For a long time, beekeepers have told bees their news. They’ve told their bees about weddings, and when people they know have died. It’s said that if they don’t, the bees will leave their hives, or stop making honey, or die.

Sometimes, like after Queen Elizabeth II died, beekeepers draped hives in black ribbon. Sometimes they’d shift their hives slightly to the right. “This movement would signal to the bees that the universe had changed, ever so slightly.”

Helen Jukes’ book is A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees, and Tammy Horn Potter’s is Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation.

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