Bees are eating Lichfield Cathedral. It sounds like science fiction, but it is science fact. I might take back the kind words I had for bees in this column (June 28), except that the cathedral-eating kind are not our beleaguered honey bees.
The vandals are masonry bees, of which there are nearly 20 species in Britain. Who’d have thought it? Normally they do little harm, as readers have reported in the Telegraph letters page (July 26). But Lichfield cathedral is built of soft old sandstone, which crumbles like cheese. The bees take advantage of exfoliating stone, and where one lays her eggs, others are attracted. Their little mandibles can burrow a system of galleries, and the holes fill with water, which freezes in winter, splitting the stone, and providing yet more desirable residences for bees.
Masonry bees favour the sunny south side of buildings, and it was this side of the cathedral, overlooking the town, that I was staring at when I bumped into the Dean, the Very Rev Adrian Dorber. He told me that English Heritage has given £250,000 this year towards restoration of the stonework, which cathedral fundraisers have matched. The next step is an application for a £5 million Lottery Heritage grant.
Must…resist…making…comment.
D’oh!!!!!!
Not surprising. I’m not familiar with masonry bees, but I used to work at an older fuel plant with plenty of wooden planks making up various platforms and walkways, and wood boring bees [I think they’re more properly known as carpenter bees] drilled a fair number of holes in them.
If only they would beehive themselves.
Bee serious, will you?
Hmm . . . there’s a honey of a sermon in there somewhere!
Well, as the Dean of St. Paul’s Episcopal Catherdal,
Peoria, I wish that masonry bees were the greatest
of my problems. It’s all so ontological, in fact, whether
to bee or not to bee. Actually, I never met a bee I
didn’t like. Bees in general are so greatly ignored and
margialized in today’s church.