bees and bamboo

Today felt like spring.  I went to see the bees, and to my pleasure they were alive and flying from all three hives.  I was particularly impressed that the little colony in the nucleus hive, only half the size of a normal beehive, has made it this far.  They appeared as a swarm late last season, and by autumn were not nearly as large as my bee instructor told me a colony needed to be to come through the winter.  However, there was nothing to do about that, short of risking upsetting one of the established colonies by trying to combine them, so I fed them and left them to take their chance.  It looks like they may have seized it with all six legs and both wings.

I didn't open the hives fully.  It would probably have been just about warm enough for a very brief inspection if I've absolutely had to, but I didn't.  There's a risk they may have lost their queens during the winter, in which case there is no future for them, unless I intervene with a replacement, but they probably haven't.  Instead I gave each of them a 2.5kg lump of fondant, a soft paste of sucrose, glucose syrup and invert sugar syrup, which is supposed to be easy for them to digest, and not to require them to collect too much water to use it.  Stored honey by this stage can be rock hard, and require the bees to gather water to dilute it before they can eat it.  The fondant comes in plastic bags similar to vacuum packs, which are peculiarly resistant to being cut open with kitchen scissors.  The brand is called ambrosia (which makes me think of tinned rice pudding) and is German.  On the side of the box it says Bienenfutterteig, which translates as Feed Paste, and in smaller letters Einzfuttermittel,  which less felicitously translates as Single feeding stuff.  You put it on top of the crown board over one of the holes leading down into the body of the beehive, and they come up and collect what they want.

I bought the fondant a while back, when I was concerned that the unseasonably warm weather might be leading the bees to be more active and use more stores than they would normally, at a time when there wasn't much forage.  My bee tutor said that they knew what they were doing and would be fine, and then it turned cold again and a friend warned me that they wouldn't touch the fondant when it was that cold.  Then I began to feel so tired and unwell I decided to believe my bee tutor and leave them to get on with it, but today felt like paying them a visit.  It was very nice to see them, and fairly soon it'll be time to have a look inside each hive, and find out what's going on.  If I see them bringing in pollen in the meantime that will be a good sign that they are likely to be feeding brood.  They were foraging today, working the crocus in the bottom lawn and the hellebores, even the new ones in pots that are still stood in the porch.

I worked at weeding the damp bed.  I still call it the Gunnera bed, even though the Gunnera died a couple of years ago.  They grow from a great scaly core, like a rhubarb crown on steroids, which is vulnerable to cold in severe winters, rotting if it gets too wet, and being eaten by voles.  I have a replacement sitting in a pot in the greenhouse awaiting planting when the milder weather arrives.  Before planting anything it is necessary to remove the excess yellow stemmed bamboo, which has run far beyond its intended space.  Its name is Phyllostachys aureosulcata 'Aureocaulis', and if you are ever offered one I should treat it with the respect it deserves.  Once I've hacked mine back to a quantity of bamboo I consider appropriate, I am going to try and check its future wanderings by sinking two rolls of galvanised lawn edging around it.  It may of course attempt to burrow under or climb over the lawn edging, but at least that will give me a boundary to work to.  I shall have to be vigilant.  The way this bamboo spreads is to send out horizontal shoots only just below the surface of the soil.  These periodically send down roots, and a new vertical stem arises from that point, which gradually thickens into a large woody plate.  The roots do not go deep, but in established parts of the clump they are extremely firmly attached to the ground.  It's no good trying to fork them out, you would just break the fork handle, and a pick axe is required.  Bafflingly and rather frustratingly, while the yellow stemmed bamboo has gone wild, the black stemmed Phyllostachys nigra planted in the same bed keeps dying out in patches, and has never made a good clump.

Self seeded willows have shot up in this bed, and reached a considerable size remarkably quickly.  I should have hauled them all out last summer, but never got round to it.  Fortunately their trunks and roots are comparatively soft, quick to saw through and to chop through with the pick axe.  The bamboo roots are tough as hell.  I have heard of really rampant clumps that could only be removed with explosives.

nice cheese, shame about the biscuits

We watched Silent Running with our cheese fest.  This is a 1972 sci-fi minor classic, or at least Dr Mark Kermode keeps recommending it on the R5 Live film programme, and the Systems Administrator was very keen for us to see it.  It is about an astronaut working in a fleet of space ships carrying biospheres containing all that is left of plant and animal life, after a catastrophe on earth has sent the surface temperature to 75 degrees C.  As a chronic biophile and pet lover I found the whole thing very upsetting, especially what happened to the plants and the robots.

The robots were waddling boxes about the size of an old fashioned TV, and according to IMDb they were played by actors without legs, walking on their hands in lightweight costumes.  These were remarkable performances, deserving more credit than they got.  I was reminded of an interview I'd heard on R4 with David Hockney earlier in the day, who recounted how he took his mother to an exhibition that included a work by Barry Flanagan, a rope snaked and coiled across the floor.  Mrs Hockney looked at this and asked 'Did he make the rope?'

The Carr's water biscuits bought to go with the cheese fest had a strong and insistent peppery taste that competed with and detracted from the flavour of the cheese.  On close inspection they had little black bits in, and the box said, in mauve letters 3mm high*, with roasted garlic and herbs.  I think manufacturers should put a large yellow exclamation mark on the packaging when they have introduced a fresh twist to an established brand, so that we could check we really do want the new version with added whatever, instead of the normal flavour we were expecting.  I suppose they're hoping that I'll like water biscuits with roasted garlic and herbs and buy lots more biscuits, but I don't, so the only effect is to devalue the Carr's brand slightly in my eyes as being unreliable.

If you want to sleep well and soundly then I don't think watching a disturbing film before bed while eating too much cheese is probably the best way to go about it, and I was rather slow to get going this morning.  Tidying the daffodil lawn, that was supposed to be a quick job just finishing it off, seems to be taking forever.  I badly underestimated how much there was still to do.  There are endless straggly bits of hedge to trim, and creeping tufts of grass that ducked under the power scythe in the autumn cut, and have now gone yellow and look unsightly.  The old dead leaves from the eleagnus take a small eternity to rot down, and in the meantime have worked their way down among the straggly grass and embedded themselves in the surface of the lawn.  The oak leaves would be very useful on the leaf compost pile, if I could get them out without carrying away half a bin load of weedy grass and rot resistant eleagnus leaves at the same time.  I was reduced to using the leaf vacuum machine.

There were honey bees foraging on the Mahonia x media 'Winter Sun'.  I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.  Honey bees don't hibernate, but they undergo metabolic changes for the winter, laying down extra fat stores, and ceasing to produce the bee milk they feed to their young, while the queen stops laying eggs.  In this winter state they can live for six months, instead of the six weeks which is all that workers manage in the height of summer.  If the weather is unseasonably warm does the colony remain in its winter state, or will the workers change metabolically to short lived summer bees too early, before the queen starts laying and it is warm enough for them to raise young?  And are they eating their stored food too quickly, if they are active when they should be resting?  I really don't know.

*Literally.  I retrieved the packaging from the recycling and measured the typeface with a ruler.  I find that vaguely disturbing.