Beekeepers Associaton of the ACT

This novel by Kylie Tennant was written in 1956 and is the story of a year in the life of Mallee Herrick, who has inherited sixty beehives from her grandfather and sets out to become a migratory beekeeper.

She sets out in the "Roaring Ruin" and teams up with the Muirdens, an experienced beekeeping family. The ups and downs of a travelling beekeeper's life form the background to a story of the personalities in and around the Muirden's camp.

Kylie Tennant says that she is not writing of bees .because nobody knows enough about the Daughters of the Light to write about them, although, sometimes, when you take them up in your hands and feel the vibrant delicacy of their living bodies you almost think you know something about them.

There are many vivid descriptions of beekeeping practices throughout the story. The following is about queen rearing. By dipping a rounded stick, about the size of my little finger, first into cold water, then in the hot wax, then in cold water again, a wax sheath forms that can be slipped off until you have a billy-can full of these tiny cups which are called cell-cups.

The cell-cups are arranged on the bar of an empty frame and slipped into a super on a hive that has an old queen or one that is queenless. If there is a queen in the box, a queen excluder keeps her down in the bottom where she cannot destroy the bar of queen cells. The bees come up and caress and smooth these cups. This is called priming and no human hands can do it. The bar of cell-cups is left in overnight, and then, next morning, in each tiny cup a ten-hour-old larva is placed with a feather or a tiny spoon. The bar, with its living tiny specks of white in each cup, is replaced so that the bees can pack the cup with jelly and build over each the curious tower of knobbly wax which is the sign and surety of a queen cell.

Once these are wrought, the bar is lifted out, on the tenth day, and carried with the queen cells like a strange, pendulous fruit to the neuc boxes where the future queens are set up, each with a home of her own, a strong frame of good young bees and brood, and two frames of honey for their sustenance.

On the thirteenth day the queen emerges. She mates any time up to five days after that. If she doesnt mate, she becomes a drone layer and you kill her. She dances a merry measure on air with her chosen lover, and then the clock strikes, and, leaving no glass slipper on the staircase of light, she hastens home, descending to the warm domesticity of the hive, and the changeless life of laying and being hustled about by her family."

At the end of the book Old Matt says to Mallee You know, Ive got a theory that the bees are awake to you mob. Come on, they say. We got to get somebody to look after us. Give them a little bit of honey for their trouble and kid them along. Bees have been dealing with us for thousands of years now and they just about got us taped.

Who do you think is running your apiary?

Lyn Shiels