Show day

Today was the Tendring Show.  The Systems Administrator asked me when I got home whether it had gone well, but I never feel I know that until mid way through the following day, when I've gone through the cash and seen whether it all makes sense or not.  Certainly our stand looked very nice, and the volunteer helpers and visitors both seemed pleased with it.

The Show organisers had given us a generous amount of space, with a larger marquee than we've had in some years, and room for a veritable tent city of overflow gazebos at the end, plus space to park a van.  We always keep a vehicle next to the stand, just in case there is any sort of serious problem with the observation hives containing live bees, and we need to bundle a cover over them and get them out of the way quickly.  Having enough space to set everything out without different sections being virtually on top of each other made for a much better flow of visitors through the tents than in some years, and there were no volunteers who could say that their section had been neglected because the public never made it as far as that corner of the tent.

Our membership secretary, who is also chairman of her local gardening club, had done a great job setting up an array of bee friendly plants in pots in front of the tent, behind a natty little picket fence.  As I arrived at a very unearthly hour of the morning (it's ages since I was up in time for the shipping forecast, and I felt quite nostalgic) and peered along the line of tents in the wildlife and countryside area, trying to work out which one was our's, the barrage of flowers hit me from a hundred yards away.  She deserves double credit for persistence, because the chairman was very unenthusiastic about the idea of flowers, afraid they would be tatty, and triple credit for spending the entire day dressed as a bee wearing a pair of gauze wings, and black and yellow deely boppers on her head.

You meet all sorts of people at the Show, and so I ran into my former GP, an old colleague from the plant centre, and a couple from the music society who seemed surprised to discover I kept bees. They said I had kept it very quiet, but it isn't something that necessarily crops up at a concert.  I was manning our tent all morning, but free to wander in the afternoon, and my favourite parts were definitely the demonstration of traction engine driven threshing, and the golden eagle on the hunt stand.  And the goats.  I like goats.  The sheep lie down in their pens, resigned, but the goats look as though they were plotting their escape, and they have those mad eyes with strange oblong pupils.  Actually, the cattle were pretty good as well, and the judge explained something about what he was looking for in each class and why the winners had won, which made it more interesting.

The Systems Administrator came first in the photographic class for a picture of A Bee.  I don't think there is a prize, but I brought home the little piece of red cardboard saying First Prize for the SA to see.  I didn't do so well in the novice honey, since all of us who entered had made such bad mistakes that the judges refused to judge it.  There was no feedback about what it was that we had done wrong, so I have learned nothing from the experience to help me to do better next time round, beyond having my lack of enthusiasm for showing honey reinforced.  The only reason I entered any honey in the Show was so that I'd be eligible to sell some, and since my honey had sold out by lunchtime I was happy with the verdict of the public.  And surprised.  I really wasn't sure they'd go for a dark honey, but only two of us had brought any, and not much at that, and it was the first to run out.