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The waters are rich with at least 1,000 species of fish, with endemic corals and reef fish found nowhere else in the world. Very special and rare in being a relatively unpolluted and undisturbed part of the world’s oceans, the Chagos Islands are still teeming with fish, invertebrates, mammals, seabirds and turtles.

Marine life almost everywhere is suffering massive losses as a result of over-exploitation, by-catch and pollution. Combine these with the effects of acidification brought about from rising carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and the survival of many marine species is in doubt.

Without your help, the diversity of life in the Chagos Islands may not be preserved for future generations. The Chagos Environment Network only has until 12 February to deliver your signatures to the Foreign Secretary. Please sign today. Thank you.

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What we’re not sure of is why the bees were caught by surprise, as they apparently were. Bees are normally attuned to the weather and pick up on all sorts of signs such as temperature variations that we humans may not. They know what they’re doing. Usually. Even in the winter months bees are awake and keep themselves warm by huddling together in what is effectively a great big ball. Their activity keeps the internal temperature very high but you need a critical mass of bees for this to work. When a colony is big and strong it can survive temperatures well below even the record-breaking drops we encountered in the UK in January.

As well as finding fewer bee bodies than expected we found evidence of damp and mould. This can only happen when the bees aren’t for some reason keeping the temperature high enough. Instead of liquid evaporating away it condenses on the frames. The hive itself has no leaks through which rain or snow could drip inside. There was no evidence of any vomiting or diarrhoea—yes, bees can do both when sick—meaning the cause was unlikely to be a number of diseases and organisms that leave behind these tell-tale signs.

The varroa mites, while we found quite a few dead, were not in sufficient quantity to have killed the colony. The bees had not drawn down any of the food we provided but neither had they had consumed all of their own stores of honey by the time they died en masse. We think the colony was too small and stressed to cope with the big freeze this winter, and the reason for that is down to a succession of lousy summers with heavy rainfall.

Apart from the sample of bees kept for analysis, we last night burned the frames, the honey, the countless little bodies. It made for an upsetting sight. My beloved could not bear to watch as his hard work and care over two years went up in flames. I took the photo you see accompanying this piece and then walked away. The smell of honey, something I love under happier circumstances, made me want to throw up. I can’t even face putting honey on my toast for a while yet. We have just two jars left from our poor colony.

The hive now stands empty until we buy a blow-torch to singe the interior. This will ensure the structure is then completely free from the risk of disease, and can be used again. At the earliest opportunity thereafter we will repopulate the hive, and start over. We’ll be praying for a long hot summer, something all British beekeepers will be hoping for. A fifth of all bees in the UK died last winter. Chances are, that decline will have accelerated this winter because it comes after another, if not appalling, certainly worse than mediocre summer.

If we can’t arrest and reverse the decline, it won’t just be bees that are in trouble. It will be all of us as well. Our main party politicians, meanwhile, are united in their determined efforts to do very little if anything to address this crisis, just as they intend to do nothing at all to prepare for other ecological crises to come.

What good are money and banks when the world we rely on is changing so dramatically, and so terribly? Instead of real action we see our elected leaders peddling GM food as the way forward for feeding the unsustainably ever-growing global human population. They do this because the likes of bioengineering corporation Monsanto buy their allegiance in backroom deals. Even if we bought into that baloney, the majority of Frankenstein crops need bees as much as traditional and natural plants. The UK government puts more money into hiring PR and marketing agencies, and finding scientists who can be compromised, to sell the idea of GM to us than it gives to bee research.

The madness worsens day by day. Money can, for a while yet, save us but only if it is spent wisely. There is little if any evidence of this happening. We need more beekeepers, yes. We do. And they need financial support from central government that is currently entirely absent. Where is the vision? Where is the honesty?

As Nero plays his fiddle the dead bees burn. We’re getting to the point where we need to ram his violin down his greedy throat and get leaders who play an altogether different tune.

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It’s my beloved who is the beekeeper in our house. He was and remains devastated. Unless you’re a beekeeper yourself or live with one you’ve no idea just how much work and love goes into building a colony, nurturing it, making sure it has food for the winter, keeping pests under control. Thousands of little lives gone. A ghost hive. It’s just horrible.

The best theory we have right now is that the extreme cold snap, the longest since records began and which saw local temperatures at one point plunge to -13C, caught the colony by surprise. It looks like the weather turned quickly and that’s why so many bees died desperately trying to get back into the hive. Those that were already inside or made it back in would have found their refuge turned into a freezer.

Bees can only do so much to keep themselves warm. In a normal winter this is more than enough. It has not been a normal winter.

It certainly wasn’t the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder that killed our bees, which sees hives completely abandoned with no bodies to be found. We found nothing to suggest pests such as the varroa mite were responsible, alhough they were present but not in overwhelming numbers because one of the jobs of the beekeeper is to keep them under control. Only testing will tell us for certain whether it was climate or disease but our money’s on climate. The weather in the UK has been at times extreme, often astonishingly awful, for three years now. The year before we got our bees, 2007, was a dreadfully wet summer; 2008, it was the most apocalyptically wet summer on record; 2009, it was a so-so summer, hardly worthy of the name, followed by what has so far been a most terrible winter. If these years had involved good summers and normal winters, our bees could have built up a strong, large colony. They never got the chance.

Extremes of weather have long been predicted because of climate change. Bees are the canaries in the coal mine. They are in trouble because of climate change, air pollution and the widespread use of insecticides, weed-killers and vast areas being turned over to monoculture crop production which wipes out native flora and fauna.

As the honey bee is now endangered, this should be of concern to everyone. It isn’t just about the honey. It’s about all the flowers, trees and vegetables. Without bees doing the work they do, entire plant species would become extinct within the space of a year and the only way for some small number to be prioritised for survival would be by humans undertaking manual pollination, flower by flower, with brushes. This is already done in some parts of the world where bees have disappeared. Even the most patient and attentive human being can’t do the job a fraction as well as bees can. If bees vanish altogether it is said that humanity would be at real risk of becoming extinct as well, and quickly, well within a decade. Bear in mind, too, that a host of other life on earth depends on pollination taking place as well and those animals and insects are predated upon by other animals and insects, so if one lot go the way of the dinosaur many others follow after. Like a big messy ball of string unraveling until you’ve got nothing left. That’s co-dependency. That’s life.

One of the ways people can help is by training to become beekeepers, to become hive custodians. And so when those of us who actively engage with the fight to save these incredible life-enabling insects come across a hive full of dead bees, it’s beyond my ability to describe the depression that kicks in as a consequence. It’s not cheap to join the fight, either. Training is not free, hives are costly and queen bees and nurse bees to start a new colony are not cheap.

The UK government is happy to bail out banks because our politicians tell us they do it for our economic survival but there are no grants or other financial incentives to help people become beekeepers. Even the amount put into researching the causes of bee population decline is insignificant small change compared to how much has been given to bankers. More money is spent every day on emptying our dustbins and on street lighting than on finding ways to save the bees. Ultimately, only beekeepers help other beekeepers and train new people. There are inevitably costs involved, and time must be accounted for.

Where equipment is concerned, hives and tools, you’d think an influx of new beekeepers might bring prices down but we live in a capitalist society in which greater demand seems to often encourage escalating, not lower, prices as suppliers seek to increase their profits year on year. There is great disparity in prices, though, and as with all things it pays to shop around. Perhaps by more of us doing that the greediest suppliers will then find their profits down, not up. As much as possible, if they have the DIY skills, beekeepers build their own hives to keep costs down.

Bees are more important than banks. Our economies can rise and fall, empires and civilisations can vanish into history, but without bees the food web will fall apart.

So what do we do in our garden now we’ve lost our first-ever colony? Today we need to undertake the sad task of cleaning the hive. We prepare the required sample of dead bees for posting, we burn all the remaining corpses and the frames on which the honey was made and eggs laid, we blow-torch the interior of the hive to eradicate any and all trace of pests and disease. It will be a mournful job to undertake all these tasks but it is best to get it over with as quickly as possible. Delay only extends the mourning period and yes, we are grieving for these wonderful industrious creatures. They, along with the chickens, made our garden come alive. At the height of summer a garden filled with gossiping hens and buzzing bees is far more attractive, to us at least, than a chemical-soaked ultra-green lawn and strict lines of border flowers developed to be of no use to bees at all, although not intentionally.

Our bees knew us. Bees seem to recognise people they happen across frequently. I would enjoy seeing them at work and hearing them buzzing in the summer months, and the occasional nosey parker would fly up to me, run a bit of facial recognition and then go away satisfied that “it’s only that human we know, not the one who looks after us, the other one doing his garden stuff, we’re okay”. They had moods good and bad, and the beekeeper especially was able to discern just how cranky they’d get with too many runs of persistently horrible weather when they wanted to get outside and knew important work had to be done.

After the burning we wait a while. It is too early in the year to start a new colony. Our friend @amethystdragon started as a beekeeper in 2007 and lost her own first-ever colony in 2008. She knows how we feel. This year she is wanting to cut down on the number of hives she looks after but she, too, fears for the winter survival of her bees. She suspects two, maybe even three, of her four colonies may have gone the same way as our one and probably, if we’re right about the impact of the weather, for the same reason. She has kindly offered to provide us with another nucleus if she is able to produce one for us. She may not have enough bees left to do that. A nucleus is what we call the cluster of queen bee and nurses I mentioned above, a starter kit if you will. It was @amethystdragon who gifted my beloved with his first nucleus for his birthday in 2008. I bought him his beekeeping outfit and our parents went halves on buying him his first hive.

The entire enterprise for us was started with the generosity and love of others, a collaborative effort. Is it any wonder we’re heart-broken? My own view—and I am not the beekeeper who has to decide, I’d like to learn but the cost of training is beyond me for the time being—is that we are best getting over this and starting again from scratch as soon as we are able. Not doing so would be a waste of an excellent, attentive and kind, beekeeper in the form of my beloved, at a time when the world needs more taking up the so-called hobby, not less. If our dead bees had been able to talk, they’d have said, should anything happen to them, they’d like us to give a home to another colony.

Non-commercial beekeeping isn’t a hobby, though. The work is far too important to call it a hobby. You won’t find beekeepers sitting on high chairs next to swimming pools waiting to rescue the drowning but they are life-guards just the same. We should all be grateful for the work they do, and for the work bees do. And we should all be concerned when we hear of bees dying, and do what we can to help where we are able.

Thank you for reading today’s entry.

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The original version of this poem was written January 9 2010 and in revisiting it I have made extensive rewrites. You’ll see below that I’ve kept the comments people made back then in response. Feel free to add your own or, if you’re one of those people who gave feedback just over a year ago, you can do so again if you like.

The inspiration was and remains obviously romantic and steeped in metaphor. The white cotton dressing gown represents purity of feeling and is presented as an intensely sensual item of clothing, a way of wrapping a lover around yourself when not there in person, the “captain of my wardrobe” being a “tailor” who has the ability to make perfectly fitting love.

I suppose this is both an erotic poem and a love poem. I’m not entirely sure how to distinguish between the two and I don’t think it’s important or necessary to do so.

Alone, he tries to fathom mystery
the inhospitality of the venerated
the interior spaces of his beloved
no flower, no rising curve of hope.

To the gods he calls this morning
asking why and praying for a son
to root and expand within his wife
a need for a new king all he knows.

This poem began life back on March 3rd 2005. It has today been extensively rewritten and expanded to such an extent as to make it an entirely new creation, although the central premise—an ancient Celt whose wife, who he loves, cannot conceive a boy—remains the same. For men, the greatest mystery of woman has always been her ability to carry a child, to bring forth new life. It is theorised, although there is no evidence to confirm, that there was a time in our very distant past when the act of procreation was not linked in our minds to the act of making love. We put one and one together and did not, so the proposition goes, necessarily conclude that the answer, not always but sometimes, is two or more.

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Were that true—and in common with everyone else, I’ve no idea—then it follows, reasonably, that the gods would likely have been called upon to bless a woman with child. An echo of this can perhaps be seen in the circumstances surrounding the story of Jesus Christ’s conception, Mary being chosen by God and Christ’s arrival in the world brought about by the intervention of the Holy Spirit. No man necessary. The concept of the ‘blessed child’ is a persistent one.

Even if our ancestors knew that man had his part to play in reproduction, they probably still made requests of the gods to bring about conception, a safe delivery, a boy or a girl. Chances were, given the evidence in many cultures around today, that having a boy was considered more desirable than a girl.

The poem does not judge. It would be arrogance of a kind we have often displayed towards cultures we unfairly and dismissively label ‘primitive’ to do so. The declaration that the man “is no savage” seeks to confirm to the reader that just because cultural beliefs may determine and certainly underline actions, it does not translate to us being able to say people are stupid. Indeed, the fact that the man “tries to fathom” indicates that we have always sought to understand those things we do not yet understand, that we have always struggled to unlock mysteries and puzzles.

If we survive the apocalyptic crises of the 21st Century—peak oil, food shortages, war and climate change—then it may well be ourselves who are judged to have been stupid savages by whoever comes after us. Some believe the modern age to be unrivalled by the past in terms of complexities and stresses, although the poem makes it clear that worry and prayer, anxiety and fear, desire both achieved and frustrated, have been with us for a very long time. Simpler times did not mean simpler men with simpler day-to-day concerns. If anything, the ancient Celt had to work much harder than any of us in the West today just to ensure his family was kept safe and fed. His opportunities for care-free leisure and convenience were hugely limited in comparison to our own, if his tribe even had words for these concepts, which is doubtful.

Enjoy the poem, and if you want to comment on that or anything I’ve written about it above, please feel free to do so. Blessed be.

Imbolc. A goddess day.

The earth spins the same as ever
even as new words are written,
gravity, circumstance,
determining our shape, and form,
the road ahead becoming clearer.

We celebrate no less.

It isn’t often said but if you’re going to republish someone else’s work then you really should obtain permission from the poet first, assuming the piece is still covered by copyright law. Of course many poems fall outside of copyright law because we probably began speaking poems back when we were painting on cave walls or not very long after, and have been writing poems down throughout human history.

The druids held poets and poetry in high esteem; indeed, one class of druid—the bard—was almost entirely devoted to the crafting and performance of poetry. Bards were said to have the power in verse to make kings successful and to curse their enemies. You certainly didn’t want to get on the wrong side of a poet. Bards would issue forth prophetic poems of incredible complexity in rhyme and meter prior to battle, predicting the outcome. It isn’t recorded what happened when and if bards got it wrong, if anything happened to them at all, but poetry probably had its powerful mystical associations long before the druids first came along.

Modern mechanical and consumerist societies have little time for poetry (although it sneaks in occasionally via pop music lyrics) but people around the world can and do still testify to the power of poems to work magic within their souls, to engage, enrage, provoke thought and action, induce calm and distill ideas. A poem can address situations global and personal, it can focus on the internal or external worlds, it can advise or chastise you without ever mentioning your name.

It isn’t the fact that poems are still liked that interests me most; it’s the still-extant ability of the poem to powerfully inform and instruct, to attack and wound without the use of guns or knives or bombs. That’s an easy statement to misinterpret, so I must explain. I don’t mean I’m into negativity, far from it, but I am fascinated not by the poem’s ability to comfort, console and elevate—although these things are all good—but it’s in their ability to provoke change, to bring forth uncomfortable truths in the hope of passing on wisdom and knowledge, that I find the greatest echo of their former standing within our ancient societies. If you’re a poet and have never offended anyone with your work, what kind of poet are you?

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If anything, the kind of poems that appear on Hallmark birthday cards might be seen not only as hugely sentimental but downright offensive and blasphemous to our ancestral forebears. If you know anything of poetry, perhaps you’ll understand me when I say I have all the time in the world for the sharply incisive and often poisonous verses of Sylvia Plath but very little time at all for the more Establishment-friendly work of former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. Alongside Plath my other two favourite poets were my teachers for two years when I studied for my MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University: Carol Ann Duffy, who despite being the current Poet Laureate is decidedly anti-authoritarian and subversive, and whose explorations of the joys and pains of love in particular are simply brilliant and beautiful—and Simon Armitage, whose ability to effectively and movingly present us with landscapes in text reminds, just a shade, of the late Ted Hughes (both Yorkshiremen, as it happens).

I will shortly be posting my own poem for this year in honour of Brigid, and Imbolc. Watch out for it. For now, blessed be.

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