Every evening, I've been walking the narrow pathway down to the bottom of my garden in companiable silence with my cat, Bumble. We walk together because he and little Phoebe are under threat from a large stray tom whose territory includes this garden. He bullies them, he hits on Phoebe, he's torn a hole in the throat of our big cat and nearly killed him. Until Guy intervened he was coming into the house every day through the catflap, stealing food and causing mayhem.
I tried trapping him; leaving out food and sweet-talking him into a cage. He wanted to come; you could see that he loved the sound of my voice - he used to be someone's cat and now he's surviving alone. So in a way I felt sorry for him - until I saw the gigantic bloody hole in Bumble's throat and paid the vet bills. Guy bought an expensive, and very clever cat-flap, one that is programmed to read the microchips inside the cats and allow in only our cats. The stray can't get in anymore so the cats have a safe house - but outside, it's still a war zone.
So I walk down with the cats to the end of the garden every night and watch over them while they mosey around for a while. I sit in my chair, and I look at my bee hive.
Sadly, it has become a mausoleum.
I left it alone for a few weeks after the last quick inspection, then I went in for a look a while ago. It was the hardest thing to see - that the small numbers of brood had tried to emerge from their cells and died halfway out. I don't know why. Perhaps the number of housekeeping bees just wasn't enough to support and feed them. The numbers have dwindled to almost nothing.
And there's no trace of the Queen at all.
I don't know if the one that was there for a short while absconded; took some of the bees with her, or just died.
All I know is that the brood hasn't survived and the few bees that are left are valiantly doing what they always do - foraging and working as a colony until they die, and then there will be nothing.
I sit in my chair in the shortening evenings of summer - a summer I'd hoped would be filled with bees and honey - and now I only see wasps gaining free entry into the hive.
I could vest all of this with emotion and tragedy; I could be completely objective about it and consider it a hard lesson learned - look after your Queen in the early spring. I'm sort of somewhere in between. I'm really, really sad and I feel guilty for being complicit in their destruction.
However I've gone and put my name down on the Swarm List of the local beekeeping association. I hope that maybe next summer I get lucky again.
For now, it seems, I'm taking a sabbatical from being a beekeeper. But I hope I get to be one again soon.
