From reading the newspapers you might get the impression that honeybees were on the way to extinction. In Europe, it is said, the number of honeybee colonies has fallen in a few years by a quarter. In the United States, it has halved since the 1940s. Nobody knows exactly why. The experts blame any number of things, from pesticides to climate change, from disease-bearing parasites to the loss of those plants on which bees like to feed. They all agree, however, that the disappearance of the bee would be a disaster. Bees don’t just make honey and beeswax. Eighty per cent of all plant species depend on them for pollination. One third of all the food that people eat would not be available but for bees.
Worrying though all that sounds, I am reassured by the fact that there always seem to be plenty of bees buzzing about in my garden in Northamptonshire; and when I arrived there from London for the Bank Holiday weekend, I found a note from my cleaner on the kitchen table warning me to be careful because there was a swarm of bees in the garden outside. And so it turned out to be, for there was a large, pulsating cluster of I don’t know how many thousands of the little insects attached to a wall on the far side of the lawn.
There are certain experiences in life that you never forget, and one such for me was when, as a little boy of seven or eight, living in the country in Hertfordshire, I walked into a swarm in flight and got repeatedly stung in my head as dozens of bees got caught up in my hair. I ran screaming back to the house; and while I can no longer remember what happened after that, or how long it took me to recover from the stings, it had a traumatic effect and left me always wary of bees thereafter.
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