A Supreme Bee-ing?

For Times of Tunbridge Wells

A Supreme Bee-ing?

By Kent Barker

It seems I may be undergoing an epiphany. And before you say: “Oooh, that sounds painful,” I should tell you that the term is generally defined as “a moment of sudden and great revelation or realisation”. In church parlance it apparently describes the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi. But let’s stick with the non-religious definition for a moment.

The thing is that, at this time of year, I suffer from crippling guilt—no, not Catholic guilt, the other kind—and I worry that I am a lousy beekeeper. Don’t get me wrong, I love my bees and there is nothing more wonderful that seeing them emerge from their hive on a warm spring morning and go about their business of house-keeping—clearing out the debris of the winter before flying off in search of pollen.

But, on one or two occasions in the past, they simply haven’t come out from the hive and, on inspection, I’ve found a large pile of dead bodies inside. This is particularly distressing both because they are such wonderful insects and are sorely needed for our survival, but more because it may have been me who caused their demise.

 Traditionally, beekeepers are taught that they can take (steal?) the colony’s food stores—the honey—as long as they feed them with sugar syrup in return. Calculating the amount of diluted sugar that’s needed is not an exact science and so, if your bees die, you are left with the worry you’ve not fed them enough and they’ve starved over the winter.

This, of course, doesn’t take into account any of the diseases they might have contracted, varroa, foul brood, chalk brood, or the mysterious CCD – colony collapse disorder. However, apart from the last, there are chemical treatments a conscientious beekeeper can administer to protect his little stripey charges.

But a conscientious beekeeper I am not. I generally open the hive up in the spring and make sure that there is evidence that the queen is laying eggs and raising brood. Then I leave them alone until there is a ‘super’ full of honey to remove. I replace this with fresh foundation comb, and do little else except watch them coming and going throughout the summer.

This means that, generally, they will swarm. As far as I am concerned, this is a good thing. I have no close neighbours. I might be able to catch the swarm and start a new hive. If I can’t, then it’s likely that they’ll find a hollow tree and create a feral colony. It means the old lot will produce less honey, but I generally get more than enough for myself and friends anyway.

If I’ve correctly calculated, and it’s been a productive year, and the swarming hasn’t depleted them too much, they won’t need feeding. There will be enough stores in the brood-box and new supers to last the winter. I usually intend to mix up the sugar solution and give them an autumn feed just in case,  but I don’t always get round to it. Hence my spring guilt if many have died.

Now to digress slightly: even though I am an avid Radio 4 listener and always awake to the Today programme, I rather dislike Thought for the Day. My main objection is that they won’t allow humanist speakers and, if those that believe there is a deity are to be catered for, then surely those who believe there is not, should too.

But, ironically, it was Anne Atkins’ homily at 7.50 the other morning that let to my moment of revelation. She had been using the hive as an analogy for a Christian society when she mentioned she was a practitioner of natural beekeeping. I rushed to the internet. YES, hallelujah (in the humanist sense of course) here was the justification—nay, the motivation and even inspiration—for my abject laziness.

Natural beekeeping holds that intervention is bad and should be minimised, swarming is good and should not be prevented and that feeding with sugar syrup is the work of the devil (well, pretty bad anyway as processed white sugar is more drug than natural food.)

The philosophy has further refinements, such as not providing foundation comb, encouraging drones and regarding the entire colony as a whole—a sort of single ‘bee’ organism, rather than 30,000 individual components. It seems that some studies have found that non-intervention and eschewing all chemical treatments produces better long-term results.

I need to find out more about the concept but I’m instinctively sympathetic to it. It’s just the nagging worry that my guilt has been assuaged as a result of a religious commentator on Thought For The Day. An epiphany is one thing, but a full-scale Damascene conversion quite another!