What I learned starting beekeeping with my daughter (hint: mostly she taught me)
I want to be upfront about something before we get started. When I decided to take up beekeeping, I had a very clear picture in my head of how it would go. Me, serene and capable, tending my hives. Maybe a little linen apron. Definitely a jar of golden heather honey by Christmas.
My daughter had a slightly different vision. Hers involved getting to the bees as fast as possible and touching absolutely everything.
She was ten. She has been keeping bees ever since. I assist.
We live in rural County Antrim. We have sheep, horses, hens, the usual accumulations of a life lived in the countryside. I thought I understood how to read an animal. I thought I understood patience and paying attention and knowing when to leave well alone.
Then I got bees. And then I understood nothing at all, and had to start over.
Our hive is at the bottom of the garden. It holds a colony of native Irish black bees, Apis mellifera mellifera if you want the full name, though she just calls them The Girls. They are small, dark, and famously thrifty. Evolved for Atlantic weather, long winters, and apparently for testing the nerve of beginners from County Antrim.
Here is the thing about opening a hive for the first time with a child next to you who has absolutely no idea she is supposed to be nervous.
She was not nervous. She was delighted.
I had done the reading. I had the books, the suit, the smoker. I had watched more YouTube videos than I am prepared to admit to. What I had not accounted for was that when you lift the crown board and approximately fifty thousand bees start making their opinions known, my nervous system was going to interpret that hum as a very firm warning.
Hers did not get that memo.
She leaned in. She looked properly. She slowed right down when everything in me wanted to speed up. And she was the one who spotted the queen first, completely calm, pointing with one gloved finger.
"Mum. There. The long one."
She was right. I had been scanning straight past her.
After that I made a rule: she looks first. She has better eyes and significantly less adrenaline, and honestly at this point I think she always will.
There have been stings. Mostly mine, since you ask.
She has so far remained entirely unscathed, which she considers evidence of superior technique and I consider deeply, deeply unfair.
The first time I got stung with her watching, I made some noise about it. A fair amount of noise, if I am being honest. She waited until I had finished, then said "that one was annoyed about something" and went back to looking at the frame she had been inspecting.
I have thought about that moment a lot. Not an injury. Just information. The bee was annoyed about something. That is such a useful way to think, and I am genuinely not sure I would have got there without her.
We harvested our first honey earlier this year. Not the romantic golden heather honey I had imagined when I started all this. Oilseed rape honey, pale and very sweet, which sets into something approaching solid fudge almost immediately if you are not watching it closely. She found this absolutely hilarious.
We got a small amount. Nowhere near what the hive will eventually produce. But she jarred it herself, stuck the labels on slightly wonky, and photographed it thoroughly before she would let anyone so much as look at it.
"It's ours," she said.
Which is true. She earned every drop of it.
I write about the bees over at beehappyhoney.uk, mostly notes about the honey and the native bees and what it is like to keep something that cannot really be managed, only worked with. She reads the posts and occasionally corrects me on small details. She has an accurate memory and no patience whatsoever for approximation.
People ask me sometimes whether beekeeping is a good activity for children and I never quite know how to answer, because it depends so much on the child. It requires patience. It requires the ability to stay still when everything in you wants to move. It requires sitting with uncertainty, because you can open a hive and do everything right and still not fully know what is going on in there.
She had all of those things before she ever met a bee. The bees just gave her somewhere to put them.
What I did not expect, when I signed up for a beekeeping course and dragged her along, was that the best part would not be the honey. It would not even be the science, though she would tell you the science is excellent. It would be the hour we spend at the hive together, where phones do not exist and screens do not exist and there is only the work in front of us and the sound of ten thousand small creatures going calmly about their business.
She is eleven. She will be twelve very soon. The Girls will still be there.
So will we.