Letters to My Daughter: The Keeper's Way

 

Dear Daughter,

The bees didn’t just move into the hive. They moved into me.

After that first rescue, something in our rhythm began to change. I was still running a shop in the Air Force, still leading a crew of seven through the relentless tempo of jet engines and mission deadlines. The pace hadn’t slowed—but I had. Not in performance, but in presence. I found myself breathing differently. Watching more. Listening in ways I hadn’t before. The urgency that had once felt necessary began to feel brittle.

At home, I noticed the contrast more sharply. Coffee still went cold before I could finish it. Meals were still eaten standing up. But the bees had introduced a new cadence—one that didn’t rush, didn’t demand, didn’t punish. They had shown me a different kind of time.

The bees I had rescued didn’t survive. They were too small, and I was too inexperienced to know what they needed. I didn’t know how to save them. But they taught me a great deal before they passed. They taught me to pay attention. To move slowly. To honor the fragility of life and the weight of responsibility. And true to fashion, I had put the cart before the horse—leaping into rescue before learning how to truly care.

So I sought mentorship.

I met Monica King at the entrance to her property, the day I bought my first nucleus colony. She stepped out in a full bee suit, her presence as grounded and tough as the desert itself. She didn’t rush. She didn’t sell. She simply greeted me with quiet confidence and a warmth that felt earned. She carried a kind of wisdom I don’t find in many people—quiet, patient, elemental. She told me what to do when I got home, and trusted me to listen.

I remember placing the box on top of the hive I had prepared for them. I removed the plastic plug that had been installed with care, and there they were—tiny bee faces staring back at me from the entrance. They didn’t rush out. They just looked. At me. At the new space. At the world they were about to enter.

It felt like a beginning.

Monica taught me things I could never read in a book—things that come only from years of experience and a kind of wisdom that lives in the body. She was a master of her craft. Over the years, she guided me through my first requeening on the original hive, introduced me to other beekeepers in the area who quickly became dear friends, and took me out on bee removals where I was taught the intimate customs of wild bees—their etiquette of air and intention. She even began entrusting me with simple swarm rescues on my own.

She taught me how to move with bees, not around them. How to read the frames like a living manuscript—watching the way they clustered, the way they moved, the way their wings held tension or ease. Looking for the signs of a healthy colony or one in distress simply from reading the beautiful golden wax and watching the movement of the bees. She taught me that bees don’t just live in hives—they live in rhythm, in scent, in memory.

She guided me through my first split with the original colony I had purchased from her. I loved that new split. I watched them with the same tenderness I had given the first. They were strong, curious, full of promise.

And then—they taught me grief.

It was my first split. A colony I had nurtured, watched grow, celebrated. I had done everything in best practice for them.  Then came the rain. And after the rain, the puddles. And in those puddles—poison. Pesticides sprayed across the suburban landscape, invisible and indifferent. The bees drank from the puddles, carried the poison home, and sprayed it across their own hive in the act of cooling. They were trying to protect their home. And it killed them.

Your father came in from outside. He didn’t say anything at first. Just stood in the doorway, his face pale. “There are thousands of dead bees,” he said quietly. I ran out back. The ground was littered with bodies. Golden, curled, still. The hive was silent.

I cried.

Not just for the bees. But for the violence of it. For the monster that suburbia had become. For the way it stole what was ours and allowed these creatures to suffer. It felt like a betrayal. Like the land itself had turned against us. I buried the dead. I whispered apologies. I sat beside the empty hive and let the grief wash through me.

And in that silence, something stirred. It wasn’t loud. It didn’t come from the hive—that space was still, emptied of its golden pulse. It came from somewhere deeper, somewhere inside me. A pull. A knowing. A wild urge, quiet but insistent, rising through the grief like a thread of instinct. I sat beside the empty box, surrounded by the curled bodies of what had once been a thriving colony, and I felt the ache of it—not just the loss, but the truth it revealed.

I had tried to build something sacred in a place that didn’t know how to hold it. The puddles were poisoned. The silence was manicured. The land was no longer ours.

And yet, something within me was already reaching beyond it—toward something older, wilder, waiting. I didn’t know where yet. But I knew we had to go.

Lesson for you, my daughter: Grief is not the end. It’s a doorway. When something sacred is lost, listen to what rises in the silence. It may be a wild urge. It may be a knowing. It may be the land calling you somewhere new. Let it guide you. Even when the world feels poisoned, your instinct to protect, to move, to begin again—that is holy.

Love, 

Your Mother 

The Desert Druid