Today I was volunteering again in a different guise, as the beekeepers had a stand at a local wildlife fair. August is a quiet time for garden centres, which is scarcely surprising. The soil's dry, the borders look blowsy and uninspiring, and it's too early to be thinking of autumn planted bulbs or winter bedding. Not for nothing is August a traditional holiday month for keen gardeners. Even Christopher Lloyd used to decamp to Scotland at this time of year. Hence you will see brave attempts by plant nurseries and gardens to drum up some trade by staging events.
We're happy enough to put on a modest display. It's nothing approaching the scale of our stand at the Tendring Show, which has grown over the years to be a complex enterprise involving over forty volunteers. For the wildlife fair we have a small pop-up gazebo, take along a core set of informative posters, a demonstration beehive with photographs of brood instead of live bees, a glass topped hive of actual live bees which remain firmly shut in their box throughout the day, and candle rolling and colouring in for the children. And honey and candles for sale, which is handy for members with only a few jars to sell and no regular retail outlet. Set up for the day, we talk about bees to passing members of the public, and between times gossip and drink coffee. On a sunny day it's a very pleasant way of spending a few hours.
I was rather alarmed to have to supervise the candle rolling, because I have never done it, and am not used to talking to children. As my nephew then aged seven informed me gravely, I am not good with children. I'm not, but I find that if I ignore the fact that they are children and speak to them politely as if they were people it generally works, so I was probably more worried about the technicalities of candle rolling. You take a piece of wax sheet embossed with a honeycomb pattern, already cut to size by our Show Secretary, place the wick at one end, already dipped in liquid wax to stiffen it by our Show Secretary, and roll the sheet up tightly, keeping the bottom end of the candle flat by not allowing your roll to go off on the wonk. That's the theory, but my fellow volunteer who is a retired home economics teacher was better than I was at gently but firmly making the children go back and redo bits of their candles when they started to go off true. I relied more on the fact that it was a very hot day to squidge the bottom of the candle roughly level when they'd finished, while praising them for their efforts.
Talking about the bees in the observation hive is more fun. What with finding the queen (she was marked with a white spot so that was easy) and talking about what she does, and how all the workers are girls, and how long they live, and answering questions on bee diseases which is the main thing that most people seem to have heard of, and pointing out how the queen is surrounded by workers smelling her with their antennae, and talking about what bees forage on and how it produces different colours and flavours of honey, and listening to stories of bees in chimneys and bumble bees under sheds, the time flows by. Being armed with an observation beehive is like having a dog with you, it is a great source of conversation.
Sales of honey weren't great, though, and we are going to have to have another committee discussion about the price. Having empirically tested the price elasticity of demand this year, I think we may have to conclude that the curve is quite steep.
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