Gone

The first tiny shards of Spring were apparent yesterday; an exuberant great tit singing from the beech hedge here, a bold snowdrop there.

It was the kind of day that reminds you that there is always an end to winter, metaphorical or otherwise, and that nature is often a simple waiting game. Like love, it won’t be hurried; like a wilful child, it will follow its own unpredictable ways.

Things that are wrong in nature often disclose themselves through what you don’t see, rather than what you do, and everything is part of a giant double negative whereby the thing, for instance, that has gone wrong with that plant, is due to the disappearance of, say, a particular insect that once stopped bad things happening to it by predating the smaller insect that was damaging it in the first place. In my case, it was the bees on the ivy in the garden.

I knew that something was wrong by lunchtime, because the advance guard of inquisitive foragers that would normally be tentatively out and about from the hives in the first warm breaths of spring, weren’t. When I walked over to the four hives, I knew that I should expect to see the first stirrings of seasonal activity in and out of the entrance holes, but I didn’t,

What I saw was emptiness, and what I heard, beyond the distant mewing of the buzzard in the park, was silence.

To cut a long story short, not a single bee in any one of the hives has survived the winter. Beekeepers generally resist opening hives in the winter, other than to slip a bit more sugar fondant on the crown board at the top, if it is needed, but I knew that I had to. And when I did, when I dismantled the first hive to its constituent pieces and laid them upside down on the dry grass, I just found the accusing sadness of white mould on the frames, and the diminished carcasses of bees around the edges, and on the grill at the bottom. A dead bee is a small and pitiful thing in comparison to its vibrant summer self, and it made a sharp contrast to the industrious, don’t-mess-with-us, three dimensional energy of the place when I had last looked inside it.

And, as with the first, so with the other three. All gone. All dead.

I’m not yet sure what has done for them. Not starvation, for sure, as there were good supplies left on each crown board. Not varroa, either, nor invaders. It was probably just the relentless damp of the Sussex air and, for two of them at least, the effects of being blown over by Storm Ciara, or Storm Dennis.

Many sensible beekeepers would take a moment like this and re-appraise whether to continue, whether the whole thing is worth the candle. But Duncan, (who I had told over the phone as gently as I could, like a parent relating to their child the death of an old aunt,) and I are not sensible beekeepers, so we will plough on. Besides, the paperback version of Liquid Gold is out on three weeks, and I have festivals and book events lined up for the spring.

I mean, you can’t very well start your talk on the adventure of beekeeping with the news that you no longer participate. That would be like allowing Gavin Williamson to run your education department.

We will clean up and disinfect the frames, put new foundation in, order another ‘nuc’ from Viktor if we aren’t too late, and then wait for kind friends and errant swarms to do the rest. We are back to square one, in that 2021 will not be a honey year, and the French delicatessen in Midhurst will have to wait another season before he can start selling it.

But something has changed, and it is probably not what you think it is. Two things, in fact.

The first is easy. Now that I spend most of my life in researching about, writing about or actually engaged in, conservation, I can take it. There are no triumphs, no tragedies out here, I find, just the endless rolling along of the ecosystems of which I am part. More bees will come. I know this because, ironically, they have me on their side. Unlike the wrynecks, curlews, flycatchers and nightingales, for example, who are being swept to extinction by the ‘way we do things round here’, this bumbling, ineffective beekeeper will see to it that the bees and other pollinators will thrive on his patch, because doing the right thing is staggeringly easy.

The second relates to our new-minted world uncertainties, of dire statistics and of breathless vaccinations. We have been changed by it all, and if we have not allowed ourselves to be changed in some way, we are perhaps slightly mad.

In the context of everything that has happened in the last year, the temporary collapse of our bee farm is a small, digestible sadness.

We have no right to complain.