Peter Ross: Sweet life of the alternative society

AS NATURE’S exemplary workers, the bees, face a struggle for survival, a growing amateur army of keepers are doing their bit to keep the honey flowing.

‘I really don’t know,” says Ian Craig, “what I would do without bees.”

Craig is a beekeeper, one of around 4,000 in Scotland, almost all of them amateurs doing it for pleasure, for the buzz, rather than for commercial gain. To make big money, you have to be a bee farmer, producing honey on an industrial scale.

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Not that Craig should be mistaken for any kind of dabbler. He is 75 years old, has been keeping bees for 62 of those years, and at present looks after – it doesn’t feel quite right to say “owns” – 70 hives at eight sites in the Gryffe and Cart valleys. That adds up to more than four million honeybees, which is why he is guilty of understatement rather than hyperbole when describing himself as the largest employer in west ­Renfrewshire.

His employees produce more honey than he knows how to handle – about 50 pounds each year. Honey in the hall, in the garage, in the loft, on the brain. “If you ever hear of an elderly couple killed by a hundredweight of honey falling on them, that’ll be us,” his wife Ailleen says.

There is a long history of beekeeping in Scotland. It is one of the age-old crafts, referred to in the Bible and by Homer, Aristotle and Virgil. There are cave paintings of wild honey harvesting, and ­ancient Egyptian art depicts man-made hives. Monasteries have for many centuries been centres of beekeeping, arguably in part because pre-Reformation Europe believed that bees were chaste. Pluscarden Abbey, near Elgin, is still well known for its honey, wax and balm.

The Scottish Beekeepers Association this year celebrates its centenary. Beekeeping in Scotland experienced a boom after the First World War when wounded soldiers, returning from the horrors of the trenches, sought solace among the hives. Another spike in popularity occurred at the time of the Second World War; anyone keeping bees was entitled to extra sugar rations, and the honey, of course, brought welcome sweetness to austere dinner tables.

One of the founding fathers of the SBA, John Moir, bequeathed to the association his vast collection of books. The Moir Library is now world ­famous among beekeepers, and a selection of the rarest books from the collection, including a 17th-century work in which the “piping” and “quacking” sounds of rival queens has been transcribed into musical notation, will be on display at the National Library of Scotland from 14-21 September as part of the centenary celebrations.

In the hundred years of the association’s existence, Scottish beekeepers have not experienced a summer wetter than this one. Bees do not like to fly when it is wet, and when they do make the effort it may be for little reward – the rain making nectar unavailable. Yet when I visit Ian Craig, a retired college lecturer, at his home in the countryside near Johnstone, it is a sunny day, all the more beautiful for being unexpected. This is great bee weather, maybe the last good day of the summer. Rosebay willowherb wears monkish beards of white seeds, and swallows are strung like ­rosaries along the telephone wires. “It’s a nice ­morning,” says Craig. “The bees will be in a good mood.” He keeps his smoker puffing away, pacifying the bees, as he lifts the top from one of the hives. This smoker is an essential bit of kit, resembling a bellows crossed with a small oily dalek. The bees, fooled into thinking there is a forest fire, start to gorge themselves on honey, becoming full and docile, their bellies so swollen they find it difficult to bend and sting. One can’t be too careful, though. “Watch yourself,” Craig warns me. “Don’t stand in front of their flight line. They’ll bump into you by accident and start stinging.”

The beekeeper is wearing protective clothing, including a hood and veil, but hasn’t bothered with gloves. He has been stung thousands of times. It used to be that his hands would swell up, but that doesn’t happen now; his body has grown used to it. There is even, he believes, an upside to being stung. “Allegedly,” he smiles, “bee venom prevents rheumatism. Well, I’ve got none, anyway.”

He has been keeping bees since the age of 13, growing up on a farm in Galloway. A neighbouring farmer gave him a box of bees and left him to get on with it. This seems to be the way of it with beekeeping. Old hands encourage new blood. Ian Craig teaches the craft, and gifts a colony to all the beginner beekeepers in his local club, the ultimate freebie; to buy a hive and fill it with bees would cost about £300. There is something rather fitting about such altruism. As Craig says, “A bee colony is a good socialist society. The individual bee doesn’t really count. It’s all for the colony and nothing for myself, unlike half the humans in the world.”

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There has, over the last few years, been a steep rise in the numbers of people wanting to take up beekeeping. But they often have to wait for a long time before bees become available. Honeybee numbers in the UK are thought to have halved over the last quarter century. Bumblebees are also in decline; out of the 24 native species, two have become extinct in the past 70 years and a further six are critically endangered. The problem appears to be a perfect storm of intensive farming practices, loss of habitat and food supplies, poor weather and – in the particular case of honeybees – the arrival in 1990 of the parasitic varroa mite. Wild colonies of honeybees have been almost entirely wiped out in Scotland.

The bee crisis has serious ramifications for our own lives. It is estimated that 80 per cent our food comes from pollination. The soft fruit industries of Tayside and Perthshire rely on the insects for their survival: nae bees, nae rasps; nae rasps, nae bawbees.

In general, urban bees are better off than their rural cousins. In the town, they can forage all year round on flowers in gardens and parks. There has also been a mini-boom in urban beekeeping. In London, beekeeping is all the rage. But in Scotland, too, it is a growing trend, with hives beginning to appear in city gardens and on top of some flat-roofed houses. The website urbanbees.co.uk has just launched an interactive map which attempts to match aspiring beekeepers with people who are willing to offer the use of their land for hives. “In the hive, the bees are packed in and working cooperatively,” says Alison Benjamin of Urban Bees. “It does chime with how we live in cities.”

Bron Wright, secretary of the Scottish Beekeepers Association, has four hives in the garden of her home near the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. “Having congenial and understanding neighbours is very important,” she says. “They get given jars of honey accordingly. It depends how many times your bees swarm into their garden.”

And what, for her, is the pleasure of beekeeping? “It’s very satisfying. It exercises your mind because you are ­always trying to work out what you’re supposed to be doing next, but the girls” – bees in a hive are almost all female – “are always a jump ahead, no matter what.”

Victor Contini, the Edinburgh restaurateur, is a newcomer to the world of beekeeping. He took an eight-week course in Bathgate and is now the owner of two hives full of black honeybees which he hopes will provide him with honey which he can use in his Scottish Cafe and Restaurant at the National Gallery. “It’s lovely being out at the hives,” he says. “I find it very relaxing. I always turn off my mobile phone, and I talk to my bees in Italian – ‘Buongiorno, ragazzi. Come stai?’ ‘Morning, girls. How are you doing?’ If you respect your bees, they will respect you.”

After my morning with Ian Craig, I drive south to Ayrshire to speak with Tony Riome, a retired air traffic controller now a careful observer of the thousands of honeybees which, every day, navigate the flight paths to and from his hives.

We walk through his farmyard to the apiary. Tony gently pulls out one of the combs. Suddenly the air is full of droning and the smell of honey; with the heat from the sun and the confining protective suits, it’s quite trippy. At dusk, says the beekeeper, each hive sounds like a generator humming. There are bees everywhere. Tens of thousands. They are calm at first, but increasingly riled. I can hear them dunting against my hood as they try to get at my face. To the uninitiated, the inside of a beehive looks like crawling, sprawling chaos, an animated Rorschach inkblot, but to the beekeeper it all makes sense. He points out individual 
bees. “You can usually tell a drone because he’s got a hairy bum. The queen? You look for the lady with the long red legs.”

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There is something pleasingly modest about beekeepers, I think, in their devotion to and admiration for a society so different from our own. They are full of wonder at the vibrant miniature worlds they help to sustain, lost in the dizzying, dazzling industry of the hive. “The accumulated bee mileage in a single pound of honey is 55,000 miles,” says Tony. “More than once around the world.”

And how much honey, the work of how many miles, has he harvested this year? “Oh,” he smiles, “enough for a piece.”

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