Detailed honeybee design in pencil

Dad always said a swarm was the bees asking to leave, and the only sensible thing was to ask them where they wanted to go. He would stand in the middle of it with his veil pushed back, talking low about nothing much. I never got the knack. I only ever got the ladder. The swarm settled on a bough above the stile, a heavy dark beard of bodies, and Ruth Hobday came down the lane from Bramble Cottage with a white sheet over her arm, as though she had been waiting thirty years for the chance. She claimed every swarm within a mile of the wood. We argued about it, the way we always did, until the bees lifted and went quietly off between the trunks.

I stood at the stile with my hands full of nothing and watched the last of them go. Ruth folded her sheet and tucked it under her arm. 'Your father would have let them go,' she said. 'He did let them go,' I said, and she laughed, which she had not done in my hearing since the funeral.

Next morning there was a single bee on my kitchen windowsill. It was not moving. The sun came through the glass and lit the stripes on its abdomen, its wings lay flat and clear as cellophane, and its feet had little curved claws that held it to the sill as if it meant to stay. I let it be. I made tea and drank it standing up, and by the time I finished it had gone, out through the gap I had left open for it.