George HW Bush, whom current circumstances are showing to be neither as bad, nor or as stupid, as we all liked to make him out, made an unusually astute point when he said that ‘we are not the sum of our possessions.’
Take my bees.
In fact, you could quite literally take my bees at the moment if you wanted. About 25,000 of them are hanging off a flimsy, 12 foot high branch of my greengage tree, having swarmed yesterday morning. I have decided to leave them to it this time, rather than take them back, and to trust that they will find a new wild home soon, high up in the crook of an oak tree in Petworth Park. It’s late in the year to start a new colony and, besides, I don’t have a spare hive. Move quickly though, as I suspect they will be gone in an hour or so.
We have four hives in what we laughingly call our bee farm, and they are performing in exactly inverse proportion to what we originally spent on them.
The cheapest, Charlie’s hive, cost us nothing, as both the hive and the bees came for free. Charlie is a perfectionist up on the South Downs, and we have started to see him as ‘the godfather’. They are producing honey at an almost embarrassingly fast rate. As soon as you extract some and replace the empty frames back in the hive, it is the work of about three days for them to clean them off and start filling them again with beautiful, clear wildflower honey. They produce a return of investment of infinity. They even look cocky.
Next is John’s hive. We got the hive for free, due to a slight misunderstanding over the respective definitions of ‘lend’ and ‘give’, but its occupants are descendants of a swarmed colony we actually bought from Viktor for £150. So let’s say that they cost us £75.00 in all. They are working away, less frenetically than Charlie’s hive to be sure, but at least like a middle ranking Championship side trying half-heartedly to get into the play-offs. They will probably give (again, I use the word advisedly) us 30 pounds of honey during the season.
Then there is what is left of the original Remain/Brexit crowd, where we paid £150 for the bees and £300 for a brand new hive. We’ve had them for 5 years now and the original queen (Theresa) and her rival (Angela) are long dead, (queens live for up to 3 years, if you don’t let Duncan anywhere near them). This summer, they seem to have set up their own branch of Gilets Jaunes, killed their queen, and refused to make another. They are making honey, sure enough, but it won’t be enough to feed them, let alone us.
Finally, there is the flow hive. You know, that one with a tap on the back where- in the promotional video at least- a rugged looking Aussie takes his breakfast honey pot down to the back of the hive and just fills it directly from a pipe there. We are hosting it for a good friend who bought it for his wife as a (very) generous birthday present, before finding out she had an anaphylactic reaction to bee stings and couldn’t use it. They are beautifully made pieces of engineering that come in at about £600, and we are all eager to see how they work. It has to be said that, two years later, there is not much evidence that they do. The first two swarms we put in there each buggered off two days later, apparently put off by the pristine smell of plastic. The third one has stuck around, or at least half of it has, but they have resisted all efforts to make them go upstairs and produce some honey. We have all decided that, even if we die trying, we will get a jar of honey of of the thing before the first frosts come rolling down through the field, and nuzzling themselves into the woodwork of the hive.
It turns out to be just as well that we are not ‘the sum of our possessions’, even if we would quite like to be.
July 17 2020
An extended version of thoughts like these are available in my recently published book, Liquid Gold. If you by it through Hive (link attached) you can direct some of the profit towards your local bookshop. Or you could just buy it at your local bookshop! Or not at all.
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