Eventful

The brewery is a magnet for 'events': cycle rides, tractor rallies, concerts, vintage car clubs, steam engines. Today was the turn of the British Driving Club. Anyone who turned up in open-backed gloves and a peaked cap, hoping for Bentleys and Aston-Martins, will have been a little surprised. If they stayed to take a look, though, they might have discovered that they have more in common with this four (or eight)-legged propulsion than they might think. As important as the actual driving is the polished metal, the smell of leather, the accessories and the headgear - all of which requires a lot of painstaking preparation before a wheel is turned

Toot, toot

A strange morning in the apiary. We returned to have a second attempt at removing the wasps nest, this time armed with spade and buckets of soapy water. No sooner had we arrived than MrsM noticed a second nest, also in close proximity to the shed and the hives. We dug this one up, dropped it into the water and sprayed some insecticide on to any residues in the ground, before putting back the earth into the hole. A reasonably efficient job

Moving to the original nest, we took the same approach, but this was larger and took a bit more faffing about to be sure we had got the whole thing, by which time we were surrounded by a cloud of alarmed insects - a little unnerving, despite being well protected by our bee-suits. Only when I stopped digging and dunking did I realise that the majority of these were not offended wasps, but highly agitated bees, at least a dozen of whom had dug stingers into my sleeves and gloves

I wasn't seriously stung, but it's still quite disturbing to see bees at this level of arousal, and throwing away their own lives, of course. We backed off to let everyone calm down a bit, then I returned alone to tidy up, retrieve to tools and get out as fast as possible

I really don't know how we managed to enrage the bees so much. We were at a distance where they might normally send out one or two outriders to buzz us, but not engage a full battalion! Maybe wasp and bee pheremones are sufficiently similar that a signal from one alarms the other. Maybe the sheer number of wasps flying around provoked the bees and we were identified as the source of the problem. Maybe digging a hole close to the hives - looking a bit like a bear in search of honey - is provocation enough. Anyway, lesson learned; if we have to do this again, it will be at a time when the bees are staying at home