Beehives on a central London roof

Last week I took a trip up to the top of the Monument, which is a memorial to those who died in the Great Fire of London. I of course took lots of photos. And in a posting on my personal blog (now revived from recent hibernation), I also had a moan about the new wire netting that they have installed at the top of the Monument, in place of the old, more digital camera friendly, prison bars that used to be there.

Here is one of the snaps I snapped that day, featuring this new wire netting:

Now, it so happens that earlier last week, the night before my trip to the Monument, I also watched a TV show about bees. Most of it was about African bees migrating across the Savannah, with lots of lurid close-ups of bees looking like alien monsters. But, as this lady explains, at the end of this show they bolted on a short and quite different segment about how bee keeping, waning in the British countryside in the face of mechanised agriculture and pesticides, is now on the rise in the big city. It was like two entirely separate shows. Very peculiar. Luckily for me, I found both shows interesting.

Anyway, take a look through the centre hole in the photo above. What do you see? I'll tell you what you see. You see beehives. Here's a closer look at them:

And at two of them even closer:

The first of those three beehive snaps was taken by mistake, as it were. As in: I only realised that bee hives were involved in it when I got home. But, provoked by having watched that TV bee show, I photoed the two subsequent bee hive snaps on purpose.

The anti-technological-progress, anti-capitalist take on this story is that technological progress, capitalism etc. is making life hell for bees in the countryside. And for the time being, technological progress stroke capitalism is indeed turning the countryside from bee heaven into something rather less bee hospitable, although it may soon work out how to refrain from doing this and how to switch the countryside back to being bee heaven again.

Meanwhile, cities like London, with all their gardens full of varied flowers, are becoming new bee heavens.