Opinion: Borage doesn’t take sting out of bee woes
Under cover of the big barn, so that it is not too obvious to neighbours, passing farming folk and the gods alike, our combine is being made ready for harvest.
Best to be casual about these things. Do not tempt fate by running the machine out into the yard and making an ill-fated assumption that crops will ripen to plan. Downpours continuing through June have definitely altered any predictions of harvest timings. I begin to sympathise with pagan folk making the odd human sacrifice to help matters along. Perhaps a weather forecaster would make a suitable victim.
When matters agricultural are not going strictly according to plan, John seems to go onto a higher spiritual plane than me. If I am worried, the whole family knows about it. I can’t sleep. I am ratty. I fret. Nothing different then, John says. He, however, after an initial outburst accepts the situation phlegmatically. “It won’t alter a thing just by worrying about it,” he states. “It will only alter if I do something.” And in the case of the weather, there is not much anyone can do. Apart from sue the Met office or all those online weather forecasts I am addicted to.
See also: Opinion: War on snails is a race against time
As the harvest workload takes priority for the summer months, our Limousin stock bull has been brought back home. It gives us one less thing to worry about. We do not want him in with the herd, or the heifers, until the autumn, so he has come back to live with the bullocks for the next few months. Last year we left him in with the herd too long and as a result ended up with him bulling a heifer calf at seven months. She has been inside since she had her calf, but has now been turned out with the herd, safe from his unwanted attentions. This is not going down a bundle with him and although he is usually quite a passive lad, every stockman knows not to trust any beast, especially one that is weighing a ton plus.
Far more dangerous than the bull, though, as far as I am concerned are the bees and wasps that are buzzing in increasing numbers around the garden and yard. My arm is violently tattooed by stings received when, in an uncharacteristic attempt to trim back some enthusiastic ivy, I disturbed a wasp nest and was targeted for my troubles. I knew gardening was a dangerous occupation.
“I begin to sympathise with pagan folk making the odd human sacrifice to help matters along.”
Bobbi Mothersdale
When my father-in-law, Pop, was alive, he kept bee hives in the orchard. John’s mother objected strongly. “Sometimes I dare not go in the garden to hang out the washing,” she said. “There are bees everywhere and they sting without mercy.”
Geoff, my brother-in-law still keeps a collection of hives. These are moved round the farm to fertilise the winter rape and field bean flowers, when these crops are in the rotation. Once they have been dealt with, Geoff either takes the hives to other farms in the area, then in August, up on to the North Yorkshire Moors for some heather honey.
One year Geoff was asked to take several hives to work on a neighbour’s crop of spring rape. This was being grown next to a field of borage, sown on behalf of a pharmaceutical firm that specialised in the health food/oil market. Borage flowers continuously over a relatively long period of time once it reaches a certain stage of growth, producing extra flowers as the crop matures. Bees just love it.
A large number of hives had already been brought in to fertilise the crop, but problems arose as other bees in the area abandoned the crops they were meant to be fertilising, and headed for the borage instead. Geoff’s bees, too, were having none of their allotted task of fertilising the rape crop. Instead they whizzed over the rape and straight to the borage. “There was every kind of bumblebee and honeybee in the area; I’d never seen so many,” Geoff said. And, not only was the crop consultant allergic to the idea of being stung by bees, but because the bees did not care who they stung, crop consultant or not, nobody could get near the borage or surrounding area. Meanwhile, Geoff attempted to keep a very low profile as his bees were a mite aggressive that year and could easily have been the ones causing the problem. But he theorised it would be hard to prove, as his bees did not stay around long enough after they had gathered their fill of pollen to attend an identity parade.
Geoff is a busy man when the bees start to swarm. If they judge they have enough honey in the hive, need more space, and perhaps a new queen for a fresh start-up, their mind (or should I say, minds) turn to house-hunting. There have already been a lot of swarms this year and Geoff is kept busy with his smoker and boxes to retrieve breakaway colonies and fill empty hives that he keeps for this purpose. But it is worth remembering this month the old rhyme:
A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay;
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon;
A swarm of bees in July
Is not worth a fly.
I could make up a new one, however, to assuage the pain from my wasp stings:
A swarm of wasps in a nest
Is a murderous, vicious pest;
An insecticide following best practice
Is effective to render rough justice.
Bobbi and husband John own the 81ha Lowther Farm near York. They have a suckler herd, a flock of sheep and arable crops. Two daughters, three grandchildren, three dogs, assorted poultry, an overgrown garden and country pursuits also take up their time.