Bee home and bee safe
With its Doric pilasters and Gothic arches, this queen of bee houses is so precious that it’s a listed building, blessed by a bishop
Three guesses as to the role of this oddly beautiful little building in the churchyard of St Mary’s at Hartpury, Gloucestershire.
A handsome prize awaits those who can give the right – and very surprising – answer: that it is a 19th-century structure for sheltering bees!
Fancied up to the nines with elaborate carving, it is eight yards long and two yards high, with two tiers of convex and concave scalloped stone zigzags adding cutting-edge brio to its joyful appearance.
These were the partitions that protected the ‘skeps’ – in this case, 28 of them, housing some 840,000 bees. Skeps were the straw domes, of satisfyingly complex, plaited construction, that sheltered the colonies of creatures making their honey.
Doric pilasters march along the lowest tier, flanking five Gothic arches – two with moulded keystones – with sunken circles in their spandrels. A continuous line of stone diamonds against a rusticated background completes this happy, unique-in-the-world decorative picture.
The stone caps are of the pleasingly named oolite Cleeve Pea Grit and the ‘plates’ are of Purbeck stone. Such construction methods, with bees and their boles, although minus these picturesque extras, had been popular throughout the world up until the mid-19th century.
This charming flight of architectural fancy in Gloucestershire has been given two wildly different histories. One, dating from c1500, surmises that it was made from stone from the Convent of Holy Trinity at Caen in Normandy, where both honey and wax were harvested. This French connection is an intriguing one, in that a bee shelter originally stood in the grounds of the manor of Minchinhampton in Gloucestershire. This had been granted by William the Conqueror to his daughter at the Abbaye aux Dames at Caen in Normandy.
It is thought that, with regular toing and froing across the Channel for the abbey’s dues and rent, stone quarried in Caen could well have been brought back to England, especially after it had been seen that such shelters had been in successful use in Normandy for hundreds of years.
The other published history more precisely hails its origins somewhere between 1824 and 1852. From the look of it, every instinct told me the earlier version must be the right one.
But, trounced by the scholarship of various beekeeping associations, I find that the later date is actually correct. This little oddity was surely the creation of one Paul Tuffley, a stonemason, merchant and quarrymaster of nearby Nailsworth, whose family, if you please, had worked on the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster. It was also decreed that the tooling marks are all typically Victorian, having been applied with the late-19th-century technology of routing, fretting, chiselling, sawing and core-drilling. Somewhat scathingly, the renowned sculptor Rory Young has described the carvings as being ‘within the vocabulary of a provincial stonemason’ of the late-19th century, although ‘architecturally ungrammatical’. Up yours! He did concede, however, that the petition brackets were ‘utterly curious and unique’.
The axe and saw work would have been applied in the dwarfingly-vast-forthe-workmen Cotswold stone quarries not far away. The original slabs would have been cut with a frig-bob saw by one man, or a cross-cut saw from square and scabbled blocks by two men.
In 1957, it was discovered by the International Bee Research Association in a ruinous state, standing in the garden of the about-to-be-demolished Nailsworth Police Station. The Chief Constable asked if it could be saved and so it was. Dismantled by the Gloucestershire Beekeeping Association, it was moved to a new site in the grounds of Hartpury Farm Institute.
Over the years, the foundations were found to be cracking and the bee shelter, by now a listed building, was considered ‘at risk’. Most unusually for a building that had been listed, consent was given to move it again – this time to the churchyard. It was recorded in meticulous detail and rebuilt, with every stone carefully wrapped for the move.
The original stones were also used, with weatherstone from Minchinhampton, as well as limestone from the abandoned quarry underground workings at Balls Green. The little building was finally reopened in 2002, with the Bishop of Tewkesbury blessing its glory.
Hilda Ransome, in The Sacred Bee in Ancient Time and Folklore (1937), writes that in the Classical world of northern Europe, honey was thought to come from heaven, with the bee a medium for bringing it to man.
Certainly many a celestial building was created for bees’ purpose. Dr Eva Crane tells us of a giant – 50ft high by 10ft square – stone tower, built for bees in the 13th century by a Nicholas de Verdon in Clonmore, County Louth, Ireland.
She wrote of another early Irish ‘Bee Tower’ at Moira Castle, County Down. Known as ‘honey pots’, these vast buildings were not confined to the grandees; the Cistercians also built a 50-ft-high tower at Mellifont, County Louth.
The most usual way of housing bees, however, was always the skep, which was placed in a niche known as a ‘bole’ in the wall. The word ‘bole’, Scots for alcove, became synonymous with sheltering the bee skeps. In his Rural Rides, William Cobbett said you needed two bushels of ‘clean unblighted straw’ to make a skep. ‘The cost is nothing to the labourer. He must be a stupid countryman indeed who cannot make a beehive; and a lazy one indeed if he will not.’
Not all skeps were made of straw. Cobbett also recommended wicker made of privet, withy or hazel. Charles Butler, known as ‘the Father of English Beekeeping’, wrote that they were in fact a convenience rather than a luxury and were commonly used throughout the land.
A good many regional names are still
used instead of ‘bole’, including ‘bee niches’ in Derbyshire and ‘bee keps’ or ‘shells’ in Cumbria. Butler’s rewards were great: he claimed to be able to hear bees singing – even transliterating every tone of their buzzing, which he wrote into the musical score Melissomelos or Bee’s Madrigal. Convinced that musicians would hear it as music – that ‘Musicians may see the grounds of their Art’ – he made his observations:
‘When the prime swarm is gone, the next Prince, when she perceiveth a competent number to be fledge and readie, beginnith to tune, to sing in hir treble voice, a mournfull and begging note, as if shee did pray hir Queenmother to let them goe. Unto which voice, if the Queene vouchsafe to reply, tuning hir base to the young Prince’s Treble, then does she consent.’
And on it goes, with page after page of musical annotation, ending with the four-page ‘madrigall’. It was the first book in the English language on beekeeping, although, with his English almost as odd as his methods, I doubt it was hugely popular.
Beekeeping was revolutionised by the invention of the movable-comb beehive in 1851 by the poetically named Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, who was well-known throughout America as ‘the Father of Modern Beekeeping’. He claimed the bee was capable of being tamed. With the easy charm of such observations as ‘bees cannot under any circumstances resist the temptation to fill themselves with liquid sweets’, he also knowledgeably addressed every aspect of tending the apiary.
In 1862, the movable-comb beehive arrived in England and the old bee boles became more or less redundant.