Life is Sweet
Author Helen Jukes got her buzz for life (and love) back when she started making honey and found that with beekeeping...
AS SHE moved into her 30s, Helen Jukes found herself exhausted by work, stressed and single. Struggling to settle into her latest job, she realised she needed to change her life. Fate intervened when friends bought her a colony of honey bees for Christmas, and so began a year of beekeeping. Her beautiful memoir, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, is a mesmerising account of how beekeeping taught her to open up to new experiences – including love…
HONEY is everywhere. There’s no stopping it. My friends and I have harvested two honeycombs from the beehive I’ve been keeping and now we’re in the kitchen of my two-up, two-down in Oxford, sieving it over a pan, straining the comb and mashing it with our spoons. The honey gloops and the smell is like sweetness and wax and splintered wood.
A honey bee will make about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her whole lifetime. Yet if you were to cut a piece of string equivalent to the combined flight distance made by foragers for just one jar of honey, it would reach almost one-and-ahalf times around the world. I wonder how many lifetimes is oozing from the combs.
I abandon my spoon and begin using my hands. They glisten and stick to things, and everything sticks to them. We’re licking our fingers and the taste makes me think of something intricately spun, clear and sharp and full of the sun.
‘How did it go?’ Pat asks, when I call up later to tell him about the harvest.
I try to describe what the inside of the hive looked like and how we harvested the comb, what it felt like to carry it away in my hands. ‘I want to see you,’ he says. ‘I want to see you too.’
THE day the idea arrives, just ten months earlier, I am wanting badly to escape. But I quickly bury the thought. Because I can’t just get out. I’ve already moved houses, changed cities, to take this job at a charity in Oxford – I can’t just up and leave.
As I walk in to work each morning I feel the muscles at the back of my neck clench, and they stay like that until I leave. The plant I brought in to brighten my desk has died and I’m not sure how to dispose of it.
The skin around my eyes is tight. Maybe the screen is too bright or my focus is too narrow, or maybe muscles are tired of bracing themselves against everything that has been pressing in. I rub my eyes, refocus. This is when the idea comes back again.
‘I might get a beehive,’ I say out loud, to no one in particular. Joanna who sits at the desk opposite bellows a laugh and points at my sorry pot plant. ‘Madness,’ she says bluntly, and returns to her screen. No one else says anything. I don’t say anything. And that, it seems, is the end of it.
Home from work and too wound up to stay inside, I open the back door, step out into the garden. A nerve at the back of my eye buzzes as if the whirr of the computer screen has got inside my head.
But for one moment, maybe two, sheltered by the holly in my back garden that pricks my thighs, I forget where I am. Forget the house that doesn’t feel like home yet, and the hectic work schedule.
This is when the idea arrives. Here is where the bees would be.
I LEARNED about beekeeping a few years ago when I lived in London, where I met Luke, who has hives all over the city. Urban beekeeping is a big thing now – part of a resurgence over the past decade in beekeeping as a hobby.
The first time we met, Luke was wearing a cream three-piece suit, a pink shirt and a summer boater, and he was swinging a blue IKEA bag. We were outside Coram’s Fields, a children’s park in Central London, where he kept two hives in a thin strip of undergrowth behind the cafe.
‘So you’ve come to see the bees?’ he said, and I nodded.
‘Some people believe that bees can smell your fear,’ he said, as he unlocked a gate in the iron railings and we followed a gravel path around. So as we pulled on our protective suits, I concentrated on not being afraid, but when he lifted a hive lid and they began seething out I was terrified. Beneath the lid the space was packed with wooden frames hanging perpendicular to the roofline, each one filled to its edges with comb, covered and crawling with bees.
I hadn’t even realised until then that honey bees are different from bumblebees; that there are more than 20,000 species of bee in the world, and only a small fraction of them actually make honey.
Soon I was beekeeping whenever I could. Luke would send a text message with an address and a time of meeting and I’d jump on my bike and race through the streets to go and join him. It would be another story to have a colony of bees by the back fence of the house I was renting in Oxford with my friend Becky. And in truth, I’m not so well versed in keeping things. I haven’t lived anywhere longer than 18 months in my adult life. I don’t find it difficult to make new friends and bar a few misjudged kerfuffles, I haven’t had a boyfriend for years.
ON CHRISTMAS Day, my brother reaches under the tree for a small hand-made envelope and holds it out towards me.
Inside the envelope is a drawing of a honey bee. On the back are the names of friends who have all put money in to buy me a colony. Next to their names is the address of a farm near Banbury.
This is where the bees are waiting, the note says. You can collect them in the spring. I’m touched, and thrilled, and panicked.
And so, one Sunday in March, Luke
HE TOOK OFF A HIVE LID AND THEY BEGAN SEETHING OUT… I WAS TERRIFIED
and I drive to the farm to collect the colony.
Back in Oxford we put on our beekeeping suits, then take the box out and open it, slipping the wooden frames out and placing them inside the boat-shaped, tangerine-coloured hive I’ve bought.
IN MAY, I’m visited by my friend Dan from Leeds. We sit on the doorstep with a bottle of wine and I tell him about all the research I’m doing into bees. Dan reaches over and ruffles my hair.
‘Been staying in a lot recently, have you?’ he laughs. ‘You’re turning bee-obsessed. Why don’t you give yourself a break? Have some fun, for Christ’s sake!’
I’m caught off guard. Perhaps I have been too caught up. But the hive has become a counterweight to a work environment I’ve been finding stressful. I’ve begun to relax out here; to drop some of the rigid outer casings that were holding me stiffly and rather unhappily in place.
The following month, I am itching to see Luke and for him to see the hive. ‘Look at that,’ he says, lifting a bar out. ‘Now that’s a good start.’ The comb attached to it is thick and full; at least as long as my forearm. The walls of a single hexagonal cell are only eight-hundredths of a millimetre thick. I peer in, trying to make out individual cells under those thousands of crowding feet. Inside we spot eggs and larvae, surrounded by pollen and nectar and a soft rim of honey stores. ‘Well,’ he says, when we’re nearly through, ‘there must be nearly 100,000 bees in here. It’s the biggest colony I’ve seen all year.’
When a hive is full, the colony will split in two. There’s a lesson in here somewhere. As I feel new spaces forming, new possibilities opening beyond the hive, I too have been preparing to break out.
Another friend, Dulcie, says: ‘You should meet my friend Pat. He’s a beekeeper too. Maybe we can all meet up when you’re in London next week. You two have just the same taste in furniture.’
I laugh and say that I didn’t know I had any taste in furniture but yes, OK, I will meet this beekeeper with the chairs that are just like mine.
When the weekend comes, I go straight to the station after work and catch the train to London, then sit in my seat and watch as the view outside the window begins to crawl, and then to flow past.
Then it is Sunday, and there I am waiting for Dulcie’s friend, hoping we’ll find something to talk about or that, if we don’t, he’ll leave quickly.
‘Dulcie told me you’re a beekeeper,’ I say, stepping back into the doorway to let him through.
‘I’m not a beekeeper,’ he says as he takes off his shoes.
‘I don’t know where she got that idea.’ And then there is a pause. ‘My uncle’s a beekeeper,’ he offers. ‘Oh dear.’
I’VE seen Pat again. He’s a musician; he makes music. I’ve heard it, and it’s really good.
We sit on a log in a park in South London eating toasted sandwiches sticky with melted cheese, and talk about being kids and growing up.
As I walk away after meeting him each time I have a feeling of being differently weighted. I am quieter as I move around, and lighter, like something emptied. The soles of my feet notice the ground under them. Not just firmness or softness but also movement, like the rumble of this lorry passing.
The next time I see Pat I am due to visit him at his flat.
We meet at Forest Hill station and he grins when he sees me, and springs a little on his feet. We walk back to his flat.
Later I tell him I’d like to kiss him. There is a pause of a few moments that feels like a very long time indeed.
And the time to leave and catch my bus arrives, and I don’t leave. .
‘This doesn’t happen to me very often,’ he says afterwards.
‘This doesn’t happen to me very often either.’
ON THE day of the harvest, in September, it is clear right away that the inside of the hive has been transformed. Where eggs and larvae lay only a month ago, we now find row upon row of honeycomb.
We fill one large Kilner jar and six small ones – it takes us three hours.
Over this past season, it seems to me that the hive – that teeming space by the far fence – became a refuge.
Down by the hive, away from the city’s tough exteriors, I found a place where I could take my armour plating off; could become more exposed, more capable of touching and being touched. Perhaps I became better at caring, too.
Pat and I have begun thinking that we might want to make some changes, move a bit closer to each other, some time soon.
I can’t shake the feeling I have when I look at him sometimes that through this experience of beekeeping, of learning about and listening to the colony, I might have called something up – might have begun to articulate and name a connection I needed.
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, by Helen Jukes, is published by Scribner UK on July 26, priced £14.99. Offer price £11.99 (20 per cent discount) until July 22. Order at mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15.