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CHAPTER 1

fortitude

In which we discover that learning can be a painful process. Even on the very first day.

It wasn't the best of starts. In fact, as starts go, it was about as bad as it can get. But I suppose at least it was unforgettable. My first trip to an apiary — the place where bees live — became not so much a near disaster as a near-death experience.

I had been warned. "You will get stung," was the mantra of the first beekeeping lesson I had been to at the Pinner & Ruislip Beekeepers Association (PRBKA), deep in the suburban outskirts of London. It was drilled into us repeatedly that beekeeping was not without its hazards, and getting stung was chief among them. And in a strange and possibly somewhat masochistic way, I have now been piqued often enough to conclude that getting stung really is where the fun is. Beekeepers can be odd like that.

* * *

It was midday on a warm, sunny Sunday, and I was more than ready for my first encounter with some live bees. I'd learned the basic theory with three other eager apprentices from our teacher at the PRBKA, taking notes about colonies and hives and basic bee biology, and couldn't wait to get out there and try it myself. In the back of my mind, I remembered that there was a risk of some kind associated with bees. But bad things would only happen if I did something to provoke them. And if I moved slowly and calmly and didn't drop anything, chances were I would emerge unscathed.

So it was more with eagerness than apprehension that I parked that Sunday afternoon in the shade outside the apiary; an enclosure about the size of a football field, dotted with beehives and, of course, busy with bees. The sun was shining, and the two experienced beekeepers who were to show me the ropes were already at work, with one of the hives open for inspection. I stood at the entrance to the apiary, where a white van was parked, and announced myself. "Hello, yes," came the reply. "There's a suit for you in the van there. Oh, and just watch out for the swarm on the fencepost."

"Ah, a swarm on the fencepost," I repeated anxiously, noticing that said fencepost was a mere eight feet from where I was standing.

Mention the word "swarm" to most people and they automatically tend to cover up and recall tales of how they'd heard that the aunt of a friend of a neighbor's local paperboy was once smothered in one the size of a house and never seen again. They picture swarms as vast hostile clouds of wild flying insects, ready to attack anything and anyone who stumbles into their path. In truth, it's not really like that. Yes, swarms do consist of vast clouds of wild flying insects, but they're not usually hostile and can be fascinating to watch. After a while they settle together in a large brown clump to have a breather and figure out what to do next, resting beneath the branch of a tree or, in this case, a fencepost.

There they were, doing their own thing, as I gingerly approached the van from the other side to reach in for the suit, which looks like a large white jumpsuit with a veil attached. So far, so good. But the thing about swarms is that they are not static. In other words, while the main body of the colony may indeed be clustered on a fencepost, there can be any number of extraneous bees flying around it — latecomers arriving from their old home, others to-ing and fro-ing looking for new places to live in, or general hangers-on buzzing around just for the fun of it.

It was a couple of these outriders who took an interest in me as I started to put the suit on. Their interest was probably completely innocent, but it was slightly unnerving on my first time out. So, remembering my beekeeping basic training, I wandered into the shade at the side of the road. They're supposed to leave you alone in the shade and head back to the sun. But this pair were defying convention. And clearly by now I was more than just vaguely interesting to these two, who began to hover around my head with some interest.

Today I always offer simple advice to anyone caught in this situation: "Stand perfectly still, and stay perfectly calm." But I know from experience that this is much more easily said than done. When some persistent little buzzer is whining around the back of your head, as they are prone to do, your every instinct is to do anything but stand still. Run, shake, swat, hide; anything to get away. But I can also tell you this definitely doesn't work. An Olympic athlete might just outrun a bee in a one-hundred-meter sprint, but since they can get up to twenty miles an hour in flight, even the fastest and fittest mammal would have their work cut out. As for swatting, forget it. First of all, a bee has five eyes. And thanks to what's called "flicker fusion potential," it can see at the equivalent of three hundred frames a second. If bees went to the movies, the film would appear to them as a long sequence of still pictures. In other words, they could see your hand moving like it's a slow-motion action replay.

Hiding can do the trick if there's a dark room close by that you could get to — preferably one that's mildly refrigerated. Sadly there wasn't one available at the Harefield Apiary that day, and I was about to forget the sage advice that I'm now giving you. I did try to stay calm for a while, until they landed on my head. Then, panic rising, I resorted to what came naturally and tried to brush them off, in the nicest possible way. Which is where we come to hair care.

Perhaps if I hadn't been working that morning I'd have been all right. I'd have come to the apiary with my "coiffure au naturel." But as I'd been in the studio, some gel had been applied to render me respectable for the viewing public first thing on a Sunday morning. As a result, my hair was slightly sticky. Not a problem for day-today living, except when bees become involved. They must have liked the smell; perhaps they thought it was a delightful new form of food supply. You can imagine the conversation back at the hive. "What have you been on today, Doris?"

"Oh, the usual — dandelion and honeysuckle. But I hear Ethel and her sister have been on some fabulous new stuff called Brylcreem. It's positively dreamy."

The problem was that once they'd landed on it, they couldn't get off again in a hurry. Given time, they would have managed. But as they were being swatted rather frantically by an enormous paddle — my hand — they couldn't exactly hang around. So they buzzed furiously around, or rather on, my head while I brushed equally furiously with the back of my hand. Sooner or later, something had to give.

I've never actually been hit on the head by a hammer, but that day I got a pretty good idea of what it's like. (Although when I was thirteen I did suffer a good thump to the forehead from a croquet mallet, inflicting a bloody wound that required eight painful stitches above my left eye. The joys of prep school. Fortunately, most stings are mildly less life-threatening.) When a bee stings you on the head, there's no flesh to cushion the barb, so it does feel a bit like a sharp blow with a blunt object, if that's possible. Think of a hammer with a thumbtack attached. And since both bees felt threatened enough to risk their lives in their own defense, think of two hammers, both with thumbtacks attached.

At least it stopped the buzzing. But there was more to come.

Eyes watering, breathing heavily, and sweating profusely, I now had to put the suit on. As I was in the middle of a road, I had to do this standing up, hopping around and trying to maintain some semblance of dignity and calm, while my inner child cried unashamedly and begged to go home. Whatever the pain, though, I had to continue. I'd committed myself to becoming a beekeeper. I couldn't just give up because I'd been stung, even if it had been more than once and before I'd even got to see any bees. (In all honesty, I might have considered it if my beekeeping mentor hadn't been waiting patiently for me a few yards away, unaware of the life-and-death drama being performed just out of his sight.)

When they teach you the first principles of apiculture, there's a second Very Important Rule most beekeepers will impress upon you soon after the first one (You Will Get Stung, remember?). It's this: make sure yours is the only body inside the bee suit. Sounds obvious, I know. To be honest, there's not much room for anyone else inside one, so on most occasions you don't have to worry. But every so often, a bee is going to try to get in there. And then things can get awkward. Still, it's pretty rare, and if you take the right precautions it should never happen to you.

Of course there's an exception to every rule, and on this particular day my suit had an unwelcome visitor — and it wasn't just the guy tripping over his pants in the parking lot. I was writhing, wriggling, and beginning to reconsider the whole project, but I determined to carry on. Having stepped into the pants, I pulled the top over my shoulders and reached back for the veil. It comes over the top of the head like a hinged helmet and zips around either side of the neck for a secure, supposedly bee-free fastening. My head was throbbing like an anvil, but I was at last ready to enter the apiary. The two bees that had stung me had disappeared and were presumably dead. But now a third one appeared on my veil. It was quite calm, taking its time, walking around some and then stopping right in front of my eyes. I thought it was strange to have a bee for such close company, but then I focused on it more closely and analyzed the situation.

If that bee was on the outside of my veil, I should have been able to see its belly. So why, then, could I only see its back?

Like a child being taught its first lesson in arithmetic, I came to the correct conclusion slowly and after some prompting. "So why has Little Miss Bee got her back to us? That's right, dear, it's because she's inside the veil."

Now, there's getting stung on the head, which isn't nice, and there's getting stung on the face, which is a whole lot not nicer. Severe facial blemishes are not a great asset for a television host, and at that moment my whole career didn't so much flash before my eyes as simply vanish. I could see the headline: TV newsman hideously disfigured in rampaging bee attack. Sting on tongue rules out radio as well. So I did what so many characters in thrillers do in tense circumstances. I froze.

You can do a lot of thinking when you freeze.

Uhoh, there's abeeinmyveil. Okay. Don't panic. There's just a bee inside the veil. Ohmygodtheresabeeinmyveilwhatam Igoingtodo?

Salvation, in the form of Christopher, my bee mentor, was just a few yards away. All I had to do was walk over there, very slowly, and get his help. If I'd had a stick of nitroglycerin balanced on my head, I couldn't have stepped more carefully. It was just a few yards, but it felt like one of the longest walks of my life, played out to a disconcertingly loud soundtrack of buzzing. I must have looked pretty strange, inching my way forward like an astronaut taking his first steps on the moon. But at last I made it through the gate and presented myself.

"Hello, I'm Bill Turnbull, and I'm here to learn about beekeeping from you, and, er, there's a bee inside my veil."

Sort of like John Wayne, Christopher stepped forward and reached out a gloved hand, found the intruder still perched a half-inch from my nose, and pinched it. I almost expected him to drawl, "The hell you say." But of course he didn't, even when I added my pathetic punch line:

"And I've just been stung on the head. Twice."

* * *

There are one or two possible morals to this story, lessons about life that you could usefully store away. And I know you may be thinking the first one is blindingly obvious: Stay Well Away From Bees and Beekeeping. But, by the time you've finished this book, I hope to have convinced you that you'd be very wrong to draw this conclusion. I certainly didn't realize it then, but beekeeping has been for me as fascinating, fulfilling, and rewarding a pastime as any you could hope to find. Honestly. And with a little luck, in the following chapters you'll understand why.

On that first day at the apiary, I had already known that there was going to be a whole lot more to beekeeping than just turning on a honey tap at the front of the hive. I realized that there would be the occasional discomfort. But the episode with the swarm and the concrete post, and the ensuing shots of pain in my head, had taught me a valuable lesson: fortitude. That is, the power of firmness in the endurance of pain or adversity. I suppose I could have backed down, taken off the bee suit, and driven home with a quick medicinal detour to the pharmacy. But I had to stick with it because other beekeepers were there, and it would have been an embarrassing and somewhat pathetic admission of failure to pack it in on the very first outing, before even making it to the hive. Fortunately for me, fortitude came to my aid. Sometimes you've just got to stick to your guns and get on with it.

So despite everything, I look back at this first day at the apiary fondly. I like to think that the bees taught me something that day, and that I came away a slightly improved individual. It was the first of several life lessons they — and my fellow beekeepers — have taught me over the past few years, and was the moment I first realized that even by being a Bad Beekeeper, you can become a better person.

enterprise

In which we recall how we got started in this malarkey; how even tough guys can be scared of bees; and our gratitude to a dear departed chicken, to whose memory this chapter is dedicated.

I lived next door to a Hell's Angel once. Well, a retired Hell's Angel. His name was Richard, and he didn't ride a motorcycle anymore because he'd broken virtually every bone in his body falling off one, and now he had kids. But he still seemed tough enough. Richard worked with his dad as a builder, and very good builders they were too. He read the Guardian and they listened to Radio Four (the British equivalents to reading The New York Times and listening to NPR) while they were working. And they charged rates commensurate with people who read the Guardian and listened to Radio Four.

We lived side-by-side in two semidetached cottages in a small Buckinghamshire village. Richard and his wife Sue were great neighbors. One night when we had a chimney fire he came in, threw a wet sack on the grate, and carried it out of the house. By the time the firemen arrived it was all over. They were really disappointed.

Another time, just for fun, he planted our Christmas tree on the roof of the house.

Another time he hid behind a bush in our yard and, in the friendliest way, fired a shotgun. Can't remember why.

And, years before the Lord of the Rings films, he had a vicious Jack Russell (I mean, truly vicious) called Gollum.

As you might imagine, Richard was not a man to get on the wrong side of. It was a family trait. Although his forebears had lived in the village for hundreds of years, some of them had ended up on the other side of the world, transported there at His Majesty's pleasure for a variety of offenses, such as poaching deer or digging up someone else's potatoes. At one point, Richard himself had endured an unscheduled break in a Saudi Arabian prison when he was caught with some cannabis on a building job. So law-abiding was not foremost among his characteristics. If something got on his nerves, he did something about it — legally or otherwise, as I discovered one dark night.

Some neighbors a little way across the road from our happy homestead were in the habit of going away and leaving their dogs — two spaniels — alone in the house. Someone would come and feed them, and they'd get in and out through the dog flap at their leisure.

One day, though, something was wrong. One of the dogs was stuck outside, and yapping. For hours. Around midnight I went over in the dark to try and figure it out. Once there, the problem was easy to remedy. A boot had fallen in front of the dog's door, stopping it from getting back in. Boot moved, dog rehoused, job done. Until I turned around. There was Richard right behind me. Carrying a knife. With intent.

If I'd been a minute later, there would have been one ex-spaniel and a whole lot of explaining to do. It was like something out of Straw Dogs. Although if Richard had had his way, it would more likely have been Raw Dogs.

Not long after that, we moved. Not because of our dear neighbors, but because with three toddlers, the house was now too small. Just a few miles away, we found something bigger, something with a larger mortgage, and something that needed a lot of work. Perfect for a Guardian-reading, Radio Four–listening ex–Hell's Angel builder.

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Excerpted from "Confessions of a Bad Beekeeper"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Bill Turnbull.
Excerpted by permission of The Experiment Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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