The death of an Empire

I know I have written a blog in close proximity to this one but I have to write this rant so that I don't commit hari kiri. Also I am going to write it like a story because it is that bad, it deserved a poetic close.

I make my way up the my colony fresh in mind a unusually happy. A cold chill blows as the easterly wind flaps at the mesh covering my face from the calculating attacks of my bees. Past the remains of the old orchard and behind the shed are two bastions against the rain, the winter snow and the unfaltering lack of warmth. The last bees are retiring now as the temperature plummets from the heat of the day to the freeze of spring nights. An acheronian darkness approaches fast and the calls of the birds above me quieten.

The smoker takes almost eight matches to light but I make it eventually and a plume of smoke, faltering quickly but stoked up by the bellows, puffs out into the crimson sky. A streak of white in a sea of blood. I open the newest hive first and drop the roof after I come face to face with an enormous house spider and the decapitated, headless corpses of a few unlucky bees. I shoo it off with a cannon like blast from the smoker allowing the tangible smell of burning paper (and seedy pictures I felt needed to be removed before my Mum tidies my room) and try to stomp it with little success. I delve through the top honey boxes to find not a drop but my fears grow as I open the brood box.

A sickly smell of rotted mellifera reek through my nostrils and I note with grim acceptance that the front of my hive is covered with thousands of bees piled upon each other. A picture not dissimilar from that of a sixteenth century battlefield. Their rotted corpses have been well preserved under the winter snow and the frost.

Back to the brood, my pace quickens, the bees are angry and try to jab me with their poison, where is the queen? Where are the eggs? Why? It dawns on me. She's gone. She must have died in the winter. The bees, aimlessly wander collecting honey for themselves, trying to continue a dying tradition, leaderless. The end of an Empire.

I shut the box tight and wander back to the house in a dazed state. Two years of cultivation, genetic trait research and kind control of the colony, added to the waste of hundreds of pounds has numbed my brain.

So R.I.P gentle workers, 24/03/'11.