The day after Queen Elizabeth II died, a man named John Chapple travelled to Buckingham Palace. Once he got there, he put on a white suit and a veil and rowed across the palace gardens’ lake to a small island, where he tied a black bow around each of the island’s five beehives. Like a chambermaid before housekeeping, he gave a gentle rap on the door of each one. “The mistress has died,” he whispered to the bees.
John Chapple is the Royal Beekeeper and he was performing the ancient ceremony of ‘telling the bees’. Superstition goes that bees who are ‘put into mourning’ help ensure safe passage of the dead to the afterlife. By not informing them, you risk low-to-no honey production, a total abandonment of the hive, or even a collective death. Some early records (the ritual dates back to the sixteenth century) even tell of bees being invited to the funeral, or given a slice of cake from the wake.
The tradition is built on beliefs that long precede the sixteenth century: there has always been a mournful symbiosis between humans and honeybees. Ancient Greek philosophers believed that humans could be reincarnated as bees; Celts believed the presence of a bee after a death signified the soul leaving the body; and the ancient Egyptians likened the hum of bees to the voices of spirits. All over the world, bees have been regarded as sacred messengers responsible for bridging the gap between this world and the next, between the natural and the supernatural.
I lost my baby in the winter: bees were hard to come by. Instead, I told the leaves as they fell. I was pregnant and now I am not. I told the wind that whipped my cheeks. I am empty. I told the sparrows who danced in my garden and the parakeets that studded the trees like gemstones. You were here and now you’re gone. In the depths of my grief, the practice grounded me. For as long as acceptance eluded me, it became a sort of mantra - the repetition brought relief. I wasn’t telling the bees: in the stubborn unreceptiveness of shock, I was trying to tell myself.
A couple of weeks ago, I spent a night at Wilton’s Music Hall watching the actress Denise Gough play Sylvia Plath and perform her poems. Wilton’s is one of London’s gems and Gough gave an extraordinary performance - the kind that gives you goosebumps. It was a brilliant evening that left me feeling inspired and alive, even - maybe especially - when you take into account what happened next. Afterwards, I sat in the bar of the theatre with a friend and we cried. Partly for Plath (who died sixty years ago this month - she would have been ninety), but mostly for our shared experience of loss. Plath knew that pain as well: between the births of her son and daughter she too lost a baby.
The next day, I returned to Plath - specifically to what have come to be known as her ‘bee poems’. The year after her miscarriage, in the summer of 1962 and full of enthusiasm, Plath took up beekeeping. Interest in bees ran in the family: when Sylvia’s father Otto was a boy, he was nicknamed Beinen-Konig - ‘King of the Bees’. He grew up to become a professor of entomology, writing a definitive study charmingly entitled Bumblebees and Their Ways. Unfortunately, he died when Sylvia was only eight, for which she never quite forgave him.
The five (amazing) poems about her bees - which Plath wrote in a single week and only months before her death - aren’t just about bees. They buzz with agitations - about her relationship with her father, yes, but also about motherhood, marital betrayal and abandonment, sexism, the grind of domesticity and female hysteria. Reading the last lines of the fourth poem (‘Stings’) about a vanished or dead Queen, in 2023, it’s hard not to think of our own Queen and her life of service to a system: “Now she is flying…/ Over the engine that killed her - / The mausoleum, the wax house.”
But the final poem in the sequence, ‘Wintering’, ends on a note of hope. Its final line is ‘The bees are flying. They taste the spring.’ Plath is rallying, anticipating her survival of a painful winter. In fact, ‘Wintering’ was the poem with which she meant to end her collection, Ariel: ‘spring’ was its final word. (It was her husband Ted Hughes who reorganised the bee poems into the middle of the book before publication.) What happened makes her touch of optimism all the more heartbreaking.
The winter that came - ‘The Big Freeze of 1963’ as it’s known - turned out to be the worst of the 20th century. It remains the coldest winter recorded since 1895, and Sylvia Plath did not survive it. So she never saw the spring of 1963, which was more than an ordinary spring. After the long, long winter of two world wars and seemingly unending post-war austerity, spring 1963 is often used as a marker for the beginning of the 60s as we know them - the spring of the century, the explosion of ‘pop’ and youth culture. On the very same day Plath killed herself in her house in Primrose Hill, The Beatles were a mile away across Regent’s Park in Abbey Road Studios, recording, in a single day-long session, their debut album - including their cover of ‘A Taste of Honey’.
Three months after my loss, I am not through the winter yet. The days are still short and dark, some darker than others. On those days, I tell the frost-laced weeds that line my garden path, but I also tell myself: this season will not last forever. As I write this, my husband is in our garden - the first we have owned. It’s a mess, stripped bare by the winter and our own hands (the previous owners had astroturf - astroturf!), but it is ours. Over coffee, we throw out suggestions for plants like we know what we’re doing. The garden is south facing - the estate agent told us, grinning - so our options are endless, apparently. It occurs to me – how could I have missed it? – that what I want to see most of all are bees. That’s what we’re going to plant: lavender, honeysuckle, clematis, cornflowers – flowers for bees. Then maybe I will taste the spring - and it will taste like honey.
Wintering
Sylvia Plath
This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwife's extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat's eyes in the wine cellar,
Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant's rancid jam
and the bottles of empty glitters ----
Sir So-and-so's gin.
This is the room I have never been in
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint
Chinese yellow on appalling objects ----
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,
Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees--the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin
To make up for the honey I've taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going,
The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.
Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,
Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,
The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women ----
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanis walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.
(c) Estate of Sylvia Plath. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Limited.
This was the most incredible and captivating read. I had goosebumps. Thank you for sharing, Ellie.
Unbelievably beautiful 🤍🤍🤍