Bodmin and the Bees
Disrupted routines and unwanted intrusions and maybe unexpected sweetness
Hello
Welcome if you are new here, I tend to write more regularly than I have been about the way mindfulness supports my life and this in turn (along with my clinical experience and training) is the basis of my therapeutic work and mindfulness teaching. It helps me to write as I ponder some of the ideas within mindfulness and secular buddhist teaching. This post is about some things that have happened in the last few weeks and how mindfulness has been a support and a way of reflecting on those unexpected life things that take you to places that you didn’t even know existed. In my case I have learnt more about bees than I knew there was to know. And honey and patience…
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My 17 year old cat Bodmin died very suddenly leaving us catless for the first time in 18 years. I was feeling very sad about that and a bit lost as I realised my own morning and evening routines were very much bound up with his. He would get fed while I boiled the kettle for my cup of earl grey and then we would both sit on the bench in the garden together and enjoy that soft early morning light and quiet. We would then both go about our day and convene in the evening over more food another trip around the garden and then, once the day was winding down, sit next to each other on the sofa, him with his paws and head on my lap demanding ear scratching until he nodded off. I didn’t realise how much I based my own day and activity around him and how much chatting we did!
A couple of weeks after losing Bodmin, several hundred bees moved into my chimney stack. When they moved in, they caused chaos, apparently it’s like when we move, there is stuff everywhere and you don’t know where anything is and are trying to work out where the cutlery should live and who is going in what bedroom. I also learnt that when they move in, it is quite an effort for them to make the hive and this exhausts the worker bees who have a short lifecycle and move out of the hive to die so they don’t pollute it with their dead bodies.
This meant my bedroom and the front bedroom were full of hundreds of bees, dying bees excreting beeswax that landed in globs and dots all over the floor, windows and bedding. The hum could be heard in the hall downstairs.
I had no idea what to do. I mainly wanted them to go away immediately. I may miss my lovely (albeit grumpy) cat, but thousands of other furry buzzy things wasn’t the replacement I needed. In folklore apparently bees moving in is auspicious…. I think that’s just to make you feel better. Having beeswax and honey in a working chimney stack isn’t a good idea (and they don’t go away if you light it, they come back when it has cooled down) and voids the insurance if there is a fire. There is no insurance cover for bees in your chimney I discovered. I also discovered there are companies who will make it all go away for thousands and thousands of pounds (£12K or more!!). I did experience kindness from a pest control person I called when I thought the bees were wasps (which I’m allergic to) who could do nothing, but did offer reassurance and advice and kept in touch until I found someone who could remove them. Then the local facebook group turned up Christophe the Bee man who came round that day and said, yes you have bees and they have moved in. And will require a whole process to remove- scaffolding, builders as well as specialist removers to cut them out of the chimney and safely rehome them. All this was during the election and despite avoiding the media, I felt there was a strange atmosphere which is a whole other thing.
By now my head was buzzing and I was in overwhelm with all the things I had to learn about bees, and the election, and lots of work in the NHS with complex scenarios and distress and overwhelm and trying to set up my private work. I spent a night at my mum’s then 2 nights on the sofa while the bees calmed down and managed to get in my bedroom with telephone coaching from my very practical friend Sasha and duct taped up the cupboard where the bees were coming into my bedroom. While I was doing this an email arrived from Gaia house saying that a place had come up on a 3 day silent retreat the following day, which was election day….
The day of the election came, I voted and celebrated my daughters first participation in democracy and drove down to Devon for the retreat. The peace, the routine of meditation, veg chopping, tea drinking, hanging out in the woods and walled garden and walking in the fields around the retreat centre were perfect.
The theme was the gentle art of patience. I didn’t know I needed patience, but this was exactly it. Life was a bit complicated at the moment, and as I slowed down, I was aware of stress and how my mind was working hard from a defensive scared place: Wanting a lot of things to be different; wanting someone else to make it all go away; anxious about how I could fund the things I needed to do…. Scenarios continued to play out, not just the bees but other insurmountable problems that won’t go away and it means either living with it or patiently waiting for other options to emerge and they don’t seem to come when you endlessly niggle away with constant thinking and problem solving. If only worry worked….
Eventually my head slowed. Silence, not talking and fuelling the stories gave space to how I was feeling. And eventually, after nearly days of solid thinking, the silence and the sustained practice within a community I trusted, I started to become more spacious and able to step back from my problem solving anxious mind and ask: “what needs to be felt?” And it was mainly sadness, about losing Bodmin and how things are different at home without him and our routine but also my youngest daughter is now fledging and was about to go travelling. I am in a transition phase which is actually very exciting, but am adjusting to living alone for the first time ever. The bees and the things about bees I have had to learn were important, but the underlying accepting loss and change and how as I as a human being struggle to accept this.
The struggle with change that is unwanted is a very human experience, and while we know it intellectually, when we are caught up in change we didn’t expect, want and that this change requires us to spend money we don’t have, change plans and routines and is generally a challenge we haven’t got time or have the resources to manage, we suffer. My example of bees is small compared to people facing life altering health diagnoses, living in unsafe parts of the world and so on. But it was something unwanted I had to face, and am still addressing a couple of months on (now having to rebuild the chimney stack).
Mindfulness of change is not about being Ok with change, it is more that we can pay attention to the fact that there is constant change. Being human, we have a strong desire to feel secure and protected so change can feel very threatening. Mindful awareness supports the tender art of responding to this complex moment of change and reaction.
The initial reaction is to recoil and try and stop the change and it can feel very powerless to realise even though this is so unwanted, it is unstoppable, and if it has to be addressed, there are things we have to do and often learn. The other challenge is that if we do not address the problem, the problem often does not go away. In my case if I did not remove the bees, I could have a hive going down my chimney stack and the older beeswax attracts other insects who also eat the brickwork, never mind the fire risk. There can be a feeling that someone else should surely be able to help! In my case with the bees, I thought the house insurance would help, or the council…. no, neither would. I was lucky that I found the local beekeeping community who knew who could help and have family who have helped me with the money for the bee specialist, the builders and the scaffolding.
Over the month or so they were there, I adjusted to living with the bees, I only got stung once when I stood on a dying bee and overall they seemed very relaxed, with a regular flight path to the chimney. I noticed a pattern to their activity- they like a lie in and go to bed at twilight. My garden felt alive with them and other pollinators and if they weren’t in the working chimney, I think I would have been delighted to be an inadvertent bee keeper.
When the bees were removed it was quite a day, the huge scaffolding was already up with a platform for all the bee equipment and there were 2 builders and 2 beekeepers. We put up signs and I wrote to all the neighbours and we blocked the pavement outside my house. 2 of us stayed on the ground to make sure anyone going past realised there were going to be a lot of bees and possibly debris as they cut into the chimney. The builders worked slowly using a slow drill to least disturb the bees and they and the honeycomb were removed into 2 boxes and brought down and moved over 5 miles away (so they don’t come back) to a beekeepers garden. I got some honey comb and honey but the rest is going to the bees to help them settle into their new home.
Directly after the bee removal I had the joy of going to the International mindfulness conference in Bangor. This was an amazing experience that I am still digesting. I have noticed that my teaching feels different since I got back and have more to reflect on. It was also wonderful to go back to Bangor and reconnect with people in the mindfulness world in person. I shared a cottage with my friend (who had the good idea to do this!) and we swam in the lake below Snowdon after each conference day. I also shared some of the work we have been doing within fatigue at the conference and will make that available soon.
That’s that for now, I have missed writing and hope to get back to a more regular rhythm again in the autumn after the usual summer craziness! Perhaps the metaphor of finding honey amidst all the work and chaos is a good metaphor for life, the sweetness is there, often hidden and sometimes we have to work for it in ways we don’t always expect or want.
much love
Fiona
❤️ 🐝 ❤️ 🐝 ❤️
Thank you for sharing your journey with such honesty and warmth. I’m so sorry for the loss of Bodmin—it’s incredible how much our routines and connections with our pets shape our lives. The unexpected challenge with the bees and your mindfulness approach to navigating it all is truly inspiring. Life’s sweetness often does come in ways we don’t anticipate, and your experience is a beautiful reminder to stay open to finding it, even in the midst of chaos.
This s a great story. My grandmother had bees in a wall of her house and the experience p,Syed out very much the same way. The bee community is crucial to contact.