Busy as the bees

There's a buzz in the air and honey still for tea, thank goodness. And as if to acknowledge the sweet wonder, the dusky mountain bathes in nectar light.

My neighbour is a retired pig farmer with about five acres. Across the lane, 25 feet from the edge of our wildflower meadow, is the entrance to his land where, every Easter, he trundles back and forth on a toxic tractor annihilating everything. Whatever it is he is spraying, the concoction wilts everything within 24 hours.

But never for long. By June his fallow land is always green once more – a forest of stout, grim thistles with a couple of outposts of indefatigable poppies. So he sprays yet again and tries and fails to plough the debris away. It's an utter mess. It is as if he is trapped in cyclical Armageddon and doesn't know what else to do.

Can you believe people like that? I despair, because every time he leaves his farm, getting out of his car to chain the gateway, he must look out over our tapestry of flowers to the hives on the far terrace, and still he cannot see. Maybe I should give him some honey and offer to cut grass for him: Either that or widdle in his tractor tank.

Some 70,000 bees live with us and we work towards having four humming hives. Two are active, and beside the barn I have cobbled another out of the serviceable parts of two wrecks. The fourth? With glee we have just treated ourselves to a brand spanking new one for our 17th wedding anniversary. Cost? Just e40, including the 12 wax sheets for the frames.

This is a basic pine box, I stress, not your cedar wood English craftsmanship, and it won't last many years, but it is so pleasing to the eye all the same, and we know the design works.

We also bought Joe his first veil, smock and gloves, for the little man is calm, fearless, fascinated and eager. Not that I intend to teach him everything. Like how we fix the wax sheets to the wire, for example. When I first kitted myself out about six years ago I bought a quaint little brass roller that you heat and run along the wires in the frame. The wax melts and bonds with the wire. But it takes an age, which we don't always have.

So we use the decidedly dodgy, do-not-attempt-this-at-home Jaume method. Friend Jaume, who has 30 hives, a man of many parts with an easy smile and boundless patience, pieces together a living growing grapes, driving lorries and selling a little honey and vegetables in his wife's village shop. Some of you may remember he came to our rescue when a colony of African bees moved into our bedroom chimney.

All village families here have their agricultural plots with little buildings, and Jaume's is down by the railway line, a minestrone of agricultural machinations always brimming with life and piled high with things that will come in handy one day. My kind of bloke.

Old chairs circle a grand barbecue that resembles a fireplace in an old manor house. Ten feet away a hive right next to the track dances with life, at the start of a line of acacia saplings that had self-sown by the roadside and Jaume had retrieved with the promise of feasts for the bees.

Of the many tree blossoms we have at Mother's Garden – almond, apple, pear, quince, persimmon, cherry, medlar, plum – acacia is a glaring omission, an invaluable and gorgeous flowerer, so to the verge I will go this autumn, fork in hand.

We found Jaume's mother in the hot kitchen preparing lunch, with three large noisy buckets around her ankles. Two had chicks in them of varying sizes, the third was home to three goslings. By the time we had returned from a quick tour of the hives all the birds were out basking in the sunshine and Jaume's father and son had rolled up for their meal.

We said we should take our leave, but Jaume wanted to show us how he fixed wax into his hive frames. No time, I said. He tutted and guided me into his workshop. He laid a wax panel on to the frame and using a car battery charger sparked heat through the wire. It took about 20 seconds.

Back at Mother's Garden we took our first honey of the year, 17lb, including one delicious frame where the bees had made comb without the need for wax.

Brian Latham, secretary of the Yorkshire Beekeepers' Association, tells me there's been a surge in interest following publicity about the diminishing global bee population and Yorkshire now has about 1,000 keepers.

York's Vince Cable, the new Business Secretary, has long been wise to the issue, asking parliamentary questions first of Tony Blair, then Gordon Brown. "They ridiculed me," says Vince. "I now realise their ridicule was based on incomprehension." Yorkshire is also home to the National Bee Unit at Sand Hutton.

Here things are somewhat less organised, as you might expect, but no less essential. There are estimated to be more than 700,000 million "domestic" bees in Spain, Europe's largest producer of honey, and the earliest known harvesting of honey by man was near Valencia more than 7,000 years ago. In every village there are people with the knowledge, passing it on from generation to generation. Like genius Jaume.

Talking of ingenuity, while David Cameron and Nick Clegg were constructing their extraordinary alliance I was knocking together a hen house out of old pallets. Only the inevitable tempest will tell which is watertight.

Chicken shed number two and fenced enclosure took shape using (I preen) 100 per cent recycled materials. It took eight pallets in all, snaffled on three raids to the dump, but there's no blueprint I'm afraid. It sort of evolved, with Joe designing a neat door that turns into a flight of chicken stairs. The project was urgent because the day-old chicks we had billeted in the barn under a heat lamp at Easter had ballooned. We're not keeping any more cockerels that's for sure, so, gulp, the next question is... will we really be able to do the deed if their number includes males? I'm going to try, but if repeatedly muttering the mantra of food provenance fails I will ask Jaume or maybe his mother to assist. The women round here don't seem to blink an eye.

Martin Kirby's novel Count The Petals Of The Moon Daisy is published by Pegasus (ISBN 9781903490297).

No Going Back – Journey to Mother's Garden is published by Little Brown (ISBN 0751535486)

www.mothersgarden.org

YP MAG 5/6/10