Covered in beees

First we'll get Eddie "covered in beees" Izzard out of the way. Our remarkable - recent - week of agri-progress coincided with another nice example of closure. It's at least 20 years ago since The Beloved started bee-keeping. When we acquired the ruined farmhouse in 1996, the disintegrating soffit and the six-slate hole in the roof were home to seven separate bee colonies. We networked ourselves up to a) an aged bee-keeper who had b) a much younger wannabee keeper in tow. These two came out with no notice one evening to "take those bees away". There followed a drunken, dangerous, hilarious adventure involving card-board boxes, teetering ladders, a pry-bar and only a few stings.

Until the bees vacated, renovation could not start and it was, in all, a full year before we actually moved into the house we'd bought at auction. Over the next tuthree years, The Beloved acquired a couple of bee-mentors, who were beyond kind, generous and knowledgeable. She also acquired lots of equipment: bee-hives, queen-excluders, frames, supers, roofs;  a smoker, a frame-pry, a veil & bee-keeper's jumpsuit, gloves, boots. We looked forward to the sweet life flowing with honey and lubricated with mead. But the new career was set back by an anaphylactic reaction to a bee-sting that added an epi-pen to the bee-phernalia. Apiculture didn't STOP because of epiculture but it definitely slowed its gallop.

It's been 2 years since La Torbalina de Tenerife aka The Biggest Heart in The Valley brought three Ukrainian refugees across for tea and scones. LaTdeT is currently teaching language, cooking and life-skills the other side of the mountain; and last Summer Dau.II went along as intern for a couple of weeks. Between the tea and chat, it fell out that one of the students was a Crimean Tatar who'd escaped the war with his wife and family of tots. So far, so normal, in these turbulent ethnic times. What was a little more niche was that Юсеф was a keen and accomplished bee-keeper back home! You may be able to see where this going. 

In the middle of agri-progress week, through a certain amount of trilingual chinese whispers, Юсеф [and his entire tribe] rocked up to "collect any surplus bee-kit" - that's what we thought anyway. But Юсеф was all "spacibo but where am the bees?". For all the years we've been in bee-land, there has been a hive in the top corner of the Home Field, fenced off against sheep-blunder, but gone completely feral. Most years there are some bees in residence but there have been at least three separate tenancies over the last 20 years. Юсеф's face went radiant when I showed him the roof of that hive surrounded by head-high nettles - there was clear evidence of bee-coming and bee-going.

Now here's the thing. If you want to move a hive of bees, you have to go less than 3m or more than 3,000m. Anything in between and the poor bees don't know whether to shit-or-go-blind, and half of them fail to return to the hive with their first load of pollen & nectar. Also, you want to scope out a strange hive when everyone is off at work in the fields BUT you want to move the hive when they are all tucked up in bed at home. Accordingly it wasn't until the following evening - Friday - that the hive was moved to a temporary home 6km up the valley. The plan being to move them back to La Quinta da Torbalina on the Tuesday following.

Because he's a very canny chiel and ever the optimist, Юсеp took the full bee-hive away and left another behind in the same location. This decoy hive was seeded with some fresh comb to say "Hello fellow bees, this is a grand place altogether, make yourselves at home". This cunning plan paid off handsomely: when I checked on Sunday evening I found a modest amount of activity on the landing stage of the decoy hive [see above L]. Who knows? They could be stop-outs who were away late foraging when their previous home was taken away. Or they could be a totally new colony which had swarmed in the neighbourhood and taken up residence in their new gaff. I am given to understand that, in the former case, the queenless rump of the colony can promote one of their number to the top job as egg-laying machine. Note added in press: hive two dang! kiting that second hive eventually failed, so Юсеp only has one working hive in its final destination.

Bonus for us: we have delivered a car-load of bee-equipment to where it can start generating honey and decluttered a corner of the polytunnel: WIN and, like, WIN.