It was the beekeepers' committee meeting last night. We are getting almost alarmingly professional, with an association laptop and mobile phone, and great plans for developing the website. The Chairman had just spent a few days minding the phone, while the Secretary was on holiday, and conversation turned to some of the calls that come in from members of the public.
Some of the very peculiar calls. Calls that leave you baffled and faintly anxious that these people are allowed out by themselves. Social services do not rush to remove their children for their protection. They have votes. They can drive on the public highway. Really scarily stupid people.
The Show Secretary's husband was called out to assist with a swarm of bees in someone's plum tree, only to find a lot of wasps busy eating the plums. All he could suggest was that if they were to pick the plums, the wasps would go away.
The Chairman had been out to see another swarm, which turned out to be bees foraging on ivy. The householder assured him that there had been loads of them, all over the garden. The Chairman explained that the bees were feeding on the flowers, as bees do. Then there was the woman who had bees in her gutter. He enquired whether they were really in her gutter, and she said they were flying back and forth from the direction of the gutter, and he said it was much more likely that she had bees in her roof. She demanded that he remove them, now, because she had people coming to dinner that evening. He had to explain that he was not comfortable with heights, nor equipped to dismantle her roof to get at the bees, and that she needed a builder. She got quite shirty with him, on account of the dinner party.
Somebody else was upset by the bumble bees in their garden, afraid they would get stung, and adding that they were eighty-five, as if that made it more dangerous, or more likely. The Secretary fielded the call, and cunningly asked whether the caller had ever been stung by a bumble bee before. They hadn't, which was the answer the Secretary was gambling on, since it enabled her to suggest that if it hadn't happened in eighty-five years it wasn't very likely to happen now.
The most bona fide peculiar case was of the digging honey bees. The Membership Secretary got that call, and was of the opinion that if they were in the ground they were bumble bees, but the caller was insistent that they were honey bees. The Membership Secretary went to have a look, and they were honey bees, digging in the earth, clustered together in little groups and fighting each other. She had never seen anything like it, and she has been keeping bees for a fair while. She called one of the local commercial beekeepers, who had never heard of such a thing either, and could only suggest that it was a swarm which had lost its queen somehow, leaving the bees aimless and disunited in the field. With no queen a colony is lost, and without a queen to act as a focus there was no way of collecting them, so all the Membership Secretary could suggest was giving them a wide berth for the while and waiting for nature to take its course.
Bees and beekeeping have been getting a lot of media cover in recent years, but to judge from the phone calls to our beekeeping division, public understanding still has a way to go.
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