Honey, I’ve found happiness
This ex-soldier was stuck in a midlife rut. Then a chance meeting in a pub gave him a sweet idea. Now his magical memoir tells how, with a few sticky moments, he’s never had a buzz like it
Like many old countrymen of his era, my grandfather’s gardener Mr Fowler had a flat cap that he never took off, a pipe kept permanently in his mouth, and some very oldfashioned views about horticulture.
He maintained, for example, that the best time to plant potatoes was when the soil had warmed up sufficiently after winter that you could sit on it comfortably with your bare backside.
i still like to think of the half-shocked, half-delighted Mrs Fowler looking out from the kitchen window at her husband perched among the spring greens, testing the temperature in the traditional way with a far-away look in his eye.
Fortunately, the potato-planting season had long passed when, one midsummer afternoon during my childhood, the Fowlers invited me to tea, followed by a visit to the beehive at the bottom of their tiny garden.
in the monochrome world of Sixties food, honey was something i actually liked, but Mr Fowler explained that the glistening riches within the hive were not yet ready for harvest, and invited me to come back when they were.
Boys of nine don’t easily understand when they are being honoured and i never did go again. But Mr Fowler’s efforts to enthuse me were not in vain, as they led my life on to an unexpected path almost half a century later.
One March weekend in 2016, my wife Caroline and i dropped into our local pub in West Sussex, after a long walk with the dogs, and got chatting to a man who had recently moved to our village with his young family.
We left the pub together and Duncan, who runs a fruit-and-vegetable business out of New Covent Garden Market in London, noticed a set of shelves where local produce was sold.
‘Blimey!’ he said, picking up a small pot of honey. ‘Seven pounds for that? i’m in the wrong business.’
WeWere all impressed by the honey’s dark clarity, but what really caught the eye was the simple, hand- written label announcing that it had come from a garden not 200 yards away.
‘i’ve always fancied keeping bees,’ said Duncan, and this stirred in me memories of peering at the rich, golden honey in Mr Fowler’s hive.
A lot had happened in my life since then. After eight years as a soldier in the royal Green Jackets, serving all over the world, i’d helped to set up the charity Help For Heroes.
More recently i’d got involved with a local cricket team, but most of my time was spent working for a small kitchenware company, and i had the slight feeling that life was passing me by.
While our two sons were growing up, i’d been able to point to their development as little accomplishments that were my own; now they were gone and so was that deception.
i needed to achieve new things that i was proud of before i lost the ability to achieve anything at all. And from all this somehow grew the idea that Duncan and i should become beekeeping buddies.
Although we agreed to split all the costs and work involved, he argued that the hive should be kept at my place.
‘Bees and small children don’t mix,’ he said and, in the months to come, we would prove many times over that bees and big children don’t mix, either.
We were hopelessly late in our preparations. The proficient beekeeper has all their work for the coming season done and dusted by the end of February but, typical of our sex, we still wanted the instant gratification of honey coming out of our ears by the approaching autumn. With this in mind, we started with that most decisive and english of activities, buying ourselves a notebook. With hindsight, we probably spent more time choosing that than any other bit of kit. As we sat at my kitchen table the following Saturday morning, Duncan wrote a formal ‘ Upperfold Bee Farm’ in block capitals on the first page, followed by income and expenditure tables. it signalled to the outside world that we were in business, but perhaps we should have thought more discriminatingly about the use of the heading ‘Profit’, something we were unlikely to see before the reunification of the korean peninsula. Duncan, who missed no opportunity to buy new kit, immediately persuaded me that our first major investment should be a brand new and beautiful, but eye-wateringly expensive, hive from our local bee-equipment wholesaler. ‘That’s 325 quid,’ i moaned. ‘A mere detail,’ he assured me. ‘They didn’t build the Channel Tunnel by being on budget.’
After agreeing that we would save money by buying everything else we needed from an upcoming beekeeping auction, we congratulated ourselves over a beer on the immense progress we had made during the morning.
‘We’re basically there,’ i said. ‘Once we have bought suits and tools at the auction, what more could we possibly need?’
‘Bees?’ asked Caroline innocently, as she walked past to the fridge.
Duncan and i looked at each other. She had a point, even if we hadn’t asked her opinion.
THe queen and accompanying colony we ordered from a bee farmer in Oxfordshire would not be ready until mid-April and, meanwhile, the assembly of the hive, which arrived in kit form, highlighted an essential difference between us.
Whereas i would find a shortcut to an existing shortcut if it got the job done quicker, Duncan liked to go through as many stages of preparation as possible, and then add a few more.
Given that the hive was at my house, it didn’t take a genius to work out who would be doing most of the painting necessary before we put it together.
And the trick, i discovered, was to use primer and undercoat when Duncan was looking, and topcoat only when he wasn’t.
eventually it was ready and, since Caroline had quite strong views about not having 50,000 bees in the immediate garden, we duly relegated it to a far corner of the paddock, in the lee of a damson tree.
As we cleared the undergrowth to make way for the hive, it thrilled the children in our souls that it would shortly house a thriving colony that would be our own.
Thanks to a poisonous cocktail, including intensive farming, global warming and pesticides, Britain has lost a third of its honeybees and a quarter of its bumblebee species since the turn of the century.
This was our own tiny contribution to reversing the trend. And, since even environmental activism needs its rewards, we opened two bottles of cheap Spanish lager and toasted whatever the future of this adventure might bring. At the beekeeping auction we bought an industrialsized extractor — a machine which spins the honey out of the frames removed from the hive using centrifugal force — and a secondhand paperback on the sex lives of bees.
‘it would be good to know what they get up to when the lights are out,’ Duncan had enthused.
Admittedly, the book made
illuminating reading. I had not realised, for example, that on her mating flight, each queen is ‘serviced’ by up to 20 drones who, once their duties are done, will all fall from the sky stone dead, their abdomens ripped open.
The night before collecting our new arrivals, we went down to the hive with the air of new hoteliers about to welcome their first paying guests of the season.
Deciding that the trunk of a felled apple tree should be the vantage point from which we observed the bees, we dragged it closer.
As the weeks came and went, we found that there was no greater pleasure on summer evenings than to sit on this log with a mug of tea or a beer, wondering idly what was going on inside the hive.
In that magical phase of our increasingly close and uncomplicated friendship, we discovered that, although I was about 25 years older than him, we both had a sense of the ridiculous, a love of a shared adventure, and a passion for cricket.
As one of the local side’s two skippers, I took to manipulating things so that Duncan and I were always batting at the same time. That way the intervals between balls and overs could be punctuated with talk of brood capping, bee space and burr comb. It must have come over to visiting batsmen as a curious form of sledging, but it worked for us.
Whenever we were back on our log, I took a nerdy interest in the colour of the pollen on our bees’ legs as they returned to the hive.
This was evidence of the different flowers and blossoms they were visiting: red for the field scabious and rock rose, orange for lime and yew, green for meadowsweet, grey for hazel, and bright yellow for the irresistible oilseed rape which attracts them like a kebab van does an undergraduate after a night on the lash.
It was beguiling to know that the honey they eventually produced for us would be an amalgam of the pollen, nectar and water of every plant or pond that they had ever visited. And even the inevitable stings we endured had unexpected benefits: each sting I received through the holey knees of my old jeans provided a week of complete pain relief in arthritic joints which had crumbled after years of doing silly things in the Army.
The
beekeeping also became a secret shock absorber to the other parts of my life. There I was thinking that the answer to my midlife crisis was to become prime minister, or at least be the possessor of a violently floral shirt, and it turned out that what I really needed was the responsibility for, and company of, a load of grumpy insects.
They took me in a direction far less frenetic than my other world of commercial deadlines. There was no way to rush a bee; the honey would come in its own good time, and I could already hear the gratitude of visitors into whose outstretched hands I would be pressing jars of the stuff as gifts.
All seemed set for a bumper harvest until June 23, 2016, the day of the referendum that was to decide the future of our relationship with the european Union. I returned from work that night to see thousands of bees swarming above the hive and heading off over the paddock wall.
To make things worse, Duncan had just headed up to London for his night’s work, so I had to interrupt Caroline who was watching the early evening news.
‘ You got a sec?’ I asked, as innocently as I could. ‘ The bloody hive has swarmed and I need someone to help me get them back.’
That’s the great thing about a marriage; the identity of the mystery ‘ someone’ to share a chore is always rather obvious. Asking the question is merely etiquette.
We walked down the road looking like a nuclear decontamination crew in our smocks and veils, and discovered that the swarm of approximately half our hive had gone no further than the neighbouring deer park, integrating itself with a load of dead ivy roots on the ground.
Since they weren’t defending any honey they were very docile, but still it took us most of the rest of the daylight to get them into a cardboard box and back into our paddock. And we then faced the problem that we couldn’t put them back in the existing hive since something about it had clearly upset them enough to search for a new home in the first place. Luckily I had a spare hive from a friend who had recently given up bee-keeping.
The next morning I realised the curious symmetry between what half the British electorate and half our bees had chosen to do on the same day. From that moment on, the captured swarm’s hive was known as ‘ Brexit’ and the one they had left behind ‘ Remain’.
A few days later, when a new prime minister had been selected, we duly christened our Brexit queen ‘Theresa’, and, in honour of the German lady across the water, we called the Remain queen ‘ Angela’.
At first, Brexit appeared to be settling well into their new home. But although Theresa began laying eggs at the bottom of the hive, the colony remained pitifully small and it was Angela’s Remain hive that thrived sufficiently over the next two months to supply the honey we decided to harvest that August.
Watched by Caroline, and Duncan’s two young sons, we set up the extractor in the kitchen and gazed spellbound as liquid gold began flowing out of its tap. For a minute or two, no one spoke; nothing we said could add to the beauty of what we were observing. The light streaming into the kitchen gave the honey an almost luminous quality, like the fine tracery of a sunlit cathedral window.
We would have given it five stars whether it tasted of tequila or Tarmac. But for Duncan and me, immersed in this world for the past six months, the first insertion of teaspoons of our own honey into our mouths was close to a religious experience.
Brandishing our notebook, Duncan recorded the details of our harvest for posterity.
‘Seven pots,’ he wrote. ‘ Dark, golden brown, and very tasty.’
What he didn’t note was that each pot had cost us around £150 to produce — enough to make even a Waitrose buyer blush — and there was a still greater price to pay, as we discovered two months later.
One
Sunday afternoon in October, we went down to check the hives. All was well inside Brexit, but almost all of Remain had starved to death, thanks to our ghastly mistake in taking their honey and failing to give them enough sugar syrup to replace it as a food source.
In the coming days we astounded ourselves by how much we minded, by how much this wasn’t just a couple of bored blokes doing something new.
But if this year had been the summer of trial and tragedy, the following was to be one of honey and hope.
Seeing the bees work with the grain of nature, rather than against it, had made me realise that I wanted to ensure that the footprints I left behind were useful ones. In the summer of 2017, I handed in my notice to the company I had worked for, and loved, for over a quarter of a century. I had no clear plan of what I was going to do, but if I didn’t do it now, I never would.
My own future aside, beekeeping was also about doing our tiny bit to inch the door back shut in the faces of the corporations to whom food was a product rather than a life force, and of facing up to the plight of the honeybee.
But above all else it was about what the Australians call ‘mateship’: in a world where it has never been easier to communicate at each other across the ether, what Duncan and I had been doing over the past year and a half was communicating with each other over our bees.
how much honey we produced seemed increasingly beside the point. But still we were thrilled when, that August, the combined efforts of the Remain and Brexit hives gave us 77 1 lb jars of liquid gold.
Winnie-the-Pooh would have been proud of us. And so, I like to think, would Mr Fowler.
EXTRACTED from Liquid Gold: Bees and the Pursuit Of Midlife Honey by roger Morgan-Grenville, published by Icon Books at £12.99. © roger Morgan-Grenville 2020. to order a copy for £10.40 (offer valid to March 21, 2020; P&P free), visit mailshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155.