Finally my brain seems to be emerging from the fog that started to envelop it at the end of last year. This morning I looked again at the beekeepers' accounts, and they still made sense, as far as I could see. Emboldened, I emailed them off to my scrutineer, crossing my fingers that she would still be able to inspect them. You never know what's going to happen in people's lives: last year she had to go into hospital, and I ended up driving one dark night down to Clacton to hand the file over to an obliging Rotarian friend of somebody else on the committee. Clacton seafront after dark, with a strong wind blowing, snow forecast, and the lights of the Gunfleet windfarm shining sullenly out of the gloom has to be one of the most desolate spots in Essex.
Then I sent my list of ideas so far for a music society stand at the local agricultural show to the society's Secretary. She replied fairly swiftly, saying that she liked some of them, though she was not circulating them to the full committee at this stage. My money would be on us not doing it, if I were a betting sort of person. Too much trouble for too uncertain a reward, and it's difficult to put together a decent stand without spending at least some money on it.
After that I suited up and went to see the bees. I have a terrible confession to make, which shows me up as a lax and bad beekeeper. I had not put my mouseguards on. A mouseguard is a device you put over the entrance to a beehive, which allows the bees to go in and out, but prevents mice from getting in. I use metal strips with bee sized circular holes in them. Mice will take up residence in a beehive for the winter, if they can, finding it warm and cosy with a ready supply of high calorie mouse food. You would think the bees would sting the blighter to death, but they don't necessarily. I suppose if it is cold and they are all clustered together, they won't break ranks to go after the mouse. Mouseguards are therefore traditionally fitted in the autumn, as part of the winter preparations.
Except that last autumn it was abnormally warm, and then very windy and wet, and as one thing and another cropped up I simply did not get round to doing it. Finally today it was calm and sunny enough, and I was sufficiently compos mentis, to risk going and disturbing them. You don't want to be messing around with boxes of bees when you aren't fit to manage them properly. It will not do either of you any good. I thought that if I lifted each hive off its floor and stood it temporarily on a spare stand, I could look at the floor and check for any signs of mouse droppings. True, I have my bees on open mesh floors, but I didn't think that every single piece of mouse poo would land conveniently narrow end downwards and drop through the floor of the hive. If mice were already in there, I thought I'd see something to alert me to start investigating further. Obviously, I didn't want to start pulling the frames apart unless I absolutely had to, since the bees are trying to keep warm at this time of the year.
Every hive had a nice, solid cluster of bees in it, and all the hives were heavy with stores, so I must have fed them enough last autumn to keep them going so far, and didn't need to open any of my packets of fondant. As I lifted each in turn, the clusters began to break up, and bees came out to see what the rumpus was about. They hadn't chosen to fly, on a day like today, but they could when they needed to. There were absolutely no signs of mice, so I stuck the guards on with numerous drawing pins, feeling that fate had been kind to me.
After that it was my turn to be unkind to the bees, or at least cruel to be kind. One of the treatments against the varroa mite, now that they have developed resistance to the first generation of anti-mite chemicals, is to drizzle dilute oxalic acid over the bees. Evidently it is more toxic to mites than bees, but even so the bees don't like it. You use the acid in winter, when there is little or no brood in the hive, and according to the bee inspector who came to talk to one of our beekeeping meetings, I should have done this in November. I was aiming to do it just before Christmas, as instructed by the local commercial beekeeper who is my tutor when it comes to oxalic acid, but then it was so wild and windy, I didn't. Finally today I did. The bees do not like having acid trickled over them, and became quite agitated, and I felt sorry for them, on the other hand varroa is fatal to the colony, if it builds up.
When I got back to the house I asked the Systems Administrator to come and see whether I had bees on me, before I took my suit off. The SA said yes, there were twenty or so on my back and the top of my head, and wanted to brush them off with a little twig. I protested that it was too far for them to fly back to the hive, and that they would be in a pissy mood after being dosed with acid, but the SA persisted, and got stung in the neck. I felt remorseful about that as well, although it will be a reminder not to mess around with them. I don't touch them unless I'm fully suited up. Fortunately the SA got the sting out very quickly, which is what you must do with a bee sting, and after a quarter of an hour was not showing any signs of any reaction except a very local one.
In the afternoon I went to see my father's cousin, who was looking very well for an eighty-five year old who has just had a major operation under general anaesthetic, and seemed pleased to be visited by a family member. He asked whether I had made a special trip, and I explained that I thought I'd better go and see him in hospital before they let him out. The round trip to Aldeburgh is almost a hundred miles, which makes it difficult to be such a dutiful relation as I could be if he were closer.
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