitation is in finding pictures that are roughly the right size.
I round off with a talk on autumn gardening, using actual plants. This will be fine provided that work doesn't let me down and not have anything in stock that looks half decent for the time of year. Berries, autumn leaf colour, late flowers, coloured stems, supplemented with a few seed heads from my own garden. I've never yet been stuck for lack of material, and using actual plants chosen on the day rather than prepared slides means that it is always different, and maybe fresher than if I'd talked from that script a dozen times before. It can be frustrating, though, to find that something I really wanted to use has just sold out and there is none left in the plant centre to take with me.
The question is, why do them? Well, I enjoy it, which probably means I am at heart a great big show-off. And it keeps my hand in. Having talked for a living as part of my City incarnation, and had some expensive presentation training, it seemed like a skill worth keeping up on my CV. Not that it does me any good in my present job. My employers are quite happy that I'll help fill the programme for their open weekend, but it won't result in an extra penny in my pay packet, versus spending the weekend on the till. I might get a talk request from a garden club off the back of it, though, and anyway wildlife gardening is a subject dear to my heart, and if I can convince one or two customers to rethink the way they garden, or at least tweak it, so much the better. Doing a few garden club talks a year doesn't make a great financial difference, in the great scheme of things, but at the margin it helps offset the cost of two quite expensive hobbies.
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