Audience Participation

The most obvious thing that dates this photograph is the blue polystyrene nucleus hive in the centre of the three. Expanded polystyrene (EPS) has existed for seventy years, but the first beehives to use it were not made until 50 years ago. Small 'nucleus' hives in EPS are even more recent, probably less than 20 years in UK. EPS for beekeeping has been embraced much more enthusiastically in northern mainland Europe than it has in UK. Are we more 'conservative' than, say, the Danes, or do we just have kinder winters?

I can't see anything in the vegetation that gives any clues at all. Common native grasses, nettles, thistles, hawthorn, oak and ash trees; the trunk on the right is a goat willow

Black and white cattle came to Britain in the late 19th century and became ubiquitous by the mid 20th. The all-white faces in the picture betray a Hereford bull as a father, but that breed also originated in the 19th century. The blotchy markings on some of the animals could be the influence of some modern, imported European breeds, but could equally be a throwback to historic English shorthorns. The one on the left rapidly emerged as the bravest, most precocious and 'boss' of the herd, but not averse to a scratch behind the ear 

The yellow plastic eartags are unquestionably modern. There is now a lot of legislation governing the tagging of farm animals. An expert could probably pinpoint the significance of the tags and how recently the convention they follow was introduced. These cattle are traditional grass-fed beef - meaning they are not being intensively or rapidly fattened on a diet of ground cereal grains, rather they will be slaughtered over the course of this summer, probably at over two years of age. Their meat will not be the tenderest, but it will be flavourful and satisfying; and traditional - this is a production system that has existed for hundreds of years 

The fence is barbed wire - invented in the US in the late 19th century, and put to work as a weapon of war before the century's end. The wire also had an enormous impact on the nomadic lives of the original Americans, and they called it "the Devil's rope". Here it is holding upright the wooden posts that have mostly rotted off at ground level. The telephone wires in the background, crossing rural Britain, put us firmly in the 20th century - the village first had a telephone call office in 1911, though there were complaints about its lack of privacy

The bee brush on the hive roof (used for gently brushing bees off the frames where necessary) is, I think, traditional materials, but the pen is plastic and the sheet on the clipboard is clearly a printed form - suggestive of modernity. 

Altogether, my initial reflex to refer to this as a 'timeless scene' is mistaken. There are many clues that place it in a modern time-frame

A four-legged audience during a hive inspection is not ideal. We try to sneak in without attracting their attention, but today we caught their eye from the adjoining field, and curiosity - as always with adolescent mammals - got the better of them. Previous cohorts have suffered for their lack of caution, but the bees were all in a benign mood today and none of us suffered any assault. If you zoom in on the picture you can see that the bees were happy to fly above them and ignore them

bucolic; bjuːˈkɒlɪk; adjective
relating to the pleasant aspects of the countryside and country life.