Pause for Thought

Perception is everything. Your scruffy corner is my magical place. This is both. This field corner is fenced off with rickety, slack barbed wire and makeshift posts, because it is inclined to become boggy and has been used as a dumping ground for farm rubbish. The rubbish pile in the foreground is overgrown by nettles that will be as tall as me by mid-summer. The blackthorn on the left, a roadside hedge, is hopelessly overgrown. The goat willows in the centre have established themselves amid the muddle, and grown to outsize proportions. The gate, which I have only once seen used in three years, is held vertical by wire and twine

But you can see two beehives in the midst. We call this an 'apiary', with a slight smile. We have put down stones and timber to create raised walkways over the wet ground - like the Saxons, Jutes and Angles in the eastern marshes. The rubbish pile and nettles will screen the site from over-curious summer walkers. The hedge is a valuable winter windbreak. The willows yield precious early pollen. The view over the fence is south east, so the colonies are woken by the summer sunrise, and get to work early. There is even mid-summer water: a cattle drinking trough visible just beyond the fence - a colony may need several litres a day in summer, when they evaporate it by fanning their wings, to keep cool

Above all this, there is a magic to the spot. We are less than 500 metres from the village centre, but all that can be seen is the top of the church tower (with the cross of St George the Turk today, of course). I have seen a fox running along the hedge in the background. Buzzards and kites scan the field for quarry. Curious young cattle sometimes provide an audience for hive inspections - a line of faces along the rickety fence. Time is a little slower here, and a hint of times past still lingers in the summer haze

"Why Do We Keep Bees?" was the title of a session in yesterday's introductory course for tyro beekeepers. "So that we have an excuse to linger in places like this", I thought, but it wasn't on the slide