This is how I begin with bees. I make hives. To catch wild swarms. And to feel like I am not old.
I build top bar hives. They mirror the kind of tree trunks bees evolved to like. Thick walls. Dark. Secure. Dry.
It feels good to work with my hands on this. Simple carpentry. Well within most skillsets. Even mine. Forgiving, imprecise, useful and frugal. Things I am sometimes myself, too.
I tell myself I want to keep bees. It’s practical. It’s adds diversity to the farms revenue stream. It’s saleable. It’s adds to the biodiversity on the farm it will increase yields on fruit, vegetable and cereal crops. We can make beeswax candles. Honey to sell. Bee bread. Perhaps even hives. Top Bar. Warre. Layens Horizontal…
All this is true. Good reasons. Useful. But the real hook is this. It is unlike anything I have ever done. It’s alien, totally new, and it’s something I have zero experience, knowledge or background in.
I want, in my forties, to try my hand at something completely outside my comfort zone. I want to be good at it. And I want it to be mine. I want to still be able to surprise myself. Learn. Innovate. Accomplish. I am getting old. I would like to still feel young. This I can do by learning. And learning well.
So. I saw, and sand, and varnish and fit. As I work, polishing linseed oil into pine planks, waiting for glue to set, I have time. I think, I read, I listen. I watch a sparrowhawk circle a nest in a treetop not sixty feet away. It stretches out a talon and plucks something from a branch and turns, casually almost, and drifts away.
I am isolating. Like everyone else. Time in our world standing still. In other worlds time spins on. Like many, I can’t see my parents. Friends. Family. Relationships are scattered. On hiatus. The natural world of my farm churns on. Lambs are born. Swallows return. Deer peer out from the forest. Badgers excavate our hill field for food. Vixens scream in the night. Overhead as I check on ewes in the darkening field bats begin again to hunt. And my world is holding its breath, suspended in the amber of an epidemic.
And so I begin with bees. Because I want to surprise myself. Because I want to know that I can still manage to excel, succeed, and come to terms with something new. And because it’s a taste of what will be when the world begins again to turn. An investment from now in the future to be. A fundamental act of faith in the unknowable then from the impossible now.
If we manage to catch them, care for them, grow them, if they feed on the wildflowers and the tree forage we have fostered in the place, we will jar their honey. Hawthorn Hill honey. And it will be a sweetness. An something we can savour and we can sell.
Inspirational