A peculiar old book from Watnall Hall's library gives us a clue about one of Sir Lancelot Rolleston's more unusual hobbies, bee-keeping, and about a remarkable building that once stood in the hall gardens, his bee house. The book is so old its leathery pages are made from vellum. It is an original 1623 copy of "The Feminine Monarchie or The History of the Bees by Schoolmaster Charles Butler"
The Watnall Hall book was
sold at the 1954 auction for an undisclosed fee. In 2021 a second edition of this book sold for £4800. The Butler bee book is particularly important, being "
...the greatest early British bee book and contains the best account of skep beekeeping which is available today" (British Bee Books). It is the first edition to contain both the woodcut frontispiece and the remarkable
4-part madrigal which was an attempt to capture the piping sound of the queen at swarming time..
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| The queen bee madrigal |
Like many educated Victorian men, Sir Lancelot adopted a particular line of amateur scientific enquiry. His interest was in bee-keeping and he had a remarkable
"bee house" built in the grounds of Watnall Hall inside which he could sit and
watch the bees through glass surrounded by the soothing sound of the bees' workaday buzzing.
The bee house is described in Leonard Jack's 1881 book Great Houses of Nottinghamshire as...
"its thatched bee-house, full of murmurous sound. Of that bee-house I made a closer inspection. It was designed by Mr. Rolleston, who takes considerable interest in bee culture, and is large enough inside for a study. As a matter of fact, Mr. Rolleston occasionally shares this house with the bees. The boxes in which the insects deposit their honey are so arranged that they cannot fly about in the interior of the apartment, whilst their operations can be watched and studied through glass. So the bee-house serves a double purpose, besides being an ornament to the garden. Whilst the bees are making their honey, and arranging their domestic matters in the glass cases, Mr. Rolleston is writing his letters at a table, and the apartment is filled with a soothing sound."
To provide his bees with winter foraging, he had a field "the size of a cricket pitch" planted with Nottingham blue crocuses opposite Hall Farm on Narrow Lane.
Why Do Bees Like Crocus Flowers? Careful selection of the crocus varieties enables you to provide food for your bees from autumn through to late winter or early spring. As well as nectar, crocuses provide hungry bees with plenty of pollen. Honey bees certainly visit crocus flowers. Those that flower in late winter to early spring will provided much needed sustenance to foraging worker honey bees, keen to replenish the colony food stores following the cool winter months. It's worth remembering that honey bees will brave very cool temperatures in order to find food for the colony.
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| Nottingham from The Meadows at Crocus time, 1890 by Thomas William Hammond |
It's a hobby Sir Lancelot seems to have kept up for many years...
Nottingham Journal - Monday 01 July 1929 - BEEKEEPERS AT WATNALL Members and friends of the Notts. Beekeepers' Association, by kind per mission Sir Lancelot Rolleston, spent a delightful afternoon in the grounds at Watnall Hall on Saturday on a tour of the grounds. The visitors saw the bee house, which is the only one of its kind In the county, also the Mill hive, which is one of the earliest forms of box hives and Is in a wonderful state of preservation. An interesting address was given by the Rev. E F Hemmins. president of the Huntingdonshire B.K.A., on keeping from ancient times until now.
The importance of talking to the bees
There is a very strange story connected with the bees and the bee-house, told by Mr. Peart, the last gardener at the Hall. He joined the staff after WW2 ended in 1945, so he never knew Colonel Rolleston at all. He was told of an event by Mr. Justice the chauffeur who looked after the bees following the death of the Colonel in 1941. It goes like this. "He said that when the colonel died, Lady Maud said to him, "Now look, Justice", (you never got called Mr. Justice - just Justice or whatever) "you're to go around each hive, give them a tap and say your Master's dead ', “and be said 'I felt as daft as a brush, but I did it'.
This is the tradition of "telling the bees" and it is well known amongst bee keepers. It was said that not doing this would encourage the bees to desert the hive or the colony to stop producing honey or even die.
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| A young bee-keeper "Telling the bees" |
In 1949, Lady Maud died, and Mr. Justice had retired, so Mr. Peart was in charge of the hives, but
“I didn't go and tap round them - no way - but there was a man in the village, a Mr. Bill Swells, and he were a big bee man so I said, "You can have those bees Bill, I don't want anything more to do with them. They're more trouble to me than they're worth, so get them out". But when he came up- you can believe it or believe it not- there was no sign of any disease, no mice, no moths, no reason, but those bees were dead - and they'd got plenty of food, but they'd gone. He got one hive that's all. The rest had died. Coincidence or whatever, but it's strange isn't it, but that happened."After the bees died, Mr. Peart removed the roof from the bee-house, placed hot pipes from the saddle room inside, and turned the structure into a greenhouse. One feels that he didn't like bees as "them bees’d go for me and I'd react to it.”
There are many stories in the village about the trouble they caused when swarming in the wrong place. They nearly always seemed to swarm on to the high yew hedge round the old cock-fighting pit, but they also ended up in the rose pergola and once even interrupted a Sunday School lesson taking place on the lawn as it was a hot day. What Lady Maud said on that occasion is not recorded!
For a more modern take on the bee house here's my son's glass-topped Minecraft version! Nice to see the younger generations learning about it, bee-keeping is very important in Minecraft ...
Sources - Watnall Hall and the Rolleston Family RA Horton 2000
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