Category: The Bear and the Bees

 

Mrs Jerry is a fantastic primary school teacher and she’s always looking for ways to enhance the learning experience of her pupils.  They adore the way that she has guinea pigs, fish and a turtle in the classroom and they vie for the privilege of feeding, holding and playing with the pets.  I have to admit that the experience is slightly less rewarding for the one who normally does the ‘mucking out’ of said class pets, but sometimes I get to work with the boys who don’t have many positive male role models in their lives and seeing their enjoyment of the even the most mundane tasks, (just so long as someone is doing the work with them), makes me very happy.

Last week, it was designated ‘bring your lamb to school day’ by my wife and we made an early morning trip to see a neighbour who had moved twelve young lambs back from their farm and into their yard in order to give them a better start in life by keeping them out of the cold and away from the foxes. They were being hand fed and were as tame as they could be, following around the nearest human and bleating sweetly.

How on earth do you pick one?

I loaded one of the dogs old sleep crates into the back of the car and let the kids choose the cutest two.  That clearly wasn’t easy, but we made off with ‘Samantha’ and ‘Trip’.  Yes, they all had names, although I accused the owner of having made the names up on the spot just to appease the kids! Probably because thats just what I would have done…

Trip on the left, Samantha on the right.  How cute are they? 

Samantha and Trip, who were by then around four weeks old, bleated prettily all the way to school and then proceeded to turn my hitherto clean and new smelling car into something decidedly more agricultural.

We attracted a great deal of excited kids (and adults) as we carried the lambs into the classroom and corralled off a small area for them to roam around in. Very quickly it became apparent that we’d need some form of ‘blotting paper’ to keep the area relatively clean and I was despatched to the supermarket to buy newspapers and a bag of straw.

Getting to know you

It’s difficult not to become attached to something like a four week old lamb and they really are quite lovely. In a previous post I described how country people aren’t generally so sentimental with their animals, particularly when they will eventually end up on the plate, but that doesn’t stop them from treating their animals very well and the small flock of twelve lambs that our friends have at home certainly don’t lack for cuddles.

“Trip” in all his glory

Around twenty eight years ago as newly weds, we stayed on a friends farm in western Australia. I worked in a bauxite mine and Mrs Jerry laboured as a roustabout in the shearing sheds. The shearers tried all sorts of ruses to fluster and reduce the pretty little blonde to tears in the competitive and very male atmosphere, but they didn’t manage it.

That pretty little blonde, with Dolly her favourite sheep dog

The shearing sheds.  Note the sprung back supports, you need them after a couple of hundred sheep have passed through.

They weren’t altogether gentle with the shears either and every now and again, a sheep would end up with quite a nasty cut on their newly shorn skin. There was always a sewing kit in the shed that was used for patching up the ‘nicked’ sheep and as an encouragement to avoid cutting the sheep, the shearer who injured the sheep was supposed to patch them up themselves, but they tried it on with her and flung a bleeding sheep at her with the instructions to ‘sew ‘er up’ but Mrs Jerry had caught on to what they were doing and cooly retorted ‘you cut the poor bugger so you can sew her up yourself’ and returned to throwing and sorting the fleeces. Begrudgingly and following the jeers and laughter of all of his mates, the shearer did just that. Mrs Jerry was invited to the pub that night by them all – a rare honour indeed when Ozzie country pubs were still very much a bastion of chauvinism.

At the end of my shift, surrounded by an orange halo of bauxite dust,  I was usually dragooned into helping out with rounding the sheep up in the evenings and putting them into a holding pen for the next mornings shearing.

The holding pens.  It wasn’t unusual to see the dogs running over the sheep backs to keep them moving forward!

I loved walking behind the farm dogs who nipped and yapped at heels of the sheep in the soft early evening light and I learned that there’s nothing quite as daft as a frightened sheep when they are boxed into a corner.

Rounding up the mob.

Rather than take the obvious and easy way, which is usually to go the way the dog wants them to go, the sheep will often run in a totally different direction and get stuck in a fence or a bush. You’d have to wade in behind them, lift them up using their wool as a carrying handle and dump them into the back of the ute before they collapsed from the stress. A few years later, whilst running a wildlife sanctuary in north Queensland, I discovered that whilst trying to herd Emu’s, that they have the same daft, but in their case, belligerent temperament and rather than turn around (they can’t walk backwards) and go the way you wanted them to, they’d try and jump over you, usually knocking you to the ground in the process!

The kids in Mrs Jerry’s class absolutely loved the lambs, but for obvious reasons, I can’t publish many pictures with them in it, but here’s a nice picture of Samantha checking out their art work.

And just in case you think that I am going too soft, here’s what we had for dinner that night…

Bon appétit!

Jerry.

You can’t go to China and not visit the wall.  Well actually, I have been to China many times over the last 20 years and have never gotten around to it, but last year, I took the opportunity of a trip that lasted over the weekend and got out of Beijing with a hire car and driver.  Mutianyu regarded as the ‘best’ section of the wall, is around 80 km from Beijing and is well administered, do beware the aggressive t shirt sellers however.  Jinshanling is also a very good place to get to the wall and although it’s around 157 km from Beijing, the crowds and souvenir sellers are less frenzied.

The Local government takes care of their own sections and some areas, such as Mutianyu and Jinshanling are beautifully restored and maintained.  I did hear from my driver of one council who decided to enlist the help and sponsorship of local business to fund the rebuild and maintenance.  The selected business just happened to be a supplier of ceramic tiles and fittings and that section of the great wall of China ended up looking like a hybrid between a public convenience and a Versace palace. State government was not amused apparently…

A very brisk morning on the wall.  It cleared the sinuses

It’s not often you can see a ‘cityscape’ in Beijing, but on recent trip I encountered a very rare clear summers day.  It was a Monday morning, of course, which means that the air has had the weekend to clear out all the traffic fumes and industrial smog.  Central heating goes on in Beijing on November the 15th and all the coal-fired power stations spark up at the same time.  Yes, you read that correctly, the Government determines when its cold enough for you to have your heating on.

What that means of course, is that your eyes sting, your throat gets sore and you’ll have a something between a low-level and ‘get me the hell out of here’ headache from the moment you leave your hotel in the morning, to the moment you return in the evening.  Forget navigating around the city by landmarks because you won’t be able to see more than 200 metres horizontally or vertically.  The Government restricts what cars can be on the road and tries all sorts of other controls but ultimately has said that poor air quality is the price you pay for progress.

Monday morning and clear skies

I was so excited when I arrived recently and I could see right across the city from the office window.  So excited in fact that I joined all the other Beijing’ers and stood at the window and ooh’d and ahh’d at the distant mountains that circle the western side of the capital. I even forgot to take a picture…  The next morning of course, it was back to a ‘normal’ smoggy day.  But bear in mind that this is summer and you can see twice as far as you normally can.

Back to normal by Tuesday

And here’s what you have to look forward to in winter.

Mao in Winter.  (sadly, not one of my pictures)

I have, on previous trips headed out into the countryside, where the air is clean(ish) and as part of my work, I have seen a good deal of renewable energy projects and had occasion to view their agricultural practices. On one trip I saw what looked like an army of soldiers with small ladders, tending to vast orchards. Upon closer inspection I saw that it was indeed a small army of soldiers tending to the orchards and in fact they were cross pollinating the blossom on the thousands of trees with tiny paint brushes. Normally, of course cross-pollination is done by our friends the bees and other insects, but the Chinese have used so many chemicals to make sure that harmful insects can’t get anywhere near the crops, that there are no bees left alive. In Australia and the US, the farmers truck in millions of commercially managed bees at the crucial times and have them augment the local bees efforts. It’s apparently cheaper to get the Army in here.

I had occasion to visit a location in the south (Tianjin) and decided to take the bullet train to turn a 4 hour drive into a 35 minute trip. For those of you who have used the Shinkansen in Japan, they are identical, if not quite as luxurious. They are also a bit quick as you can see from the speedometer picture  on the wall below. Getting on and off them is like negotiating a Saturday afternoon football crowd at the turnstiles as they are very well patronised.

Train stations are unfortunately a popular venue for violent political protests and the government are very well aware of this and prepare accordingly.  Luckily, firearms are very difficult to obtain in China, so your average criminal resorts to physical force or the use of edged weapons to get what they want. The Uyghur terrorists who largely reside in the Xinjiang region and want autonomy, tend to use knives in frenzied attacks in public spaces, such as train stations, of course.

The Chinese authorities now post uniformed and plain clothes security guards at prominent places who are equipped with long poles for holding would be knifemen at bay, presumably while they can be bludgeoned with clubs. The guards are also equipped with fire extinguishers as sadly, there are numbers of mentally ill or disenchanted citizens who also protest against the government with self-immolation. It happens a lot more than you’d think apparently, but is never reported.

Note the curved end to hold the nutters at bay and the extinguisher to put them out.

I enjoyed this trip, not least because of the warm weather and the relative lack of pollution, but also because I had the chance to sit outside at the JW Marriott restaurant and have my habitual (Australian) eye fillet steak and bottle of Malbec as a trip closer. I had looked forward to it for days and it always ends a visit well. I know it’s not a very Chinese dinner, but believe me, I have had enough of the three major Chinese countryside food groups – dog, duck and donkey to last me a lifetime, so please forgive my culturally insensitive meal.

All the best,

Jerry.

 

The gargoyles are enough to give the kids nightmares..

Last week was my third and probably last trip to Denmark this year.  This trip was a quick ‘in and out’ due to the fact that I was missing home and I’m staring down the barrel of several other overseas trips (junkets, according to some) that I could honestly do without right now.

Just in case you think I am protesting too much and of course I am, because I love travel, up to a point, I am on the defensive.  When I walked into the hotel, twenty minutes after getting off the plane, the barman called over and welcomed me by name.  A good or a very bad sign, depending on your point of view.  Last time we did the entire gin menu one and a half times and it was a gin bar, so I planned to take it easy this trip.  I failed, of course.

I learned a few things about Danish culture this trip, firstly, when there is and invitation for a night out ‘on the company’ there is no end of takers. Seriously, they aren’t like your average English/Australian party crasher, they do it like it was a corporate takeover, with beer at the end.  Under normal circumstances, they might go home at 23:00 and not mention the night before upon the morn, not even a “did you see how pissed Jerry was last night!”.  Even if you paid yourself, there is no word for “please” in Danish, so don’t be offended if someone just nods assent for the massively expensive cocktail you have just offered them.

That doesn’t mean to say that the Danes are rude, far far from it.  It’s just that I think their Viking origins somehow prevents them from saying it.  In fact,  it’s as if they’d much rather cleave your skull with a double headed axe than use that word.   Upon questioning such linguistic differences with english, I was told that polite children are taught to say, “Må jeg bede om…” when requesting something, which translates to “May I beg for…”

You can also ask politely if people would “be sweet” and do things you would like them to do. When requesting that, say, your large bearded Viking neighbour in the open plan Ikea like office, remove his giant mountain bike from the space next to your desk where you bang your shins on it every day, you can say, “Vil du ikke være sød og…” or “Would you not be sweet and…”. Putting anything in the negative form makes it more polite in Danish. So, “would you please not be so sweet and move your f’ing bike” is apparently quite acceptable….

On this occasion, several of the striking Viking ladies of the office decided to accompany our small team of misfits out on the ‘toon’ It actually looked like we were being escorted by Lagertha the shield maiden and her sisters.  Passers by stepped into the road rather than disrupt their determined stride.  Needless to say, I became confused at some time during the proceedings and having a natural homing instinct, found my way to the metro only to wake up on numerous occasions, only to find that I had travelled the said metro, end to end several times.  This time a 20 year old Valkyrie woke me and suggested that I actually get off the train at my stop.  She was kind enough to point out the correct one and I made it back to my stylish matchbox of a room at 06:00.  I remember thinking that I might be too old for this…

I had a really busy week, but I managed to take a few hours before catching the flight home and I decided to make like the tourist and wander through the centre of Copenhagen.  There is long street called “Strøget ” that runs the length of the CBD, which is just over a kilometre long.  It’s totally pedestrianised and is the place to be seen in Copenhagen on a sunny day and wonder of wonders, the sun was shining and it was a toasty 17 degrees.

Strøget  starts at the ‘Rådhuspladsen’ or City hall square and meanders past some fantastically expensive clothes shops and also some delightfully tacky souvenir shops – think little mermaid tea towels etc. The buildings are lovely, thankfully not having been bombed in WWII.

Note the Tuborg wagon taunting me…

Strøget was converted to a pedestrian zone on 17 November 1962 when cars were beginning to dominate Copenhagen’s old central streets.  Inspired by a number of new pedestrian streets created by the RAF in Germany, the town planners decided to make some changes.  After the war, during the 1950s they closed to traffic for several days over Christmas and people liked it. The original closure was initially a temporary trial, but the change was made permanent in 1964, and the road has been pedestrianised ever since.

Not everyone liked the idea of banning the cars, as for some reason some people believed that the Danes did not have the mentality for the kind of “public life” envisioned by such a street, and many of the local merchants believed the move would damage their business.  The gentleman behind the idea of a car free Strøget was Alfred Wassard, who was Copenhagen’s ‘mayor for town planning’ from 1962–78.  The poor devil even received death threats for his efforts.  On the opening day, police officers were present to protect against assassination threats, and unhappy car drivers blew their horns from the adjoining side streets to mark their displeasure even though the event was well attended and celebrated with dancing and music.  The upmarket shops on the east end of the street were particularly angered by the change, and they lobbied to have the project restricted to the other end of the street, which was dominated by bars and cinemas at the time.

Unsurprisingly, it’s the bar and restaurant end of the street that intrigues me the most and it concludes at Kongens Nytorv (the Kings new square).  There is a lovely harbour area with sea going barges and fishing boats tied up alongside the cobbled streets.  Beautiful old buildings that would have once been merchants houses are now home to restaurants and bars with seating along the canal side.

Beautiful, but I’m not tempted to go for a swim…

I had a great seafood lunch and a cheeky glass of white wine, whilst people watching and due to Jerry Jnr’s allergy to shellfish, I felt no guilt at overdosing on prawns, scallops and crab claws whilst here.  I’d really miss Australia but if Northern Europe ever did recall me, Denmark could become home for a while.

 

Dorothy Boyd, who was Renee Zellweger’s character in the film ‘Jerry McGuire’ said “it used to be a better meal, now its a better life” when speaking about first class and how wrong it all was.  Well Dorothy, sorry, but I can’t agree.

Today has me on a 31 hour odyssey from Melbourne to Copenhagen, via Sydney and Dubai. The first leg is a manageable two hours and I think I may have referred to my usual position of being right at the rear of the plane before? On a flight like this one, I can sit anywhere, even in the middle seat, if I had to, but one of the perks of air mile numbers that look like Lat/Long references, is that I can usually book ahead to achieve an aisle seat and one thats somewhere near the front of the economy rows, just so as I can get off the thing faster. I refuse on principle, to use my airmiles to upgrade on work trips and instead, I cling to the forlorn hope that on the rare instances when I fly for fun, I’ll be able to lord it up over the plebs in the back and give the impression that I always fly this way.

On the short leg of this trip, as one of those plebs, I witnessed the hoi polloi scrambling to get their numerous bags in the overhead lockers regardless of the actual location of their seats. Passengers who struggle in late find themselves having to sit with their luggage at their feet, which isn’t the best prospect, even for a couple of hours. Those unlucky souls who will spend their trip folded like a swiss army knife will often exclaim sotto voce “well, SOMEONE has taken the luggage space above MY seat” and then another shirty voice will justify their swinery with the claim that “SOMEONE took MINE first” It’s funny, but you never seem to hear that up the front of the plane.

I travel with the absolute minimum of luggage (note that I didn’t say baggage, as I have plenty of that) and I pride myself on being able to move through airports like a guided missile, from A to B like I was on rails. A is usually the taxi and B, thanks to excess Qantas air miles, is the first class lounge. I can always get a decent meal and successfully self medicate on cabernet sauvignon before leaving this haven of civility and head back to the lower decks, both literally and figuratively. On this occasion, I had sufficient warning of a trip to carefully book myself a seat on the upper deck of a relatively new A380 aircraft, it was economy of course, but the economy seats on the upper deck seem to be populated with a more discerning clientele. I moved through the almost empty business class section, with the air of a person who was just going to sit down amongst the nobs and ever so casually, slipped my small suitcase in their overhead locker. Ha, no fighting for locker space for me!

Seeing the semi detached palaces of business class seats took me back to a previous incarnation when I worked for a US bank. Banks, of course, always sit up front as they are spending our money, not their own and this just happened to be the first Singapore airlines flight on their brand new A380. There was a great celebration in the business class lounge and lashings of champagne to be had. My boss at the time and I had arrived some three hours early for the flight, which was unheard of in Singapore as even with as little time as 30 minutes (with carry on luggage mind you), I have made flights, the airport is just so efficient. Needless to say, our time in the lounge was quite convivial and we were amply hydrated for the journey. We had found ourselves chatting to a couple of pleasant young ladies who had been working as flight attendants for some years and had been detailed off as hostesses for the celebration. They promised to ‘put a good word in’ for us with their colleagues on board with regards to the liberal service of alcohol and off we all unsteadily trooped to the gate with great fanfare.

The business class seats looked at first glance to be a huge leather bench and had an airbag in the seatbelt. They were also about as comfortable as a court bench.  I had actually been sitting two rows behind my boss and so, when the seat belt lights went off, I was invited to join him by one of the hostesses who sweetened the deal with a bottle of champagne. I realised, of course, that the seats were for one person, but as they were so generous, it wasn’t a hassle to share one for a while. As one bottle became three, I realised that the attendants in the lounge had completely misunderstood the relationship that my boss and I had and this was reinforced by the staff’s knowing smiles and merry “cheers” each time they topped up our glasses.  A visit from the very clean cut and winking second officer who laughingly declined a glass of champagne finally convinced me that they had been ‘greasing the skids’ (so to speak) for the first homosexual tryst on board the inaugural flight.

My innate hetrosexuality plus increasing fatigue defeated the persistent matchmaking intentions of the flight crew and I declined the offer of a nightcap and struggled back to my cold court bench.  I then attempted to get some sleep before the inevitable hangover arrived. After a couple of hours, I awoke to the feeling that I had been pulled out of a matchbox to see one of the attendants standing over me with what looked like a swag (for non Australians – that’s kind of a bed roll). As I looked around, it dawned on me that my time in the dock was wasted, there was in fact a completely flat bed, lurking under the hard leather seat. Needless to say, once she had finished fluffing, I wasted no more time and slipped under the duvet.

On this current and not nearly as glamorous flight on the ‘upper deck’ I had pre booked an economy aisle seat, so there was a reasonable chance of at least having some leg room and it turned out that the crew were delightful mix of Aussies and Brits, who smilingly served the almost edible pap that passes for airline food. Without the self medication (I am occasionally sensible pre flight) I struggled to do more than cat nap, but I have survived MEL-SYD-DXB and I am just about to land at LHX where I hope to able to pass quickly through the great unwashed and into the once more rarified air in the lounge for a wash and brush up before the next leg in a couple of hours.

This week I am in Southern Thailand, or the ‘Deep South’ as its referred to by the Thai media.  It has been conflict afflicted for quite a few years thanks to a separatist insurgency.  The three largely muslim southern provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat have been in state of what is effectively a civil war, but in reality is a fight between a few die hard separatists who believe that the deep south should rightfully be self governing as a Sultantate and be more closely aligned to Malaysia.  The Thai authorities refuse to countenance that of course and they pour millions of dollars worth of aid each year into containing the violence.  The conflict started in 1948 but it has really picked up in intensity since 2001.

Driving into Yaring, which is known as being ‘ground zero’ for the conflict, I noticed that there were a number of similarities between 1980’s Belfast and 2017 Southern Thailand, soldiers with automatic weapons at check points on almost every corner, armoured Police cars, heavily fortified barracks and police stations with makeshift grenade screens and hundreds of metres of razor wire, but then I thought about the differences; friendly locals, good food, great weather, incredible beaches and the like, so, nothing at all like Belfast then….

All the beaches along this part of the coast are the same – deserted and clean.

Damage from the conflict is repaired almost immediately by the local government and this is an extension of the ‘broken windows’ theory where damage and vandalism left, leads to further civil disorder and attracts criminal activity.  A by product of this is lots of fresh paint and new buildings in the area, so there is somewhat of a silver lining.

There are weekly attacks and just today a car bomb exploded just outside a hotel that the media claims was popular with western tourists.  I don’t know about that because I only saw one westerner there the whole time I was in the area and Caucasians do certainly draw the eye. I am not going to post pictures of what happened, but you can see for yourself here

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/security/1246622/pattani-bomb-blasts-leave-scores-hurt

It’s really not a good idea to be taking pictures of all the road blocks in the city so I kept the camera down and tried to look harmless. I did however manage to snap one check point not far from the village we were visiting.

Just a normal checkpoint in the country!

The locals or ‘Bangso Yawi’ as they are called are very traditional and devout, but excluding the few who have actually taken up arms, they are not at all extreme in their views.  The countryside is similar to North Eastern Malaysia, mostly flat and covered with rubber trees and palm oil plantations. As the country narrows before it reaches Malaysia there are beautiful beaches both on the East and the West sides.  Small fishing villages that have racks of very smelly drying fish are all along the coast and there are very few cars or trucks, which is in complete contrast to the northern cities.

Fishermen working on their boats before going home and sleeping through the heat of the day.

I spent quite a while working in the North East of Malaysia in years past and I remember it as being distinctly less friendly than it is here. There was a lot of smuggling and cross border violence back then, but even though the insurgency hasn’t really dimmed in its intensity, with murders and bombings being common, the locals here at least haven’t lost their charm.  We visited the village headman at his home and they made us very welcome, laying on a feast of organic fruit and coconut water fresh from the nut.  For security reasons they asked us not to take photographs of them and they got very tense when an Army reconnaissance patrol rode past the house very slowly on motorcycles.  Being naturally alert to tension in these circumstances, it did make me wonder just who we were working with.

I thought the black cloth was an emergency sail, but it’s actually a sun shade

Just like 1980’s Northern Ireland you never really knew for sure ‘who was who, in the zoo’ and special interests abound in a country like Thailand.  But, the bottom line is – they want investment and infrastructure brings that.  All in all, it was a good week and it seems certain that IED’s permitting, I’ll be back soon!

 

Firstly, beekeeping is cool, very cool… and don’t let anyone tell you that it isn’t.

Secondly, let me list the things that beekeeping is cooler than:

• hipster beards on 25 year olds
• unicorn Latte’s
• miniature pigs
• cauliflower florets

Lets face it, if you aren’t already a beekeeper, you want to be one now don’t you?

If I sound in any way defensive and self justifying, it’s possibly because if you know me well, beekeeping’s probably not quite what you might expect my hobby to be.  It’s also possibly one of the most ‘Zen’ hobbies that you can have on the planet and that might take a bit of an explanation, but I’ll get to that in a moment. Please firstly allow me to explain how I became interested in the gentle art of beekeeping.

I grew up on the edge of a medium sized village in the British East Midlands. There were farms and orchards all around and people still followed traditional English country pursuits including maypole dancing, shooting, beer drinking, fishing, cider making and beekeeping. Ok, I made the first one up as there weren’t many folks still doing that, but I did as a kid and apart from feeling a bit silly dancing with girls, I enjoyed it.

In the summer and really, the last great summer I remember in the UK was 1976, when there were bees everywhere and it was quite dangerous to run barefoot in the garden because you’d run the risk of treading on a bee feeding on the clover in the grass. When the bees swarmed, which they always did in the middle of summer, it wasn’t uncommon to find a football sized teardrop of bees hanging from your tree, the eaves of your house or even your car. In most cases, they either had to be left where they were in the hope that they’d move on, or they had to be physically relocated by someone who knew what they were doing.

And here’s one the bees made earlier

For our small village of the damned, the local ‘go to’ person for relocating bees was the village plumber and he was known by the local kids as “whistle Poo” – one, because his real name sounded like that and two, he whistled when he was in your house, so you always knew where he was and three, he was usually up to his elbows in someone else’s poo.

My parents, had many roses and a large orchard that attracted a lot of wildlife and at bee vacation time, we’d often find a swarm clinging to one of the apple trees, or on one memorable occasion, in a hollow of the cherry tree. Whistle Poo would usually respond to a bee call faster than a burst pipe and luckily his call out fee for removing a swarm was much cheaper than for a plumbing call out as it usually only amounted to a couple of pints down at the local pub. He didn’t exactly lose out through his largesse as he ended up driving a Porsche and living opposite the local golf club, so that shows you how successful a plumber he was!

During the cherry tree incident, I watched from a safe distance as he suited up and lit his smoker, fascinated with the calm and deliberate way he moved among the bees and coaxed them into a box for their safe removal. As an adult, I had always wanted to keep Bees but had been frustrated by circumstances; my years in the service or living in multiple rented houses and apartments around the world had always precluded a hive, but I always planned to have one someday.

When I moved back to Australia, one of my neighbours mentioned that he had access to a number of old hives that had been abandoned when a farmer he knew had passed away. The bees had all moved on, but the twenty or so hives left behind, were up for grabs. Ordinarily, you don’t take on abandoned hives, because you just don’t know if they have been diseased or poisoned, but being a newbie and a bit tight, I decided that I’d take a look at them and see what could be salvaged.

Anecdotally, the farmer had been a keen beekeeper until he’d become too old to look after them, so I could be reasonably certain that they hadn’t been poisoned and the bees had probably moved on of their own accord. Unlike kids, bees do actually leave home eventually and set up somewhere else without insisting on being given lifts, having tantrums and bleeding you dry of your hard earned but by the by; out of the pile of brood boxes, supers, lids and frames there were around half a dozen that were salvageable so I hired a high pressure steamer and went to work on them and burned the rest.

That summer a friend called and said that she had bees in her chimney and could I please come around and remove them? Excited at the opportunity and buoyed up by all the training that You Tube could provide, I struggled into my brand new suit and clambered up onto her roof and into a grist of happily buzzing Bees.

After a couple of puffs from my new smoker (which I had filled with shredded cardboard and some dried leaves), I removed the chimney pot and with the aid of a torch, I saw a fantastic vaulted wax chamber and felt, as much as smelt; a beautiful waft of warm honey envelop me. I was hooked.

Despite feeling distinctly out of my depth, but borne out of the confidence of never having been attacked by a swarm of angry bees, I decided to press on with the removal of the comb. Having been anchored in the chimney for quite some time, it took me a while to remove it all, sawing the wax from the sooty brickwork with my hive tool and all the time, listening to the frequency emitted from the bees as it rose and fell. I learned then that you can tell the state of mind of the bees by the pitch of their buzz – the higher pitch, the more you should back off or puff more smoke. The lower the buzz and when you can almost feel the sound in your core, the happier they seem to be.

Some beekeepers say that puffing the smoke tranquillises them, but others claim that it mimics the smoke from a bushfire and the bees start eating all the honey they can and protectively surround the queen as a prelude to moving out en masse, to a safer place. I’m not quite sure which one it is, but as I took a rest sitting on a flat part of that hot tin roof on that beautiful sunny afternoon, I was feeling the buzz (pun intended), I knew that I wanted to do more of this, much more of it. I felt so calm and yet so absolutely in the zone. I hadn’t focused on anything quite so closely since Miss Gooch’s* mini skirt. And there you go, there’s the ‘Zen’ reference explained…

*My very stylish and attractive 1970’s primary school teacher.

I heard once that if you are in the fire ban season, which we have annually in certain parts of Australia, in order to prevent bush fires, you cannot light any fires, have open bbq’s or even use your bee smoker and then it’s best to spray sugar water all over the bees to calm them and they will spend ages licking each other clean and they don’t worry too much about the unwanted company. Well, I thought… you would, wouldn’t you?……….

At the moment, I have two hives, one at home and another at a friends place. I took advantage of a recent hot spell, which where I live, outside of the summer months, generally isn’t that hot at all and I disturbed the bees in order to upgrade their accomodation. Last winter’s weather hadn’t been kind to the pine boxes and there were several areas where the bees were taking shortcuts through holes in order to get out and tend to the flowers in the garden. Some serious renovation was clearly in order.

 

The hive – looking a bit worn out (like me..)

Before I go into the hive renovations, let me try to explain what the inside of a man made hive actually looks like. Inside your hive the bees build their foundation on pressed wax sheets that are fixed onto a lightweight wooden frame and they hang, more or less like the folders inside the drawer of a filing cabinet. The bees use their energy to first build out the wax and then to fill the little chambers with honey. The honey in the bottom box, or “deep” as they are sometimes called, belongs to the bees and the workers tend the Queen and produce enough honey for the hive to thrive on.

The smaller boxes that sit on top of the deep are called “supers” and that technically is the beekeepers honey, for him or her to gather. It’s important of course, not to take too much from the bees and to always leave them enough honey to take them through the winter months.

One of the most stressful things that you can do to your bees is to raid the hive and steal the honey and to be honest, whist I love working with the bees, I have never found the extraction of the honey to be a very satisfactory process. Don’t get me wrong, I love the end result, but the troops spend so much energy creating the wax foundation before they get to making the honey, that I always feel like I am destroying so much of their hard work when I try to extract the honey from the cells.

The traditional way for the semi commercial beekeeper to get the honey out is to use an extractor; which is a a bit like the spinner in a washing machine. The older ones are hand cranked and the newer versions have motors to avoid the work out. I borrowed a hand cranked one from a friend and had a go. First you scrape the wax caps off the little cells that contain the honey (as seen in the picture) and then you slip the wooden frames into the spinner and get going.

Attempting (and failing) to warm and coax the honey out of the frames in front of the fire.  

I have to admit that on my first attempt, I failed miserably and ended up piling the gooey, waxy mess into a sheet of calico and hanging it up in a warm place to drip out the good stuff over a couple of days.

Since then, I have wrestled with different extractors and I even had an ingenious (or so I thought) small stainless steel frame made that fitted into the chuck of a drill in order to help spin the honey out into a large plastic drum, but I always seemed to pick a day that is too cold and the honey won’t run, or it’s so hot that the wax foundation collapses; thereby ruining the foundation for reuse.

My not so – genius invention..

A lot of the time, I ended up spinning it too fast and centrifugal force flung the honey and wax everywhere without actually getting any into the bucket. It’s bloody frustrating to be honest and I always seem to end up trying to do it just before I go away on a trip and getting covered in honey and not enjoying the process as much as I should.

I did ask the long suffering Mrs. Jerry to hold the bucket still one time in a bid to refine the process and then we both got horizontal stripes of honey all across our chests, faces and in our hair for our trouble. In the full knowledge that I was going away for a few weeks, I glanced amorously across the bucket and briefly reminded her about the bees covered in the sugar water but I was quickly told ‘not to even think about it’…. but, it’s always worth a try though right?

Eventually, after planning to refurbish the hives but putting it off through lack of time, I heard of a new invention that has revolutionised beekeeping – the flow hive….

Note to readers – as previously mentioned, for those of you who do know me well, I bet you never thought I’d be singing the praises of a revolutionary new beekeeping invention…. but look, its an honest hobby and it doesn’t hurt anyone – unless you get stung, of course and it keeps me out of the pub, so there!

The ‘flow hive’ is the brainchild of a father/son team who live in the hippy hills behind Byron Bay, in NSW, Australia. It took them about ten years and judging by the look of them, probably more than a few herbal cigarettes to invent and refine something that allows you to harvest your honey, without even opening up the hive! have a look at their video – it’s absolute genius…

https://www.honeyflow.com.au

Cedar (told you they were hippies) and his dad raised the money for developing the flow hive concept by crowdsourcing and the $300K they were asking for reached around $30Million within a few weeks. Now; thats a fair few free trade lentil pancakes isn’t it?

I took the option of NOT buying a new and quite expensive hive as depicted on the extremely impressive marketing video , but instead I decided to modify my existing hives. The secret of the flow hive is in the frames, as shown below. They are around twice the width of the normal wooden frames you can see and split vertically in two when you place a large flat ‘key’ into the top and twist it.

The modified ‘super’, with the key port 

A bit of basic woodworking later and I was set up and the bees were doing their thing. If this all sounds a bit like hands off beekeeping and in some way cheating, let me assure you that it isn’t. As Cedar’s laid back Ozzie drawl tells you in the video, you still have to look after them, maintain the hives and you’ll still get stung occasionally. So just like old fashioned beekeeping then?

I went back to check on the bees a couple of weeks ago and I thought that as it was still a fire ban period, I’d just sneak around the back of the hive, open up the little window and see how they were going. Just in case you think that this is a little foolhardy, in the video link above, there’s a little girl sticking her finger in the honey outlet tube and after sucking it, expressing her delight with a very cute lisp. Righto, I thought, I can do that and I won’t even have to bother with my suit and veil. I avoided the flight path out of the front door of the hive and stepped around to the rear and business end of the flow hive. I opened the trap door and bugger me; the bees were waiting. Douglas Bader with stripes and his mates scrambled to attack the bandit. Firstly, they went for my eyes, then my ears. I tried to stay calm, willing myself to remember that for a bee, stinging is its last resort, because they don’t live long after leaving their sting and most of their intestines in your skin, but obviously, this lot had guts to spare and they didn’t give a stuff. I felt like Godzilla, surrounded by American fighter planes, but this time being actually hit by the bees rather than being hit by missiles. Initially at least anyway.

I fled back to the house and glanced at my reflection in the cars wing mirror on the way. I had started to resemble the male lead in the 1980’s Cher movie ‘Mask’ and I could see that some serious anti histamines were in order. I couldn’t see anywhere on the label that beer wasn’t appropriate in conjunction with the pills (largely because my eyes had swelled shut) so I pressed a cold can to my forehead as I gulped down another. I decided not to mention my stupidity that evening at the dinner table, but instead muttered something about running into some stray bees that were clearly not my own well mannered bees and retired early to bed, with the snickers of my own poorly mannered family ringing in my ears.

The very next day, I judged that the bees had calmed down and that as they’d never recognise me in my suit and smoker in hand, I’d have another go. I gave them a few good puffs of smoke and a moment to get used to the idea that I meant no harm. A couple of bees did fly round to have a look at me, but they didn’t seem too fussed and so I carefully opened up the small window and I could see that they had indeed started to fill up the plastic frames with honey. It was working! I decided that as the weather was getting colder, I wouldn’t try and ‘crack’ the frames and steal some honey, but instead, I’d leave it to the bee community and hopefully, they would make it through the winter unscathed.

I sat for a little while, just watching and listening to the happy bees flit in and out of the hive, going about their daily business seemingly without a care in the world. Bees really are an example of how to live together cheek by jowl (mandible?) and working together for a common cause. They would work tirelessly for the betterment of the community and they don’t hesitate to sacrifice their lives in order to protect others if it is required.

With the pain and humiliation of the previous day behind me, I decided that next season we’d start anew and I’d make it up to them by not pulling the hives apart too much, planting a lot more flowers and maybe even trying a little sugar water spray, just for their own enjoyment….

A little of last years swag – worth all the stings!

Enjoy.  Jerry.