BEEKEEPING - OUR FIRST YEAR

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.

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.

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.

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.