The Linden Fortnight

The lindens along the esplanade opened this week, all forty-one of them more or less at once, and the whole street smells like the inside of a teapot. This is Saltmere's main flow — a loud, brief, ten-to-fourteen-day argument between every nectar-bearing tree in town and every bee that can fly — and the scale under Lark has started drawing a mountain.

The morning readings from the hive scale, copied from the notebook, because in January I will want proof that this happened:

date        06:00 kg   change    notes
2025-06-16     41.2      —       first linden blossom open
2025-06-17     43.1     +1.9     hum audible from stairwell door
2025-06-18     45.8     +2.7     comb whitening in top super
2025-06-19     48.4     +2.6     third super added
2025-06-20     50.1     +1.7     overcast until noon
2025-06-21     52.9     +2.8     solstice; peak, surely

Nearly twelve kilos in six days. A colony at full strength during a flow is the closest thing I know to weather you can keep in a box.

Work done: third super on Lark (undrawn foundation, and she was whitening the top bars within a day), second super on Vesper, who came into the flow late but is now flying until genuinely dark — from the roof door at ten p.m. I could still hear her fanning, moving air over open nectar to drive the water off. A hive during a flow runs a night shift; the foragers sleep and the house bees dehumidify.

The May queen in Lark, incidentally, is laying like a stamping machine — the artificial swarm in April cost me honey, but it bought me this: a young queen at the head of a huge workforce exactly when the town turned the taps on.

Rooftop note: linden nectar in a heat wave can be too much of a good thing for bumblebees, and the pavement under the esplanade trees is dotted with the sleepy and the dead. My honeybees seem immune to the narcosis, if not to the greed. I know how they feel. I have been up here every evening this week for no reason a landlord would recognise as maintenance.