Sound-bites
Dreams shattered by a Sunday morning alarm - a travesty of justice...
Drag body out of bed to wake Matt for work - surprised and disappointed sounds issue from Matthew, who has to have his feet pulled into position on the floor so that his body will follow them into the shower...
My body daydreams downstairs to make coffee for son, when from behind me comes a loud bellow from the deaf cat. "Am I actually miaowing?" she thinks....
Driving back from the Y by myself, a sudden loud singing of Climb Every Mountain from The Sound of Music assails my ears, and I discover it is me singing, with all the intonation of Peggy Wood, the mother abbess. Good grief...
Running, I can feel the earth radiating heat at my face. I wear a baseball cap to keep insects from biting the top of my head. The peak of the cap is like an eyebrow, maintaining a curve of earth in front of me, the path is all I see, and so my ears are more attuned to what would have been my peripheral vision, so I hear many different birds, some I can identify, some not, but I slog on, not looking up, sweat cooling my body as it should, my hair under the cap damp, tendrils from my plait sticking to my back and shoulders. And my breath, the loud even breath, 2 steps for the in-breath, 4 for the out-breath, only when I have been running a while does it change to 3 for the out-breath.
And later, the bees buzzing around me as I work with the hives, peering out through my veil. I spend two hours with the bees, turfing out big black ants and all their eggs, they have taken over the empty hive, ironic really, ants in a hive, their society so similar to the bees'.
I find queen cells in a couple of frames and decide to try something new, take three frames from this extremely strong hive and put them into a new hive body to create a nuc, which might turn into a new hive, if the queen they produce is a good one. I get stung once, but it is an accident , neither the bee's fault nor mine, just an unlucky bee walking on my sleeve, getting caught in the crook of my arm as I heft a hive body. Very painful for a couple of minutes and then fading away to nothing.
I try really hard not to hurt the bees as I inspect them, taking out frames and putting them back again. I have noticed that male beekeepers mostly couldn't be bothered with that. For example, my mentor just squished a queen who wasn't doing well between his thumb and fingers to kill her, and all the women beekeepers kind of let out a horrified aahhh! I destroyed some queen cells just by lifting the top hive body out, because they were attached to the bottom one, and there was a baby queen, her little eyes gazing around, almost ready to hatch, and now she was going to die!
At one stage they were getting very agitated and my smoker had finally gone out. I was banging frames to get rid of ants, and the bees are not partial to that kind of noise, so more and more were whining away at me. So I sang to them. I don't know if it worked but it calmed me down very well, it is like the charm for putting a baby to sleep, you always sing a slow lullaby. My children all responded to "Speed bonny boat, like a bird on the wing, Onward the sailors cry..... Carry the lad that was born to be king, over the sea to Skye", and it works with other people's children too. And maybe bees.
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