Concealing the Evidence

It's 15 months since we dealt with the drama of having diseased colonies. Part of that was digging a pit in which to burn all our used frames and much of our old wooden equipment. Digging a 1m x 1m x 60cm pit with a spade (this spade) is hard work. The night before we were due to do the burn and have a big clean-up, under government supervision, a spring storm brought a night of heavy rain. In the morning, the pit was full of water and the surrounding ground was flooded

We deferred the clean-up for 24h and, together, we dug a second pit, on higher ground. The clean up went well; the second pit did its job. When the fire was done, the pit had to be filled in immediately, to avoid any risk of other bees visiting the remnants. You can still see a rise in the ground where it was, but the hummock is slowly settling

It has taken until today to get around to filling in the original pit. I suppose there might be a psychological dimension to that, but I think it's mostly indolence and inertia. By now, the clods of earth that I had carefully stacked and sorted had crumbled into amorphous piles of consolidated soil. Digging them up again was hard work (serves you right!) I found a lot of white limestone when I dug the hole - I think possibly some primitive attempt to drain the area; I tossed the stones to one side. Building a cairn was an impulse in the euphoria of finishing the job. It marks the spot where absolutely nothing happened

(Just visible in the grass in the background is a hive, where we have been waiting for eggs to appear. Today they did; that made the digging easier)