John Carey's Blog

Bees and Books

2012-02-27T09:11:00.002-08:00

Saturday was sunny - about 15 degrees - and bees from all three hives were flying and taking in pollen (by the look of it from crocuses, aconites and Japanese honeysuckle). The new colony had finished their candy so I gave them a fresh 1.5 kilos of Apifondia.
On Friday 2 March I'll be doing an event with Claire Tomalin titled "Charles Dickens: the Best of Men, The Worst of Men", organized by the Royal Society of Literature and chaired by Maggie Fergusson. It will be at 12.30 in the LSE's Sheikh Zayed Lecture Theatre, New Academic Building, Lincoln's Inn Fields, WC2A 3LJ. Admission id free but you need a ticket from the LSE website www.lse.ac.uk/spaceforthought

Books and Bees

2012-02-07T11:15:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow 8 February at 6.00 at the British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, I and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Becoming Dickens (2011) will be discussing Dickens - in an event to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth - and asking what explains his popularity, what makes him so attractive to biographers and readers, why has his work been adapted for TV and film more than that of any other novelist? There will be a question-and-answer session afterwards and a reception.
No news on the bees. We had 3 or 4 inches of snow in the Cotswolds on Saturday night but it started melting in the afternoon, so it should not worry the bees much, but they are sensibly staying indoors.

Winter Bees

2012-01-09T13:56:00.000-08:00

A quiet time for bees. I've been up to the hives once or twice around Christmas, and even taken a peep inside the roofs when the sun has been shining. On Christmas Eve when I lifted the covers over the bees in my new colony I could see them taking in candy quite eagerly from the pack I had left them. They seemed fit and lively so that's a good sign. The mild weather means bees are eating more than usual so checking stores regularly is important. Fields of oilseed rape around our cottage are astonishingly advanced. When we went for a walk on Boxing Day one field had self-sown oilseed rape plants at the field's edge already in flower. We have violets, snowdrops and primroses out, clematis budding up, and a big subhirtilla autumnalis cherry in magnificent snowy flower for the last three weeks. A neighbour told me there were bees foraging in her garden at the weekend. Hope they were mine.

Bees and Books

2011-10-09T14:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at the Cheltenham Festival I interviewed Claire Tomalin about her splendid new biography of Charles Dickens. There was a big, eager audience and our discussion and the question-and-answer session that followed were tremendously enjoyable. The festival seems bigger than ever and was teeming with people, including lots of children. Altogether a very cheering event.
My bees are now ready for the winter. The two big hives have plenty of store and I am feeding the new colony on a half pack of Apifonda candy from Thornes - just in case they are a bit short. When I looked in the brood chambers last weekend there was capped brood in all of them so their queens are still laying. This year there have been almost no wasps - a great change from 2010. Maybe the hard winter was bad for them.

Books and bees

2011-09-04T04:33:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday with the novelist Meg Rosoff I took part in an event in the BBC Literary Proms series - a discussion about William Golding as man and writer, recorded earlier in the evening in the Royal College of Music and broadcast in the interval of Tuesday's promenade concert. Ian McMillan chaired it and in the audience question-and-answer session afterwards I discovered that one of Golding's ex-pupils was present - Peter Hodgman, who was taught by Golding at Bishop Wordsworth's School in 1957. He had some fascinating memories.
The bee news is good. As the season is so early I put mouse guards on all three hives on 7 August, as a safeguard not just against mice seeking winter quarters but also against wasps seeking honey. The mouse guards restrict the entrance to just a few holes and make it easier for bees to keep wasps out. So far I have not seen any wasps up by the hives which is a relief. Last weekend I put clearing boards under two supers. I took them off the hives on Wednesday and when I extracted them yesterday I found I had 35 lbs of beautiful dark amber late honey which smells wonderful. Very cheering. The new colony is thriving and I gave them one of the emptied supers to clear any remnants of honey out of. They seemed keen, and it will add to their winter store. The other two hives are well stocked for winter. Both have a full super in addition to the honey in their brood chambers.

Bees and Books

2011-07-14T04:54:00.001-07:00

No swarm has chosen to take up residence in my empty hive (possibly because Ali's bees in the next-door hive are so fierce that they frighten off prospective residents) so last weekend I bought a nucleus from Mr Perrin, a beekeeper and queen breeder in Enstone. He is a retired cabinet maker and makes all his hives and equipment himself and his apiary is a joy to see. I left my new bees in their travelling box over Saturday night and transferred them to the hive on Sunday evening. They cover five frames and have lots of capped brood and ample stores beautifully capped with pure white wax. When I drove out to see them on Monday evening they had settled in and seemed happy despite the noisy neighbours. The queen is marked with a spot of white paint on her back, so is relatively easy to pick out.
On the book front - I'll be having a discussion with D.J. Taylor in the Taylorian Institute in Oxford on Monday, 18 July at 5.30, about Golding, biography, and related topics. The event is in aid of Oxfordshire Mind.

Books and Bees

2011-06-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

My honey harvest this year has just topped 200 lbs - it stands at 212 lbs currently That may be all I'm going to get this year - and from two hives it's not to be grumbled at. But if there are field beans at a bee-flight's distance there may be more to come. No obliging swarm has occupied my empty hive yet and I'm thinking I may have to buy a nucleus.
On Tuesday at 7.30 I'll be talking, with Sarah Savitt, to the Oxfordshire Publishing Society, in the Buckley building at Brookes University about Golding, biographies, writers, publishers and related issues.

Bees and Books

2011-05-30T01:52:00.000-07:00

The bee news has got better. There has been some rain (not much, but enough to make a difference) in the last two weeks and it seems to have got the nectar flowing, In the last week I have extracted 100 lbs of honey from my two hives and they are still going great guns despite the current dull and overcast weather. So what seemed a bad season is turning into a so-so one. Ali reckons she has got 75 lbs so far from her national hive and they are still piling it in. Pretty good for a beginner. Hers are rather fierce bees and she got stung on her ear through her bee hood last week so now wears a white woolly hat inside the hood for added protection.
Next Friday I shall be at Hay-on-Wye to do an event at the Book Festival with Judy Golding and Tobias Hill. I'll be talking about Golding from a boigrapher's angle, Tobias about Golding and the sea, and Judy about her memoir The Children of Lovers. In the evening (6.00) I'll be on a panel at the HowTheLightGetsIn philosophy festival, discussing utopias and dystopias with the environmental journalist Paul Kingsworth and the scientist Kevin Warwick.

Bees and Books

2011-05-01T05:09:00.000-07:00

The bee news is mixed. one of my three hives failed to survive the winter. the queen must have died in the horrible pre-Christmas freeze. On the other hand the hive that had the little late swarm has boomed and is now bursting with bees and working hard. I just extracted a super of honey (the oilseed rape has been in flower for three weeks here - which is three weeks earlier than last year when it flowered on 1 May) and there are two more supers filling. The third hive has been slower starting - I think they have concentrated on filling their spare store-space in the brood chamber. But they are now filling their first super. With luck my queenless hive may attract an early swarm. Hope so. Ali's national hive next door to mine is going great guns. She extracted a super yesterday. There's a cold north-east wind, which the bees hate, so they're not in a very good mood.
This week I go up to Glasgow for a one-day conference at the Glasgow School of Art on Thursday (5 May) which will be looking at questions raised in my book What Good Are The Arts? A bit daunting.

Oxford Literary Festival

2011-03-14T04:16:00.000-07:00

This is William Golding's centenary year - he was born on 19 September 1911 - and the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival will dedicate the afternoon of Saturday 9th April to
A Celebration of Golding, which will be held in Merton College's new T.S.Eliot Theatre. At 2.00 I shall talk to Golding's daughter Judy Carver about her memoir of her father, The Children of Lovers, which will be published in May, and at 3.30 I'll chair a dicussion of Golding and Evil with Booker Prize-winning novelist Penelope Lively and the philosopher John Gray, famous for Straw Dogs and a series of other brilliant and challenging books. At 5.00 the acclaimed documentary maker and TV producer Anthony Wall will introduce archive footing of Golding on film and will discuss the film about Golding he will be making later this year in the BBC's Arena series.

On the bee front, things look good - so far. I went up to the hives on Saturday and the bees from all three hives were flying strongly, enjoying the spring sunshine and taking in pollen. But March is a notoriously tricky time for bees - colonies often falter this month even if they have survived the winter. So we shall see.

Books

2011-01-26T03:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went to Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury to talk to the boys there about William Golding's 15 years as a teacher in their school and the effect I thought it had on his writing. The talk was in the school chapel, where Golding, during the religious crisis he went through after his wartime experiences in the navy, spent many hours in solitary prayer.

Bees

2011-01-16T09:07:00.000-08:00

It was sunny today (Sunday, Jan 16) so I walked up to the hives and was delighted to find that bees were flying - especially delighted (and amazed) to find that my little new colony, made from a late swarm last year, was alive and vigorously eating some candy I had left on the hive. As they had almost finished it I gave them a new slab. A beekeeping friend suggests that the snow on the hives may have helped them to survive, keeping warmth in and acting as a kind of igloo. Our neighbour Ali (married to Guy, and mother of Ned, born just before Christmas) is a new beekeeper - started last summer - and her hive (a National, as opposed to my WBCs) is next to mine. Her bees were flying in grand style this morning, which suggests that Nationals are just as good at low temperatures as WBCs, despite being single-walled hives.

Bees

2010-11-24T11:15:00.000-08:00

It was sunny on Saturday at midday and all three hives were flying. I took a quick look at the two that are being fed on candy and the bees are working their way through it very satisfactorily. I'm using a candy marketed by Thornes as "Ambrosia", which bees seem to like. Last year in the really cold weather mice or rats pulled away the hive entrances to try to get inside. This autumn I screwed them down, putting two two-and-a-half inch screws through the ends of the entrance porches (they are WBC hives) and into the landing boards. I've never seen this recommended in bee books but it seems to work.
Two Saturdays back I went to Liddington to give the Richard Jefferies Birthday Lecture to the Richard Jefferies Society. It was really heartening to see so many enthusiasts devoted to the memory of such a fine writer, who was also so deeply knowledgeable about the English countryside.

Books and Bees

2010-10-27T00:36:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday 26 October I talked about William Golding to the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution (as always, there, a keen, receptive, intelligent audience). Bee news is that when I looked at the weekend my little swarm colony had finished every scrap of the slab of honey I had given them a week back, so I gave them another (larger) slab. The milder weather today will, I hope, encourage the queen to go on laying a bit longer.

Books and Bees

2010-10-15T03:01:00.000-07:00

On Sunday 10 October I was at the Cheltenham Literary Festival for a discussion of utopias based on my Faber Book of Utopias, with Julian Baggini, Professor Karen O'Brien of Warwick University, and an enthusiastic audience, full of ideas about the ideal worlds they'd like - or not like - to live in. The Friday before - 9 October - I chaired an event at the Savile Club in memory of Ian Hamilton, founder editor of the Review and The New Review, who was once a student of mine, where Dan Jacobson, Alan Jenkins and Hugo Williams read some of Ian's poems and reminisced about him.
The bees have been enjoying the late sunshine, packing loads of bright yellow pollen from ivy flowers into their hives to feed newly hatched young. A lovely sight.

Bee News

2010-09-27T10:59:00.000-07:00

Update on bees. My attempt to rescue the queenless hive by putting a frame with uncapped brood into it from another hive failed. The colony was too depleted, I guess, and wasps finished it off. Then there was an odd coincidence. An ex beekeeper whom I know phoned me to say there was a swarm in a tree outside his house. This was the end of August!! I went round and collected it and put it in the dead colony's hive. It was not a big swarm, maybe just a cast, about the size of a rugby ball, and it had been in the tree long enough to build comb. I hoped it had a laying queen and waited a couple of weeks before looking - and, yes, it had: there was newly capped brood. I'm feeding it and just hope the queen will produce enough bees to last the winter. The other two hives seem fine. The bigger of them yielded 80lbs of lovely late honey at the end of August - unset, golden and fragrant, from (I think) lime trees and field beans. Now all hives are taking in light yellow pollen from ivy.

Book Prize

2010-08-26T11:22:00.000-07:00

Last Friday I went to Edinburgh for the award ceremong of the 2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prizes. The James Tait Black is the oldest literary prize in Britain and has two sections, one for fiction and one for biography, each worth £10,000. After sitting through a nail-biting discussion, in which Ian Rankin and the chairs of the two judging panels assessed the shortlisted books, I was delighted to find that my life of William Golding had won the biography prize. Golding won the fiction prize in 1979 with Darkness Visibe, and I think he'd have been tickled pink to achieve a double. A.S. Byatt won the fiction award.

Books

2010-08-18T04:09:00.000-07:00

On 10 October I'll be at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in an event with Julian Baggini and Anthony Kenny, where we'll be talking about ideal commonwealths and perfect worlds and choosing our favourite literary and philosophical utopias. It will be at 6.00 in the Parabola Arts centre.

Bees

2010-08-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

One of my hives still seems to be queenless, so on Saturday I took a frame with uncapped brood (and quite a lot of capped brood) in it from one of the other hives and transferred it to the queenless hive (replacing it in the "robbed" hive with a frame of store from the queenless hive). If the hive really is queenless the bees are meant to make a queen from one of the uncapped brood cells - so the bee books say, and looking back through my bee diary I find I did this successfully on several occasions in the 1990s. So when I check the hive at the end of the month there should be some brood in it. We'll see. While I was moving the frames there was a lot of agitation among the bees, and this was made worse because I took the opportunity to put wasp/mouse guards on the entrances, as there were a few wasps about. This always puzzles the bees at first, I find. But they soon settled down.

Books and Bees

2010-07-14T04:11:00.000-07:00

I'll be going to Malta on Sunday 19 July to give the keynote lecture at the International Association of Professors of English conference in Valetta.
The bees are having a very good season. The new hive have drawn out foundation in the brood chamber and started filling it with stores. I've put a super on to give them a bit more room. One of the other hives has no brood still, but I'm hoping the queen has stopped laying temporarily. I've had this happen before and have ordered a new queen only to find, when she arrived, that the old queen had started laying again. I'll check again when I get back from Malta.

Bees and Books

2010-06-28T00:10:00.000-07:00

Going to Australia and New Zealand in May took time from beekeeping, and we were back only for a week before leaving for New York to do some publicity for my Golding biography which was published there at the start of June. However we were able to extract the first harvest during that week, and on our return from New York I collected a new colony (on 6 frames) from Gloucestershire beekeeper Clive Jakeman ( a man who really knows his beecraft) and it is now housed in the hive that failed to survive the winter. Meanwhile the other two hives had been piling in honey from several nearby fields of field beans, and in the last week I have extracted 110 lbs of this - beautiful, dark, fragrant honey which it is so pleasurable to gloat over that it will be a bit of a pang to put it into jars and sell it. The total yield so far this year is 220 lbs, which is not as good as last year but OK considering it is from two hives not three. There seems to be a good deal of honey still left on both hives, thanks to the marvellous weather in the last week, but one of them, the smaller colony, now seems to be queenless. I'm hoping they swarmed while we were in New York and that the new queen has not started laying yet.

Books and Bees

2010-04-26T14:20:00.000-07:00

On 10 May I shall be flying to Auckand to talk about my Golding biography and take part in a "What Good Are the Arts?" discussion at the Auckland Festival of Writers and Readers, then on 17th I shall be in Sydney for the Sydney Writers' Festival discussing the Golding book with Ramona Koval on ABC Radio National's The Book Show, and taking part in a "Judges and Winners" debate about literary prizes with Thomas Keneally, Colm Toibin and Su Tong.
The bee news is good on the whole. The two surviving hives have strong (and quite aggressive) colonies. The oilseed rape in our part of Oxfordshire is coming into full flower, and the bees have started foraging. n the other hand, the big expanse of field beans sown in the autumn in the field next to the hives seems to have been completely wiped out by the cold winter.

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2010-04-04T04:18:00.001-07:00

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Bee News

2010-03-31T14:34:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday it was warm enough to open the hives. One has not survived the winter. It has quite a lot of live bees still, and many dead ones, but there is no sign of brood and clearly no queen. They had plenty of food, and were a really big colony. I don't think their dying out has anything to do with mice getting into the hive (if mice did get in) and certainly nothing to do with the legendary Colony Collapse Disorder. More probably the queen died or was damaged, resulting in what old beekeepers called "spring dwindling". The other two hives are booming, lots of pollen going in. I've fed them both with 2kgsx1pt sugar solution, just to pep them up, though they both have quite a bit of food still in store.
At the end of the 2008 season I had three supers of solid rape honey, which I had not been able to get off the hives in time to extract. I stored it over winter in a shed, hoping to feed it to the bees later. Throughout last summer the shed was alive with wasps, and even though I wrapped the supers in black polythene they continued to try to get at them. When I unwrapped the supers last week I found that the wasps had cleaned them out perfectly. Every scrap of rape homey was gone and the drawn comb in the frames was clean and dry and ready to go back on the hives. So wasps have some use.

Book Events and Bees

2010-03-09T01:28:00.000-08:00

I shall be talking to Michael Schmidt about my Golding biography at the Glasgow Book Festival on Saturday 13 March at 3.30 in the Mitchell Library.
More bee news. I replaced the wooden slides on the two hives where they had been eaten and two weeks later the slides on one hive had been eaten away again to enlarge the holes. A fellow beekeeper says it is rats, which may be right, though the holes do not seem big enough for a rat to get through. The weather is too cold to open the hives and see how the colonies are, but last Sunday the sun was shining and, though there was a bitter wind and an air temperature of only 5, bees from the central hive of the three were flying - so maybe all is well. Hope so.