Good morning dear readers & Substack friends, I am writing to you from my sofa, in front of my new (gifted, thank you boys) wood burner in the barn which is making this place feel super cosy for the first time in 7 years since moving off grid & into a barn that needs rebuilding.
As you may or may not know from my previous letters, we have not got a good roof on this building so the Winters can be wet & windy inside here. But not anymore! Yay. What a victory.
Now I want to share my latest hobby with you all… beekeeping.
Its quite a random story actually. We did not necessarily want to keep bees when we decided to begin a homestead because we had an incident on the land when we first arrived with the bees from next door. The dog spooked the bees somehow & we were right behind the dog, the bees obviously felt attacked & they came for us. We got swarmed, hundreds of bees ( thats an exaggeration, but it really did feel like hundreds ) dive bombed into our hair & stung us on the head & neck quite a few times. Marlley got it worse than me, he got disorientated & was running around smacking himself on the head trying to stop them from stinging him, I remember the pain being immense. I have never heard him squeal like that before, or since, which I know is quite mean of me but it makes me laugh so much when we tell the story today.
my bees ( November, 2024 )
A few months back we had to remove a beehive from Marley’s parents house, they decided to build their home inside a butchers block that was on the patio & we decided we wanted to keep the bees & put them into a hive on our property. This is the second time a beehive has been removed from their house. The mission was a success, we went in in the early evening with the bee suits & a friend & we cut away the comb & got the bees inside the box. I got stung through my gloves because i was scooping up the bees into the box & i think I squashed somebody a little bit, but generally they were very gentle & just vibrated in clumps in my hands which was so amazing, a surreal experience. I instantly fell in love with them. I think we managed to get the queen into the box because the bees are still buzzing around the hive 7 weeks later. It was not such a great time for moving bee colonies due to the incoming cold weather so I was told by my bee keeping friends to not hold too much hope for them but to give them as much of a chance as you can.
We all know that bee populations are declining due to globalisation, we know that they are super important for the pollination of crops, the safety of our food supply & for general biodiversity so it felt like the right thing to do to take them home with us. They play such an important role on the homestead… they will pollinate our olives, oranges, passionfruits, apricots & our vegetable garden when that is back up & running.
We are now feeding them with this sugary fondant bee food that you buy in agricultural shops, they got through the last packet in about 3-4 weeks & I changed them over to a new packet & I wanted to share this with you all because I am just so excited about the fact that bees will now be pollinating our land & helping us to grow a garden & perhaps at some point we will collect some of their honey.
Each morning I head out to feed Noodle pig, I wander over to the beehive & observe them coming in & out of the hive & I just listen to the sound that they are making inside the box, it is incredible, almost like a calming frequency that I can’t really describe.
I hope you enjoy my awkwardness on camera, had a good giggle at my filming voice & my cool stanger things tracksuit bottoms that I picked out of a bin in England. I don’t really like filming myself talking to camera but I am embracing the cringe from now on & you get to see me wearing a beesuit which is epic & a small insight into my new life as a beekeeper.
I would love to hear your bee stories! Please subscribe to my stack for more stories from our homestead & get a newsletter in your inbox every so often.
If you can share this post with your friends & family I would be so grateful, lets get the importance of pollinators out there.
Much love, Jaymie
xx
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