I put a clearer board underneath a couple of really good heavy supers on Saturday morning. For those of you who don't keep bees, and are completely lost after the first sentence of today's blog post, I started getting one of my beehives ready to harvest some honey. Obviously you don't want to take a load of bees into your kitchen along with the honey, and the clearer board is a way of clearing (the clue's in the name) bees out of the top part of the hive. Little metal flaps let them go out, but not in again. If you leave the one way devices in place for too long they tend to cease being one way as the bees find their way back through, so by this morning I needed to go and get the honey.
When I looked in the top of the hive there weren't many bees there. A few, but not many, which was probably as good as it was going to get given how many there had been there to start with. I lifted the two supers into a wheelbarrow and left the apiary at as brisk a pace as I could manage with the barrow. I could hear a certain amount of buzzing from the boxes.
Unfortunately, and long before I knew I'd be putting the boards on last Saturday and need to get the honey off by today, I'd arranged to meet a friend at Audley End We've been talking about going to Audley End for about two years. She lives in north London, and is a really committed Londoner, venturing outside the M25 only very occasionally to visit family, or friends who have escaped from the Great Wen. The nature of her work, and far flung family, mean that London's departure lounges are home from home, but after more than thirty years' residence in the UK I'm guessing that she could count the places in England she's visited outside London on the fingers of both hands and maybe the odd toe. A summer visit to a Jacobean stately home and landscaped grounds sounded like a pleasant change from lunch in central London.
I put the boxes down on some newspaper I'd already laid out on the study floor, and shut the front door before any passing bees could scout out the honey bonanza in the house. There was a fair amount of noise coming from them. I peered inside, one, two, six, oh botheration, a couple of bees, if not more. I opened the back door in the study and shook one of the combs outside. Two or three bees flew off, circled, then made away in the direction of the apiary. I did the same with a couple more frames, then managed to brush a small handful of bees off the inside of one of the boxes outside the door. If you are trying to imagine what several dozen bees look like, about thirty will fill a matchbox. Bees started to fly round the room, and as they landed on the window I was able to catch them one by one by putting a glass over them and sliding a piece of paper over the mouth.
Once it got to the point where when I opened the study door to release a bee, another flew in, I thought I'd better keep that door firmly shut. I put another half dozen bees out of the front door, and by then it was time to go out. I had warned the Systems Administrator that I was going to have to leave the supers in the study for the day with the door shut, and promised faithfully I'd deal with them first thing on Tuesday morning, and the SA had said that that was all right, but I still felt mean going out for the day leaving the room moderately infested with bees. In theory they shouldn't sting, not having a hive to defend, but you never know. They might simply have been feeling irritated about being kidnapped. The really key thing was for the SA to keep the doors and windows shut, so that we didn't end up with about a quarter of a million bees that weren't going to leave until they'd finished robbing out the supers, but the SA knows enough about beekeeping to understand this.
Audley End was very nice, once we both got there. I managed to take a wrong turning and did an unscheduled circuit of Braintree, then had to stop twice to consult the map at Finchingfield, a village so ridiculously quaint that the authorities must have decided that allowing any road signs would ruin the effect. My friend got held up by multiple roadworks in Hackney. I've been to the garden at Audley End before, but not previously toured the house. It is a large and imposing Jacobean mansion, which according to one of the room guides was an anachronism even before it was finished, but fortunately for posterity the owners never attempted any wholesale remodelling. The grounds are a palimpsest, all sorts of landscape designers having had a go at them at one time or another, and since I arrived first I had time to go and look at the parterre and the ornamental lake and admire some of the trees. There is a large and good tulip tree, and some extremely fine oriental planes. We never got as far as the kitchen garden, but we enjoyed the dairy and the servants quarters.
I like that part of the world. The whole sweep of countryside from Braintree across to Saffron Walden is extremely pretty, and Saffron Walden has the Fry Gallery and a turf maze, with the splendid Beeches nursery just up the road at Ashdon. There's easily enough to do to fill a whole day, instead of messing around with bees first thing.
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