Bee home and bee safe

With its Doric pilasters and Gothic arches, this queen of bee houses is so precious that it’s a listed building, blessed by a bishop

- LUCINDA LAMBTON

Three guesses as to the role of this oddly beautiful little building in the churchyard of St Mary’s at Hartpury, Gloucestershire.

A handsome prize awaits those who can give the right – and very surprising – answer: that it is a 19th-century structure for sheltering bees!

Fancied up to the nines with elaborate carving, it is eight yards long and two yards high, with two tiers of convex and concave scalloped stone, zigzags adding cutting-edge brio to its joyful appearance.

These were the partitions that protected the ‘skeps’ – in this case, 28 of them, housing some 840,000 bees. Skeps were the straw domes, of satisfyingly complex, plaited construction, that sheltered the colonies of creatures making their honey.

Doric pilasters march along the lowest tier, flanking five Gothic arches – two with molded keystones – with sunken circles in their spandrels. A continuous line of stone diamonds against a rusticated background completes this happy, unique-in-the-world decorative picture.

The stone caps are of the pleasingly named oolite Cleeve Pea Grit and the ‘plates’ are of Purbeck stone. Such construction methods, with bees and their boles, although minus these picturesque extras, had been popular throughout the world up until the mid-19th century.