of bees and beetles

I was woken at half past midnight by a vixen barking close to the house.  There was enough suspicion of background kerfuffle that I put on my dressing gown and went down to check that she was in the wood, and not attempting to break into the chicken house.  The chickens were sitting on their perch, looking rather fluffed up and vigilant, but there was no sign of the fox.  A vixen's scream is an unearthly sound, and if you were not used to it I suppose you could convince yourself that it was an exotic animal such as a lion.  On the other hand, if you are a resident of St Osyth rather than a visitor staying in the caravan park you will be fully familiar with foxes.

The national newspapers had by this morning decided that there was definitely not a lion, and ran grainy photos of what did look awfully like a fat ginger cat.  I don't think it can have been Our Ginger, since he never leaves the premises, but he must have sprung from somewhere, so maybe he left relatives behind him.  The Telegraph's principal suspect is a ginger Maine Coon called Teddy Bear.  The East Anglian Daily Times stuck with a photograph of a real lion with resplendent mane, doing a Metro Goldwyn Mayer roar.

When I went down to water the conservatory I found a large black beetle, lying dead on its back on the floor.  It was so big I wondered whether it could be a female stag beetle, so put it in a cook's size matchbox to show to a friend who is a member of the Colchester Natural History Society, and has a friend who is an expert on stag beetles.  Finding a live stag beetle would have been more exciting, on the other hand I don't think they live long in their adult state, after spending several years as a larva.  I suppose, therefore, that instead of thinking of the larva as a stage towards producing an adult, it would make as much sense to think of adults as a necessary stage to produce more larvae.

My naturalist friend is a fellow beekeeper, and we were due to meet in the afternoon at another beekeeper's house to see his bees.  One bee honestly looks much like another, but this chap uses what are called top bar hives.  Instead of giving the bees wooden frames filled with wire and sheets of wax and inviting them to build combs in controlled sizes which he then takes out and inspects regularly, he just gives them boxes with wooden bars across the top, and leaves them to build comb as they please.  He doesn't inspect them regularly, or try to stop them swarming, though he does monitor for disease.  They swarm.  Boy, do they swarm.  He gets a lot of new bee colonies, but not much honey, which suits him since his intention is to make more bees.  He catches the swarms and gives them to other beekeepers who want them.

Top bar beehives are popular in the developing world, because they are simple and cheap to make compared to a western beehive, though I don't know how the beekeepers cope with the high ratio of swarms to honey, given that development charities always talk about the value of honey to them as a cash crop.  Our friend had two sorts, a tall hive with a square cross section made of several stacking boxes, and a long hive shaped like a manger.  Both had glass windows in the sides, normally protected by little wooden doors, which he removed so that we could peer inside.  He also had a little nucleus colony in a mini-manger shaped hive, and he took the roof off this one and removed one bar with its crescent of comb hanging below so that we could see it, suspending it from a little wooden frame brought out for that purpose.  It is essential that you don't tip comb that's just hanging from a piece of wood, as if you don't keep it vertical it will break, and I thought that learning to handle a top bar hive would in my case mean unlearning a lot of deeply ingrained habits.

My Colchester naturalist friend, our host and his wife were all sure that my beetle was a female stag beetle.  My friend has hung on to it to show it to the expert, so we await the definitive verdict.  It would be great to have stag beetles about the place.  North Essex is a hotspot for them, indeed oak leaves with a male stag beetle are the emblem of the Colchester Natural History Society, so it isn't totally unlikely.