I keep four hives on borrowed ground in the Taunus foothills and write down every inspection, including the ones that ended badly, so that next spring I am working from a record instead of a feeling.

Bramble Path is not a place you can visit. It is four hives, sometimes five, standing on a strip of rough ground at the top of an old orchard in the Taunus foothills, half an hour by train and then a walk uphill from the middle of Frankfurt. The ground belongs to a family who wanted their fruit pollinated and had no use for the corner behind the sheds. I have kept bees there since 2020, badly at first, and I have written down every inspection since the second summer.

I am an amateur and this is an amateur's record: weights in kilograms guessed on a luggage scale, temperatures off a cheap thermometer nailed to a post, and a great many sentences that begin with the word probably. What the site is for is memory. Bees run on a calendar that repeats each year with small variations, and without notes I found myself making the same April decision wrongly three springs in a row. Written down, a mistake only gets to happen twice.

Nothing here is advice and none of it is for sale. These colonies belong to this slope, which faces south-west, sits at about four hundred metres and runs a fortnight behind the city below it in almost everything. A beekeeper on the far side of the ridge would read my dates and be misled by them. I do not name the family who own the ground, the people who taught me, or anybody whose hives stand within flying distance of mine.