Hard Labour

We have come to assume (in England, anyway) that 'stables' house only horses, but it was not always so. Those of Augeas, king of Elis, protected his prize herd of 3000 supernatural cattle, each of which was immortal and, in consequence, produced superbovine quantities of dung. Augeas, it seems, was an incompetent farmer, and had stables with high roofs, because the cattle were not cleaned out for 30 years. The job was assigned to Heracles who, at the time, was subject to a community service order for the minor infraction of having murdered several of his own family, but successfully pleaded diminished responsibility due to temporary insanity

Heracles may have had anger issues, but he was ingenious and, rather than set about the job with four-pronged fork, shovel and the sweat of his brow, instead diverted the flow of the rivers Alpheus and Peneus through the stables and got the job done in no time. Environmental protections were little better then than they are now. He had even come to a side agreement with Augeas that he would get 300 of the cattle for the job

Augeas, who had never believed the task could be done, reneged on the deal, so Heracles killed him. His probation officer, Eurystheus, king of Tiryns, seems to have overlooked this rough justice, but not the fact that Heracles had (a) worked for payment and (b) not actually done the work himself, so his stable work was discounted, and he was instructed that he still had to complete seven labours in total

Possibly the bee shed is not quite on the scale of the Augean stables, but it still took us a long morning to take everything out, brush out all the spiders, webs, dust and woodlice, along with the corpses of a great many wasps (I'm not going to say 3000, but for sure more than 300!), clean, sort and winnow the contents, and put it all back. The shed is on the highest point we could find, so no hope of a helping sluice from the brook

Oh yes, the bicycle. It's a long wheelbase recumbent, a hangover from the days when I had a different power-to-weight ratio. I loved it, and still get a little frisson when I move it around. When I bought an electric bike last winter, I toyed with the idea of renovating and converting it instead. Maybe, just maybe... Meanwhile, it's ridiculously out-of-place in a bee shed, like cows in a stable