The Venerable Bees

10:00am Thursday 10th January 2008

A sting in the tale, the enthusiastic Archdeacon of Auckland just loves talking about his passion for bee-keeping

WELL actually it stands at seven o'clock, and it's Holy Trinity vicarage not Grantchester's - but whatever the hour, there may never have been a better time to keep bees.

Two New Year MBEs were awarded for services to apiary, one in Northern Ireland, the other in Northumberland.

Whatever they said in Co Down, in Northumberland the paper talked inevitably of a buzz of excitement about the place.

Few activities, few veritable hives of industry, may more greatly lend themselves to punning. We shall endeavour, doubtless unsuccessfully, to resist the mellifluous temptation.

The Guardian even carried a leader, unequivocally headed "In praise of bee keepers", which supposed it among the world's oldest occupations. "None of the accolades in today's honours list has the same simple beauty," it said.

The Venerable Nick Barker, since last May both Archdeacon of Auckland and priest-in-charge of Holy Trinity, Darlington, has kept bees for 15 years, though both his mother and grandfather were old hands.

"Venerable", it should incorrigibly be explained, is the formal style given to Church of England archdeacons. This one could almost be the Venerable Bees.

His mother was the only one of seven children prepared to continue the craft.

The family's elderly copy of the Practical Bee Guide, written in 1904 by JG Digges - himself an Anglican priest in Northern Ireland - sits on his study table. It was her bible, he says.

Archdeacon Barker, 58, had himself been allergic to bee stings, though the years seem to have procured a certain immunity. So what does a senior clergyman say when, as once happened, he's stung 17 times on the leg in the same incident?

"I think I probably told them to go away," he amiably insists.

Its image may almost be something from a Giles cartoon, its reality much different - and pollination puts at least £120m annually into the national economy.

Sales of honey add a few quid to the church building fund - there's always a church building fund - too.

Like Prince Charles and his pansies, Nick Barker also talks to his bees. "They say you should do it and I do, I may even tell them my problems.

"It's fascinating, wholly absorbing, takes you into another world really. I can stand and watch them for ages, amazing creatures, but I'm afraid my wife might think I'm a little mad."

So does he feel affection for them? "I don't know about affection, but you do feel responsible for them," he admits.

Brought up with bees - his father was vicar of Dent, that half-hidden Cumbrian village that's in the North Yorkshire Dales national park and the diocese of Bradford - he'd had enough experience to know what to do when a neighbour in his former parish reported a swarm.

Perhaps there was something of the Good Samaritan about it. He took them in, anyway.

"Swarms are what most people are frightened of - they have this Tom and Jerry image of being chased down the street by thousands of bees - but it's when they're swarming that they're usually at their most docile. They're full of honey, non-aggressive, nothing to defend.

"I rang my mother. She quickly arrived with equipment and advice."

These days he has a single hive, typically holding between 30,000-60,000 bees.

Almost all will be female workers - how they work, those lady bees - with a single queen and a few hundred male drones who, after inseminating the virgin queen, do absolutely nothing at all.

It is no doubt reassuring, at least to half the readership, that the males usually get a pretty fearful comeuppance in the end.

Always engaging, the archdeacon is positively animated when talking of his hobby. "Buzz" may really be the best word, though waxing lyrical comes close.

He's studied them, watched them, admired them, would love to spend more time with them but for the job-juggling demands of a busy parish and an archdeaconry that stretches from the Durham dales to north Teesside.

"I suppose there are two sorts, the professionals who are beekeepers and people like me, who keep bees and who just find it all so engrossing. I can't remember how I learned it, I suppose it was just trial and error.

"Part of it is the fascination of opening a hive and seeing inside their lives, as it were - and the other is the fruit of your labours, and one of those is the honey. There's also a huge amount of industry and agriculture dependent upon pollination. The average bee is incredibly hard working and energetic. It might be working in the hive, flying for forage or doing guard duty. They make a very significant contribution to the economy."

The busiest time is in the Spring, about which he quotes the little rhyme about a swarm in May being worth a load of hay, and a swarm in June a silver spoon. A swarm in July isn't worth a fly.

In winter they usually hibernate, though his own had been flying the day previously - a result, he supposes, of the warm weather. "I think they just wanted to do their poos," he says, by way of archidiaconal euphemism.

The clock stood at almost half past eight when it seemed polite to give him back his evening. It had been thoroughly enjoyable; like Nick Barker's bees, time had flown.

Bees+: Ten things you may never have known about the winged wonders

■ There are more than 20,000 species of wild bee, though the honey bee is alone kept in the UK.

■ Until the 18th century scientists thought the queen was a king, probably explaining why they couldn't understand the bees' reproduction.

■ Aristotle described bee keeping in such detail that many believe the ancient philosopher must have kept them himself.

■ Bees have long been used to protect valuables, including by bandits guarding their loot. The British Bee Journal of 1951 reported the finding the long lost plans of Cologne cathedral in a bee hive.

■ The Times in 1953 told how smugglers on the River Hamble kept their contraband in the bottom of a hive, customs officers suitably deterred.

■ The Japanese in the Second World War used bees to carry microscopic documents across enemy lines.

■ One of the world's great apian authorities is the splendidly named Amos Root.

■ A good queen may lay 3,000 eggs a day, more than her own bodyweight.

The average is 1,500.

■ A worker bee may live little more than six weeks. A good queen might last three years.

■ There appears to be nothing special about bees knees.

The etymologist Nigel Rees supposes the phrase's popularity to be due simply to the rhyme.

Hanging matters

UNWITTINGLY inviting suspended sentences, Billy Mollon in Durham sends a photograph of Tom Pierrepoint - His Majesty's hangman - with Tommy Sharp, a relative of Billy's who kept the Lord Seaham in Gilesgate, Durham.

The Pierrepoints - for execution was a family business - would stay at the Lord Seaham when despatched to Durham.

Billy also recalls that William Joyce, otherwise Lord Haw Haw, would boast that German bombers would widen Silver Street - the city's main thoroughfare.

Albert Pierrepoint hanged him.

Henry, Tom's brother, had been the first of them. Albert was Tom's nephew.

"When I leave school I should like to be the official executioner," wrote the 11- year-old Albert, by way of "What I want to be when I grow up" composition.

Tom was a hangman for 37 years, his estimated 294 victims including 13 of the 16 American servicemen executed on UK soil during the Second World War for murder or rape.

He is also credited with the advice to his uncle Albert that if he couldn't do it without whisky, he shouldn't do it at all.

In 2006, however, previously secret papers released by the Home Office showed that Tom and fellow hangman Robert Baxter had been reprimanded for touting for business. Whenever the newspapers reported a capital sentence, both would write to the appropriate county under-sheriff offering their services.

Tom was indignant. "The junior man was getting all the work and I was waiting idle," he said.

Albert is said to have conducted 450 executions, his fastest just seven seconds between the condemned man leaving his cell and the trapdoor opening. Most, he reported, were brave. "There were only two but they were spies - foreigners."

He also ran a Manchester pub, somewhat mordantly named Help the Poor Struggler, before retiring to Southport.

He died in 1992, Timothy Spall playing him in the 2005 film, The Last Hangman.

We also recall, long since, interviewing one of Albert Pierrepoint's assistants who lived - memory suggests - in Newfield, near Bishop Auckland. Can anyone recall him? Was Tommy Sharp really also a champion athlete as Billy Mollon supposes? There may be more hanging matters ere long.

He couldn't write a shopping list'

OUR kidder's best Christmas present may have been a book called Dinner With Mandelson, and the letter - via here - that accompanied it.

It's written by John Ashton - a pseudonym for Mark Hargreaves, a Hartlepool Grammar School pupil between 1969-76. Our kidder, now retired, taught him English - and with a guy called Dave Kent, says Mark, taught him all he knows.

"He also once announced to a class of less than enthusiastic pupils that Hargreaves couldn't write a shopping list, a great line which has stayed with me for the past 30-odd years.

He tried to become a famous geologist, worked as a lamp fitter's mate, qualified ("through a series of administrative mistakes") as a chartered accountant, lives in Carlton-in-Cleveland and now coowns a business making computer games in Middlesbrough.

Like almost all the best wheezes, the idea of the book arose in the pub. After a few more beers it had become a trilogy.

Dinner With Mandelson (Vanguard, £9 99) is the third; the first will appear later.

Mark sent it here, with a spare copy "to use as a door jam", because he'd no idea where Dave lived.

Amid the customary Christmas library, it has not been possible to read it all, but any book which lists among its credits some of the finest real ale pubs in North-East England is off to a flying finish.

It actually seems highly diverting - and a whole lot better than the shopping list.

THE lady, among much else, was given the Christmas edition of the Oldie magazine. It reproduced a letter which had been in the Teesdale Mercury, and now appears third-hand.

"I was very angry when I read about the motorised scooter hit-and-run incident that took place in the supermarket car park.

"This is becoming a serious problem.

It seems to be that people who get behind the wheel of one of these scooters can eventually become very aggressive.

"Only last week an old lady of about 80, operating a dark red scooter, stuck two fingers up at me as she sped past and last month there was an elderly man driving at high speed with a bottle of whisky half-empty in his hand.

"I come from Poland and have never seen anything like this in my country."