Bees are Coming Home

Apparently, our phone isn't working. Neither is our e-mail.

This was the response from our bee supplier, after I'd e-mailed to make polite enquiry as to when we could expect to collect the Malarkey Manor Colony One.

That's odd, I thought, after picking up the e-mail, which said, 'Your bees have been ready for ages. Come and get them as soon as possible,' followed by a rather rude phone message informing us that our phone didn't work, and neither did our e-mail, because both seemed to be working now.

Had I been hormonal, I might have got a tad stroppy re: the tone of the phone message, but instead I sat on the stairs and laughed and thought what a cantankerous old git this bee supplier must be. Clearly he had forgotten about our bee order, and decided to blame our inward bound technology rather than 'fess up to his error.

Still, I remained calm, kept the sarcasm in its box, and e-mailed a polite response apologising for the inconvenience that our crap phone and e-mail had caused and please could we collect our bees on Saturday morning, sir, if that's convenient to you, sir, doff cap, curtsey, curtsey, doff, doff.

The response, via my miraculously working-once-again e-mail said, yes, we could indeed, just let him know when we would be arriving. So I did. So on Saturday we shall be collecting our bees from the depths of Gloucestershire and setting forth on what I think will be a long and lustrous career in keeping bees.

The last couple of days have been filled reading up about hiving bees once we get them home, and making sure we've got all the necessary equipment, including digging out an old sheet to place on the floor so we can spot the Queen should we inadvertently drop her. And really important stuff like thinking about what we are going to call our first hive. Well, the hens' home is called Cluckinghen Palace, so I think the hive should be called something, too, instead of merely 'Number 1'.

You have to keep records, you see. And I already know that we aren't going to be guardians of a single hive. And calling them '1', '2', '3', '4' etc is, for us artistic types, very boring. The trouble is, coming up with witty bee-home names is proving a darn sight harder than coming up with hen-related ones. Andy's offerings are 'The Appropolis' - a very tenous link to one of the Seven Wonders, and 'The Pollen Nation.' Mine are probably even worse - 'Pollen Nesia' and 'Nect Arena'. We've tried out puns with 'bee', 'honey', 'nectar', 'pollen', 'buzz', 'hum', 'propolis' and 'sting' and nothing seems to click.

And then there's the matter of what to call our first queen. Apparently, lots of keepers name their queens. I don't want to go down the predicatable route of Elizabeth, or Ann, or Victoria. I quite like the idea of Priscilla, as in Queen of the Desert, or possibly Roger or Carmen after either of the camp characters in 'The Producers', my favourite musical. But again, I think I'll need to see her first. She might not look like a Priscilla, or a Carmen.

Anyway, very soon the gardens of Much Malarkey Manor will be alive to the gentle hum of our first bees. Or angry buzz depending on whether I manage to hive them without whipping them up into a wild bee frenzy.

Either way, it's all very exciting!