It's not that often that people ring at 10:30 at night, and even less often that they say 'I haven't got time to chat, but your nukes are on the way'.

Nukes? Nucs? I hoped MI5 weren't listening in - or we might be in for a dawn raid.

It was a nucleus of bees for Ian's new venture - bee keeping. The company was supposed to give us a weeks notice that the bees were being dispatched, but they were clearly struggling to keep up. And sure enough, the bees arrived the next morning, not under their own steam as I had fondly fantasized, but by courier. So that meant all other pressing tasks had to be dropped while Ian hived them (I think that's the technical term).

Why bees?

Well, they are undervalued and under threat. Bees polinate about 70 food crops in the UK, and that's not counting the plants that become animal feed. They contribute somewhere between £165m and £200m a year to our economy. Yet wild populations have almost disappeared because of disturbance and the parasitic varroa mite. So we thought we'd devote a corner to giving the bee population a hand, and hopefully benefit from some honey along the way.

We'll start them off in the new orchard. And when  Ian gets more confident we'll move them further afield, probably down to towards the nature reserve, and may be even in it. Popehouse Moor Honey - I can almost taste it now....

Find out more by visiting the British Beekeepers' Association website.