FRENCH LETTER: A lesson from bees (a tale with a sting)

When bees give you a sting, when what you really want is their divine nectar. Marita van der Vyver shares her latest Substack column with us.

I wanted to call this one Post(cards) from Portugal, but then the bees intervened. And when bees bring you a message, you’d better listen. In Ancient Egyptian mythology bees were believed to emerge from the tears of the sun god Ra, making them divine messengers between the gods and humanity. So now I’m writing about bees and refugees. And honey.

Imagine the scenario. We arrive back home on Sunday night after a week of work and play in Portugal, exhausted because we’ve been up since 3am, travelling in taxis, trains and planes for the whole day, drenched in sweat because of a record-breaking heat wave sweeping through France, dazed and drugged because we both caught a nasty cold which we’ve been trying to contain with too many pills. And relieved, oh so relieved, that we can finally fall down on a bed and sleep.

But as we enter the kitchen we hear an ominous buzzing sound and walk into a welcome party of bees. We love bees, we’re concerned that they’re being driven to extinction, we definitely don’t want to kill them – but how do we stop them from taking over our house? They are not aggressive at all, more bewildered refugees than violent invaders, so we open windows and doors while we try to figure out where they all come from. We even manage to revive some who seem on the verge of dying by feeding them drops of water and honey as we gently guide them outside.

I get stung on both hands during the rescue operation, only because I touch surfaces with dying bees before I notice them, so I refuse to blame them. At last we realise they come from the extraction fan above the stove and when we check the outlet of the fan in the thick stone wall outside, we discover an alarming number of bees obviously intent on building a hive in this little hollow. We switch on the extraction fan in the hope of blowing them out, and it seems to work, but the moment we switch off the fan, they return.

After two or three hours and a few more stings, we are too tired, ill and miserable to continue the struggle. We leave the extraction fan on at full blast and go to bed, closing the bedroom door to make sure they don’t bother us while we sleep. I dream of bees, of course. Of bees and of refugees and of books about bees and refugees.

Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a compassionate novel about Syrian refugees published to high acclaim in 2019. I read it with particular attention since I was supposed to be on a panel with the