Covered in bees

Original image © autan

Now everybody’s competently growing tiny lettuces and dismal herbs in their window boxes and smugly claiming that as ‘food’, the logical next step seems to be keeping livestock: pigs and chickens and the like. Lately, this has manifested itself as an interest in bees. Everywhere I look, someone is writing about bees.

Bees are hot these days, presumably ever since sleepy politicians woke up to the realisation that if our bees die out, we probably die with them, and that’s a difficult platform to win votes on. We’re being encouraged now to grow plants that are bee-friendly, and keep bees in urban environments with trendy new plastic hives.

The more gentrified of the nation’s tabloids — the Guardian and the Telegraph chiefly — have picked up the scent. The Telegraph has an entire section of its website devoted to bees plus a diary written by Ian Douglas who is attempting to keep bees in a Hampstead allotment, presumably so that his bees grow up with a sense of entitlement and nothing to say.

Less dedicated but still bravely grabbing the zeitgeist with both hands, the Guardian dumps its bee coverage in the insects category, boringly making the bees share the limelight with ants, moths and their painted whore cousins, butterflies. Nevertheless, there’s already been some coverage of the Beehaus, a plastic hive designed for metropolitan beemongers with a penchant for German art and disregard for biodegradable materials.

The makers of Beehaus also make a similarly rugged and sanitised chicken coop, the Eglu, which suggests to me that they’re really just in this business for the puns.

In the above article, The Guardian helpfully advices us on urban beemongery etiquette. For instance, people are told they should consult their neighbours first. I don’t know how things are in the rest of the country, but I can’t imagine anyone in London consulting their neighbours before doing anything; buying a drumkit, building a shed, having a party, burning a cross, keeping bees, whatever. What I can imagine is the shocked and outraged blustering by the beemongers when someone dares complains about their hive vomiting angry stinging death directly into somebody’s kitchen.

I like the concept of beemongery, I like the idea of having a hive at the back of my garden or on my roof, calmly approaching it every now and then to get honey and wax that I can sell on for an obscene profit, but I’m a realist; if I were to attempt to do anything with bees, I’d most likely begin by being stung to death the first time a bee quizzically approached me and I responded to its approach by screaming and trying to kill it dead with a book.

Even if I survived my initial encounter I’m sure it wouldn’t pan out in a blissful, Good Life-way; my colony would collapse, or I’d spend hours milking them for honey that ended up tasting of local petrol fumes instead of local orange blossoms. Or I’d accidentally buy a wasp nest instead of a bee hive. And it would explode. In my face.

All this is academic anyway, as I’ve nowhere to put a hive. I may not be the most well-read person I know but I know enough that I won’t even contemplate placing a bee hive, say, above my fridge, or in the corner of my bedroom. Such are the limitations of living in a third-floor flat; it’s also what prevents me from owning a cat, a dog, or to have a really good stab at growing those tiny lettuces.

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