The Beekeeper

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Ffion, Nel, Cari, Glyn and their hillside are invented. The old custom of telling the bees is real, and what is said about bees, heather and the prayer comes from the sources listed below.

Six hives

The hives stood in the top corner of Glyn Price’s sheep field, in a row along the hawthorn hedge, just where the lane gave out and the hill began. Below them, in the valley, the slate roofs of the little town came up out of the mist one by one.

There were six of them, square wooden boxes on legs with tin lids. Since January they had belonged to Ffion Lloyd.

Ffion was forty-one and drove the post van around the hill farms. Nel Bevan, who had kept bees in that corner of the field for more than fifty years, had died in January at eighty-nine. She left Ffion the hives, the smoker, the veil, the hive tool, and an old skep, a dome-shaped straw hive from before the days of wooden boxes, which had hung unused in the shed for years.

Following Nel

Ffion had first walked up that lane behind Nel when she was twelve, the summer her parents split up and she needed somewhere to be. Nel handed her the smoker, a tin can with bellows that puffs smoke to calm bees, and said nothing else. Ffion followed her.

Nel had been a nurse. In her thirties she had nursed for two years in the hills of Nepal, and came home, she said, with a taste for strong tea and not much else. She went to chapel at Christmas and Easter. She was not a woman who explained herself.

But every morning at the hives, before she lifted the first lid, she stood still for a moment with her hands at her sides and said something under her breath. A few lines, once. Then she started work.

When Ffion asked, years later, Nel said it was a prayer a Tibetan woman had taught her on the ward, to a teacher who had been born in a flower. “It’s so they know it’s me,” she said, and lifted the lid.

Ffion remembered the tune of it. She remembered one word, Pema. That was all.

Telling the bees

The day after the funeral, Ffion went up the field in the frost with a length of black ribbon in her coat pocket.

There is an old custom, known in Wales, England and many parts of Europe, of telling the bees when someone in the household dies. You knock gently on each hive, tell the bees the news, and ask them not to leave. Nel had done it when her husband died.

Ffion did not know whether she believed in it. She knocked on each tin lid with her knuckle anyway, said Nel’s name, and tied a bit of ribbon to every hive. A blackbird watched her from the hedge.

Spring

In April it was warm enough to open the hives. Ffion found that her hands remembered more than she did: a puff of smoke at the door, a moment’s wait, the hive tool under the lid, each frame of comb lifted out and turned to the light.

She kept glancing at the hedge, as if Nel would be there, telling her to stop fussing.

On the fourth frame of the third hive she found the queen, long and copper-coloured, walking over the comb. Around her, as always, was a ring of workers facing inward, feeding her, cleaning her and moving with her wherever she went. Beekeepers call them her attendants. Nel used to call them her ladies.

A colony holds together around its queen. Where she goes, the others follow.

The swarm

On a hot afternoon at the end of May, Ffion was halfway round her deliveries when Glyn rang. “Your bees are in the air,” he said.

When a colony grows crowded in spring, a great part of it may leave with the old queen to find a new home. That is a swarm. Ffion drove up the lane too fast.

The air above the hedge was full of bees, a roaring brown cloud turning in the sun. Glyn’s granddaughter Cari, who was eleven, stood at the gate with her mouth open.

Then the cloud thinned and poured itself onto one low bough of the hawthorn. In ten minutes it hung there as a single brown cluster the size of a rugby ball, humming. The queen was somewhere in the middle. They had followed her there.

A resting swarm is usually gentle, with no home yet to defend. It waits, usually for a few hours, while scouts look for one. Ffion fetched Nel’s skep from the shed, held it under the cluster, and gave the branch one hard shake.

Most of the bees dropped into the straw with a soft thump. She turned the skep over onto a sheet on the grass, propped one edge on a stone, and sat down on the bank to wait. Cari sat beside her, at what she judged a safe distance.

Evening

If the queen was inside, the rest would come. At the rim of the skep a few bees stood with their tails in the air, fanning their wings to send out the scent that tells the others where home is. One by one, the bees on the sheet turned and walked in.

“Are they following her?” Cari asked.

“Her,” said Ffion. “And the ones who found her.”

At dusk she carried the skep to the empty hive at the end of the row. She laid a board with the white sheet over it from the grass up to the hive’s doorway and tipped the bees out onto it, the way Nel had once shown her.

The whole swarm began to walk uphill: thousands of bees, in no hurry, climbing the white slope into the dark doorway like people filing into chapel.

Ffion remembered then that Nel, the last time they did this, had stood beside the board while the bees went in and said her few lines, quietly, once.

Ffion and Cari sat on the bank until it was almost dark and the last bee had gone in.

The prayer

That night at the kitchen table, Ffion typed into her phone the only things she knew: Tibetan prayer, teacher born in a lotus.

It was the Seven-Line Prayer, addressed to Guru Rinpoche, also called Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born: the eighth-century teacher whom Tibetans remember for helping Buddhism take root in their country. It is the prayer to him most often used in the Nyingma tradition, the oldest school of Tibetan Buddhism.

She found a recording of a woman chanting it and pressed play. Out of the phone came Nel’s tune, the same rise and fall.

She read what the seven lines are about. They name the land he came from and the lotus he was born in, and the highest accomplishment he reached, and they give his name. They say he is surrounded by dakinis, a word for female embodiments of enlightened energy, which is often explained as meaning “sky-goers”. Then the person praying says they want to follow in his footsteps, and asks him to come and bless them.

One teacher, Chökyi Drakpa, explains that sixth line as a promise: to follow the master’s footsteps and keep practising until you reach where he reached.

She thought of the lane, the smoker in her hands at twelve, and the brown cloud pouring onto the hawthorn after its queen. She had been following someone for twenty-nine years without ever asking where Nel was going.

Once each morning

She did not decide anything. But the next morning, before she lifted the first lid, she stood still with her hands at her sides and said the prayer once, slowly, getting half of it wrong. The morning after, she got less of it wrong.

The bees were as cross on thundery days as they had always been, and in July one stung her through her glove just the same. The prayer did not bring the honey in. Nobody had promised her that it would.

It was a way of arriving. Of standing still for the length of seven lines before the work began, the way Nel had. Of letting the bees, and perhaps someone else, know it was her.

Heather

In August, Glyn helped her carry two of the hives up onto the open hill, where the heather was in flower, purple to the skyline. Heather honey is much prized, and many beekeepers carry their hives up to the moor for it in late summer.

Cari came too. Since the swarm she had been turning up at the field most mornings, and in July she started carrying the smoker. Nobody asked her to. She simply walked a few steps behind, the way Ffion once had.

One morning in September, Cari asked what it was Ffion said to the bees.

“It’s a prayer,” said Ffion. “Someone taught it to someone, who taught it to Nel. I’m still learning it.”

She did not offer to teach it. She stood still at the first hive and said it once, and Cari stood a step behind her and listened. Then they lifted the lid.