Busy Bee Week

The other day the house was buzzed by the Air Ambulance which, after two tight circuits, decided to land in the field opposite the drive. Great excitement, all the neighbours were out to watch.
The doctor was picked up by the local police and whisked off to Tesco because, rumour has it, someone had had a heart attack in the car park. It seems shopping is a dangerous game and best avoided. It perplexes me that an important, life-saving service like the air ambulance is a charitable organisation – why?

For several years I’ve been meaning to sort out the garage floor. The cement dust gets onto your shoes and it then gets deposited everywhere. I tried giving the floor a coating of silicon to bind it together but it made no difference. Painting the floor seemed like a lot of effort so I bit the bullet and laid rubberised matting across the whole floor.

The tiles are edged so that they lock together without having to be glued down – biggest jigsaw puzzle I’ve ever completed. It took me several hours but it also forced me to tidy up a little bit. There is still some tidying to do in the back right hand corner. There is a table tennis top that Jane insisted on rescuing from somewhere – it needs to be dragged out and used. Maybe I could use it as a cover on one of my many log stores – now there’s an idea.

I finished the week by collecting my beehive from Thornes. Here it is in the garden alongside the vegetable plot. The entrance is south facing as recommended and there is space around it for me when I need to inspect it.

The next step is to get some bees. My friend Gary in Banbury possibly has a spare nucleus (queen, workers and drones). I will need to get down there and collect the travel box before the end of the month otherwise there might not be enough time through the summer for the hive to make itself strong enough to survive through winter.