I had a look at the bees after breakfast, before it got too hot. I'm pretty confident that they're past the swarming stage for this summer, which means that inspections don't need to be so frequent, but I wanted to check that they had enough to eat. My fellow beekeepers were muttering about how little forage there was left by this stage of the summer, and while I thought there ought to be something still out there for them, like brambles, I didn't want to risk leaving them to get on with it until belatedly discovering that they'd starved to death.
Only one hive was filled end to end with stores of food, but all four were dripping with nectar. Recently collected nectar does drip, because it is still very liquid, whereas honey that is ready to be capped over with wax doesn't drop out of the frame, unless you give it a brisk shake, or damage the the comb. If you look carefully at a piece of honeycomb you will see that the hexagonal cells slope slightly upwards, so that nectar deposited in them won't run out of the front. I don't know where the bees are foraging. I've seen very few in the garden, even on the lavender, which the bumble bees have been feeding on with gusto, and there weren't many in the meadow, where field scabious and other good nectar plants were in full flower. However, they are going somewhere.
They were in a pretty good mood, the warm weather and their mystery nectar flow keeping them happy. Even though I went early, I got very hot inside my bee suit, so much so that drops of sweat had fallen on the inside of my spectacles by the time I got to the last hive. Bees don't like the smell of human sweat, but today they forgave me. One hive has started producing a proportion of golden bees, very pretty. I had one of those last year, but failed in my attempts to artificially swarm them, and they failed to requeen themselves after swarming. Worker bees in a colony are either full or half sisters, as the queen mates with several drones, so perhaps some other beekeeper is producing golden drones for my queens to mate with. All four colonies contained eggs and young brood. In some years the queen starts giving up laying in late July, but this year they seem to understand they need to make up for lost time, with the dreadful weather earlier in the year. George Smiley's friend Mendel, the retired police inspector, kept bees, and described them to Smiley as cunning little beggars.
The postman brought not one but two pieces of mail clearly addressed to somebody else. Name, address, postcode, the lot, tucked in between two magazines addressed to us. I registered a complaint on the Royal Mail website, adding that this had happened before, while I had failed to receive mail I was expecting, and had got to the point where I avoided having tickets sent to me if there was an option of collecting them from the box office on the day. I'll see if I get a reply. I didn't the last time I told them I'd had someone else's mail. Today's wrongly delivered items both looked like marketing gumph, one for a beauty fair and one a brochure for cruises, but still they were in sealed wrappers and addressed to someone, not just fliers. The way the mail is heading, they will end up doing nothing but shoving unwanted brochures randomly through wrong doors and misdelivering birthday cards from very old people who don't use the web, while 99 per cent of people arrange to do everything at all important electronically or in person.
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