Learning from Rhubarbs

I have come late to the joys of the outdoors, of gardening and of keeping bees. I can't presume to be an expert on these topics. But there are some simple lessons I've learned in my few years of tending gardens, which lead me to wonder if these things cannot also be true of beekeeping.

When I first came to this house in Finchley, I walked out into the garden and noticed a very sad, bedraggled rhubarb plant (although I didn't know then that it was a rhubarb). All I saw was a plant, a living thing, in distress. It consisted of only two leaves which lay half-dead on the ground. It was June, and I wondered why - in the height of summer - this plant should be suffering so.

Then I looked carefully at the ground. And I realised it was as dry as a bone. All it needed was some water.

Four years later, our rhubarb is sometimes known as "The Sacred Cow" and sometimes just as "The Monster". None of us who've lived in this house and know its history, and the story of Nigel - so distressed and damaged, but who loved this house and planted that rhubarb and died tragically in a car accident - none of us, even those who never met him, will ever harm that plant. We love that rhubarb. And we know that it doesn't need the life-giving drink of water quite so much now, as it did the day I first encountered it. It survives, it flourishes and this year, its harvest has spread to our neighbours for the first time ever, in a little ritual that has led to bonding, community and - blow me down - an invitation to my first ever Christening (of my neighbour's baby, you twits, not of me!).

Through the years, I've watched the rhubarb grow incrementally. Over the seasons, one deeply foul and irritating predator has swept through our garden and near-demolished that rhubarb. The hated, the disgusting - SLUG. Well do I remember "Basil's Revenge" when Tina, our fierce red-haired Scottish housemate, reacted in fury to the demolition of our favoured little basil plant by a horde of slugs. Fondly, I recall how she researched every means known to man to destroy the slugs. We spoke wistfully of creating Slug Guns, cannon-like weapons in which we'd hurl piles of slugs and shoot off, over the leylandia trees, into the loud, crass hordes of railway men clanking away on the Tube lines at 3am of a weeknight.

For several seasons, Tina threw down the direst chemicals in her search for a Slug-Devastator. Slowly she came round to a more organic mindset, and looked for less cruel, more natural ways to murder en masse. She created little pools of beer traps, and in the mornings we would find squads of drunken drowned slugs squashed into those pools. Yeeuurrrgh, well do I remember that lot! She'd bucket hundreds of 'em and freeze 'em. We never ever really got to the bottom of how to rid the planet of slugs, although - man - did we try!

But eventually, one day, Tina moved away. Since she left, I've not had the time or the inclination (or the heart) I once had to garden. I miss chatting with her out on the lawn, as we wait for the robins to come visit us at the sound of our voices, directing us imperiously to feed them and their progeny. So the garden has been left to grow a little wilder, a little looser and freer and less suburban. This has benefitted the bees, I know.

But I have also noticed something else. I've looked closely at how my pretty little flowers emerge from their green bases, only to have the tenderest prettiest coloured tips munched down by the Inglourious Basterd Sluggards. And then I've watched again, as the pretty little flowers grow back. And this time - remain untouched.

Why is that?! What have the flowers done to adapt sufficiently to become resilient to slugs? Or is the season of slugs gone past?

One reason, I surmise, is that I have done nothing. I've not put a pellet or a beertrap down in - ohhh - at least a year. And my plants seem to be becoming Slug Resistant.

Which leads me to muse on the nature of nature itself. Is this how nature works? Allow it to be attacked; don't intervene to protect, nurture and ultimately tenderise the plant to a point where it can no longer protect itself?

But isn't that the way of all life, methinks.

And so to bees. I've been reading all about varroa. Those dastardly little creatures that have spread so voraciously worldwide, all due to the intervention of man, to such a point that they are in every beehive in Britain, almost, where two human generations ago, beekeepers knew nothing of such a creature.

Says Philip Chandler, in the paper on Sustainable Beekeeping "We artificially maintain strains of bee that are ill-equipped to deal with infections or infestations, despite their ancestors having done so, unaided, for at least 100 million years."

And I believe he's right. He is RIGHT.

And what that means is, we need to let them be. We need to let the bees fight their own fight against varroa. Perhaps we need to take that heart-breakingly tough decision NOT to medicate against varroa, but, if necessary, allow a hive to die. Sacrifice it in the name of generations that can sustain themselves and their own varroa-resistant future. (To do that, we have to limit our own naturally greedy instincts for commerce, sacrifice the size of the honey crop, limit the returns we try to glean from bees).

And limit our intervention only to the most minimal, the least disruptive of ways. From the rhubarb, I learned to water a little, but leave it to fight its own battle against the predators. So when I read about Drone brood excision or Queen-Arrest ways of manipulating hives, or even Powdered Sugar to manipulate new behaviours into bees, my heart wrenches. It just doesn't feel right!

But I cannot profess to be an expert; I can only trust my instinct. At the very beginning of my beekeeping venture I was tempted to go for a Top Bar hive; the more natural way of keeping a beehive, in which the bees must build their own comb, right from scratch. I was tempted to limit my honey harvest to almost nothing, in the interest of simply hosting a bee hive. But I took a strategic decision to learn the classic modern beekeeping style first, because I truly know nothing of the craft as yet. And I'll see that strategy through.

But while I learn, I will keep pondering and musing, and theorising ...