Late Swarm

The bees swarmed on the fourteenth of October and I stood in the garden in my socks watching a cloud of them pour out of the second hive and thought, that's not right, in the flat way you think things when they're happening in front of you. Swarms are a spring thing. May, June. The colony gets strong, the queen gets restless, half of them leave with her to start again, and the ones left behind raise a new queen. It's the most alive thing you'll ever see, forty thousand insects making a decision. In October they should be shutting down. Clustering. Eating the stores I'd left them and waiting for March. Instead there they were, a great humming ball of them in the apple tree, and the sun on my face warm enough that I understood, roughly, why. It had been 21 degrees for a week. The ivy was still in flower. The hive thought it was August. I did what you do. Box, sheet, shook them in, watched for the queen going up the ramp. All the while thinking: there's nothing out there for you. No stores, no drawn comb, and you've left a hive that'll be queenless going into the cold. I rang Bill, who taught me twenty years ago in a church hall in Shropshire. He's eighty-something now and still has six hives. "October," he said. "October." There was a silence I could hear him thinking in. "Had one in September last year," he said. "First time in fifty years. Put it down to the weather." "What did you do?" "Fed them like mad and hoped." "Did it work?" "No." So I've fed them like mad. Syrup, fondant, a frame of stores robbed from the strongest hive. I look at them every morning and they're still there, still humming, doing everything right for a season that isn't. The old hive is quiet. There might be a queen in there. I'll know in spring, or I won't. Bill said one more thing before he rang off. "You know what the trouble is. The books are all wrong now. Not wrong. Just written for a year that's stopped happening." I've got his book on the shelf. Third edition, 1994. There's a whole chapter on the beekeeping calendar, and every month has a heading, and I read October last night and it says: "Little to do. Ensure entrances are reduced. Enjoy the rest."