Chapter Two

The taking of a swarm of bees is usually quite a simple operation. A swarm occurs when a colony decides that their queen is getting past her peak in egg laying ability. The cell in which one of the worker bees eggs would normally be laid is enlarged and the embryo becomes a queen. When she is ready to take over, the old queen gathers around her a good quantity of workers, usually about one third of the whole, and they leave the hive to find somewhere to hang altogether in a bush or tree while scouts go out searching for a suitable new home.

If they can be collected, in a cardboard or wooden box, they can be deposited in an empty hive. Although the queen has already done good service in her old colony she is good for a few years yet and is quite often replaced in a less dramatic way after a year or two. In this way the bee-keeper can increase his number of colonies.

Before a swarm leaves a hive the bees that are leaving fill themselves with honey and pollen to provide supplies for their first few days. In that condition they are relatively benign, enabling the bee-keeper to show total disregard for the thousands of bees that, to the uninitiated, are attacking him. This creates an undeserved reputation for imperturbability especially if one of the bees goes off and stings one of the onlookers!

The taking of a swarm is, as already mentioned, quite a simple operation but sometimes becomes immensely complicated for one reason or another. There are several occasions that stand out in my memory, one of which was quite early in my time working with bees (and Harold). The location of the swarm was right at the top of a very old pear tree. It was a good large swarm and would well repay the trouble of collecting it. Harold noticed it first - he usually did. He had been looking at our crop of goslings with a view to buying them later on. "Seen that swarm?" he asked. Of course I had not, and I suggested that if he wanted it we should collect it quickly as the weather looked like deteriorating into a thunderstorm. I set up my extending aluminium ladder which proved several feet too short to reach the swarm itself. Harold thought he could get it if I held the collecting box below while he shook the bees into it. This meant that if the bees missed the box they would fall all over me! Another danger was that pear trees, especially old ones, are notoriously brittle.

However, in spite of everything seeming to be against us we put on our hats, veils and bee-suits and got into position. Harold climbed from the top of the ladder on to a branch of the tree while I stayed on the top rung balancing the box that was to receive the bees. I was at full stretch and very unstable, but Harold was quite imperturbable. He was saying what a perfect swarm it was when the branch holding the bees broke, depositing the whole swarm on to Harold's trousers (which were only held up with baler-twine). Those bees that missed him fell all over me and at that moment the thunderstorm broke with a great flash of lightning, rolls of thunder and torrential rain. It would be easy to say that chaos reigned, but it was not quite like that. Harold, typically, suggested that we both stayed quite still, which we did and very soon the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. We then took stock and found that the bees had, more or less, finished up in the box, via Harold's trousers. The broken branch that had deposited the bees in the box was still held to the tree by a piece of ivy which we cut, then lowered the branch, bees, box and ourselves very slowly and carefully to the ground. We gently put the lid on the box and put it in a dry place at the base of the tree. We then went off and had a cup of coffee and put on dry clothes. Harold's only comment was to the effect that "You shouldn't really handle bees in thunder"! I assured him that I would remember that in future! For Harold it was just another swarm collected, for me a lesson in taking things slowly without panic.

Another swarm that stands out in my mind occurred some years later when I was fairly experienced and on this occasion, by myself. The swarm arrived in our raspberry bushes and the weight of it bent the canes down so that the whole swarm was crawling about on the ground and not hanging from a branch as is the usual situation.

In these circumstances the accepted drill is to set up a hive nearby with a piece of slate sloping up from the ground to the entrance of the hive. If you can get a few of the bees in place in the hive and especially if you can find the queen and put her in too, the remaining bees will immediately troop into it and settle down in their new home.

Finding the queen is more easily said than done. Some are almost indistinguishable from all the other workers, but most are noticeably bigger. The trouble is that all the others try to hide her, either deliberately or because they do crowd her all the time. Groups clustered together could easily be where she is, but there usually are lots of groups changing their make-up all the time.

I always get the impression in these circumstances that bees have not read the same books that I have. I did have an empty hive handy and a piece of slate. I set it all up and even put an inviting comb of honey inside. I could not find the queen among the milling hoard of bees but there were several groups that were quite thick enough to be hiding her and I put them inside by hand. I then waited an eternity but it was probably only about an hour. The bees just continued to mill around on the ground showing no cohesion or organization at all.

There then occurred a phenomenon that one reads of, but although observed many times has, I believe, never been satisfactorily explained. Quite suddenly every bee, and there were several thousand, faced towards the hive and marched steadily to the entrance. Within about five minutes they were all inside, the ground was quite clear and there was a very satisfactory humming noise coming from the entrance. The queen must have been among those inside because she was laying eggs before the day was over. That colony went on to produce a lot of honey for me.

Before leaving the stories of the more memorable swarm gatherings there is one that must be recorded. It took place some years ago when I was still earning a living. I was in my office when my secretary came in rather tentatively as she did when not quite sure that I would want to be disturbed. In those days one did not have disembodied electronic voices or, worse still screens. I had a real, live, youngish lady who put on a very good act of being constantly terrified of interrupting me for insufficient reason. She said that my wife was on the 'phone and, to paraphrase her words slightly "was going on about bees". On being connected to Jan I learnt that there was a swarm in the cherry trees and would I go home as fast as possible? Well the answer was "No I could not". Jan then asked if she should take it. Now that was a quite unprecedented suggestion. It was like a chef suggesting that he may as well deliver the baby as the mother was in the restaurant anyway. Until then Jan had observed my operations, ministered to my stings and generally kept a watchful eye on my bee work, but she had not handled bees. This time she seemed determined to go ahead. We arranged, through my disapproving and distrustful secretary, that the 'phone line from my house to my desk should stay open. There was another line available to me so work was not interrupted, but my secretary behaved as if the bees were on my desk. The actual swarm was, apparently, in a large cherry tree, but could be easily reached from a step ladder. The swarm was about 50 yards from the 'phone in the house, so that quite long delays in communication were inevitable. Also, by the time I had given instructions about the next move, the situation at the swarm had altered.

However, after several rather wild conversations there was a prolonged silence. I was really getting very worried, and my secretary asked how many more cups of tea I was likely to want, when at last I heard Jan's voice again, "They're all in the box". Even over the 'phone the triumph in her voice was unmistakable.

It seemed that all had gone well, and from the point of shaking the main body of bees into the box, to the time when all was complete the next step had seemed obvious and there had been no time or need for that matter, to refer back to me. It had all gone like clock-work and we had another first class colony to be hived the following morning. Thereafter that colony was known as "Jan's bees".

The worst non-swarm disaster I can remember concerned a hive of very bad-tempered bees. They were so bad that I moved them away from the house into a field next to the garden alongside the ponies paddock. We had a visiting horse in the paddock together with our two ponies. It was a huge creature of uncertain temper.

This event occurred in summertime when the night was warm and we were sleeping with a minimum of clothes. It was very dark with an overcast sky. I awoke to hear some scuffling from the paddock and then the most terrible horse-trumpeting and screaming. I dashed out dressed only in pyjama trousers and grabbing a torch as I went. The scene that met my eyes in the rather dim light was very frightening. One huge horse down on the ground apparently wrapped up with barbed wire, legs flailing dangerously. The constituent parts of a bee hive were scattered around and the noise of very angry bees was everywhere.

I ran back to the house intercepting Jan and we both put on out bee kits after treating the many stings I had already suffered. Jan, as I.C. horses, managed to disentangle the horse from the barbed wire (how she did that without damage to herself, I do not know. Getting the horse to keep still while the wire cutters were brought to bear was a work of art). The next day the horse required many stitches but we had avoided broken bones (Horse and human).

We then turned our attention to the bees. It had been a large colony, and from time to time they completely covered our veils making it impossible to see to do anything and deafening us with their angry protest. We worked in very short spells, retiring some distance between-times. This was as much to gather the resolve to continue as to let things settle down, but eventually we had the hive together again and at least some bees inside. At that point we retired from the fray and settled in the kitchen with all the doors and windows shut, and drank a lot of brandy. Probably the worst treatment for multiple bee stings but it seemed necessary at the time.

This, probably is the place to consider bee and other stings and that I shall do in the next chapter.

Chapter Three