My name is Yvonne Ridley & I want to become a beekeeper
OUR FIRST anniversary as beekeepers is fast approaching and as I look back in wonder on the last 12 months it's amazing how we've survived to tell the tale.
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| HELLO HONEY: A worker bee gathering nectar |
There
were also times when I thought we would never get this far because, despite valiant
efforts over the previous year to become beekeepers, it felt at times like
searching for the holy grail.
In truth it has been a bit like trying to
join a secret society where no one wants you as a member, or at least that’s
what it felt like when we moved to the Scottish Borders more than two years ago.
Until the move to the country we lived in Soho in the heart of London where, if you wanted something, it would be a five minute
walk away whether it was entertainment, films, plays, cuisine, clubs etc.
In my business you can order whatever it is you need in a phone call or the click of a mouse. So naively thought becoming a beekeeper
would be just as easy. I went on the internet saw a youtube film about a
Beehaus – a big plastic crate thing that looked like a cooler for tins of beer.
The video lasted just a few minutes and
the man giving the talk wasn’t stung once. Yes, I thought, that’s for me. I’m
off to the countryside and becoming a beekeeper should be a doddle.
So coming from a zapper culture where
everything is done within minutes,
how difficult would it be?
I called the Scottish Beekeepers Association
and they passed me on to the Borders Beekeeping Association and I spoke to a
man there. The conversation went something like this:
“Hello, my name is Yvonne Ridley and I want
to become a beekeeper. I am going to order a hive, probably one of those
plastic ones.”
At this point, I didn’t realise there were so
many fixed views and opinions about hives and the mention of a plastic hive
brought a long pause of silence.
I broke the silence by continuing: “Do you
have any classes?” And he told me there might be some in the autumn or the
following spring in 2013.
“But I want to start next week.” He responded
wearily: “We don’t move that quickly” and I could almost feel from the disdainful
reply that he was saying to himself “oh no, one of those awful city folk coming
to live the good life in the Borders”.
Next year was no good for me. it was January 2012 and I wanted to
start next week and I watched the youtube video again of the Beehaus man with
his rooftop apiary ... making everything look so easy.
He-who-should-be-obeyed-but–rarely-is
cautioned against the purchase – about £500 for the whole kit and said I should
find out a bit more. Well in the coming weeks and months I pestered anyone with
any connection to bees and soon discovered there was a great deal of hostility
at play over a choice of hives.
Some people swore by Nationals, others said a
Smith was the best – Prince Charles’s team at Highgrove were offering something
called a top bar hive for £1,250 painted blue and with an appropriate crest.
There was an offer of a beekeeping course for a princely sum – hubby put his
foot down as he is known to do on monetary matters.
He’s an Arab and in the Arab world time
passes by very slowly and waiting for a few years is no big deal. This patience
is in his DNA but I wasn’t in the same queue when it was doled out.
Meanwhile I was getting more agitated and, I
can’t remember how I found him, but I called a man called William near Dalkeith
and he gave the family an introduction to beekeeping.
Of course our meetings were infrequent and
with everything being so weather dependent (2012 was a bad, bad year for bees) it was
difficult to keep up.
But we had a few lessons at his expert hand
which made me feel at little confident hanging around hives and so I went out
and bought a couple of secondhand Smith beehives from a man in Manchester.
I spoke to someone else who was adamant Nationals
were the only way to go and so I bought a couple of them as well and then some
other secondhand kit and clobber.
Now all I needed were more lessons and, of
course, some bees. It was a chicken and egg situation. No one was prepared to
give or sell me any bees until I’d kept some.
I then went on to websites and gasped at the
cost of getting some bees with the all important queen; we’re talking around
£200.
Hubby found a beekeeping course in Cumbria
and so went there for two days and found a variety of others in the same dilemma
although a few others had helped beekeepers and were experienced enough.
I didn’t know any beekeepers locally who I
could pester but we had our two day course and were shown a hive where the
occupants were largely inactive due to the cold weather.
That weekend I decided to take the bull by
the horns and contacted a firm in Shrewsbury called Fragile Planet and ordered
some bees. I wanted those mean, black bees that are apparently brilliant honey
producers but when I told the man on the phone about my limited experience he
convinced me to stick with a friendlier breed called Buckfast.
Then I asked him about the pretty lavender
blue hive I’d seen on the website catalogue and he told me it was a Warre hive,
designed by some Frenchman who called it the peoples’ hive. Well that appealed
to my socialist leanings so I ordered a Warre as well.
“OK”, I said, “I want them next week”. Again
the familiar pregnant pause. He said that they wouldn’t be ready for a few
weeks and I would have to wait.
This time I put the cart before the horse and
contacted the Scottish Beekeepers Association and put both my husband and I
down to take the Master Beekeepers exam.
“How can we take it when all we have are some
empty hives?” he asked. I said things moved slowly in the world of bees and by
the time they got around to sending an examiner we’d have our own bees and be
accomplished.
To my amazement and horror,
the SBA sent me a letter the following week with a date, saying an examiner would arrive in two weeks time.
I wondered if I should cancel – how could he
test us without any bees? However, I thought if I cancel I’ll probably have to
wait another year.
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| BUSY BEES: Working on the comb storing honey |
In the click of a mouse, I ordered a whole
raft of beekeeping books which we set out about studying in order to at least
get the theory before our bees arrived by post.
The postman was none too happy since he
already had to encounter a vigilant gaggle of geese and some temperamental
turkeys I’d bought earlier. The thought of dealing with buzzing parcels of bees
did not fill him with glee.
And then fate intervened. A beekeeper from
Ayr called saying he had a swarm and wasn’t sure if it contained a queen or not
but it was mine if I wanted it because he was leaving for a two week holiday at
6am in the morning.
No worries, I said. I would go up and collect
the swarm. And so clueless, off I drove to Ayr – just a few miles on the map but
a four hour drive to get there. His daughter was waiting for me and handed over
this vibrating shoe-like box. She invited me to look inside but I declined and
then we set about trying to seal the box with gaffer tape … in the driving
rain.
I gingerly placed the vibrating box in the
back of the car and set off on the four hour journey home.
An hour into the journey driving through some
breath-taking scenery, I looked in
the rear view mirror and to my
horror all I could see was hundreds of bees.
I wondered if I should stop the car and let
them out or if I should continue and put my foot down. I even thought what
would I do if the police stopped me and I had to wind down the window.
In the end I put on my beekeeper’s smock and
my right foot down. I then opened the driver and passenger windows and hoped
the cold air might persuade them to go back in the box.
Miracle of miracles! Unbelievably most of them did although a few buzzed off. When I got back home unscathed, shaving an hour off the drive, I called hubby for assistance.
We opened the box and slotted the frames into
the National hive since they wouldn’t go into the Smith hive – so that was a
lesson learned instantly. Stick to one make of hive only, it’s easier when grabbing kit in an emergency.
Great, now I’d got some bees to show the
examiner, I thought. For the next few days we had our heads buried in books and could tell
you every disease a bee can catch from Berwick to the Upper Limpopo in the
Amazon and what to do in a drought ... in Africa.
We jammed and crammed so much useless
information into our heads.
On the Monday the box of bees arrived by
special courier, so as it turned out our usual postie escaped the joy of that
delivery.
The Buckfasts were placed into our brand
spanking new Warre hive – that’ll impress the examiner. I thought. When he arrived the next day I showed off our apiary with the empty
Smiths, the National and the pretty Warre.
Singularly unimpressed he asked how long we'd been beekeepers. I didn’t want to lie but neither did I want to tell
him that our hands on experience covered only three whole days, so I obfuscated and talked
about handling bees at other apiaries and referenced the course in Cumbria and William in Dalkeith.
Mercifully he didn’t try to pin us down. He
viewed the apiary again, momentarily halted at the Warre before looking at it with mild
disdain and moving on.
He tested us both individually and we passed,
not with flying colours so we really need to do it all over again to get our
distinction, which will qualify us both to go to the next level.
By the end of the week the cavalry arrived in
the form of the Caddenfoot Beekeeper Association’s President, Alex Thompson. Somehow he'd heard we needed a mentor and responded to the call.
I told him about the events of the last few
days and he looked unphased and equally unimpressed. He pushed aside my
mountain of glossy new books and said: “Read that, it’s enough to get you
started.” It was an out-of-print Ladybird book with simple instructions and
pretty pictures.
Had we read this wafer thin little book I reckon we would've got our distinction and save a few quid on the pile of glossy new books I'd ordered online.
I wish I’d met Alex two years earlier as I
wouldn’t have bought the Warre and I would’ve stuck to either a National or a
Smith. Although I must admit I'm still curious about the merits of a top bar hive (but please don't tell anyone).
The next week hubby and I went to Lincoln to
buy three hives, all Nationals, from a man who’d come a cropper in his first
year as a beekeeper.
He’d tripped over one hive and sent the other
two flying with near-death consequences as thousands of angry bees attacked
him.
When we took delivery it was six weeks on but
the bees were still temperamental and he watched our 'Laurel and Hardy' antics from the safety of his lounge.
We realised we couldn't move the hives until all the occupants were settled and they were doing what bees do - zooming around gathering nectar to make honey. We had to wait until well after 7pm for the sun to go down before
they flew back home.
We were told that some of the frames inside the hive
would be skewed, broken and missing after the accident so we weren’t sure what to
expect when we looked inside. It was chaos and anarchy.
In the coming weeks our mentor Alex taught us
more than we’d probably have learned in a lifetime of courses and books.
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| WARRE: The peoples' hive but failed to impress the examiner |
We have blundered through, we’ve been stung
(many times) and had our fair share of dramas but we’ve survived the first year
– which is sadly more than the first colony did.
The Ayshire swarm swarmed again leaving a weaker
colony without a queen and then the survivors were laid waste by an
extraordinary number of wasps which raided and stole all of the honey supplies.
Sadly it wasn’t strong enough to survive and
in the following week the colony collapsed.
Gale force winds saw off another colony when
my beautiful Warre was swept up and blown down scattering the frames and the
bees in all directions. I didn't discover that until a couple of days later by which time it was too late. Heartbreaking.
We did get some honey in the first year and it tastes beautiful but even without it neither of us has any regrets about entering into this amazing little world.
Now another year is looming and this time we
feel slightly more prepared. There’s still loads to learn, and I’m sure more bee stings are
in the pipeline but beekeeping is a great hobby and the beekeeping world is
amazingly friendly, full of wonderful people.
Stay tuned for more up dates and please feel free to share your wisdom, tips and observations.
*Part of the contents here would used in a speech by the author at the AGM of the Caddenfoot Beekeeper's Association of which Yvonne Ridley is a member.
