Lark & Vesper
Hefting in the Wolf Moon
Went up after dark, which sounds romantic and was actually just when the luggage scale, the head torch, and I were all free at the same time. Full moon over the harbour, rime on...
A rooftop apiary log · Saltmere Harbour
Gloaming
Two hives on the roof of the old Cordage Works — Lark on the east parapet, Vesper on the west — written up season by season, one honeycomb cell per inspection.
2 hives 6 storeys up 31 kg harvested, 2025 salt wind, always
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Lark & Vesper
Mite Wash Arithmetic
October is when a beekeeper stops being a farmer and becomes an epidemiologist. The winter bees being raised right now are the entire colony until March, and every varroa mite riding a pupa is...
The comb runs back to a bright February morning and two hives waking up.
Open the full log, cell by cell
Why “gloaming”
Gloaming is the hour the bees come home. Every evening from March to October the flight boards of these two hives fill with returning foragers, heavy and slow in the last light, and every season I write down what the colonies did while I was pretending to be in charge. Two hives, one roof, six storeys above a working harbour: Lark on the east parapet, which wakes with the sun, and Vesper on the west, which forages late and sulks all morning. The log runs season by season — hefting in winter, swarm arithmetic in spring, the linden fortnight in summer, mite counts in autumn — and none of it is advice. It is only what happened, written down close to the day it happened, before the roof taught me the next thing. If you want the cast of characters first, start with the roof itself.