HIVE OF ACTIVITY

Alex Preston on the trials and triumphs of beekeeping

It was the nail in the coffin of a cataclysmic year. My bees, which had brought me such comfort during my first summer as a beekeeper, had turned nasty overnight, fulminating angrily about their hive, dive-buzzing me as, heavily suited, I approached to inspect them. I knew enough by this stage to be fairly certain of what I’d find. Sure enough, there in the mesh that lines the bottom of the hive, I saw her, Boudicca, my first-ever queen, curled in on herself as if mourning her own passing. She was much smaller in death than she had been in her pulsing, productive life. I cried a little, but then, there’d been a lot of death that year.

That was in late September, apple-harvest time. I ordered a replacement queen from Romania. She arrived in a little plastic box in the post and I carefully introduced her to my hive. Then the waiting season: a winter of storms and falling branches, squally showers and short, dim-lighted days. I placed bricks atop my hive, strapped it down with ropes against the worst of the wind. I imagined the bees pressed into a tight knot for warmth inside that dark hibernaculum, sensing the fading of the light and then its return, the lengthening of the days, the creeping up of temperatures, all from within the humming, humid ball where individuality is lost to the overwhelming collective logic of the hive.

And then, one day in early March, I walked out to a morning of birdsong and long slanting sunlight. There, in among the hellebores that line our driveway, I saw a single bee, flitting between the nodding sepals. Is it foolish to say I recognised her as one of my own? When I went over to the hive, I saw that the entrance slot was dark with the coming and going of bees. I watched them dance their knowledge to one another, one of them indicating the clumps of daffodils on the village green, another pointing towards a skimmia so heavily perfumed it seemed to dye the air about it.

Now, the bees are out in force, and the year is brightened by their presence. When he saw swifts arrive from their African winters, Ted Hughes used to cry: ‘They’ve made it again!’ He wrote a poem saying as much. I feel the same about my bees, although when I say they’ve made it, what I mean just as much is I’ve made it, we’ve made it, and there are soft, bright days ahead after this darkness.

THE BEES ARE OUT IN FORCE, AND THE YEAR IS BRIGHTENED BY THEIR PRESENCE