Walking past Cosener’s House on Wednesday, I saw six people dressed in beekeeping suits. Two of them were on scaffold. They were working beside a hole in the side wall of a building while bees flew around them.
The team must have dismantled part of the wall to remove a colony of bees. Along with the bees, they removed some large pieces of honeycomb in large plastic boxes.
I was told there were three boxes of comb like the one pictured. The bees must have been there for a long time to have produced so much honey.
Once the bees and honeycomb had been removed, the wall was rebuilt.
As I was taking photographs, a man driving past remarked, “That’s not something you see every day.”
The following day, bees were still flying around the rebuilt wall. By today, however, there were fewer signs of the bees.
The monks used to keep bees for their honey and these could well have been the remains of that colony. They had certainly been there a long time to produce that much honeycomb. Cosener’s House (the old monastery kitchens) called the beekeepers in because guests were complaining about bees in their rooms. They look darker than domestic honey bees and could well be the wild native black species, which would have been the ones the monks had available in their time.