Bee Business

Last Monday we went on an introduction to beekeeping day at River Cottage HQ. We could have chased bees around a field in a handier location, but we once went on a cookery course at River Cottage and Jason is still on their mailing list, where he is enticed by improbably elaborate courses and good discounts. When the chance to poke bees in a Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall adjacent space arose, he booked it, and who was I to protest?

We have been idly thinking about having bees for a few years now. Bees are cool and mysterious creatures and much cuter than wasps. We had the vague idea that one day we would have a house with an orchard and some beehives and win an award from Chris Packham for being champions of insect conservation. Well I did, but that’s because I’ve had a massive crush on Chris Packham since I was about sixteen. Jason is just sad that Terry Nutkins is now dead and has no interest in winning awards if Terry isn’t handing them out. He once got excited driving down a road in Vancouver where he saw a man he thought was Terry Nutkins. He wound the window down and shouted: ‘Hey! Terry!’ He was adamant that it must have been him because the man turned round to see who was shouting at him. It was only some frantic internet searching that laid that dream to rest. RIP.

It’s a long way to Devon from Poplar, so we booked an Airbnb on a flower farm in Somerset and drove down on Sunday via Chesil Beach, which happens to be in Dorset. It’s one of those areas where you can travel widely in a very short geographical space. By Sunday evening I was feeling positively jet lagged by it all.

Chesil Beach was on my list of places to visit and I was super excited to finally go. The weather was glorious, which you would think makes for excellent beach visiting. It does, if you’re the sort of person who wants to bask and dip with the occasional foray for an ice cream. That is not the sort of beach goers we are. Jason, as proved on our relaxing holiday to Rhodes, can only relax for five minutes tops and only if a stringent list of requirements has been ticked off beforehand.

The beach is a site of special scientific interest. It has rare birds and plants along it, some features which are geographically unique and nineteen miles of pebbles that curve all the way out to Portland Bill. Unlike Dungeness, which is open to everyone all year round, Chesil is closed in big swathes for much of the year, so that the birds and plants can have a fighting chance of not being killed by over enthusiastic Instagrammers. What’s left open is massive banks of shingle and very deep water that you are not advised to swim in. It looked gorgeous, but after ten minutes of trudging around, ankle deep in boiling hot rocks with the sun beating down on our bare heads, we decided to call it a day. The most exciting thing was paying for our ice creams in the cafe by using Apple Pay on some kind of digitally savvy, plastic crab.

On the way to our Airbnb, we stopped off so that I could take a look at the Cerne Abbas Giant. The giant, is, as its name suggests, a huge carving of a giant in a chalk hill face. He is 55 metres long and apart from the fact that he is wielding a club in the shape of a huge Nik Nak, his most prominent feature is the fact that he is naked and sporting a giant, chalk erection. What I particularly love about him is that nobody actually knows if he is 400 years old or 4000 years old, and nobody has any clue as to why, instead of the usual white horses, which are carved into hillsides up and down the country, they went for a deranged flasher with a comedy club in his hand. My bet is on it being the work of a particularly lairy 18th Century stag party. I was delighted to see him.

When we finally got to the Airbnb, it was one of those places that photographed really well, but wasn’t particularly comfortable or practical. The sofa and armchair were extremely fierce and we sat bolt upright, as if we were waiting to be called in for an interview, before going to bed on a mattress so thin we kept accidentally meeting in the middle of the bed. I made coffee using a sieve and a picnic jug in the morning, which is far too McGyverish for anyone in need of a flat white before they can function. I was quite impressed with myself but I wouldn’t recommend it as a method of making coffee unless you are really desperate.

Our day at River Cottage was super interesting. It was a good mix of hands on bee wrangling and lessons in how to care for your bees. There was, thank God, decent coffee that had been made in an actual machine and not an elaborate Mouse Trap style set up. Lunch was, as you might expect, very tasty and quite honey heavy. In the afternoon there was cake, and this was a very good thing indeed.

I thought I would be terrified of handling bees. Even in the relatively small hive that we were working on, there were about forty thousand bees. I have only ever snuggled up to one bee, maximum, so it felt a bit mind bending to be casually holding a comb with hundreds of bees clambering all over it. When we first opened the hive I fully expected to panic and excuse myself, but I actually felt incredibly calm when it came to my turn to pull out a rack of bees. It helped that I had so many layers of clothes on that any bee that managed to figure out how to sting me should have been awarded some kind of medal for persistence and bravery. I had on a full, bee suit, plus wellies, plus a pair of Marigolds. It was boiling and in all the pictures I look like a sweaty, spacewoman who is on her way to do some al fresco washing up.

What I enjoyed most was seeing not just traditional hives that are largely designed for the benefit of bee keepers, but a range of hives that are designed to make the bees happy. There was one hive, called a rocket hive, which was made out of a hollow log on three, long legs, which is just designed to be an excellent home for wild bees. You take no honey from it and although there is a hatch in the bottom where you can observe the bees, you don’t ever bother them unless something is wrong. I loved that, because my main take away from the whole day was that I can best help the bees by mostly planting bee friendly plants, not using insecticides and leaving the bees alone to do their own thing. Some people really enjoy dressing up like a space washerwoman and hassling the bees into ponying up honey. I enjoy chilling with the bees, telling them my news and letting them get on with being the best bees they can be. I think Chris Packham might even give me an award for that.