11/05/2026
Today is my Mum’s birthday.
Somehow, this feels like the right day to finally speak.
On November 2nd 2025, my Mum, Milabaye Dajee, left this realm unexpectedly - far sooner than I could have ever prepared for. Grief cracked through my life, fracturing my forcefield. Since then, I’ve been quiet. Offline. Healing. Trying to understand how to carry a loss so heavy while still navigating life itself.
Life felt like a hive after a disturbance. When a Queen Bee dies, the colony feels it immediately. The hive becomes confused, stressed and disoriented. Survival mode takes over. Worker bees scramble to reorganise themselves around an absence they cannot yet understand. The energy changes. The movement changes. Nothing remains untouched. That is what grief felt like after my Mum died. Grief moves through people the same way it ripples through a colony. Everyone feels the shift.
There’s an old piece of folklore called Telling the Bees.
A well known tradition rooted in parts of England, that we share with our Scottish, German and Irish beekeeping friends.
When someone died, got married, pregnant, had a baby, the bees had to be informed. If major life events were not shared with the bees, it was said the hive might stop producing honey, leave, or perish altogether. Bees are the witnesses to grief and keepers of memory. They are the guardians of the home. Communities would quietly whisper to them - sometimes draping the hives with black cloth to show mourning. I do find irony in the situation as bees are technically ‘deaf’!
Although it took me time to pass this news onto the bees, I found beauty in this ritual. It acts as a reminder of how deeply people felt connected to their bees - not as property but as part of our family. Generations ago, communities grieved together, we wore symbols to show our mourning, now we are just expected to grieve isolation, and go back to work in a few days, despite the fact our brains and bodies are literally rewiring themselves.
Read the whole story on in my Diary of A Beekeeper blog 🐝
https://www.thewildbee.co.uk/blogs/bee-haus/telling-the-bees-my-hive-lost-its-queen
