My first meeting of the mid-kent bee-keepers association.

A thirty minute drive through dark country lanes, some scary oncoming traffic moments and finally, heart racing and white of knuckle, I arrive at The Bull public house for a winter meeting of the Mid Kent Bee-keeping association.

I was a bit late, so I walked in midway through a talk being given by Brian (a retired bee-keeper/lecturer) about how to breed queens.

After a trip to the bar (served by a cachexic youth, pink tracksuit chavette in attendance on a bar stool) I settled down to what I hoped was the tail end of a short lecture on bee-keeping techniques.

Two hours later, and I felt like a Vietnam Vet who had seen too much. Looking around the room I realised I was not the only one.

What did I learn? I now know that you can ‘De-queen’ a hive (or colony) and then put in a few young larva or eggs from another colony and the bees will bring them up as queens.
I found out that you need to remove these immature queens before they hatch or else the first one out will kill the rest.
I also found out that ‘de-queen’ is a euphemism for ‘kill’.

In fact it turns out that bee keeping is all about death. Death and manipulation. Maybe this is where we get out deep rooted cultural fear of ‘the men in white coats’.

Once the talk was over, I watched the various officials of the association (treasurer, secretaries etc) vie with one another to prove that they all knew more (or had more to offer) than Brian. This strange posturing was all done in a strangely passive-aggressive way: “Now, I am sure that Brian would probably know better but…”

Brian, I am happy to report, took all these challenges to his superiority with grace. Then he destroyed the pretenders to his throne with a couple of well chosen bee-related put downs.

I was left with the rather trite impression that the queen bee had fought a subtle battle, and won.

The most vociferous of his opponents left soon after with half a dozen members of the association to go and hang of the branches of a near by tree, before looking for a chimney to make a permanent home in.

Or not. Actually they called the raffle and all went home. You can, after all, take bee analogies to far.

Written by exmonkey on March 16th, 2007 with 6 comments.
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