Bees and Books

Saturday was sunny - about 15 degrees - and bees from all three hives were flying and taking in pollen (by the look of it from crocuses, aconites and Japanese honeysuckle). The new colony had finished their candy so I gave them a fresh 1.5 kilos of Apifondia.
On Friday 2 March I'll be doing an event with Claire Tomalin titled "Charles Dickens: the Best of Men, The Worst of Men", organized by the Royal Society of Literature and chaired by Maggie Fergusson. It will be at 12.30 in the LSE's Sheikh Zayed Lecture Theatre, New Academic Building, Lincoln's Inn Fields, WC2A 3LJ. Admission id free but you need a ticket from the LSE website www.lse.ac.uk/spaceforthought

Books and Bees

Tomorrow 8 February at 6.00 at the British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, I and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, author of Becoming Dickens (2011) will be discussing Dickens - in an event to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth - and asking what explains his popularity, what makes him so attractive to biographers and readers, why has his work been adapted for TV and film more than that of any other novelist? There will be a question-and-answer session afterwards and a reception.
No news on the bees. We had 3 or 4 inches of snow in the Cotswolds on Saturday night but it started melting in the afternoon, so it should not worry the bees much, but they are sensibly staying indoors.