Downshifting Abroad

Diary of a Downshifter - Part 5

It was now time to acquire some bees. After all, that was why we were there. We heard from a friend that an old boy was downsizing his bee stocks and contacted him in Velez Malaga. He turned up about an hour and a half late for our appointment and immediately took us off to one of his favourite bars for a pre-work brandy and a gossip about bees and how there was so much future in it and wasn’t I lucky to be able to buy at very reasonable cost his bee hives full of specially trained, hard working, completely tranquil bees. As usual, reality was different. We approached his apiary along a horrendous series of narrow tracks with million foot drops on either side and on arrival were nearly pasted into oblivion by the bees which attacked on sight. I’d heard about the Iberica bee and so wasn’t unduly surprised at their ferocity, but it was explained to me that it was all due to a series of low pressure systems crossing this part of Spain that had upset them. The television had said so. Usually you could stroke them as though they were flies! What ever that meant! I was never able to stroke an Iberica without having to run for it!
I purchased 40 stock to start off with and we were then rushed to the old boy’s house in town to celebrate with several or more glasses of the local filth drawn up from a deep amphora set into the ground. I took more than I should have (I needed it) and was eventually forced back home, mumbling and scratching my many stings, by my wife.
Now all we had to do was move the hives to some new sites. Three of the locals offered to help me and from the way they spoke I thought they were experts on the subject (another thing I found common in Spain). Bees are moved at night and so one late evening off we set and very soon reality again hit me in the face when I found out that none of them had ever had anything to do with bees before and so another adventure of the Keystone Cops look-alikes began. Only this time the horror lasted all night!