Books

Yesterday I went to Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury to talk to the boys there about William Golding's 15 years as a teacher in their school and the effect I thought it had on his writing. The talk was in the school chapel, where Golding, during the religious crisis he went through after his wartime experiences in the navy, spent many hours in solitary prayer.

Bees

It was sunny today (Sunday, Jan 16) so I walked up to the hives and was delighted to find that bees were flying - especially delighted (and amazed) to find that my little new colony, made from a late swarm last year, was alive and vigorously eating some candy I had left on the hive. As they had almost finished it I gave them a new slab. A beekeeping friend suggests that the snow on the hives may have helped them to survive, keeping warmth in and acting as a kind of igloo. Our neighbour Ali (married to Guy, and mother of Ned, born just before Christmas) is a new beekeeper - started last summer - and her hive (a National, as opposed to my WBCs) is next to mine. Her bees were flying in grand style this morning, which suggests that Nationals are just as good at low temperatures as WBCs, despite being single-walled hives.