Key

J: = Interviewer, Julia
MR: = Participant, Margaret Riches
RB: = Richard Backhouse
AA: = Alison Andreassen
[time e.g. 5:22] = inaudible word at this time
[5:22 IA] = inaudible section at this time
[word] = best guess at word
… = interruption in sentence, trailing off or short pause

J:So could you just tell me about how Pentrith Beekeepers came to be at Acorn Bank?

MR:Yes, we were looking for a site for a training apiary and investigated various possibilities around the local area, and one of our trustees, John Innerdale has had a very long association with Acorn Bank. His son, Mike Innerdale, is one of National Trust’s regional directors nowadays, and so actually with their advice and support we then did consider and eventually decide on Acorn Bank, reasons for that being, mainly, because of the access to some wonderful plants in that medical garden that’s there, just round the side of the apiary, and also the fact that we could talk to visitors, so visitors could learn more about bees. So one of our aims is to broaden out the education of the general public, and this is a very public place. So for all sorts of reasons it seemed a very ideal solution.

J:And has it worked out well? Is it a good place?

RB:It is a good place, isn’t it? We do get a lot of visitors to Acorn Bank who are very interested in the bees, and some of them we do get to put a bee suit on and have a look round. Yeah, so very good. I mean the disadvantages are it’s a long way to carry everything, we had to, when we were setting the site up, we built a structure to cover the bees over and a decking to put the hives on, so all that had to be carried through the gardens, so there’s no easy access, and when the gates are shut we have to walk round in the field, past electric fences and things, but otherwise a good site.

AA:It benefits both the bees and the orchard, ‘cause we’re in the corner of an orchard, so I think there’s a lot of people coming to the orchard, and always ask the question do the bees go on the [2:05]? Yes. So they’re getting their food and everything, and probably we don’t need to feed them quite as much. So it works both ways.

J:And how long have you been here?

MR:It’s ten years since we were fully established as an apiary. We actually started in 2013, with just the decking and a couple of beehives and then we had to raise external funding to fund the structure, and it was officially opened in May I think 2014, so we have just, we didn’t celebrate, actually, we should have done, shouldn’t we?

AA:Should have done, yes!

RB:And the shed, you got funding for a nice shed.

MR:And the funding we raised for the shed, so that was also put alongside and had to be again taken up there, didn’t it? Delivered and put up by a company did that for us. So yes, it’s ten years since we’ve been fully operational as an apiary.

J:And how many hives have you at the moment?

RB:So we have four, do we, at the moment?

AA:Four at the moment, and two different systems, so people can get used to two different hives, so we have a WBC hive, which is what people think look like a beehive, and some national hives, which are square boxes really.

RB:We had to take care when we set off, to make sure we got bees that were good temperament, ‘cause they obviously can’t be very angry bees, and we’ve had one or two issues, haven’t we, since, but –

AA:Yes, we have to deal with it. We can’t have angry bees in a public place like that, really.

J:And what are the best things about being on this site, do you think?

AA:The food source for the bees! Particularly, I think.

MR:Yes, absolutely abundant, isn’t it? And it’s abundant for most of the year when they need it.

AA:Yes, I mean they’ve got raspberries there, they’ve got the apples there, and then the late raspberries I think we’ve got.

J:What sort of things do they forage on from spring to autumn?

MR:There’s a range of flowers, so we’ve got all the flowers in the medicine garden and all around in the flowerbeds, and the fruit crops, and the apple trees of course, although bumblebees are more active on apple trees, apple blossom, earlier on in the season, but our bees do go on there as well, so there’s a full range for them here and the National Trust has established a meadow with meadow grassland and meadow flowers, not very far from here as well, so the bees will fly for about three miles to get the forage that they want, so that again is within their scope to go there.

RB:And plenty of hedgerows, natural hedgerows still roundabout, plenty of uncultivated grassland.

MR:Tree blossom.

RB:Yes, dandelions early on.

AA:And lots of ivy.

RB:And ivy later on, yes.

J:Have the gardens planted anything specially for the bees?

MR:Last year, I think Heather has continued it, they put some troughs down the centre of the grassland going up towards the slope, up towards the apiary, didn’t they, and they planted them all out with wildflowers. That was a beautiful display. So I think they found that was very successful and again visitors could see, these are wildflowers and we could actually get some wildflowers in quite a small patch in their own gardens, ‘cause that’s the other message we try to get across to people, is what could you do in your own environment to support bees of all sorts really, and even just leaving a small wild area in the garden can attract a lot of bees, if you plant out the right things.

J:What’s the most popular plant with the bees that you see covered in them?

AA:Well Richard’s mentioned dandelions in the spring.

RB:They do like dandelions, don’t they?

MR:They need dandelions, don’t they?

AA:And as long as the farmer doesn’t plant rapeseed oil too quickly ‘cause it’s a bit of a natural attraction to the bees to go zooming off and eat the yellow flowers.

RB:Yeah, we don’t really have any rapeseed nearby.

AA:No, you could just see some in the distance a couple of years ago. I don’t particularly like it. It’s very difficult to get any honey off it – it crystalises.

MR:It crystalises But the orchard’s there and it’s on their doorstep so hopefully they’ll go back there and get what they need.

J:Have you seen any changes in the ten years you’ve been here – obviously you were talking about the Asian hornet and things – with the insect variety good or bad?

MR:We have some years when wasps are a real problem and obviously they’re attracted to the apples, and we’ve had wasps nesting just up in the porch area of the shed, and then you get the year, as we’ve had this year, with hardly any wasps at all and I think that’s a common finding. The sheer insect numbers per se are down right across the country, wasps in particular, and that’s a concern because wasps do a very valuable job. We don’t like them with our bees, ‘cause they invade the beehives if you’re not careful, in the autumn, again after the sweet stuff, but they do a very valuable job in gardens and forests and we have concerns about the insect –

RB:We haven’t been long enough to establish a trend, have we, really? So it’s up and down each year with weather and different insects.

MR:We certainly had a very difficult season this year at the beginning, it was so wet. Bees can’t get out when it’s wet really, can’t do much at all so then we’re feeding them artificial food, syrup and then fondant, which we don’t want them to have particularly ‘cause we want them to have the natural stuff, but if the weather’s against them that’s the way to keep them alive, to feed them.

RB:Some years we’ve had a very good spring and then the weather’s gone terrible, downhill.

MR:Often in June.

RB:May, June.

MR:Well you expect Cumbria to be wet, don’t you? I think traditionally it’s July and August that are the wettest months, aren’t they? But we’ve had some times when it’s really extended beyond that, or started early. And that’s why we have to be very careful about the strain of bees that we bring up here. We encourage our beekeepers to develop a strain of bees from the local bee stock. There’s a lot of beekeepers that will find easy answers to shortages of bees by just buying them off the shelf and they’ve been imported from Italy or they’re just these European strains, and they can’t cope with the damp climate up here. We need hardier bees.

RB:We don’t get a massive honey crop because we have apiary visits every two weeks in the summer, but we’re checking the bees every week and there’s often people come every week, so the bees are disturbed more than they might be otherwise, so we don’t get a large honey crop, do we?

J:You have training up here, and you obviously have a lot of interest from the public. What sort of questions do the public ask, what do they want to find out from you?

AA:Are they doing well is usually the first question, and then it leads from there. A lot of people, we’ve got some posters there that the public can read but a lot of times they don’t really understand and they don’t know how many queens are in a hive, and how many … so it’s just nice. And then to be honest they’re there for such a long time, we try to encourage them to either plant their gardens or something. There’s a lot of interest comes from people who are thinking of beekeeping. The first thing we say is ‘Go to an association and get some experience,’ because it’s quite scary once you’ve … even though you’ve trained for such a long time or you’ve had courses and things, the first time you get bees …

MR:It’s daunting.

AA:You’re responsible for 30,000 insects in a box! So you’ve got to be a bit more responsible and know what you’re doing.

J:Are there any common misconceptions that the public have about bees?

MR:They don’t know the difference between bees and wasps, so that’s why I’m [10:27 IA]

So that’s a big one actually, because it’s so common, even now for people to want to have a swarm taken away or whatever’s happening in their garden, bring in a beekeeper and it’s not bees at all. So there’s a lot of education that we do from that perspective. Just what is a bee and what is not. And there are other types of bees. So we can’t forget our solitary bees and our bumblebees so we try to do quite a broad bit of education in the chats to them, don’t we?

RB:If we can, yes. A common question is how many bees are there in a beehive.

AA:And they’re wide eyed when they realise how many bees are actually in there! But a lot of people think they just go out to sting, and it’s difficult to try and educate them and then sometimes we can find a drone which obviously doesn’t sting, and we’ll take one out and you can put it in a person’s hand and they’re still thinking …but they change their attitude then, that it’s there to cause damage.

RB:It’s particularly useful for very new beekeepers, the ideal is someone who is going to keep bees but hasn’t started yet. So they join our association, they come along to the apiary on a Sunday afternoon, and so they can look in a hive and see what’s what and they can learn a lot just by what we’re doing, inspecting the bees and looking through the hives.

MR:And I think that’s really valuable. We worry that our introductory course possibly comes a bit late in the season. We’re dependent on somebody else who’s very expert coming in to do it for us, so we have to fit in with her schedule, but actually it works well if the people who’ve signed up for an introductory course have already been up to Acorn Bank and had that little bit of a taster experience. Then they come on the introductory course and it just helps them to feel that they know a little bit and they have made up their mind that they’re not so nervous, that they will be able to go through with it. And then there’s time after that course is over for them to come back again before the season finishes, shadow another beekeeper. We have bee buddies and that’s what we try to set up for them, and then perhaps make a decision the following year that they’ll have bees of their own. We do try to say to beekeepers, don’t jump in too quickly. It’s very often the case, somebody’s read about something or somebody’s given them a voucher or something and boom, they come along and they say, ‘I’ve got my bee suit and what’s more the bees are being delivered next week’ and you’re aaarrh!

And then very often they’re the person that we are struggling to support, because they’ve gone in too quickly. So I tend to say bees don’t know that you’re interested in becoming a beekeeper. Just wait and see. You don’t need to jump in too quickly.

AA:We usually let them come in and then say, ‘Would you like to handle these bees, but we’ll be here if you get nervous’ or whatever. And then you can just point things out when they do. You can usually see them with a smile on their face after and yeah, you’ve got a beekeeper there! And then we can actually produce small nucleus for them, because we do have problems with … not problems, but they will produce queen cells, so you get lots of queen cells and from there we can make a small colony of bees that our members can eventually take and hopefully they’ll have gained the knowledge then, that they can actually handle these … it’s a small colony cell. There may be 10,000 in a small nucleus, which is enough to start with I think. It’s not too scary. And we can provide that for them, depending on the season and the year. We’ve not had too many this year.

RB:And also there’s the possibility of leaving the nucleus on the apiary site and then they can look after it but we can be there as well, so until it’s big enough to go in the hive, so depending on the time of year.

AA:Getting that support early on is really important, isn’t it?

MR:I think so. I think it’s that confidence-building from the start that’s really so important. If you don’t get that, it’s very difficult to backtrack, isn’t it, and build that up later.

J:What you said about the decline of insects, do you know what the reason for that is then?

MR:Very boring but it’ll be climate change, generally speaking it is climate change. Things are not coming into flower and they’re not growing at the right time or there’s too much rain, fundamentally I think it is climate change. Would you agree?

RB:I think it’s too early to say really.

AA:Yes.

RB:Things vary year to year anyway, don’t they?

MR:And of course all the intensive farming, insecticides is another big issue, isn’t it, for everybody, lack of meadowland. So we’re not building the environments for insects to survive.

RB:But I think we are very lucky living in this area with generally plenty of insects, plenty of hedgerows, plenty of grassland.

MR:Compared to other place.

RB:Yes, and no monoculture or very few monoculture crops and hedges ripped out.

J:And how important is the water source for bees?

MR:They do need water, and at times bees have their own messaging service within the hive and they will just send the foraging bees out to far water, so water needs to be close by, so having a water source here is important. We do have a water butt up by the shed which collects a little bit of water at the top, but no doubt they do go to the stream.

RB:I think generally in Cumbria there is plenty of water, isn’t there, everywhere! Plenty of puddles, plenty of wet leaves.

AA:You find them on the soil.

RB:Wet gravel, yes.

AA:And the dirty puddles and things.

RB:They don’t always drink the water you would put out for them!

J:How do they take water back to the hive then?

MR:It’s in their honey-stomachs, so that’s a part of their body where they would be carrying the nectar, so if they haven’t been told they’ve got to get nectar, they’ve got to get water instead, they’re carrying it in there and then they’re transferring it into the hive amongst the bees when they get back. it’s a cooling mechanism as well, isn’t it? Having the water come in. So yes, they do need a water source. In fact even in the winter they need a water source.

J:Do you think your bees go down to the riverbank?

MR:They probably do. They won’t be going where the water is really rushing through, there’ll be places where there’s puddles and areas where they can perch and take the water in, so yes, around the riverbank.

AA:They’ll forage on whatever happens to be around, so people will ask us, ‘What kind of honey is it?’ And it’s … foraged honey from around here. It’s wildflowers, it’s everything. You can’t specifically say it’s apple blossom honey because … they choose where they want to go.

RB:Particularly like Himalayan balsam in the riverbanks.

AA:

RB:‘cause the bees get coated in pollen, they have a big stripe on their backs, when they’ve been on the blossom.

AA:We call them ghost bees.

MR:Ghost bees!

RB:So we’re aware it is near here but it’s around somewhere, I suspect they’ll travel quite a long way for it.

AA:For the people who don’t like Himalayan balsam, [18:15 IA]

MR:Well it is an invasive species.

AA:Very invasive, isn’t it?

MR:And we don’t like it for the river. [18:21] of that, I have to say! It produces a lot of pollen and nectar, the bees absolutely love it.

J:Have you noticed more of that around the area then, than it used to be?

MR:Well, where I keep my bees at Greystoke yes, it’s very prolific, and I suspect it’s up here, unless they can get down there with a –

RB:It must be somewhere, yes, it’s not necessarily obvious where it is, but they find it.

AA:What’s the pollen look like?

MR:White.

AA:So they’re ghost bees, they’re covered!

RB:It’s a big flower, isn’t it, and they crawl inside the flower.

AA:It’s really good. I’m always in conflict because I like the bees to have an easy source of food there, and I volunteer at another National Trust and you’ve got to grab all the Himalayan balsam out and I’m like no! It’s very difficult when you’re a bee keeper; you know it’s causing a problem but you also got an immediate food source that they love.

J:You need a secret clump!

AA:I tried taking it out once before the seedpods get there, but you can’t do that, ‘cause they produce seedpods at all sorts of different times, so it’s very difficult. I’m always having this conflict. Perhaps I’ll do another job for the property, rather than …

J:Pulling out all the balsam.

Do you think that the honey produced here, I know you don’t get an awful lot, has it got a particular taste?

MR:I wouldn’t say it has a particular taste but it’s a very popular taste. People say it’s absolutely lovely. But it will differ every year, because the flowers are coming at different times and different intensity, but it’s usually very good.

RB:But even two beekeepers who live quite close together will produce different tasting honeys, it is unique each year from each location.

MR:Very particular to what the bees go for, ‘cause each hive, a bee’s found a particular source, so off the bees go to that one, and the hive next-door might have had a source somewhere else.

RB:We don’t take honey off except in late summer, so we don’t have any spring honey. We take it off probably in August, do we? Towards the end of August.

AA:Yeah. We just don’t get spring honey. You get the publications and magazines that say take your spring honey off now and we just laugh because really Cumbria there’s no chance. We’re lucky if we do get it in July time.

J:I’m assuming you love coming up here, and you do like it; what do you like about Acorn Bank, and what do you feel that you love here?

MR:There’s a sense of tranquillity up here, because I think people are coming here to enjoy the gardens, and we’re not impacted with so many visitors all at once, are we? There’s a much more gentle pace up here. There is a sense of just leaving the rest of the world behind for a bit. It is a lovely place to come.

RB:It’s a reasonably big site, close to the house so yes, there’s not too many people in the small area, and the trees are very nice, all the fruit trees.

MR:It’s lovely.

J:And when will the busy time start again for the bees?

AA:Well, we’re keeping an eye on them now, checking on the food source because that’s what you need to do, and hopefully watch that they’re not getting damp, which is a problem here. They’ll start to produce more bees early on in the season and that’s another time when they could want feeding again. And then you start to get to the swarm season, so then you do need to watch carefully ‘cause you don’t want to lose your bees or go and collect them from the trees, which is quite useful if they do happen to go into the orchard here, ‘cause they’re quite small trees so we can retrieve them, but we try not to have a swarm at all. There are preventative measures that you can take. But occasionally they will hide a queen cell and then they will decide to go off and you don’t even realise.

J:Have you had to collect swarms from the orchard?

RB:We have collected a few, haven’t we? Conveniently we’ve had one or two on a Sunday afternoon and there’ve been lots of people here, so as part of the experience from the beekeepers has been collecting a swarm.

AA:Yeah, the public have been quite interested at that point, because they’re quite calm when they’re in a swarm and they don’t realise what a swarm looks like and how big it can be, so it’s quite a novelty when that happens. Not that we want it to happen but it does sometimes.

J:What would you like to see the future of beekeeping at Acorn Bank or beekeeping in general?

MR:I think what I feel we would really appreciate, because it’s just something that we can’t do here very easily, if in some form or other we could have a training room that would be adequate for training people, it would be lovely to do our courses up here. We tried it in the very early days but use of the different rooms has changed over time and we had that drawing-room space downstairs but it is considered to be part of the historical part o the house, so there isn’t that feeling we can use that space. And it’s just something that I think it’s a pity that we can’t do more on site. So what we do for the training is we use where I keep my bees, which is Greystoke, where there are facilities there. There’s the village hall very close to where we have our apiary there, and so we use that. So it’s just that it would be lovely to do things a lot more in house here, but at the moment there’s just not the facility. I don’t know whether it’s now in the longer-term plans; it’s just one of those things that hasn’t happened in our favour.

RB:I mean a live webcam would be very nice, showing somewhere in the house or in the café.

MR:That’s again in our plans but the signal is very difficult here, so what’s holding that up is getting an adequate signal that would then make that work, so we could have some sort of screen up in the café and people, when they’re having their cups of tea, can see what’s actually happening up at the apiary.

RB:And could watch us looking through the hives.

J:That would be really interesting.

MR:So that is all planned. Because there’s other issues to do with the site, without the connections and mobile signals and things.

RB:Yeah, the signal’s not great.

MR:That’s what’s holding all that up really. So it’s an aspiration but it’s just not being able to come to fruition in the way that we would like.

J:And if you had a message to the public visiting, what would it be in terms of helping bees, helping insects, helping wildlife?

AA:Come and have a look where we are and have a look at the posters we’ve got up and the questions will come from those posters, and if we can help them to understand the nature around and what the bees need, I think it’s a good education process.

MR:I think people can help bees so much and insects so much, in doing very simple things. We talked about this, with what they plant in their garden, but if you haven’t got a garden you could perhaps get a window box, so that’s something very small that you could do just to help nature along. And then of course sadly the message that we keep on putting out there is look out for the Asian hornet, make sure you report it! We’re desperate to keep it under control, ‘cause otherwise our bees are going to disappear very quickly along with a lot of other pollinators. It is a real worry. But it’s what we focus on now. We have a scheme when we come up for our training, the apiary, when it’s open, that one of us will stand further down the slope, to warn people to not go too close if the bees are out and active and being disturbed but also use it as an opportunity to talk about Asian hornet to the general public. So we’re doing that a lot more proactively now than we used to do. I know that one of the things we also try to do is we work with other groups to make people aware of the different sorts of bees. This is a wonderful site for bumblebees, isn’t it? And people can be aware of that as well. So again, we’ve started to open up with a taster course that we’ve experimented with last year where yes, they learn about honeybees but they also learn about other types of bees as well and can see them onsite. So that’s part of our job, I think, to do that.

AA:You often get calls to collect swarms, ‘cause we can be on a swarm-collector’s register, and I think most of mine were for bumbles. We do ask them now to produce a photograph. I’ve dealt with bumbles, just because of the fact I’ve got a suit on and it was in a particular place and their horses were getting stung etc. but it’s not anything we would normally do. But people don’t realise. They’re trying to eradicate them and they’re going to go in walls and things. And we say there’s no real need to do that, and I think that’s part of the education as well. No need to get rid of them. They will go over their own course and they’re not going to do you any harm.

RB:But it’s very good that so many people are interested in bees, be it honeybees or bumblebees, and they like seeing them in the corner of the apiary and in the orchard. Very nice.

MR:I think it’s a very attractive feature actually for the general public, the Acorn Bank. Don’t you?

AA:Yes I do.

MR:And it’s been very effective really and we’re pleased to be here.