I don’t know much about bees. I’ll say that upfront.
What I do know is that I once spent ten minutes on my knees in a stable, carefully unpicking cobweb threads from the legs and wings of a bumblebee that had got itself thoroughly tangled. It took patience. The bee, to its credit, took patience too. It stayed still. It seemed to understand, or at least to accept, that something was being done on its behalf.
When I’d freed the last thread, I offered it water on the end of my finger. It drank. Sat there for a while, collecting itself. Then flew away.
That was it. No drama. No acknowledgement. Just a small creature getting on with its life.
I’ve thought about that moment more than seems reasonable.
What We Share a Country With
Britain has around 270 species of bee. Most people could name two, maybe three. The rest go about their business almost entirely unnoticed.
The masonry bees that used to find their way into my bathroom when I lived in a basement flat are a good example. I had no idea what they were at the time. Slightly anxious about them, if I’m honest. They turned out to be solitary bees, nesting in the old mortar of the building above, entirely uninterested in me. Each female works alone, building her own nest, laying her eggs, sealing everything shut. No queen to serve. No colony to defend. Just a single bee doing everything herself.
There’s something admirable about that.
Around ninety percent of British bee species are solitary. They don’t make honey. They don’t live in hives. They go largely unrecognised and almost entirely uncelebrated. And yet they are, alongside the bumblebees and honeybees we’re more familiar with, quietly holding a great deal together.
What Quietly Holding Things Together Actually Means
Bees pollinate around three quarters of the world’s flowering plants. A significant portion of what ends up on a British plate got there because a bee landed on a flower at the right moment. Apples, pears, strawberries, broad beans, courgettes. The list is long.
This is not a small thing to lose.
And losing it is not a hypothetical. Bee populations across the UK have been declining for decades. Habitat loss, pesticide use, the steady reduction of wildflower meadows and unmanaged green space. The causes are well documented. The solutions are largely known. The gap between knowing and doing is where the problem lives.
World Bee Day, which falls on 20 May each year, exists partly to close that gap. It is a reminder, not a celebration. A prompt to pay attention to something that has been going on without most of us noticing.
The Bumblebee’s Version of Events
I think about what that afternoon in the stable looked like from the bee’s perspective, which is admittedly a strange thing to think about.
It was in difficulty. Something intervened. It recovered. It left.
From where I was, it felt like a moment. Something quiet and oddly affecting. The bee drank water from my finger and that was, in whatever small way these things can be, enough.
I’m not going to dress that up into a lesson. But there is something in the simplicity of it. A creature entirely focused on staying alive, doing what it was built to do, unbothered by anything beyond the immediate task. No performance. No wasted effort.
The Stoics would have recognised something in that. Marcus Aurelius returned again and again to the idea of doing your work and doing it well, without complaint and without expectation of recognition. The bee had that entirely sorted.
What Actually Helps
If you have a garden or balcony, planting things that flower in early spring and late summer makes a real difference. Bees need food at both ends of the season, when pickings are thin. Lavender, borage, and single flowered dahlias are all useful. So is leaving a patch of lawn unmown through May, which is why No Mow May exists, giving wildflowers a chance to come through.
It doesn’t require much. That’s the point.
The bee in the stable didn’t ask for much either. A few minutes. Some water. A little patience.
It knew what to do after that.
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