Garden in the Clouds by Woodward Antony

Author:Woodward, Antony [Antony Woodward ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007351930
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2010-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

The surroundings for my beekeeping course the following February, in Pontypool, could hardly have been in starker contrast to Ray and Meryl’s pitch-perfect idyll. The Torfaen People’s Centre in Trosnant House was as municipal as it sounds, a brick hall and tarmac car park, kerbed and planted with berberis and other tough-looking, charmless plants, reached by a series of bypasses and roundabouts.

Sixteen of us, mainly men, mostly between forty and sixty, sat at tables in a ragged semi-circle around an overhead projector. Two or three had the weatherbeaten complexions of those used to working outdoors. Our first talk (‘Life in the Beehive’) was by a woman, but it soon became clear that our presiding spirit was a mysterious figure called John. His name continually cropped up as the supreme authority on bee matters, whether on questions of currency of data, prevailing agronomic theory, Defra directives, or matters of apiarian history and law. ‘You’d have to ask John’; ‘John would know that’; ‘We’ll check with John.’ Yet for the first three lectures we saw not a glimpse of this hallowed mortal. On our third evening (‘The Beekeeper’s Year’), a question that prompted the lecturer to respond: ‘Well, I don’t know. What d’you think John?’ indicated that the great man was in our midst. However, as the room was in darkness, by Week Four I still hadn’t an inkling who he was.

All was revealed, however, in Week Five (‘Things That Can Go Wrong’), when John took the lectern himself. He had the lugubrious physiognomy of a bloodhound, as if his head had been moulded in beeswax and then inadvertently left a little too long in the sun. In his mid-sixties, he was (it was now revealed) no less than the ex-County Bee Inspector. In fact his recent enforced retirement from this exalted government office, due to statutory age limits, was, we soon learnt, one of the greater iniquities of our time, prompting regular swipes about imbecilic new procedures and declining Ministry standards. John was, it went without saying, a towering figure within the Gwent Beekeepers Association.

As for the theoretical side, there was a good deal more to the working of a colony of bees than I’d realised. The gist (and there was no shortage of jokes about the matter) was that the females (the ‘workers’) did all the work, while the larger males (the ‘drones’) did little except hang around waiting to fertilise the Queen. Given the endless British cultural claims on honey and bees, from Rupert Brooke to Winnie-the-Pooh, I’d rather assumed that the British invented modern beekeeping, so it was a surprise to learn this couldn’t be further from the truth. America, Germany, Austria and France all had made their mark, but the sole British contribution, when it came down to it, was the ‘beehive-shaped’ beehive that every Brit associates with the word, and which Ray had, but which hardly anyone else now used.*

Little was made of stings. Indeed, for the first five weeks of the course you might have thought that getting stung wasn’t even a hazard connected to the activity.

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