A few years ago, I developed a fleeting, sensational zest for gardening. I was living in Tempe, a Sydney suburb famed for her proximity to roaring arterial roads, where flyovers rattle the glassware within cabinets bought from the IKEA just down the street. Not a likely location for a Gardening Australia-style idyll. Yet that’s exactly what I found myself conjuring. Mowing the lawn and turning the compost in my Blundstones, I concocted plans for a garden to rival even the Vietnamese lady’s across the road, an impressive tangle of dragon fruit cacti and elephant’s ears.

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I recalled my mother’s gardening plans for the family home. Those that came to be, like lilly pilly plantings and frog pond diggings, and those that never eventuated, like the chicken shed. On weekends I’d help Mum mulch tree cuttings, beat back lantana or split logs in our bushy yard on Scotland Island. Weekdays post-school were spent planted in front of the television, watching that little box until Mum got home from work—usually mid-way through an episode of The Nanny. But on Saturday, we’d roll our sleeves up. Despite complaining throughout, I remember those green-thumbed moments fondly.

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Years later, I felt a taste of that same contentment as I was carried away by my garden ambitions. I envisioned a pastoral paradise sprawled across my modest yard, around the corner from a ghostly Kingsford Smith Airport during the pandemic. Through my palpable, misguided satisfaction, I imagined all manner of veggies clambering up the back fence, thrusting fierce from what I didn’t realise was contaminated soil. Along with those flowering delights, busy pollinators buzzed happily, from zucchini stamen to tomato blossom, before disappearing into the air, as far as their wings could take them, their flight allowing a vicarious freedom that lockdown laws denied.

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I knew: I had to get some bees.

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Mum’s chickens might not have ever made it off the ground, but surely hosting a bunch of teeny-tiny bees couldn’t be that hard. Besides, my friend from high school, Elyse, was a beekeeper, so she could show me the ropes. How complicated could it be?

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I even fancied I’d look cute in my special suit, wielding my weird pre-industrial-revolution smoky thing. I’d take little jars of honey with gingham fabric on the lids to dinner parties with friends—maybe I’d sell it on the side of the road like a sweet, enterprising kid with a lemonade stand. Mum would've loved all that.​

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The notion was tantalising, definitely more excitement than I was accustomed to in my tired routine of Zoom calls and walks around my restricted radius. In a fit of titillated whim, I messaged Elyse, who was thrilled and very encouraging of my plan. ‘You’d be great at it,’ she said, ‘And a lot of the time, the bees will just be a box in your backyard you’ll hardly notice.’

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Within a week, we were at the beekeeping supply store in Hornsby, and I was dropping around $1K beekeeping supplies. With that, the point of no return had passed, before I even had time to think about it properly. I’d used the last of my share of Mum’s estate on my apiary setup, having recently made a similar impulse purchase on a dodgy used car, which I’d imagined might also bring me some relief from the lockdowns we were going in and out of.

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While there was some truth to Elyse’s optimistic remarks, and I still appreciate her supportive, enthusiastic energy, the idea that beekeeping is easy was… a tad misleading. I had to learn fast, through mistake after mistake, strange event after strange event, bee sting after bee sting.

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