Read by Matilda Longbottom

A garden without sounds is to me as much a deprivation of the senses as a garden without scents. My ideal garden has a perpetual music of trickling water, the grating croak of frogs at dusk, a vibrating of katydids and grasshoppers, and, because I’m English, a nightingale singing, too. That, l admit, is a dream garden, but any garden can encourage birdsong and the hum of bees.

If I couldn’t keep bees, and obviously most people can’t, I’d encourage them by planting flowers that they like. Actually, although I like honey, I value my bees most for working the flowers, pollinating vegetables and berries, and their wonderful drowsy music. At first, though, I thought mostly of the honey and this reflects our historical relationship with bees.

Honey was used as the principal sweetener in Europe until eighteenth century and cheap, slave-supported sugar. Every garden was supposed to have hives. William Lawson in A New Orchard and Garden, 1618, admonishes the gardener not to be “an idle, or lazie lubber” and, among other tasks, says he must “watch his Bees and hive them.” John Reid in his book on Scottish gardening, written in the 1640’s, includes instructions every month for the caring of bees.

John Reid emigrated to America in 1648. Honeybees had arrived in America before he did, but not by much. They were more li kely brought over for honey producing than pollination. Although the settlers may have noticed that the native bumblebees did not pollinate the new apple orchards (apples were also brought over by Europeans) as well as the honeybees did, the sexuality of flowers and the role of pollination in fruit bearing was not understood until after Linnaeus died in 1777. By the time Gilbert White is writing in the 1870′ s, he observes that bees are “much the best setters of cucumbers” and advises tempting them by putting “a little honey on the male and female bloom.”

Bees settled quickly into seventeenth century America. The Indians, though delighted to have honey as a supplement to maple sugar sweetening, called them “English Flies” and associated them with advancing settlements. St. Jean de Crevecoeur, writing about American Indians in the 1760’s, says that when they found honeybees, the news “spread sadness and consternation in all minds.” In the words of Longfellow’s Hiawatha:

“Wheresoe’r they move, before them Swarms the bee, the honey maker … ”

I, too, first took up bees for their honey. Walking home from the market one day in Italy, I peered into a house and saw a group of people processing honey. With usual Italian friendliness, they beckoned me inside, fed me honeycomb, and gave me a large jar of honey. The rivulets of honey flowing into the great buckets, the taste of the comb, the sheer beauty of it all, made me spontaneously announce that I would like to keep bees. Beppino, the beekeeper, said if I could get a hive he would give me the bees.

In those days I took on anything, so I bought wood and proceeded to build a hive. In the evenings when the babies were in bed, I hammered and sawed and measured. Now, I’m no carpenter, but in the end I had what passed as a hive. Like many of my creations, though, it was more showy than practical. Its sides squiggled alarmingly, but there was a beautifully painted Greek motto on the front which, roughly translated, read “sweets for the sweet.” I was ready.

Bees always take you by surprice. I was at the butcher’s when an urgent message arrived that I was to go to the corner of the road immediately. I went, and there, high in an olive tree was Beppino. He called down that I was to climb up and help capture my bees.

I was wearing a short summer skirt and a skimpy T-shirt but I deposited the groceries and the two little boys by the side of the road and started climbing. There was no danger of the boys running off for, as usual, a small crowd had gathered to watch the fun.

It’s hard, 20 years later, to describe the excitement and the beauty of sitting up in that olive tree. The swarm of bees, dark as molasses, was dripping from the grey-green branch of the olive. There was a quiet sound of buzzing and below, through the dappled olive leaves, the flowery grass and upturned faces of my children. The youngest waved his fat baby hand. Several old ladies in black were looking after them and feeding them with large hunks of Italian bread drizzled with olive oil.

Beppino had a large cardboard box which he instructed me to hold while he gently coaxed the bees into it with little puffs of smoke from his smoker. My skirt was not fulfilling any particular function at all by now, for I was astride a branch (which didn’t increase the interest from the crowd below), but he bade me not to be afraid of being stung for they were “good bees” and hardly ever sting when swarming (they are on a voyage of survival so not at all aggressive). Italian bees are notable for their gentleness, anyway.

Well, we climbed down from the tree with my cardboard box and so began my beekeeping career, such as it was. I kept bees, though not very efficiently, for many years until I could no longer lift the frames. But although I no longer do the work, I feel like a beekeeper still. For beekeeping, like gardening, is an awareness as well as an occupation. Now a professional beekeeper takes care of my hives, and there is another huge wildnest in a hollow tree on the lawn. We have honey which we enjoy, but I think of the bees mostly as a contact with a different level of the world.

Most people worry about beestings, but beekeepers expect to be stung sometimes. Beppino never wore protective clothing or let me, either. He said I should listen to the bees, and when they buzzed angrily lay off and come back another time.

Once after we started keeping bees in America, my young son went out do something for them-and dropped the hive section. It was one of those very hot, humid Pennsylvania summer days, and he rushed into the house covered with stings. Nothing would make him go out and put the hive together again, so his father and I had to do it. We donned snow suits, thick hats, rubber boots, gloves.

As we went down to the hive, he said, “Some people pay for a sauna,” but, of course, we were stung badly, for bees, when really mad, can find their way into every little crevice and sting through layers of cloth. We couldn’t go outside again, either, for the rest of the day because they were plastered against the screen waiting for us. Normally, though they don’t sting unless threatened, and the odd sting seems a fair exchange for all that work and honey.

When we first got our bees in Pennsylvania, I worried because we have a lot of rhododendron, mountain laurel, and azaleas in our garden. These produce honey that is toxic to humans. There’s a dramatic story about soldiers of Cyrus the Younger who, camped near Trebizond, ate some local honey.

The soldiers “lost their senses . . . and none of them was able to stand upright .. . as if there had been a defeat.” The effects of the poisoning (probably from Rhododendron ponticum) lasted 24 hours. Even now, hospitals occasionally get cases of “mad honey poisoning.” Generally, we leave that early honey for the bees, so it’s not a problem.

Bees, although we now know more about them, are still, as Gilbert White put it, a mystery “to a thinking mind.” There’s masses of folklore associated with them and political lore, as well. In the revolutionary seventeenth century, it was supposed that the queen bee was a king. Royalists pointed out that this proved a “natural inclination” for their form of government.

The folklore includes a tradition.that bees instantly sting fornicators, but also that beekeepers live longer than anyone else and that a woman who eats a bee will never conceive. I don’t know if all these traditions could be reconciled, but it’s still believed that beekeepers don’t get arthritis. And everyone knows that to keep your bees happy and get lots of honey, you must immediately tell them if there’s a birth or death in the family.

You never know, anyway, with bees, like everything else in the garden. That’s why I wouldn’t be without them. We need their mystery and their added dimension, qualities which modern gardens are in danger of losing. Anyway, even when it is too hot to garden, we can lie on the porch and listen to them working: flower after flower after flower. That way we know at least something is getting done … ❖