From Ireland to Belgium and bees

here's how it started

Dear friends,

I’m back! Thanks for holding the line. What you can expect here? Let’s refresh, seeing as I’m refreshed:

• Narrative non-fiction: beekeeping

• Art witchery and the transformative power of making things with your hands

• Occasional poems from the collection I’m working on, and zines

• Finding yourself (IRL) in real life

Watercolour dyptich painting of a rockpool, by Jessica Maybury

Beekeeping: how it started

It started with a conversation over pints with my friend Daniela, a mutual fangirling over bees. It was mid-afternoon in a cosy pub on Capel Street (Dublin, Ireland). The guy who worked there had gone to the bathroom, leaving us in the empty bar. We joked about jumping over the counter and opening taps into our mouths, but instead she gave me fliers for a beekeeping club in Fingal (Co Dublin). Pictures of men in big otherworldly suits that made me think of that bit in E.T. Cool! I said, and slipped it into the pages of the notebook I take everywhere with me, and forgot it.

I emigrated to Belgium. I didn’t really realise at the time that I was going for, possibly, forever. It was a very lonely while, then. I was struggling through Dutch classes at the adult education place I’d naively assumed all Flemings spoke English. This was far from the case. The other students were refugees or women whose children refused to speak to them anymore in their ‘mother’ tongue. They’d come to the classes to be able to talk to their children. These mothers probably didn’t realise that they were emigrating to Belgium possibly permanently too. It caught them unawares, while they were changing nappies and slogged through the long baby days.

I didn’t have a job then, so the ambit of my life was rigidly pinned on Dutch classes and the traumatised, desperately needy dog that we’d just adopted. I’d lived in Flanders about three months at this stage. The weather was damp and grey, and the apartment I was living in now, my boyfriend’s apartment, had almost no natural light.

I started thinking of bees again. I dug out the flier. Did I do it because I wanted to save the bees? Not really. It was all about the lives of these insects, for me. I gave scant thought to harvesting honey.

I wondered if they taught beekeeping where I was: it was way trendier than I’d ever thought it would be. After about a year I signed up at a local beekeeping course, stumbling through it in my faltering Flemish Dutch, while simultaneously falling asleep during lessons because it was all powerpoint lectures.

I graduated from the course with a certificate from the ministry of agriculture without ever seeing a beehive in real life, and certainly never been near an open hive full of bees. A fellow student had taken pity on me and my language skills (and lack thereof) and helped me finish the final exam.

Why it started, I think, is another story. We’ll get to that.

Thanks for reading

I always love to hear from you in a comment, with a ❤️, or even a restack to Substack Notes. 🐝