Richard Bray’s hives stand in a crooked line at the edge of the apple orchard, beside a low thicket of nettles. Richard was “brought up with” beekeeping here at Haywood farm, and at the peak of his apiary business had 250 hives; today he has seven. This spring, for the first time in 75 years, none of his bees survived the winter.
Richard lifts the lid of the first hive, releasing a sour smell of old wax and honey. “There’s nothing,” he says, “that’s very worrying. You’d expect to [at least] see dead bees in there. But there isn’t a bee anywhere.” An inspector from the National Bee Unit advised that the loss was caused by the varroa mite, a notorious destroyer of bee colonies. “I’ve never had anything like this,” Richard tells me. “Varroa mite? I don’t know.”
