From the editor

It was very quiet. Unsettling. Something was missing. It took me half a day to work out it was the silence of the bees. The gentle background hum to my life was gone.

I’ve had about 20 commercial hives on my block for the last couple of years. It’s funny how you get quite philosophical about bee ‘poo’ all over the car. How you actually enjoy the few minutes you spend each day guiding lost bees out of the house. Or on one bad day, about 300.

I didn’t realise how much I had grown used to the pleasing mellow song of bees industriously moving their way through my world until it was gone.

The hives have been sitting in an area of natives along my boundary. At the moment these plantings are still quite open and that means incursions of weeds. The worst is crack willow (only recognised when we did a story on it!) and blackberry.

But it’s not possible to do any kind of control when you need to get quite close to a million or so bees who think you’re out to get them. I had to ask the beekeeper to remove the hives so I could get into destruction mode.

Day 1 of Operation Die Weeds, Die began with slashing. My big, old ride-on mower is 35hp of spinning fury and she quickly created some pathways. I got so enthused, we continued along a narrow section beside a row of poplars. A few short years ago these were 5cm thick, 2m high poles. Now they have 30cm thick trunks and tower two storeys above me.

At the end was a mass of blackberry, almost 1.5m high in some places. It was either mow it down or reverse for 100 metres. We went in.

I deeply regretted it. Within seconds, rats and mice were flying all around me, flung out by the mower deck. I had just enough room to turn and chug out of there at the mower’s top speed of not blimmin’ fast enough, screaming the whole way.

Day 1 complete. It was a massacre.