We spent some time recently at Green Mist, looking after Elodie, while Tanya was in town with Rio and Orlando. All was going swimingly. We were spending some time in the bathroom, brushing the teeth of various soft toys. I had noticed a 2p coin on the floor, and wondered vaguely why Rio hadn’t snaffled it to help fill his purse. I learned afterwards it belonged to Elodie, who played with it regularly, and considered it an old friend. When she first popped it into her mouth I wasn’t too alarmed, as I knew she had a tendency to ‘park’ objects there. I also thought if I drew attention to it and asked her to remove it she might take exception to being told what to do and clamp her mouth firmly shut. Of course, there were numerous clever ways I could have enticed her to deliver the coin up to me; but I concluded there was little danger.

Looking online, I’ve discovered since that choking on coins is rarely fatal; but I didn’t know that when she turned first red, then various shades of blue, while gagging violently and looking at me beseechingly. After a split second of cursing the fates that this should be happening to me, I flipped her upside down and pumelled her on the back. She vomited a torrent of foul smelling gunk; but no coin was visible and she was still gagging while slowly turning vermillion. I lurched through the house seeking Michelle, who has a steadier head than me in such circumstances. Various nightmare scenarios were playing themselves out in my racing brain as I held her aloft, pumelled some more on her back, and gazed in mystification at more vomit on the ground. Still no coin. At that point, Michelle thrust her fingers down Elodie’s throat, and either that, or some more pumelling, or another spasm from the gag reflex, must have caused the coin to become dislodged, because suddenly we both saw it lying on the ground, and Elodie had stopped choking and was letting out a refrshing bawl.

She recovered pretty quickly. It took me far longer. I felt drained. Lying on the trampoline, with her bouncing around me, I reached out a palsied hand, to grip the metal frame and drag myself back to terra firma, when I got an almighty static shock. That almost finished me off.

Beautiful gardens on a beautiful day:

At home:

B

Yoga enthusiast:

Two weeks ago, we had a swarm of bees in our garden. I don’t think it was from our own colony, though it might have been. I caught it and popped it into a fresh hive I had made for just such an occasion.

Today, we had another swarm, this time from our original, top bar hive. For five minutes, the air was a maelstrom of frantic buzzing. Then, they settled on a low branch and I debated what to do.

Eventually, I hit on a cunning wheeze. I would take the roof off my new hive, lay a sheet of newspaper across the top, add a storey with some empty frames, tip the swarm into this, and then pop the lid back on. By the time the bees from below, or possibly the new ones above, ate through the newspaper and discovered their neighbours, they would hopefully have forgotten their allegiance was to different queens and would happily coexist.

Naturally, one queen would have to be sacrificed, but I would leave it to the bees to decide which.

The plan didn’t run faultlessly. I shook the branch the swarm was on in the approved manner, and a largish chunk of bees dropped into the box I was holding, but I couldn’t persuade the others to follow, and the queen must have been amongst them, because when I spilled those I had caught into their new home, they vacated it within an hour and were soon back on their tree branch again.

So, I had another go, this time cutting through the inch thick branch they were hanging from and carrying it, with the bees clinging on, and to each other, in a writhing mass, across the garden, through the greenhouse, to ‘apiary corner’.

The oddest part of this scheme is that the topbar hive the swarm came from is only a few feet from the hive they’re now in; but they’re supposed to have no memory of ever having been there. I’m not sure you can put them back in their original hive, though.

I googled this solution, which, if it works, seems the perfect method of swarm control.

While on the subject of humanure, it seems most compost toilets utilise the same preference for sitting, rather than squatting, popularised by Thomas Crapper himself. This is unfortunate, as the position is implicated in too many health problems to count. However, there is a movement afoot to circumvent this that doesn’t involvce ripping out your prize ceramic throne and replacing it with one of these (available for £50 on ebay):

Such as:

squattypotty.com/

www.amazon.com/The-Welles-Step-Easier-Defecation/dp/B000Z03SHM

www.naturesplatform.co.uk/

Or, for those who like to make these sorts of thing themselves:

www.lillipad.co.nz/

My own construction, based on the lillipad design, is still going strong:

Of course, what we really need is this sort of thing in our back garden (or yard) if we’re lucky enough to have the space: