Telling the Bees

There is an old custom, kept until quite recently in the country places, and still kept here and there by people who could not tell you exactly why, and it is one of the gentlest and strangest things I know: when someone in the household died, you had to go and tell the bees. Someone would walk out to the hives, usually a woman of the family, and knock softly, or simply lean in close, and say the words — the master is dead, or your mistress is gone — informing the bees, formally, of the death in the house. Sometimes the hive was draped in a piece of black cloth. Sometimes the bees were invited to the funeral, or given a portion of the funeral food, a bit of the cake, a taste of the wine. And it was not optional, and it was not sentiment. It was believed that if you did not tell the bees, they would take offense, or take fright, and leave — abscond from the hive, or stop making honey, or sicken and die themselves — and that the family would suffer for the discourtesy of having kept them in the dark.

I love this custom more than almost any other, and it took me a while to work out what it is actually doing, because on the surface it looks merely quaint — a bit of rural whimsy, talking to insects about a death. But it is not whimsy. It is a serious ritual with a serious logic, and the logic tells you something true about how people once lived inside the world, and something we have largely lost.

The household that included the bees

Start with the plain fact underneath it: the bees were part of the household. In a country place, the hive was not a hobby or a decoration; it was a member of the working family, a source of honey and wax and income, tended daily, depended upon, as much a part of the household economy as the cow or the garden or the hired man. And so when a death occurred, the bees had, in a real sense, lost one of their own — the person who kept them, who knew them, who walked out to them each day. Telling the bees was, first, simply courtesy — the same courtesy you would extend to any member of a household who needed to be informed that one of the family had died. You would not let a member of the household learn of a death by accident, or be left uninformed; you would go and tell them, gently, in person. The bees were of the household. So you told the bees.

And this is the part that reaches me, because it reveals a whole way of being in the world that we have mostly given up: a world in which the human household extended outward into the natural one, in which the animals and the hive and the land were not scenery or property but participants, members of a shared life who were owed news, owed courtesy, owed inclusion in the great events of the family. To tell the bees of a death is to live in a world where a death is not merely a human matter but a disturbance in a whole web of relationships that includes the creatures you keep — where the grief has to be carried outward and shared with the other members of the living arrangement, because they too have lost something, and would feel the absence, and deserve to be told. It is a widening of the household to include the more-than-human, and a widening of grief to match.

What the ritual knew

There is, of course, a rational residue in it, the way there usually is under a good folk custom, and it is worth naming because it does not diminish the thing. Bees kept by attentive keepers do respond to disruption; a hive whose keeper dies may genuinely be neglected in the upheaval, may go untended in the chaos of a death and a funeral, and may indeed weaken or abscond — not because it was not told, but because the person who cared for it is gone and the care lapsed. So the belief that a death threatens the hive is not baseless; it points, in its folk way, at a real vulnerability, and the ritual of telling the bees was also, functionally, a ritual of not forgetting the bees — of making sure that in the storm of a death someone walked out to the hive, checked on it, kept the thread of care unbroken, marked the bees as still belonging, still tended, still part of the family even as the family reeled. The courtesy and the care were the same act.

But I do not want to reduce it to its function, because the beauty of it is in the courtesy itself, in the choosing to tell — to walk out and speak the death aloud to the hive, to say the words to the bees, to include them in the news. And I think that is the thing worth keeping, even now, even for those of us who keep no bees: the instinct the custom preserves, which is that grief should be carried outward and shared, that a death is owed to the whole web of a life and not only to the humans in it, that there is a dignity in going personally to inform the world of your loss rather than letting it be absorbed in silence. We have mostly stopped telling the bees, because we mostly no longer keep them, and no longer live inside a household that extends into the hive and the field. But the impulse survives, transposed, in whatever we still do to carry our griefs outward — the ones who tell the garden, or the dog, or the old tree, or simply speak the death aloud to an empty room because it needs to be said, to something, to be real. Someone still walks out, somewhere, and leans close, and says the words: she is gone. The bees may not need to hear it. But we have always needed to tell them, and I do not think we ever really stopped — we only ran out of bees, and kept the telling, and gave it to whatever was left that would listen.