About The Author
Born in Manchester and presently living in Leeds, I've been keeping bees for some eleven years. I love bees and hedgehogs and I've written "The Hedgehog and the Bee" with a view to donating profits to hedgehog rescue centres.
Why hedgehogs and bees?
I really love hedgehogs – I remember first seeing them in Hyde when I was tiny – they seemed like mystical creatures…occasionally appearing for brief periods at night…their arrival usually accompanied by noise as they crawled through bushes and noisily munching on the food they found…I also remember being horrified by the squashed hedgehogs by the wood on Dowson Road. I'm not even sure that wood exists anymore….we have taken and developed so much land that doesn’t allow for co-existence with species like the hedgehog, which is now listed as vulnerable to extinction. I’ve always wanted to help hedgehogs as they seem so damned by nature – even the food they eat, slugs for example, can give them lung worm. I don’t want to run a rescue though as I know I would bond with the hedgehogs brought to me and so many would die – I couldn’t cope with the grief! I hope one day to buy some land – woodland ideally – and populate it with many wonderful hedgehogs from the rescue centres of Yorkshire.
As you can probably guess, I also love bees! However, my love of bees began with the bumble – they can sting a human and not die as their stinger is straight, not barbed, yet they have such a lovely temperament, their various species have never stung me. Honeybees on the other hand, have stung me thousands of times!
I'd bought some bumblebees in 2010 or 2011 to put on my allotment. However, greater wax moth invaded their colony and despite my efforts to save them by pulling out the vile wax moth grubs and torching a few of them, the bees did not make it. I then resolved to start beekeeping and did a course in 2012 and was surprised to see that honey bees looked a lot more like wasps to me. I wasn’t aware at the time, that honey bee populations were doing relatively well and it is other bee species that are on the decline – mainly as a result of habitat loss. We beekeepers have introduced the varroa parasite to honeybees (by shipping queens and small colonies around the globe) and now Australia is the only continent which don’t have this horrible blight upon them. Although, recently, even Australia has seen varroa invade its shores - mass honey bee hive culls have been organised as a result to try and stop them establishing there.
I owe honey bees a great debt for all the honey I have stolen from them, for the bees I've sold, the bees I've accidentally crushed during inspections and for the life experiences they have afforded me.
Bees and hedgehogs helped me win “Come Dine With Me” in 2017 as I used honey in my recipes and I had presented a hedgehog I was fostering after dinner! I made the comedy film “The Hedgehog and The Bee” and wrote the book of the same name, to highlight the pressures that bees and hedgehogs are under – with the hope that the book and film will help educate and inform people as to how they can help hedgehogs and bees. It’s the least I can do for all they have done for me. The profits from the sale of my book will be given to the rescue centres of Yorkshire and I hope this website will help people who need advice on how to help hedgehogs and bees.
I'd love to work with bees and hedgehogs full time, manage woodland, or even just make silly content relating to them, but I've been a headhunter for so long, I'm not sure if that possibility is now closed for me….if you think otherwise, please reach out and let me know the way!
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