THE five bird feeders hanging from a pole in the garden require regular filling to keep up with the ravenous appetites of the many feathered visitors who dine there.

Going back into the house, balancing a bucket of corn in one hand and a tub of suet balls in the other, I glanced back to enjoy the feasting throng, and promptly fell over a vintage 56lb weight I keep near the back door to prop it open, landing crunch onto my elbow. Did it hurt? It certainly did, and required a visit to A &E, x-ray, dressings, sling and a lot of TLC from John. If I hadn’t been in such pain I could have enjoyed all the attention.

But such idleness and malingering cannot be tolerated for any length of time round here. This summery weather is certainly waking all manner of creatures up and all of a sudden things have really started humming. In the bee hives, of course.

After anxious weeks when we wondered if our bee colonies were still viable and had not been decimated by wasp predators, the warm weather has got our bees flying. There is plenty of fondant left for them to feed on in the hives.

John prefers feeding our hives with fondant over the winter as it is supposedly less attractive to wasps than sugar syrup. It is only fair too when you consider that we have taken away the honey the bees made to see them through the winter. But the sudden rush of activity around and in the hives has alerted us to the fact that we needed to get on with a few improvements, so, poorly elbow or not, I was dragged in as carpenter's mate to make new stands for them.

Over the winter I have also bought some rather fetching new wasp traps. Usually I rely on jars with holes punched in the lid and a strong sugar solution inside to pull in the wasps, and then drown them.

The traps that I have found are shaped like a hive and made of translucent blue and green glass with a reservoir that you fill with said sugar solution to attract wasps to a sugary sweet demise. But not I am assured, capable of luring my bees to a sticky end.

Rather taken by the design of these fatal attraction devices, I have bought a couple of extra ones for the porch to lure all the greedy little insects who have their (many faceted) eyes on the grape vine in there. Already, the reservoirs are filling up with flies and I have high hopes of them to lure in visiting wasps too. The killing season has commenced.