Turning the Wheels

A cycling "sportive" starting and ending at the brewery. A sportive seems to be a group leisure ride on a prescribed route. You enter in advance, you register on the day, you get a number and a briefing and signage and marshalls and a roving mechanic and feeding stations. At the end, you get a pint of ale if you did the long (100km) route and a half-pint of you did the short one (65km), and a BBQ. It is not a race; they suggest you stop for a coffee! I know a lot of the road the riders are following - they are well-planned routes; they will have had a lovely day

Cycling is a slightly strange activity to do communally - by its nature it precludes all but the most cursory interactions with others. I suppose you commune before and after, comparing tyres and pumps. Myself, I cycle to escape the present - to give myself the illusion of travelling back in time and observing the world before it was assailed by motorways and satellites and high-speed everything. A regression to childhood, I suppose - perhaps that's why we do a lot of things

For the first time for 17 days, we felt well enough to put on bee-suits and bend over hives. It is a critical time of year: in a few weeks the queen will be laying the eggs that produce the 'winter bees' - the long-lived individuals that must carry them all through the winter, and still be strong enough to kick-start their expansion in the new year. It is vital that those individuals are a healthy as possible; in particular, it is important that are not infected with viruses that will reduce their longevity. The highest risk of infection resides with our old enemy, the Varroa mite. So this is the moment when we begin a 4 week programme of treatment to reduce the population of Varroa in each hive

We remove all the honey supers (in a normal year we would harvest some honey, but that hope is long gone in this drab summer) then put a tray of gel above the frames. The gel contains 'thymol' - the aromatic compound found in the herb thyme. This has been found to cause bees to groom themselves, and Varroa to release their grip on the bees bodies. The Varroa fall through the open mesh that is set in the floor of all our hives, and cannot climb back. The gel is refreshed after two weeks, and removed two weeks later

Moving all the boxes, getting all the bees in the right place, organising the equipment - it was a lot of hot lifting and shaking and carrying and stacking. It's good to feel somewhat back on track, but it was hard work. Not as hard as cycling 65km, but hard enough for this stage of recovery