| In a former life, for a brief, triumphant season, I was a beekeeper.
It was 2004, and it was a dream three years in the making. I'd read "The Secret Life of Bees" by Sue Monk Kidd a couple of summers before and I was instantly charmed. Not just by the novel's trio of beekeeping sisters and the grace they showed a 14-year-old motherless girl, but by the bees themselves — their communicative dancing, their rhythmic purpose, the way they spun flowers into gold. They way they'd only let you into their vibrating community if you kept your own nervous system regulated. I was in my 20s, in a marriage we didn't yet know wouldn't stick. Even though we had a young daughter of our own, I still felt, in many ways, like a 14-year-old girl myself. I hadn't yet found a way to manage so much of the chaos that buzzed inside me.
But I clung to the idea of those bees. Dove headlong into borderline obsession, devouring every book I could find on the subject. These ranged from dense nonfiction texts to photographic celebrations to novels that simply had "bees" in the title but contained little else on the subject. If it was connected to bees in any way, I bought it. I even got a little bee tattoo. My best friend found a large wooden HONEY sign at an antique store in Indiana and brought it home for my kitchen. We researched and gathered equipment, and that triumphant spring we drove to the eastside post office at dawn to pick up a screened box buzzing with our very own colony. It was good for a little while.
Then came an unexpected season that lasted a few years: We had another baby; the bees caught a mite and didn't survive that winter; I got sober and, eventually, divorced. Keeping bees became part of an old life I no longer recognized. I gave away all those books except the one that started it all. Years passed.
And then I was charmed again when I read Associate Editor Emma Waldinger's lovely photo essay on beekeeping in the new July issue. Her story focuses on an OG beekeeping family, the Wollers of Gentle Breeze Honey. I went to the same high school as Tim Woller, as well as with Angele Mlsna of Worker Bee Honey Co., who is featured in the sidebar — I love it that these hometown characters are so devoted to protecting the winged creatures in that familiar patch of prairie. Since the days of my failed experiment, there's been an explosion of hobbyist beekeeping and overall awareness of the critical role bees play on the planet. Even my ex-husband, in a surprising turn of events, revived the hobby a few years back. Our younger daughter — the one born the winter the old bees died — now in college with a bee tattoo of her own, painted the white box supers in whimsical colors. I gave them the HONEY sign. They drop off jars of liquid gold, as many as I want.
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