There are all sorts of dangers for Hayley’s swarm every year. Bees from elsewhere can come in and hijack the hive. Many years ago Hayley opened one of her hives and found a mouse corpse inside, which, in self-defence, her bees had entirely encased in wax. The previous year she’d lost her swarm when wasps drove them out. I think I know the exact wasps she means too: I’m pretty sure they were the same ones who’d been waging war on my garden furniture, weakening it to the extent that one of the chairs finally gave way beneath me, sending me crashing to the ground. I doubt my weight was much of a factor in the breakage since I am, in the words of a man I once paid to adjust a shirt, ‘built like a whippet’. The wasps had been nibbling industriously at the wood for two and a half years, and although they are very small and their work is gradual, my hunch is that their adherence to a diligent long-term plan weakened the structure. The chair was the second part of the patio set to break in the space of the year – the other being half of the sofa section, which came in useful as fuel in an unusually cold late spring, when I ran out of logs.
If the weather is dry, in the warmer months the wasps and I often sit on my broken garden furniture in the morning and have breakfast together. I normally have muesli. The wasps are quite content with wood, which they take straight, without milk. I look carefully at what I’m eating and drinking before I put it in my mouth, as I don’t want my tongue to get stung and swell up and suffocate me, but I don’t think the wasps want any trouble. They get on cheerfully with their thing, and I get on with mine. They’re in good spirits in spring and summer, far different to what they’re like later in the year, when their tempers flare due to being, in the memorable words of my gardener friend Andy, ‘drunk and out of work’.
On paper I have more reason to be nervous around wasps than most, and as any wasp worth his salt will tell you, paper is important. When I was eight, a few days after I’d fallen through a garage window, ripping open the underside of my arm and getting rushed to hospital for several stitches, an Italian wasp planted its sting deep inside the fresh wound. I should point out that I was in Italy at the time of the sting, and the wasp had not travelled overseas specifically to hurt me, although I sense that its malevolence was such that it probably would have thought little of doing so. If I close my eyes now I can still feel the spiteful acid furnace of pain I experienced. It was one of many examples I’d seen of just how formidable insects were in Italy, a country where on the same family holiday I’d witnessed thirteen ants successfully carrying a whole baguette along a medieval wall. Wasps then left me to get on with my life in peace for many years after childhood until one day in Norfolk in 2013 when four of them simultaneously stung my bottom while I was in my garden. I had just mowed over their nest though, so who could blame them? I hadn’t realised the nest was there, but you know what it’s like with wasps: they are not interested in going back over the nuances of a fracas.
I have since come around to wasps. They’re formidable architects, they kill lots of garden pests, they pollinate much more than people tend to believe and they helped humans invent paper – a fact that contradicts the long-held view of them as the anti-book thug counterparts to bees’ gentle selfless intellectuals. In mid-summer any defects they might have are also put into sharp perspective by the horseflies across the road from my house. To date I have never encountered a nice horsefly. Even the one horsefly I met who seemed sort of OK and didn’t bite me probably later turned out to be a Scientologist. I must have been bitten by fifty of them when I went alpaca trekking in Norfolk in 2011. ‘I will never forget what your legs looked like on that day,’ my friend Will told me. ‘Oh, Will. That’s such a beautiful thing to say,’ I replied before realising he was referring to the runnels of blood that turned my shins into a painted horror show as we walked along the North Norfolk Coast Path. I don’t know how the Jersey cows who live near me cope. If I had as many horseflies around me as they do in July, I’d be sarcastic and hard to get on with, but they’re always up for a cuddle when I walk the footpath through their field.
Insect Day arrived behind schedule last summer. This is the twenty-four-hour period when all the insects in the south-west of the UK get together and agree to all crawl and fly into my front room at exactly the same time. I remember the exact day, as it was the one when I saw my cat Roscoe pummelling a small creature against the French windows of the room with her paw. I hurried outside and removed Roscoe from the creature, which turned out to be the biggest cockchafer beetle
