A bit of housekeeping

After sitting and watching the bee's flight patterns I was beginning to get a little concerned that they were only getting to about 4ft before making a beeline for the blackberry flowering on a fence three plots over from mine. In the middle of these plots, directly in their path, Bob tends his ever growing sunflower forest. Bob is a good 6ft 6in so was in imminent danger of getting a bee up his nose. The allotment beekeeping guidelines suggest screening the hives to a height of 6 ft in order to force the bees to fly up and out rather than straight over, it seems they will always take the path of least resistance to conserve energy, makes sense. So with this in mind and considering my legendary (in my own head) womble like approach to the whole allotmenting thing i.e. "making good use of the things that we find....." I started rootling around for something suitable to use as screening, I didn't really want to buy anything (see womble like comment) but after seeing Mrs Dobby's allotment beekeeping blog and how they had screened theirs I decided that was the way forward. I'd seen some reed screening in one of the local bargain shops but hadn't checked the price, I assumed it would be out of my price range but scurried off to have a look see. Result! 2 x 6ft x 3m for £18.00. Just ideal to screen off the open side and make the fence side prettier. Back to allotment with my booty, by then it was late afternoon on a very sunny and blustery Saturday, the bees were still flying but I thought I could get in there and get the screening up without protection. I thought wrong. It turns out if you suddenly stick up a screen in front of the hive they get confused and not a little bit cross with the nearest moving big thing (me). With the screen half up I decided to guy-rope like secure the rest of it and beat a hasty retreat to the pub! When I returned the next morning, all was calm and I finished the job off with no drama what so ever. Screening now up and secure I feel happier that Bob won't be inhaling any of my girls. The added benefit is that I can now pick and weed the raspberries and watch the hive entrance through the screening but I can no longer sit on my sofa and watch them coming and going. Ups and downs, the worlds full of them.