The Sting of Death

Granville Norton is the kind of village where the bees are watched more closely than the people, and this week the bees are missing. Barnaby and DS Jamie Winter are called to the stately home of a master beekeeper who has been injured trying to apprehend a thief, and the whole parish is abuzz with theories about where the hives have gone. The gossip has barely settled before one of the locals is stung to death, and the question of the missing bees starts looking less like rural gossip and more like evidence.

The investigation settles on the source of the fatal venom, which is the kind of detail this show does well: a murder weapon that depends on knowing your bees. The suspects are drawn from the hives' owners and their neighbours, the Deddingtons and the Babbages foremost among them, and every rumour about the vanishing honeycombs seems to have a name attached. Barnaby and Winter pick through the stingers and the suits, the smoke and the superstition, looking for the person who turned a countryside craft into a way of killing. Beekeeping, as the show is happy to remind us, is a hobby with sharp edges.

Caroline Graham and Julia Gilbert wrote the episode, and Matt Carter directed. Neil Dudgeon and Nick Hendrix lead the investigation, with Fiona Dolman as Sarah, Annette Badland as Fleur Perkins, Griff Rhys Jones as Ambrose Deddington, Imogen Stubbs as Tamara Deddington, Wendi Peters as Lynda Babbage, Jacquetta May as Melissa Deddington, Jack Fox as Jude Deddington and Bryan Dick as Cyrus Babbage. Griff Rhys Jones fits the village comfortably, which is another way of saying the casting department knows exactly what it is doing.

The episode takes a quiet pleasure in the mechanics of beekeeping, and it uses them fairly. Beneath the honey and the hives sits the usual Midsomer truth: people will kill over the things they have built their identities around. And here, those things happen to be small and striped. The village may never look at a jar of honey the same way again.