The gift of live creatures

Air Bee'n'Bee open for business

My mum bought me some bees on the internet. She ordered them a fortnight ago when I was particularly upset. Unravelled by the state of the nation and the empathy drought it has concieved. The gift of life and live creatures are among the best things she has given me. They arrived without fanfare through my letter box, in their modest cardboard nursery, no bigger than a CD case. 25 virgin cocoons, as unassuming and lifeless as sheep poo. The first time she bought bees on the internet I thought it was exactly that: a genius faecal scam targeting altruistic gardeners with disposable income everywhere. Until I spent a spring watching them hatch, one-by-one into impossibly alive little things.

The box, labelled ‘Live Creatures: Handle with Care’, made me instantly aware of my heavy handed tendencies as I placed them on the kitchen table. Isn’t it strange that you can send whole lives via Royal Mail? All panicked and prying like a parent, I googled how this could be legal, picturing them being tossed from disorderly vans and sorting rails. Turns out you can send all sorts in the post: cockroaches, caterpillars, pupae and chrysalides, even living things that are no longer alive. Dead insects and human ashes, no more than 50g, frozen water and asbestos are understandably banned.

I rarely read instructions so thoroughly, if at all, but the responsibility for the birth or death of these 25 souls was weighing on me warmly like the heavy legs of a friend or lover. You have to keep them in the fridge until spring has settled in and chased away the frost. So I rented them some real estate atop my two-storey hummus pots. And they lived there for a week, tucked among the Tupperware beneath a canopy of wilting greens whilst I installed their little home, in the garden, facing east: The Air Bee’n’Bee.

My housemate is a fantastic gardener. Since we moved into our London flat at the curtain call of last winter, she has transformed our humble earth patch from wasteland to life giver. It’s healing, I’ve learnt, to siphon concern into a different living creature. But my eyes have always been greener than my fingers and I lack the patience and discipline to parent lanky saplings. So the bees will be my burden and blessing this Spring.

In my bumble opinion, they are as close as we’ve come to a morally impeccable being. Just givers, sharers, non-violent but in self defence, only if the threat is a fate worse than death. I’m thrilled to be the neighbour to these flightful altruists. To unfurl my languid limbs as they do theirs, from those winter cocoons. So soon they will emerge to remind me that change, air, light and flight are possible - are good.

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Meet you in the bookshop

The Arrival of the Bee Box by Sylvia Plath

I ordered this, this clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can’t keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appals me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are,
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

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This year I’m on a quest to try and support myself more through my music and writing in the hopes that I can dedicate more time to both. In light of this, I have switched on a paid subscription to this weekly blog which you can sign up to below if you would like to, and are able to, support me on the slightly mad mission to being a full-time artist. Thank you for being here.

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