My Garden of a Thousand Bees

I am married to a bee-fetishist*, he is also an insect-botherer and a garden-stealer . During the last eighteen months (the Lockdown project) he has been indulging all of these passions by stealing my garden to make a film about all the bees and other insects that live there. PBS are streaming the movie which is titled 'My Garden of a Thousand Bees' 

 obviously it should've been 'Lulu's Garden of a Thousand Bees' but apart from that error I have to admit the film is perfectly decent and, judging by the comments on PBS's site, so do quite a lot of other people.

This blog started with an account of filming insects in France, anyone new here and wanting more hymenoptric content could check out some early posts

I just revisited this post  and only now realise that the garden theft started in earnest 11 years ago

This post  about a disastrous attempt to film a bee hive   is from 2009

 

*he refuses to take my surname so we have to call him Martin Dohrn, he's worried that if he becomes Martin Labonne people will think that he's related to Duran Duran

 

 

image credit: Jack - Thank you Jack

I had one of those builders round

the sort that do a lot of teeth-sucking before telling you how difficult it will be to fix a broken window. This one, in his broad brummie accent, assessed the situation and told me quite frankly it would be cheaper and less trouble to move.   

I said  we can't move, there's 50 different species of bee* in the garden, it's like having a farm

he said   I know what that's like, I leave a sandwich out every night for the fox - a chip buttie, he bites the middle of it and then just walks off leaving the crust - every night         



*More about bees here

I should be driving to Italy

right now, annoying the Man by singing Cliff Richard songs and arriving somewhere near Verona in time for supper.

But that didn't happen.

I'd already arranged for Rabbit to cover my Brain Doctor days so here we are having a 'staycation' which in my case involves cleaning the kitchen, washing my jumpers and sulking. I am also knitting a garden chair with electrical wire.

The Man has channeled his disappointment into bee maintenance; having planted lots of 'flowers for bees' - his slug-defense strategy is getting progressively aggressive, he is photographing and logging all the insects that come into our garden, particularly the solitary bees and has identified around FIFTY different species of bee just in our tiny city centre patch.

This intense scrutiny also means that he has become an expert in bee First Aid, frequently placing tired bees near a source of food and rescuing rain-sodden bees. On Sunday I saw him taking a tiny glass of water out to clean a bee that was muddy and couldn't fly properly.

Gardening Leave

SOLITARY BEES. (Apidoe.)
1, Osmia; 2, Anthidium; 3, Panurgus; 4, Megachile.


I’ve just had an extended weekend back in Bristol. My husband (known on this blog as The Director) is a very dedicated naturalist so when the blackbirds wake us up with a blast of new season competitive singing at four in the morning his response is to get up and stand outside the front door in his pants with recording equipment. My role in this enterprise is to defrost the man-sized ice block that rolls back into bed an hour later.

I miss not having a garden when I’m in London and I love sitting outside with my coffee. However, our garden mustn’t be disturbed because our house houses a production company that makes natural history films and it’s quite handy to have a film set outside the back door. I am forbidden from doing any digging or planting apart from a very small area the size of a child’s sand box right at the end where I am allowed to plant a bit of salad (for the caterpillars).

One community that is being groomed for greatness in the garden is a colony* of solitary bees that started making burrows in our lawn a few years ago. Year on year the number and variety of species has increased and as these creatures arrive in ever greater numbers so do gangs of reprobate insects; parasitic bees and wasps coming round to steal the bee holes and lay eggs on the bee larva, a whole soap opera of naughtiness and cheating is going on down there.

Once the bees start their activity no sitting on the lawn is allowed in case the bees get a bit cross waiting to get in or out of their holes so The Director and I teeter together with our morning coffee on a bit of wobbly wall by the edge of my sand box.


*Strictly speaking we shouldn’t say 'colony' the correct word is aggregation, none of the bees are related, they just like living around each other in dense populations.

Dressed To Impress

12th June
I haven’t seen the Maire since we went hive shopping a couple of weeks ago – he’d said that he would come and move our bees into the new hive - we’ve been poised for bee action, but we've also been busy with other things…

Yesterday we were all in the garden filming the hatching eggs of a swallowtail butterfly when hoards of winged ants started coming out of the earth behind us and climbing up the stalks of chili plants to launch themselves off on their nuptial flights. We’d just scrambled another camera to film the ants when the Maire’s car pulled into the drive and two men in futuristic-looking white overalls got out and walked towards us, the Maire was pumping bellows attached to a metal jug that puffed out smoke, it was like Gardener’s World had merged into an episode of Lost in Space.

The smoke calms the bees down, the Maire and his son set the new big hive next to the one already in the garden, they opened the lid of the new hive and put in a couple of frames of new wax, then they opened the top of the old hive and pulled out frames full of bee larvae and honey and crawling with bees, these were slotted into the new hive.

We wanted the frames spaced wider inside the hive for easier filming - we couldn't do this - the gap between the frames should be the width of a bee, otherwise they get stressed trying to keep the hive temperature constant.

The Maire left us with the smoke blower and his bee outfit, we will have to improvise more protective clothing from net curtains and the dressing-up box when we start filming.

...And Now With a Grown Up In Charge

22nd May
The Director took charge of fixing up our new hive this time:

Bee's go to a lot of trouble to keep a constant temperature inside the hive, using their bodies to warm the hive up if the temperature drops and fanning with their wings to cool the place down. So we devised a way to get access with our lenses (boroscopes and endoscopes if you were wondering Mr XL) without letting in a draught.


We made holes about three inches in diameter in the sides and back of the hive

then we stole someone's yoga pants and cut off half a leg, stapling the stretchy lycra over the hole - The lycra has been cut with a cross so when the lens goes in it is covered by the material

To finish off, pieces of wood are fitted over each hole, they can easily be slid out for filming.

Hive Shopping

Following our recent bee fiasco I went and threw myself at the Maire’s mercy.

Where can I get a bigger, empty hive so we can make holes, then put bees in it?*

The Maire is quite mumbley and said something that I translated as
hhrrrmmmhmmm … later mmhm…nhmmn are you at home?

I wasn’t sure what this meant exactly but I said yes then went and lurked around the house wondering if he was planning to turn up today, tomorrow, next week... I really needed to go off and buy bricks and more plastic sheeting. The boys had gone filming at a lake and were out for the day. I ended up trying to intimidate a feral cat who comes round and terrorises our cat Julie - the invader is white with a black pirate’s eye patch. I made monster-claw hands at her and hissed, she flattened her ears, and made low blood-curdling growls like in those devil films. Monster-claw hands obviously weren’t going to work so I turned the hose on her.

The Maire turned up after lunch and I got in his car (still no idea what the plan was). He took me to a commercial apiculturalist – a very short man who was quite severely disabled, he swung himself about on a pair of crutches and gave me a tour of a machinery-filled shed where the honey is separated from the combs, it was quite gruesome - all dripping sticky after the morning’s honey-processing, with a surprising amount of dead bee debris around.

Honey Man and The Maire exchanged money for new wax sheets and a big wooden hive. The Maire refused my attempts to reimburse him and put me and the hive back at the Lovely House. He say’s he’ll be round when the weather is suitable to transfer the bees.

*The bees that the Maire brought round earlier this month were a small colony in a half-sized hive, as the colony grows they can be put into a full-sized hive (like repotting a plant)

Midnight Farce

18th May
The Director and I were fast asleep last night when four of our crew got back from the pub in the pouring rain and remembered that they’d promised to put holes in the beehive...

An electric drill, several extension cords and an umbrella plus black plastic bin liners were involved - and zero protective clothing.

The one holding the umbrella and the torch also filmed this adventure but much as I’d love too show you the wobbly, grainy footage of boys screaming in the rain, they are refusing to hand over the tapes, so you will have to take my word that bees did get upset, people did get stung and the holes were mostly drilled in the wrong places.

What we were able to see through the one useful hole was that there was too much wax and too many bees, packed too densely to be able to film in this hive. I now have to go back to the Maire to see if we can transfer this colony to another, bigger hive...

Bee Electricity

17th May
Until recently I’d dismissed our Maire (mayor) as a dreary sort of chap; hunched over, grey and lugubrious, he is renowned for his lack of interest in village issues. In the past when I have visited the Maire with the simplest request he has looked around anxiously for an exit and suggested that I return when his secretary is in.

Near our house there is a giant sequoia, it has been split by lightning and a large colony of honey bees live in it. Early in May masses of bees swarmed out of the sequoia and settled on a tree branch right outside our house. The Maire is a beekeeper, we would like a beehive in our garden, needing some advice I decided to give the man a go...

It turns out that bees are the electricity this man needs to function - when I told him about our swarm he was transformed, told me what the bees are up to, the conditions that they need to make a move* and offered to help me get a beehive set up in our garden. He didn’t want to use the swarm settled outside our house but he came over a few days later with a hive containing another wild colony that he had collected.

All we have to do now is work out a way to film them, drilling holes in the side of the hive to allow access to our lenses is on our job list (but we think that might upset them). The Director has insisted that we must film the bees this week. The holes must be drilled tonight…

*My shortened and very inexpert interpretation is that when the bee's nest gets too full, a queen (the queen thing is way to complicated for me to explain here) takes half the nest to look for a new home. They settle somewhere like the branch of a tree, all in a solid mass, while scouts go off looking at new housing possibilities reporting back to the swarm with information that they convey by means of a waggely dance. This can go on for days until a consensus is reached. In the middle of the day and when the weather is settled, they make their move to new premises.

Bees And Birds

9th April
I’m getting a lot of flak from The Director, he says that I’m giving the impression that it’s all studio filming here. So, lets get this straight, most of the filming is outside, mostly nearby but some of it involves packing up a car and driving for an hour or so.

These kind of trips usually need two people – a camera person and an assistant, sometimes, someone gets the short straw and has to take me out with them. I’m good at all sorts of things but I can’t get the hang of camera stuff or technology and all the cabley/connector-ey/knobby stuff that goes with it. I only get picked for camera assistant if there is no other option.

Recently, The Director had to take me with him to film the relationship between solitary bees and bee orchids. We drove the car as close to the spot as we could and then fought our way on foot through scratchy bushy stuff the last few miles uphill to the filming location.

Loaded with unwieldy cases, tripods and rucksacks, we decided not to completely empty the vehicle – that would’ve been silly, we just made a couple of trips carrying as much as we could. As the day wore on, if a different tripod or lens was needed, the assistant would run back to get it.

Insects really hate being breathed on so you need to stay as far away as possible for them to keep doing their thing - as an assistant you can’t really see what’s going on.

It wasn’t until I saw the material being logged that I realised what had been filmed that day. When the male bees hatch and emerge blinking into the sunshine they’re not sure what a girl is exactly - like excitable boys they experiment with the nearest likely object. The bee orchid, growing cunningly near the bee colony, has a flower that is a bit like a female bee, the male bees snuggle into them and rub themselves around while the orchid plants yellow deeley boppers of pollen on their heads. After a while the male bee meets a real female, then he feels a chump for having been fooled earlier and he doesn’t visit the orchids quite as enthusiastically any more, but by this time he and his mates have pollinated the orchids ready for another year’s April Fool.