Tonight it is the beekeepers' barbecue. The Met Office forecasts of showers have been shifting around all over the place, but it sounds as though this evening should be dry, which is good. We have a couple of gazebos, and sitting under canvas in the rain has a sort of piquant Somerset Maugham charm if it's a hot night, but it's easier if it's dry. It doesn't rain on the actual barbecue, for starters, and somebody always ends up sitting under the drip where the two gazebos join.
Last night it was the beekeepers' regular monthly club meeting. On top of the committee meeting on Wednesday that is a lot of beekeeping events for one week, but it was the way the dates fell out. Opinion is mixed among the committee as to whether we should have regular monthly meetings in summer, in addition to outdoor events like apiary visits, the Tendring Show, and the barbecue. The Chairman is for it, while one committee member seemed truculently against. He said it was a lot to organise. There again, apart from helping at the Tendring Show I have never seen him volunteer to organise anything in the time I have been on the committee.
There seems to be quite a lot to do at the monthly meeting, if you are the Treasurer and have offered to take charge of the library. I set out my stall of bee related books once I'd finally worked out how to unfold the table, pursued my co-signatory to get cheques countersigned for everyone who sold honey and cake at the show plus the Show Secretary's expenses, and dished out cheques to those who were there. I tried to go and add my name to the list of people wanting tea, but ended up merely lending my pen to the person who had the list at that moment. A commercial beekeeper who'd sold honey demanded a list of what he'd sold to go with his cheque. Last year I wrote everybody a nice letter thanking them for their efforts and itemising what they'd sold, but this year I didn't get round to it. I thought he'd have been pleased to get payment so promptly. I had taken my master spreadsheet of who sold what to the meeting, so wrote down his pounds and half pounds of honey on a spare piece of paper once I managed to get my pen back. Meanwhile, the list for teas and coffees stopped circulating before it got to me or the row of people behind me, while the person in charge of tea money made rather loud rattling noises with the tin.
The speaker was from Friends of the Earth, talking about bumblebee conservation. I am sure his heart was entirely in the right place, and that Friends of the Earth are right to emphasise that pesticides are not the only threat facing wild bees and other insects. Habitat loss is important. While the FoE chap undoubtedly cared a great deal about bees, I'm not sure he knew enough about them to satisfy some members of the audience, and it was unfortunate that the Colchester Beekeepers seemed more up to date on bee-related and environmental news via Radio 4 than he was (high incidence of pests on imported bumble bees reported last week, Monsanto's announcement that they are pulling out of applications for GM in Europe that morning), and that one member had worked in commercial tomato production and was able to give him a detailed technical explanation of how bumble bees are used in glasshouse pollination, while he seemed rather hazy on details like Do they escape? (answer, almost certainly. Carrying their imported diseases with them).
If FoE can persuade the local district council to alter its grass management regime so that verges and other areas of public grass can grow long, allowing wild flowers to bloom and set seed, before cutting it, then that's all to the good. They may be pushing at an open door, since cutting grass once or twice a year instead of keeping it short all year round is an obvious way to save money. It was nice of the council to buy them some plug plants of wildflowers, though I'd have thought that in a rural area like this, if you cut the grass appropriately, flowers will probably turn up by themselves. As a council tax payer I'm not sure I want to pay for loads of wildflower plug plants. The FoE man had visions of an England where we once again had hay meadows like before the last war, and seemed a little hurt by assertions from the floor that the reason they had been ploughed up was that without increased food production we'd have starved, and that the only way to really sort out the environment was to address the size of the human population. He was keen for local food production to replace the current supermarket based distribution system, and I considered asking him whether he'd read Jay Rayner's conclusions on that subject, but decided it was too hot, I couldn't be bothered, and he was already having a difficult enough time as it was, after someone from the back of the room had told him that the giant panda was a useless animal and was doomed. A sweet well-meaning man, but fluffy. The Colchester beekeepers tend not to do fluffy, but they love a good argument.
The Chairman, who is still quite new to the job, missed a trick and failed to give out the parish notices before the talk started, so tried to do so after it ended, by which time a good section of his audience had already gathered around the FoE speaker to continue the argument. Or perhaps they were picking up leaflets, but I was slightly reminded of the way that bees will kill intruders by surrounding them in a ball of bees, and suffocating and stinging them to death. I had to hover by the speaker to try and pay him, then scoot back to my library books before any disappeared without being signed out, and only just got a cup of tea, having eventually managed to add my name to the list.
It was marvellously cool when I got back out into the car park. One disadvantage of having meetings inside during the summer is that the room gets so dammed hot.
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