Bless air’s gift of sweetness, honey
from the bees, inspired by clover,
marigold, eucalyptus, thyme,
the hundred perfumes of the wind.
Bless the beekeeper

who chooses for her hives
a site near water, violet beds, no yew,
no echo. Let the light lilt, leak, green
or gold, pigment for queens,
and joy be inexplicable but there
in harmony of willowherb and stream,
of summer heat and breeze,
each bee’s body
at its brilliant flower, lover-stunned,
strumming on fragrance, smitten.

For this,
let gardens grow, where beelines end,
sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;
where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees

are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them

By Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate

Please note that this beautiful poem is published here with the author’s kind permission.

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“Not a single bee has ever sent you an invoice. And that is part of the problem – because most of what comes to us from nature is free, because it is not invoiced, because it is not priced, because it is not traded in markets, we tend to ignore it.”
Pavan Sukhdev, author of UN report The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity – October 2010

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The Bee is not afraid of me,

I know the Butterfly -

The pretty people in the Woods

Receive me cordially -

The Brooks laugh louder

When I come -

The Breezes madder play;

Wherefore mine eye thy silver mists,

Wherefore, Oh Summer’s Day?

by Emily Dickinson

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“From their bellies comes
a drink of varying colours,
containing healing for
mankind. There is
certainly a sign in that
for people who reflect.”
(Qur’an, The Bees: 69)

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A RARE BEE

I heard tell of a tale of a rare bee,
kept in a hive in the soul of a wood
by a hermit – hairshirt, heart long hurt -
and that this bee made honey so pure,
when pressed to the pout of a poet
it made her profound, or if smeared
on the smile of a singer it sweetened his sound;
or when eased on the eyes of an artist,
Pablo Picasso lived and breathed;
so I saddled my steed.

No birds sang in the branches over my head,
though I saw the wreaths of empty nests
on the ground as I rode – girl, poet, knight -
darker into the trees where the white hart
was less than a ghost or a thought, was as light
as the written word; legend. But wasn’t going, gone,
I mused, from the land, or the sky, or the sea?
I dismounted my bony horse to walk;
out of the silence
I fancied I heard the bronze buzz of a bee.

So I came to kneel at the hermit’s hive -
a little church, a tiny mosque – in a mute glade
where the loner muttered and prayed, blind
as the sun, and saw with my open eyes
one bee dance alone on the air.
I uttered my prayer: Give me your honey,
bless my tongue with rhyme, poetry, song.
It flew at my mouth and stung.
Then the terrible tune of the hermit’s grief.
Then a gesturing, dying bee
on the bier of a leaf.

By Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate
Reproduced here with kind permission from the author

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This lovely photograph was taken by Hugh Salvesen in Bohemia. It shows St. Ambrosius, Patron Saint of Beekeepers. He wrote: “Let, then, your work be as it were a honeycomb, for virginity is fit to be compared to bees, so laborious is it, so modest, so continent. The bee feeds on dew, it knows no marriage couch, it makes honey”.

ooooooOOOoooooo

Here in my heart

In the dusk dark

A thrill and a lightening

You Bees!

How Love shines

from your dark

Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

William Blake

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Rudyard Kipling