Wax works
Douglas Oliver
The Joys of Beekeeping Richard Taylor. Illustrated by Men i Shardin (Barrie and Jenkins, £3.25) Richard Taylor believes that if you 'send out love' to the bees, you can work in shirtsleeves among them, in harmony and rarely stung. He writes for nature-lovers, not to instruct them in the craft exactly, but to instruct them in this love, this happiness of gearing one's life into the cycles and patterns of nature, and into the routines of the bees. With bland lyricism, he sets down each detail of his part-time occupation because these details hold his happiness in code. Explaining the language of beekeeping becomes part of an initiation for the reader. The beeyards he has established in a 75-mile stretch upstate are each a 'natural sanctuary'. In this mood of reverence, he takes us entertainingly enough through the Spring revival of activity outside the hive, the nuisance and fascination of swarming, the minutiae of honey flow and production, the problems of stings or angry hives, and the pleasure of setting up a brilliant little honey extraction plant in his 'honey house'. He'll tell us how to mop up honey from the floor (sponges and water, and see) with almost as much enthusiasm as he'll describe the extraction plant in his honey house. There, former washing machine motors hum as a knife slices off the comb cappings, the combs spin round in the extractor, honey pumps along its pathways into the granulation retarder and thence into the storage tank; meanwhile plastic buckets fill with wax. I imagine the proprietor with tawny joy, a gentle smile that never falters, operating the whole contraption from its midst. Then my reading of his book truly warms.
Stings or honey: our imagination has its choice of which to concentrate upon. Richard Taylor, blessed as he tells us with a good demon, takes the stings in his stride. Such hearts of love are everywhere that even animal pests turn up as friends. After all, they don't interfere with production that much. The kingbirds don't snatch many bees, mice can be screened from the hive. Nature's economy here is almost Rousseauist : if there's no need to compete, nature avoids competition. The bees themselves don't fight each other for nectar sources and only under rare adverse conditions (often resulting from human mistakes) will one colony rob another.
At this point I could easily turn cynical, but I don't really want to bring cynicism into Richard Taylor's bee yards: joy, even when irritatingly evangelical, remains valu
able. And, no question, the bees and their cities do present mysteries enough to justify an enthusiasm. Pausanias tells us the second temple of the Delphic oracle was of beeswax and feathers. Virgil reminds his readers that bees were considered to have portions of ethereal thought. Vaughan in his poem, 'The Bee' wanted to hive in God. And, surely the ultimate in bee mysteries, Charles Butler, the man who saw the so-called 'king' bees laying eggs, gives credit to this anecdote in his The Feminine Monarchie (1609): A woman carried from church a holy wafer in her mouth and laid it in a hive stricken with 'murrain'. Honey production resumed, of course, but when she lifted the skip she found the bees had built a chapel, with steeple and architect-designed windows. The wafer itself lay upon the altar, while the bees 'making a sweet noise flew round about it'.
The events of the bee city even in today's view are not much less spectacular. This book is best on the practical aspects of beecraft, not least on swarming and its prevention—always a central riddle and one to which today's bee journals continue to devote space. I like Richard Taylor better when he's puttering about his yards or telling us of a fine question from a relative: 'How much do you make on your honey per bee?' It's characteristic that he should add with insistent wisdom that he feels the richer for receiving the question. But He does include an interesting chapter on how to make a living from honey while keeping it strictly a family affair.
1849, 'gave as a definition of a spinster 'a lady who has attained the age of twentyfive without having married a fool, a gambler, a knave or a drunkard'. Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig could be said to have, in their critical assessment of girls' fiction from 1839-1975, taken this quotation as the criterion on which to base their judgement of the books they describe and discuss. But the amount of ticking-off that middle-class women writers appear to deserve (up to the last ten years) does make for some rather repetitious reading. It seems, sadly, that it is not enough that a child's book be enjoyable, tell a good story and be well written, it must also avoid the pitfall of directing the heroine towards a life of domestic bliss, and it must also be socially relevant to working-class children. This latter point accounts for one of the few boring chunks of the book when the writers describe the egalitarianisation of girls' fiction in the 'thirties and 'forties. Girl magazines proliferated and churned out fantastical stories of great banality to do with British schoolgirls meeting mysterious eastern princesses in the desert and running away from sheikhs, or girl pilots bopping the Germans during the war. These stories were often written by men.
Luckily, the greater part of You're a Brick Angela! takes the woman reader on a nostalgic and enjoyable journey through the fiction of her childhood. The strictures of Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig on the errant, home-loving authors of my favourite children's books gave me a pleasurable feeling of guilt. One of my favourite Victorian novelists, Charlotte M. Yonge, is guilty of making her girls and young women subjugate their personalities, pleasures, thoughts and feelings so that they may become a civilising influence on man. In Miss Yonge's eyes men are a crude and hopelessly imperfect sex, and the girls subjugate themselves for the greater glory of God. Of course, when a man is admirable, womanly virtue becomes a shadow in his light. The fact that the heroines sip this unheady cup of ambrosia as though drinking vinegar does not save their authors from getting it quite rightly in the neck from Ms Cadogan and Craig.
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