Bees beside the seaside

If you come out of the front door of my little house by the seaside and turn right you will find yourself walking down a narrow road with an avenue of trees on either side.

I can remember when this was a through-road, but at some point when I was living away it was cut into two unequal segments by the placing of some bollards. The four posts are slim and handsomely shaped cast iron, as if on a quay side but painted bright blue, and they march in single file from one side to the other. The span between is enough to let a bicycle, motorbike, pushchair or supermarket trolley pass but no larger vehicle than that. So the road is a quiet one, with nothing on the north side except a strip of parkland hemmed by ancient hedgerows and only the sea beyond.

Skeletal and dormant at the moment, the avenue of lime trees throbs with life for the warmer six or so months of the year. Their brilliant green leaves are large and felty, perhaps the size of a man’s hand, and an imperceptible unguent oozes from them leaving any cars parked beneath covered in a sticky film. Sparrows and doves and pigeons and starlings squabble with magpies, crows and three types of gull for foraging rights, food scraps and larvae and the chance to dine on a thousand and one kinds of flying, creeping and crawling insects.

When I first moved here some nineteen months ago I was overwhelmed with delight to find a colony of bees living underground in the loam on the slope outside my front window. They are a bumblebee species of some kind, but small and beige-ish brown, not the big bright black and yellow striped sort of children’s books. I uncovered them – literally – quite by chance whilst raking away debris that had accumulated during the years the house had stood empty. An angry squadron streamed up from the ground, intent on chasing away whatever unwelcome vandal had torn the roof from their home. I stood back, absolutely motionless, rake still in hand, watching them as they swirled and massed above the ground for twenty minutes or more. Once satisfied that the danger had passed, they one by one returned to their underground bunker until buried invisibility shielded them once more.

I didn’t tell anybody the bees were there, afraid that someone pleading sting allergy or some other latter-day intolerance would ring the council to have the nest destroyed. Their secret home outside my own seaside sanctuary lay safe and undisturbed and I watched them all that summer until late autumn came and the colony fell silent. I was very sad when they didn’t return last year. Maybe this spring will bring the bees back again.

At the far end of the road and hard up against the sea wall is the town’s sports’ centre and I went there this evening for my yoga class. Warm and loose after an hour of stretching, it was dark by the time I made my way back down the dimly lit road to my home. A group of teenage boys were gathered around the bottom of one of the lime trees, one of their companions having climbed up into the branches. They were peering on tip toe over the rear wall of one of the houses of a small row that backs onto the road, using the feeble lights from the screens of their mobile phones as torches.
“Sshhh! Don’t tell anyone!” the boy in the tree top called, seeing me walk past.
“Why? What’s up?” I threw back, sensing their good spirits even in the dark. At that moment, another boy popped up from behind the wall, grinning, and jumped down into the road beside his friends who greeted him with great jubilation.
“His mum locked him in and threw his keys in the sea!”

I laughed with them and continued on my way, smiling to myself. I thought it might spoil the party to ask how he was going to get back into his home later.