The Peppercorn, The Secret Garden and The Gangster Queen

Strange goings-on, dear readers, strange indeed!

Are you comfortable? Well then, let me begin ....

First off, it has been a month of direness, confrontation, stings and more stings. This embattled beekeeper has learned just how agonisingly hard it can be to Make Honey.

Every visit to Itchy Knee and San-Shi has grown shorter and shorter, and I have grown more fearful. It has been terrible to feel frightened, hopeless, defeated, powerless. I have felt completely unable to cope; at times I simply wanted to sneak down to the hives in the dead of night and kill the bees with the dreadful formula of a Cup of Petrol (it's the fumes wot does 'em in), and not tell anyone. Just leave beekeeping, give up, admit defeat.

But every time I thought about doing it, what stopped me was the thought of those valiant little creatures, who fight all the odds to survive and thrive in spite of everything, including my rough handling, and how unfair it would be to sacrifice them on the altar of my pride and frustration.

And there have been times when I have been extremely rough on them; I've crushed wild comb under the roof in frustrated anger, I've hurled a crownboard off in fear, I've flung a Queen Excluder on from a distance, all because I've been so afraid.

What pulled me up short was the afternoon I took to sort out my Hive Records, and looking back through the past 13 months, it was unbelievable to view my records from last summer - each visit was calm, every hive inspection a joy. I was always surrounded by industrious, busy bees, too distracted to sting me, too calm to care.

THAT, my friends, was a harsh reminder - making it all too clear to me just how bad things have become.

What to do?!

Well, once again, it has been The Human Hive Mind of the beekeeping fraternity that has come to my rescue and together, we have resolved to do two things ...

• Move my beehives out of my garden to a more appropriate "Out Apiary", and
• Kill the Queen that's caused all the trouble

For it is She - The Gangster Queen - who has made enemies of my bees!

In the past few weeks, some quiet negotiations have found for me A Secret Garden, in exchange for the fee of :

One Peppercorn

I can say no more. The rest is Secret. Verily, I have become A Beekeeper. (They say that beekeepers become so secretive about the location of their hives, that some have died of old age and left no clue as to the whereabouts of their beloved bees, who are left to become feral foragers, freed slaves, creatures of the wild once more.)

And as for The Gangster Queen - well, suffice to say, this weekend we are planning Regicide.

By killing the Queen, and merging the two colonies under the reign of The Old Queen (who, for heaven's sake, was only born last summer!) we should be able to bring the little blighters back to the sunny nature of the past summer gone.

Yes, some of these things are sad and even my Housemates, The Flatties, will be sad to see them go. But go they must, because I want to see my next door neighbour's daughter playing games in her garden again, not on her front porch, in fear of the bees and of being stung to death - however unlikely that might be.

So let us draw a veil now, dear readers, over these images of sadness and violence, and let us move on to Better Things!