Is beekeeping left-wing?

‘Zip my head in,’ he said, after climbing into a white jumpsuit with a mesh helmet.

It was a beekeeper’s outfit, but the effect was less apicultural and more like the scene in E.T. where the special agents in biohazard suits come for the alien. The builder boyfriend was struggling with the zip around his neck so I made sure it was shut.

He then fussed with the arms and legs so much, worrying about gaps, that in the end I used gaffer tape to tape his wrists and ankles. ‘Now you look like a Teletubby,’ I said. ‘Foot the ladder, will you?’ he asked.

The BB had come home with a beekeeper’s suit after doing a roofing job for a lady living up a nearby mountain who had been trying to live with a vast colony of wasps.

The lefties in West Cork are mad for bees and wasps, to the extent that they will do anything to make them happy.

An artist down the lane who keeps bees and paints with the honey screams at unsuspecting Irish locals doing their front gardens if she spots them spraying weedkiller: ‘My bees!’ she caterwauls, as though this is a sentence requiring no explanation.

It’s exhausting for the locals, of course, but they don’t ever seem to react to anything the mad English lefties do. The BB claims this is because they just block them out, like something that is so far beyond their understanding they don’t even try to process their madness, never mind argue with it.

This lady up a mountain had a massive wasps’ nest in her roof and had tried spraying it with peppermint, which of course didn’t work. I’d say trying to drown wasps slowly in peppermint is more cruel than killing them quickly with chemicals, but what do I know?