Recollection

A brilliant fiction by Ursula Le Guin creates a world in which a year lasts only slightly less than a human lifetime. People may mature into middle age without ever seeing snow, or hayfields. It becomes the responsibility of the very old to carry the memory of winter's rigours through the long salad days of summer - reminding the young of the need to maintain and expand the cities to which all must eventually retreat from winter cold. And in the long winter of freezing struggle, those who remember summer must retell the stories of summer's glory to those who are losing hope

Of course, as well as spinning a (very) good yarn, she is creating metaphors of our own need for remembrance across the generations: the dangers of unmuzzling capital and exposing the twin incisors of hyper-inflation and grinding depression; the bottomless horror of warfare, but the futility of appeasing tyrants; the fragility and vulnerability of our food supply

The lives of summer-born bees are measured in weeks - a frantic, frenetic existence, ended by exhaustion, death by air miles, sacrificed for the greater good. No bee that remembers winter past will live to see the next one, but still they prepare for it. Evolutionary biology will reassure you that it is encoded not in the spirals of the mind, the labyrinths of culture or the spinning of stories, but in the helices of the nucleus. But what if it is not the bees that remember, but the hive, the colony. I remember watching Neil Armstrong take a giant step for mankind [sic], but not many of the atoms that were in that body watching black and white TV are in this one writing on a mobile

Winter bees are really cute. They are dopey and docile and bleary-eyed (all five of them), like children dragged out of bed for the school run who honestly weren't tired at 9.30pm last night. Their lives are the very converse of their summer sisters - waiting, enduring, slow and considered, for months, not weeks, until spring is come. And I wonder if, like Le Guin's old ones they are remembering - passing on in vibration and chemical signal the promise of warm sunshine and pollen and a foretaste of fresh nectar to the tyros born during winter nights, whose task is to begin rebuilding the colony in spring, when the old ones have fulfilled their task and completed the circle

We gave the colony this one came from some more sugar fondant, still paranoid about the risks they will face in a cold March. Today reached 15 degrees - do the bees remember how fickle nature can be? Are they growing their numbers too fast? In the faffing around removing old containers and installing new ones, inevitably a few confused bees emerge blinking into the sunlight. In their sleep-drugged state, they are disinclined to respond to a little smoke, and scuttle back into the hive through the feed-hole in the top, as summer bees would, so we have to brush them or pick them up individually and persuade them back in through the entrance. It's a little undignified, but they will not hold a grudge - or maybe they won't remember