5 January 2024.
I wake up in darkness at 7.20, after just over eight hours of blissful sleep, in the house I built 23 years ago on a remote hillside in Fife, Scotland. This far north in the British Isles, dawn won’t rise for nearly an hour.
Looking at Fitbit on my phone, I find that my slumbers rate as “perfect” and that’s how they feel as consciousness dawns and I turn towards the day. I sit on the edge of the bed, gathering my scattered wits, hearing my wife in the kitchen getting ready for work and savouring faint scents of the coffee she always makes for us both before she leaves the house.
I am now five months into my 78th year but, as I go over the prospects for this day, I find myself thinking, “I’m actually at the edge of something more than a new dawn here: this feels like a new way of life.”
That’s both an exciting and a daunting thought for a man approaching the end of his eighth decade and, necessarily, the end of all days. But I feel confident both that I know where I am now and where I am going. My ideas have taken a long time to work out and they are grounded in reality. Multiple realities, I trust.
My plan from this point, from this moment, is to get so seriously into beekeeping that it carries me further into communion with divinity. Why not aim high?
Among my more mundane aims, I do intend to develop my beekeeping as a one-man business selling honey, queens and colonies to supplement my pensions and pay for a gardener/assistant on the acre I own. I also want to understand more of the science of beekeeping.
At the same time, I want to delve into and explore the sacred sides of beekeeping, as I see them. The precept that animates these explorations was given voice by Einstein when he said, “Religion without science is blind: science without religion is lame.” It also follows the astronomer Keppler when he said, ““Can I find God, whom I can almost grasp with my own hands in looking at the universe, also in myself?”. In my case, however, I am looking for divinity primarily in the beehive and hoping to find an echo in myself.
If this works (or even if it doesn’t), it should become a learning experience both for me and my readers. I hope it might develop into a kind of correspondence course, in which I am always learning both from my own efforts and from the wisdom of my readers. In needs to be made clear at the get-go that you find me, at this moment, as little more than a stumbling beginner in my beekeeping and as a spiritual devotee. I’ve got a long way to go and, perhaps, not a lot of time.
Shall we now set out on that journey?
I should start with the back-story about my beekeeping. It begins as recently as 2017.
I have two young daughters from a late marriage who are now university students (I am also father and step-father to men who are now in their middle age).
When she was in her mid-teens, Rachel, our older daughter, aired a casual interest in the idea of keeping bees. Though I had never even thought of it before, I seized upon this notion as a possible bonding agent between the two of us. At that point, Rachel was working towards her Scottish Higher examinations at school and, in any spare time, was mostly preoccupied with her new boyfriend. Though always close and loving, the relationship between her and me was dwindling down to little more than conversations at meal-times and during school-runs in the car. Keeping bees might give us some special time together, I imagined, and bond us anew.
That airy impulse led me to join the Scottish Beekeeping Association and my local beekeeping group in West Fife and to sign up for beginners’ classes in January 2017.
Rachel did go with me to some early lessons. That didn’t last long. Initially, she said she didn’t mind being younger than the average age of the other beginners by about half a century but, more and more often, she would find excuses not to come. Important conferences with her boyfriend were high on the list. Having spent all day at school, she was not enchanted to find herself sitting for an hour in a dark village hall listening to lectures on bee biology and taxonomy. When the outdoor sessions began at the local group’s apiary after April, she enjoyed handling the frames from the hives and examining the bees, but she found it beyond her endurance to stand around in hot sunshine for an hour listening to a speaker droning on while simmering in a beesuit, veil and rubber boots and gloves.
I fully sympathised. The teachers in these classes wouldn’t exactly rate top billing in Vegas. Few seemed to have given any thought to the pedagogical methods and aids by which to engage and entertain a class. They had no use for any of the most basic teaching aids, such as handing round models to show us the different parts of a bee or exhibiting a hive to let us see how it works.
The vocabulary of beekeeping went largely unexplained, so that terms such as “comb”, “drawn comb”, “brood”, “capped brood” and so on remained largely unexplained. I was often in the dark in those halls in more ways than one.
By the time summer arrived in 2017, Rachel had largely dropped out and it was obvious that I was on my own. Either I was going to have to take this hobby more seriously or abandon it altogether.
By that time, however, I had developed enough of a taste for the subject to be genuinely intrigued. For example, I found it mesmerising, like a far-out science-fiction fantasy, to learn that there might be 60,000 individual insects in a colony at the height of the breeding season and that they all can be viewed a single living organism -a superorganism, as it is known - which is communicating and acting as one. More practically, the prospect of being able to harvest our own honey for my family and make candles and furniture polish out of our own beeswax was truly enticing.
And I was also sensing, in ways I couldn’t exactly pin down, that beekeeping might open a door to the divine by a crack.
Something about the strangeness of a mass of bees – all those waving antennae, those compound eyes, those exoskeletons that can so easily be crunched – made me aware of a form of life other than our own mammalian existence with which I had never previously connected. Throughout my earlier life, my unthinking attitude had always been to regard an insect as a nuisance to be squashed.
At the same time, the social organisation of the colony – its labours and its disciplines, its home-making and its housekeeping, its aggressions and its defensiveness – bore manifest similarities to our own. This dichotomy felt as if it pointed through a veil of reverence towards the nature and purpose of life itself which, in a mysterious way, felt as if it might complement my daily prayers and meditations. I wanted to go further with those apprehensions and intuitions and see where they might take me.
Moreover, just by dint of having attended a few lessons, read Beekeeping for Dummies and joined some Facebook communities, I seemed to have become some kind of expert on bees in the eyes of other people who knew even less than I about the subject.
Meals with family and friends would be enlivened with questions about the waggle dance by which bees communicate with each other in the hive; or the menace to bees of the Asian Hornet, that bee-killer from the East which has now arrived on our shores; or the life in the colony of the male which is called the drone (men at the table would beam in fraternal pride at the idea that these makes spend their entire existence feeding, grooming and having sex. Their faces would rapidly fall, however, on hearing how badly it all ends for those brother bees when they do actually mate for the one and only time with the queen in flight and then their lower abdomen, including sexual parts, is ripped away and they fall to the ground in agonising death. The females around our table often seemed to find that fate grimly amusing.)
My new pursuit also gave my family a ready answer to the problem of presents for Christmas, birthdays and Father’s Day. Tomes on beekeeping flooded in as gifts along with jars of exotic honey, recipe books and subscriptions to beekeeping magazines. Friends were eager to dust off and pass over books about beekeeping which they had bought when idly considering the possibility that they might take it up themselves.
I even found some neglected texts on my own shelves, which I had acquired when I bought an old house more than 30 years ago – including a classic, The Pollen Loads of the Honeybee by Dorothy Hodges, published by the Bee Research Association in 1952 which is now, apparently, worth a bit of money.
For all these reasons, I decided to sign up again for beginners’ lessons in January 2018, even though it felt a bit like having to re-sit school exams along with all the other slackers and duffers who never did their homework.
This time round, it all made a lot more sense. I knew what they meant when they talked about “the super” [the box in the hive where the bees store their honey] or “propolis” [the sticky substance the bees make out of tree resin and use to seal draughty gaps in the hive]. I had some grasp of the nature and purpose of swarming [it’s nothing more than the way in which the colony reproduces itself].
My personal Rubicon was crossed at the moment in May 2018 when I ordered and paid £150 for a National hive and gave notice to the people who live near us that they were about to acquire tens of thousands of new neighbours (they were delighted). I had also acquired a personal bee mentor who, for £120, sold me a colony with a queen he had bred himself and delivered it in early August – by which time there was little for me to do for the rest of the season but prepare the hive for winter and start to fret about their well-being.
At that point, I also began to write a column titled Diary of a Novice Beekeeper for Scottish Beekeeper Magazine. That went on for a few years. In 2020, the Scottish Beekeeping Association gave me an award for that column which is in a frame on my office wall and of which I am more proud than my university degree. In 2023, I turned that collection of articles into a book called Getting the Buzz: Diary of a Novice Beekeeper. I’m going to offer a copy of that book as a reward/incentive to everybody who takes out a subscription to my Substack blog. It fills in the full story of how I got from there to where you find me now.
Shall we now go further?