“Is it safe?” asks Laurence Olivier of Dustin Hoffman in one of the most terrifying scenes of the film Marathon Man (1976).
Hoffman is strapped into a dentist’s chair. Olivier is standing over him with a dentist’s drill in his hand. Henchmen are at either side of the chair ready to prise open Hoffman’s mouth. When the drill starts to whine and the screen smashes to black, the audience knows Hoffman isn’t going to be safe at all.
This scene came into my mind when I was fiddling around the hives the other day. In what ought to have been a scene of rustic peace, man in harmony with bees and garden, I quickly realised it wasn’t safe at all.
Dressed in an orange safety helmet and work gloves and carrying an electric chainsaw and hedge trimmer, I had gone to clear the ground of some undergrowth, mixed with felled saplings, that were making it tricky to move around the hives. When you have lifted a box heavy with honey off the hive and want to put it down on the grass beside the hive-stand, it’s not an ideal moment to trip over a tangle of brambles.
No sooner had the chainsaw begun to whine, however, than a guard bee was rapping on my helmet with all the authority of a rozzer at your door with a warrant in his pocket. What had set her off? Was it the colour of my helmet? The sound of the saw?
Whatever it was, it spelt trouble. When defensive bees zing out the hive “they come not single spies but in battalions”, as Claudius tells Gertrude in Hamlet. In an instant, they’d be pouring out in hundreds and thousands looking for fresh human flesh in which to sting their venom. I knew better than to stick around. Abandoning the saw and the trimmer on the ground, I legged it back to the house to put on the full armour of bee suit with veil, Wellington boots and long rubber gauntlets under the work gloves.
When I returned to the hives, looking like an astronaut on a moon walk, they largely left me alone to get on with the task. It was as if they sensed there were no more easy pickings on offer.
This came at the end of a week of increasing perils in tending my bees.
It began on 27 April with the first full inspection of 2024, an event which had been put off for weeks.
The standard rule about conducting the first inspection of the year is to wait until the weather is warm enough that you would feel comfortable being outside wearing nothing more on top than a T-shirt.
Ha! In Scotland, where I live, that notion has been remote as Maui all this calendar year. We have endured the most miserable late winter in living memory, lasting from Christmas to mid-April. We never saw the sun. There may have been no snow but it felt as if rain fell every day. The garden all around our house turned into a sea of mud.
I have lived in Scotland for 26 years and have grown wearily accustomed to long winters, dark nights and precipitation, whether of snow, sleet or rain. But this was something else. Everybody got fed-up, more than I have ever known. On 27 April, that number appeared to have included my bees.
Around 2pm that day, a window of opportunity suddenly opened brightly, with unexpectedly warm sunshine lifting the temperature to about 15C and sweet, gentle breezes. After kitting up quickly, I rushed to the shed where I keep my beekeeping caboodle, dug out my smoker and filled it with kindling (with a layer of paper from my office shredder at the bottom, followed by a layer of hessian and a topping of splinters of rotten timber picked up on my walks with our dog in the woods beside our house). The theory is that the smoke pacifies the bees and drives them to seek shelter in the middle of the frames.
After I had got my smoker going like Puffing Billy, I went to the hives and gave each of them a puff around the entrance and in the slot at the back for the varroa inspection plate. Lifting the roof of the first hive, I was ready to smother the bees thoroughly with smoke but immediately realised that no such thing was called for. They were all calm and placid and hardly bothered to lift their heads when I took off the crown board that covers the frames. A few guard bees made desultory efforts to make their presence known around my veil but most weren’t troubled.
However, it was immediately apparent that the colonies were alarmingly short of provender. The packets of fondant I had placed on top of the crown boards only weeks before had been picked clean of every crumb, almost as if they’d been through the dishwasher. There was no honey in the upper box, called the super, where they build their stores. Little pollen in the lower box, called the brood box, where they raise their young.
Those long weeks of rain, during which the bees had been unable to go out and forage for food, seemed to have brought them to the edge of starvation.
Everything else about the colonies was as good as can be. I didn’t spot the queen in either hive (not unusual) but the presence of eggs in cells proved that each queen was laying healthily. On the few frames that bore sealed brood (where larvae are hatching), the patterns were excellent. There was no sign of queen cells which are an indication of impending swarming. No shortage of space for expansion. All well. All serene.
(good pattern of developing brood)
Next day, I boiled two litres of water in a pan on the hob and added two kilos of granulated sugar, stirring the mix with a wooden spoon until it dissolved. Leaving the syrup to cool, I took two feeding trays out of the shed and made sure they were clean before taking them and the syrup to the hives.
The reception I got from the bees was as if I had come to administer poison. They were up and at me in seconds, buzzing furiously around my face and hands. Expecting a repeat of the previous day’s calm, I hadn’t bothered to light the smoker nor to put on nitrile gloves beneath my rubber gauntlets. Result: I got stung several times on my fingers.
What the hell?
I could only guess that they might have been unsettled by the previous day’s inspection and didn’t welcome a second disturbance. Or perhaps the temperature might been lower by a degree or two. Or the wind had shifted. Or, perhaps, in lifting the roof of the first hive, I might inadvertently have squashed a bee and the rest of the colony had become alarmed by the pheromone she would have released. And that would be enough to set them all off.
Who can tell? It wasn’t safe, that’s for sure.
Am I allowed to be on the bees' side?
Sun is out here so let's hope bees are happier.