Strange Django ''BEGIN' - PARAMS = ()" query

I'm optimising my code which was making far too many queries on start.

I'm getting to almost the bare minimum now, and have started coming across the following:

QUERY = 'BEGIN' - PARAMS = ()

This seems to be used almost every single time and practically doubles the number of queries made - but I don't think it is actually doing anything (apart from opening up a connection to the DB and wasting time and CPU).

Can anyone tell me what it is, why it is necessary, and if it isn't, how I can remove it?

I'm viewing my queries using django.db.connection.queries.

Django - 1.8 Python - 3.4 with sqlite as the DB.