I must admit, I fell out with the idea of beekeeping for a while. The death of a colony requires a period of reflection and recalibration. One day recently however, I was sat head in hands (not an unusual posture for me) asking myself ‘who am I?’. A self indulgent moment, yes, however I felt I had become some sort of passive entity, gliding through my days in banal existence. I was missing something? Today I walked past a flowering rowan bush with my daughter and remembered with nostalgia when i was first married, picking branches of the Christmas-type berries off for winter home decoration. I wondered where and when I had lost that simple wonder and secret world of delighting in nature with it’s bountiful gifts. I’d found, in a world that just seeks to take, a generosity in nature, that only seeks give and nurtured my dry, thirsty soul. I reckoned by soul was longing to be in the midst of the quiet, magical, solitude of nature again.
This thought was like the warm sun on a sheet of ice and slowly started to change my lethargy into a twinkle of inspiration. So I dragged a small nuc hive out of the summerhouse, placed an old frame inside and set it out on the lawn. This is a common practice amongst beekeepers and gives wild or swarmed captive bees a welcomed place to reside, should they be on the move and choose to move in. It was a low commitment, low cost, low energy, toe dipped in water way of beginning beekeeping again. But it was something. A start is everything, as my Grandas used to say. So let’s see what nature brings…
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