HAVE BEES WILL TRAVEL
by Sally Evans
“There is in my head a bee that talks” – Max Jacobs
But it is myself talking to the bees, my bees that are two hundred miles away, out in the sunshine
if there is sunshine to guide them, out into the light if there is enough light, out to collect their
pollen and nectar and the sticky stuff called propolis they find on chestnut buds and walnut trees.
After a while, said my old friend beekeeper, you start to think like a bee, planning for them,
where they can find their plants, you start to think in terms of the day, the hour, the season. A bee
does not think in sentences but in light, in darkness, in peace, in strife, a bee thinks in terms of
flying and surviving, of crawling and surviving, of drinking and surviving. A bee does not think
of dying though it knows well enough to throw a dead bee out of the hive. And now I remember
how I fetched these bees, transported them from England to Scotland in a travelling box, how I
proudly put Bees in Transit stickers on my car, drove them down from Scotch Corner on the
small roads after Brough, the week that Appleby Fair was breaking up and how I passed horses
and caravans and singing Gypsies all the way, and how I thought, They can never accept me,
meaning the Gypsies not the bees, but how Bees in Transit on the back of my car flagged me up
as a countrywoman. And how I took them up the motorway to Scotland. And how the bees were
not consulted when they became Scottish bees, but how they settled down to being bees none the
less. It is in the nature of a bee.
do not disturb –
a spray of sugared water,
our lives take flight.
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