Long life | 4 June 2015

I wrote last week about a swarm of bees that had attached itself to a wall of my house, as if this were a rare and momentous event; but since then there have been three more swarms, and the men in spacesuits have been back again to remove them. Well, they’ve actually removed only two swarms, for I don’t know where the third one ended up. I only know that Stan, my nearest neighbour, knocked on my front door last weekend to report that a swarm in flight had just crossed his house and was making a bee-line (yes) for my garden. But whether they stopped there, and if so where they settled, I haven’t managed to discover. Anyway, the experience has turned me into a bee-crisis sceptic, as some people are climate-change sceptics. The experts could be right, for all I know, in claiming that bees are in precipitous decline all over the world, but with so many thousands of them buzzing about alarmingly in south Northamptonshire, I find it hard to be too worried.