As Monday mornings go, this one isn’t bad. There’s a chill in the air that seems right given the time of year, but the sun is shining and I’m settling in to write something for my humble blog. Well, it’s actually a bee blog, but it’s also small, occupying a quiet and rarely visited corner of the web. There are no tumbleweeds rolling in this part of the internet, just graphs of visitor stats that remain stubbornly flat. When I worked for General Electric, they were obsessed with “double-digit growth.” You won’t find any of that here, although I assume “0.0” is two digits, something like that? Oh good.
This weekend we had a visit from our relatives from Kent who was very nice. I took them to see my apiary yesterday and was pleased to see that some of my bees were still flying and bringing back pollen. I saw a live wasp so I’ll keep the wasp traps out for a while longer. I also saw hundreds of dead wasps, drowning in the sweet liquid at the bottom of the traps. I don’t hate wasps at all, but a walrus must defend the bees from it.
I’ve been going over the interview I had with David Kemp in August. He’s something of a legend, as he worked alongside brother Adam at Buckfast Abbey from 1964 to 1974, and then became a bee inspector for many years. He has spent his entire life with bees and has been part of the history of beekeeping in this country. He kindly left me some pictures from his time at Buckfast that will be in my next book. They still need a bit of Photoshopping to remove dust specks and odd blemishes, but they offer a fascinating glimpse into a bygone era. Many thanks to Andy Wattam for making the digital scans and sending them to me. Andy was the National Bee Inspector until a few years ago, and he too spent time at Buckfast Abbey, but in the 1980s, David Kemp was his boss.
One thing I immediately noticed about Mr. Kemp was that he can talk. This is a good thing because in our interview he had very little to do besides check the battery levels of my recording device. However, he rarely answers a question directly. It was probably because my questions were rubbish, or maybe because they triggered memories, that he went off on a tangent down memory lane. That was fine with me; all I wanted to do was enjoy my time with him and listen to his stories.
We were in a pub called The Fox in Kelham, on the River Trent, near Newark. I had arrived at 1150 with a burst bladder, having crossed the Pennines in the walrus cart, and was surprised to find that the pub didn’t open its doors until midday. Ten minutes may not sound like a long time, but unfortunately it was more than my water supply system could take, so I had to sneak to a quiet area by a hedge and have a relief pee (the other type of pee). I guess I could have been arrested for “hedge poisoning” or something, but they didn’t catch me.
Here is a small excerpt from my interview with David:
DK But after they came back from the moors, they would collect them and weigh them on a scale, and if they needed to, they would feed them with a large pan feeder. They raised the hive, and because they knew the weight of the hive, they were able to calculate what supplies were needed. The honey was taken from them in the moors. We used to go up with a team of men in a truck. The beekeepers would remove the supers from the hives (they had left them in the bee escapes over the weekend) and we would stack the supers in the truck and move on to the next apiary.
He was brilliant in the organization, he was Adam. He was perfect, typical German.
SD Were you one of the many who helped or…?
NS No. When I first went there, the ad said “Beekeeping Assistant Wanted for Buckfast Abbey” and I had been keeping bees since I was 9 years old, and I had this fascination with how bees worked. I had dabbled in buying bees from France and the Isle of Wight from Douglas Roberts, and I got to see the crosses. Douglas Roberts’s bees were fantastic, not only were they calm, but they used to bring in a lot of honey. French bees were vicious.
SD Was it them?
DK Oh… they do well, but do they sting? When he was a ranger, he had some French bees, and my lab showed up and got stung around his lips and ears. He left me for the first time, he came back home
SD can’t really blame him
DK Every time I went to the hives after that, he would stay about 25 meters away. But the French bees I had were nasty. You could deal with them on a really good day, but the slightest indication of rain or thunder or something… and if they were confined for any length of time, they would just take it out on the beekeeper.
While I was at Buckfast you never wore gloves. There are no suits like the ones people wear now because they weren’t there.
SD Just a veil?
DK She had on a WWII African Rifles hat and a black net veil and apron. The apron string held up your veil, and the apron protected you from getting dirty with sticky honey.
But back to the staff, when I got there and met Brother Adam for the first time, one Saturday morning, he came in with his hands in his sleeves and his hood up… he looked like something out of MacBeth. He took me to the bee department where brother Pascal worked, he was also an excellent beekeeper, he had been in bees for 25 years, he was really good…
Yeah
DK So brother Adam, brother Pascal and I work with the bees. Brother Bernard took care of the mail and things like that; post honey for Christmas: he used to go to Fortnum & Masons and a couple of stores in London, and many used to go privately in little boxes to various people. So we ran like that for quite a few years.
SD So you were in quite a privileged position.
NS Yes, and looking back, how do these things happen? Why did I apply for a job at Buckfast Abbey? Although game care, which I was in for the previous six years, I could see that everything was going to change. All the shooting went to money. When I applied for the job as a beekeeper, one of the old rangers said it was the best thing he ever did and all the shots went to the money.
It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I thoroughly enjoyed my 4 hour talk and am pleased with some of the stories I received. Just think, when you first went to Buckfast there was no varroa, no rapeseed, and there were vast white meadows with clovers. They had to deal with bad weather around Dartmoor, and much later bad blood, but for a while it must have been an idyllic place to keep bees and learn from Brother Adam who was ‘a man ahead of his time’. “According to David Kemp.