Bees stop work
June 1st, 2009
In the middle of the heat wave work on my bungalow on Lyme Bay has been going on apace. Until a week last Friday, when the man who was reconstructing the shed decking to take a summer house came charging down to the house, chased by a swarm of bees. He would come back next week, he said, after I had removed the offending nest thereby making my garden a safe place to work for today’s health and safety regs. Which required a lot more work by me than I had bargained for.
My next door neighbour gave me a can of spray to kill them off, but the family insisted that insisted on a more ecological appoach. The web provided a welter of helpful suggestions. All I needed to do was to get an old shoe box, go into the garden in the middle of night, finding my way with red light, which apparently does not wake bees up, scoop up the nest and put it in a suitable hedge. This proved not a viable option, because this bee nest was buried in the earth.
But I did find on the web the telephone number of a Dorchester bee-keeper, who said I must first establish what kind of bee I was dealing with. It is the white tailed bumble bee, which does not normally sting, but could not be relied upon not to fight if the nest was under threat. It needed an expert with the right protective gear. He could not do the job himself. Nor could he recommend anyone, because most of the people on the council list killed them off.
I would have rung the council then, had I not be writing all those blogs urging more ethical behaviour by our MP’s. How could I go on complaining about them bumping up their expenses if I was prepared to bump off an endangered species?
So I did another trawl of the neighbours and got the telephone number of another local bee keeper, who had dealt with a sudden swarm of bees at Forde Abbey, the local stately home. He agreed to come over and investigate. His verdict was that moving the nest was not practical, so they would have to be killed.
So I told him to go ahead.
But ethically does that not make me just as bad as all those MPs who are telling us that everything they claimed on expenses was sanctioned by ‘experts’ from the fees office, accountants, advisers, etc?
Probably not. But at least I am spending my own money. And am once again doing my bit to fight the recession by spending my money on British labour, not stashing it away in a tax haven.