The Dolce Vita Diaries

In the countryside you don’t have to be away from your house long before nature puts in a tenancy bid. A couple of months ago while we were in London we got a call from our friend Luisa. She’d been down at the house checking for mail and noticed loads of bees buzzing around above the front door. They seemed to be disappearing behind the bathroom shutters. She ventured upstairs half expecting to be met by swarms flying amok (they don’t though do they? They fly anything but amok. Did you ever see a bee crash? It just doesn’t happen). Instead she was met by a rather beautiful sight. The bees had indeed set up hive in our house – in the two inches of so of space between the bathroom window and its shutters. Their home covered almost the whole area of glass – a good few square feet – and they were perfectly protected from wind and rain and whatever else bees might worry about, by the shutters on the outside. Better still, because they’d made one side of their bee world glass, the hive worked for the viewer just like a proper hive display in one of those honey stalls you sometimes see at country fayres. You can get your nose right up close to explore all the intricate chambers and the amazing honeycomb detail with no risk, just a bit of extra thrill from being so close to danger.

Luisa wasn’t sure what to do about the bees so she called us. We weren’t sure what to do about the bees so we called Guida. Guida is always sure about what to do so she called her friend the bee keeper. Within a day, the bee man had been and bee-ed. Sadly we weren’t there to see it (who doesn’t love all that spaceman bee-keeping regalia). But happily we did see two beautiful things when we arrived at the house a few days later. The first was the amazing site of the now empty hive and stickier-than-superglue honeycomb trails which decorated our bathroom window. The second was our very own honey left on the porch for us in one the friendly bee keeper’s miele jars. Now that’s what I call homemade.