As Monday mornings go, this one isn’t bad. There’s a chill in the air that seems right for the time of year, but the sun is shining and I’m settling down to write something for my humble blog. Well, it’s actually a bee blog, but it’s also small, occupying a quiet, little-visited corner of the web. There are no tumbleweeds rolling around in this part of the internet, just charts of visitor statistics kept 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 around 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, drowned 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 is a bit of a legend, as he worked alongside brother Adam at Buckfast Abbey from 1964 to 1974, 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 of his time in Buckfast that will be in my next book. They still need a little sprucing up in Photoshop to remove dust specks and weird 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 also spent time at Buckfast Abbey, but in the 1980s, David Kemp was his boss.
One thing I noticed right away about Mr. Kemp was that he can talk. This is a good thing because in our interview he had very little to do other than 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 tangents down memory lanes. 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 11.50 with a burst bladder, having driven across the Pennines in the walrus cart, and was surprised to find that the pub did not open until noon. Ten minutes might not sound like a lot of time, but unfortunately it was more than my water supply system could handle, so I had to sneak off to a quiet area by a hedge and have a relieved pee (the other kind of pee). I guess I could have been arrested for “hedge poisoning” or something, but I didn’t get caught.
Here is a small excerpt from my interview with David:
DK But after they came back from the moors, they would pick them up and weigh them on a scale, and if they needed to, they would feed them with a big pan feeder. They raised the hive, and since 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 take the supers out of the hives (they had left them in the bee escape 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 “Buckfast Abbey Beekeeping Assistant Needed” and I had been keeping bees since I was 9 years old, and had this fascination with how bees work. I had dabbled in buying bees from France and the Isle of Wight from Douglas Roberts, and I could see the crosses. The Douglas Roberts bees were fantastic, not only were they quiet, but they used to bring back a lot of honey. French bees were vicious.
SD Was it them?
DK Oh… they do well, but do they bite? When he was a ranger, he had some French bees, and my labrador showed up and got stung around the lips and ears. He left me for the first time, he came back to the house
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 hint of rain or thunder or something… and if they were confined for an extended period 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.
SD Just a veil?
DK She had on a WWII African rifles hat and a black net veil and apron. The apron’s ribbon held 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, on a Saturday morning, he came in with his hands up his sleeves and his hood up…he looked like something out of MacBeth. He took me to the bee department where brother Pascal worked, who was also an excellent beekeeper, he had been in bees for 25 years, he was really good…
Yes
DK So Brother Adam, Brother Pascal and I work with the bees. Brother Bernard handled the mail and things like that; posting honey for Christmas: he used to go to Fortnum & Masons and a couple of shops in London, and many used to go privately in little boxes to various people. So we ran like this for quite a few years.
SD So you were in a pretty privileged position.
NS Yes, and looking back, how do these things happen? Why did I apply for a job at Buckfast Abbey? Although the care of the game, which I was in for the previous six years, I could see that everything was going to change. All the shooting went to the money. When I applied for the beekeeping job, one of the old rangers said it was the best thing he had ever done and all the shots went to the money.
It may not be to everyone’s taste, 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 clover. They had to deal with bad weather around Dartmoor, and much later bad blood, but for a time 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.
