From A to Bee(13)

I want to know how it feels to have the bees flying all around you. I want to know how it feels to put on the bee suit (I wonder if it makes you feel invincible or will it just make you feel self-conscious and silly?). I want to remember that I must put elastic bands over my gloves/sleeves to stop bees wandering up them. I want to understand what it must feel like to have a veil on, let alone knowing how I will feel seeing a bee walk across my eyeline, millimetres from my nose. I want to know what the smell is like when you light the smoker for the first time. I want to know if I am brave enough to actually try to pick up a bee, to handle it without hurting it, just to see what they are all about. I want to pick a frame out of the hive as if I've been doing it all my life and check both sides in that sweeping movement that beekeepers make while checking for problems or looking for the queen (apparently if she is present and laying that is generally a sign of good health in the hive). I want to know if I will be able to find the queen when I am looking at thousands upon thousands of other bees…



Pause for breath.



I just want to start my journey and communicate my feelings and adventures to other aspiring beekeepers. I want to show people that, if I can become a beekeeper, anyone can.



Ultimately, at the end of the day, I just want to start making my one pot of honey.





JANUARY 30





Jo, Sebastian and I went to a National Trust garden in Esher. It was one of those lovely sunny winter days with a layer of frost covering the ground, which meant it was also bitterly cold! The gardens were beautiful and dated back to 1715 and as usual old Capability Brown had an input somewhere along the line, with the rolling hills and sporadically placed tree copses dotted around to make it look all natural.



We went back via RHS Wisley as I had been meaning to drop in there for some time now. The National Trust and the Royal Horticultural Society are two institutions I cannot fault. RHS Wisley has a fantastic library there with every gardening book you could conceivably imagine. I had a feeling that they may have a good selection of books about beekeeping and fortunately I was not disappointed.



Therefore on top of the house-sized Beekeeping Bible which I am trying desperately to get to grips with, I picked up Keeping Bees: A Complete Practical Guide by Paul Peacock. It is by far the most modern book I have seen and has the best pictures. Not sure if this makes for a great read but it looks far more inviting than some of the others.



I also picked up A World Without Bees by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum, which I am looking forward to reading as its opening fact states: 'If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left.' This is supposedly a quote by Albert Einstein, though I have heard that it was a beekeeper by the name of Albert N. Stein, from the US – if this is indeed the truth, isn't it funny what Chinese whispers can do. Anyhow this book attempts to substantiate this claim and gives reasons for the problems they are facing.



I am also going to go through Beekeeping: Self-Sufficiency by Joanna Ryde, which also looks pretty new and quite 'fashionable' with its muted, earthy-coloured front cover and modern typeface. We shall see how well it reads! Everything else seems so old and textbook-like.



There I was in an RHS library, sitting on the floor with books all around me. There was a 'Yes' pile and a 'No' pile and then a sporadic jumble of books in a 'Don't Know' pile. I must have looked a bit of a test case and so when a lady approached me, I had a feeling she was about to ask me to leave for creating such a mess. However, she simply asked me if I needed any help with the beekeeping books.



As I looked up at this rather demure lady, books everywhere around me, I could hardly say no. It turned out that she was one of our regional bee inspectors. Her name was Dianne Steele and I couldn't believe my luck. Maybe she was off-duty but, either way, my preconceived vision of an inspector was not really coming true. There was no uniform, no medals of service and no yellow and black beret. Dianne was just normal, lovely and thrilled to speak about bees.



What a great person to bump into! Anyway she recommended Bees at the Bottom of the Garden by Alan Campion. To me, everything that Keeping Bees has in design, this book makes up for in functionality. It really doesn't look inspiring and is looking a little tired of life, but it does look like it is filled with detail.



Therefore on my pile of rather modern beekeeping books I also had one rather moth-eaten book, but I was hardly going to disagree with a bee inspector. I trudged off to the counter a little bit worried about just how much reading I was about to take on.





FEBRUARY 1



In just the short time I have been on Facebook and Twitter I now have over 500 beekeeping 'friends', and every day I get updates on what they are doing. It's very weird having all of these virtual friends. And then, on this beginners' page, I now have over 1,000 beekeepers following the updates – amazing really, in such a short time.