Well, it was a puzzling episode. I can imagine to Creatives, meeting somewhere in Broadcasting House, saying "I want us to show how a swarm happens!" The project accountant says that having the film crews on standby for three days will cost £100,000 and use half the filming budget. Creative decides he wants a man-made swarm that's not too complicated for the viewers to understand. The entomologist explains about an Artificial Swarm but the Creative does not understand it. "Anything I don't understand won't be understood by the viewers" So they come up with an Artificial Natural Swarm - "We'll get our resident expert to catch the Queen, put her in a box, hang her on a fence post, throw some bees at the post and then brush them off and pour them into one of those little boxes" Martha does not know any better and the expert has never earned so much money in his life and does not feel inclined to rock the boat - hence the Artificial Natural Swarm, which left everybody confused, including the flying bees who come home and find that Mum has gone.
The real swarm that Nick was delegated to collect from Martha's colony consisted of a couple of cups of bees. I suspect their clipped Queen had returned to the hive and Nick was left to do some tidying up and pretend it was a swarm.
As a former Health and Safety Manager, I felt it was good to see Heidi wearing some personal protective equipment (decorators' googles) during an intrusive hive intervention. Julia Bradbury must have phoned Martha and told her "On no account go anywhere near her bees without full protective equipment" Martha was sensible and took notice!
I was puzzled by the curtailed honey extraction part - there seemed to be very little filtration, no settling and a very messy bottling procedure and the honey, when used, seemed quite hard, not really creamed. SWMBO observed that she wanted softer honey than that from my very expensive bees. Doh!
Despite all of my nit-picking, I still look forward to the fourth and final episode. As people with some knowledge of beekeeping but none of making TV programmes we can sit on the sidelines and make adverse observations but we're not the target audience - that will be the customers who will talk about The Wonder of Bees at your next Country Fair.
Can't wait for next week.
CVB
