A Beekeeper's Farewell

Spring - Week 19 - On the Wild That Cannot Be Tamed

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

The sun is setting on my apiary tonight, golden light washing over three white boxes that have been fixtures in my yard for years now. The hives are humming with their usual evening activity, but tonight feels different. Heavy. They don't know what I know - that tomorrow will be their last day here.

After years of tending these colonies, watching them build, survive winters, raise new generations, I never thought it would end this way. Not with a bear attack or colony collapse or mites - threats I've vigilantly guarded against - but because the bees themselves have changed. Become something dangerous.

The aggression built slowly at first. A few extra stings during inspections. Then pursuing us farther than normal. Then the terrible day a few weeks ago when I was stung repeatedly, far from the hives. We tried everything - repositioning the entrances away from the yard, adding more barriers. The final hope was re-queening, introducing gentler genetics to tame whatever wildness had taken hold.

But today revealed their answer: all three new queens dead, and multiple queen cells under construction. The message couldn't be clearer: they choose their own bloodline. They choose this fierce, defensive nature that has transformed them from backyard companions to neighborhood threats. Potentially africanized, my wise mentor tells me. No longer safe to keep here.

I ran my fingers across the smooth wood of the nearest hive. Inside, thousands of beings continue their perfect dance of cooperation, unaware that I've made the call that will end their story. I feel like a traitor. A failure. And yet, I've become afraid to walk in my own yard, to garden near blooming plants, to exist in the space I've created.

There's a unique sorrow in knowing something another being doesn't know about their own fate. I felt it with my old whippets before they were put to sleep - this heavy, secret knowledge. The bees work on, planning for a future they won't have, while I stand here grieving what hasn't yet happened.

Part of my identity is wrapped up in these boxes. “The bee lady,” friends call me. Hours spent learning their language, marveling at their society, becoming fluent in their needs and habits. Tomorrow, that title becomes past tense. A chapter closing that I never wanted to end.

I'm caught between relief and grief. Relief that soon I won't jump at every buzzing sound, that my yard will be mine again. But profound grief for these vibrant, living creatures whose powerful will to survive is so evident in their rejection of the queens I tried to give them. They want to live - just not in the way that allows us to coexist safely.

Tonight I honor what they've taught me: about determination, about the wild that remains untamable even in our cultivated spaces. About how deeply we can care for beings so different from ourselves, and how heartbreaking it is when that relationship must end.

Tomorrow will bring its own emotions. But tonight, I sit with this strange, quiet moment of knowing, of bearing witness, of saying goodbye to something that has been part of me for longer than I realized.

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What few people understand about my relationship with these bees is how deeply they've been intertwined with my healing. After the accident, when the world became a dizzying series of doctor's appointments and physical therapy sessions, the apiary offered something that medicine couldn't provide: a different kind of restoration.

I remember those first days back home, when my body felt like a stranger's and simple tasks exhausted me. My attention span was fractured, my patience thin. But something remarkable happened when I would be with the hives. The continuous, gentle hum worked its way into my nervous system, recalibrating something fundamental that had been thrown off-balance. A sound therapy no doctor had prescribed.

There's research about this, I've since learned – about how certain sound frequencies can affect brain waves, heart rhythms, even cellular regeneration. The bees weren't just making noise; they were broadcasting healing at 190-250Hz, a living symphony tuned precisely to what my wounded body and mind needed most.

How ironic that these creatures who've now become a threat were once my most steadfast healers. The same fierce nature that now makes them dangerous was what I admired during recovery – their relentless drive, their collective resilience.

When I stand at the hives now and feel fear instead of comfort, I try to hold both truths: that they helped make me whole again, and that our time together has reached its natural conclusion. The healing they offered was always wild at its core – untamed, unbounded by human expectation, following its own ancient wisdom. That wildness restored me and now asks me to release it.

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But who will I become when the hives are gone? This question haunts me as I watch the evening unfold. For years, my rhythms have been attuned to theirs - checking winter weather forecasts with their needs in mind, planning garden plantings for continuous bloom, setting aside weekends for hive inspections, building bear-proof fences. The scaffolding of my seasons have been partially built around their care. This sudden freedom feels more like emptiness than liberation.

I find myself mourning not just the bees themselves but the person I became through knowing them. More observant. More patient. More willing to be humbled by complexities I couldn't control. The bees taught me to move slowly, to breathe deeply when afraid, to understand that sometimes retreat is the wisest response to threat. These lessons weren't always gentle, but they reshaped me nonetheless.

Perhaps this is the hardest part of letting go - recognizing that relationships change us, even relationships with non-human beings. And that endings require us to sort through what remains after the physical presence is gone. I stand at this threshold between who I was with them and who I might become without, uncertain of the transformation this loss will bring.

I could retreat from this tenderness, decide never again to invest so much of myself in something so vulnerable to lose. But that feels like betraying what the bees would have me learn - that life continues, adapts, finds new expressions even after disruption. Their resilience was what drew me to them initially; perhaps I need to embody that quality now.

Maybe there will be other bees next springtime for me, gentler ones in a different space. Or perhaps this ending is simply a turning in the spiral of connection that continues throughout a lifetime - drawing us toward new relationships with the living world around us. The capacity to nurture doesn't disappear with one chapter's closing.

For now, I'll allow myself this grief without rushing forward. I'll honor what was by feeling its absence fully. And I'll watch for signs of who I might become next - carrying my heightened awareness, the reverence for small lives, the understanding that even the creatures who wound us have something essential to teach.

After tomorrow, I'll no longer be a beekeeper. But I'll forever be someone who was changed by bees, someone who learned the profound lesson that loving what is wild means sometimes letting it go.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let's experience nature's gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane