Charlie Pollard, Devon’s best and foremost member
of the Beekeepers’ Society
June 1962
Sylvia tends the hive well.
Her husband bumbles
and his back’s full of stingers.
Sylvia transfers queens
from one hive to the next
so that a virgin bee ascends
the throne. The old one’s
outgrown her little home
and moves on.
Sylvia’s husband skips meetings,
absent as summer snow.
I marvel at how she grows
her garden and home alone
and still manages the bees,
cares for their honeycomb.
In a letter to her mother, Sylvia wrote that the local bee meeting was “attended by the rector, the midwife, and assorted beekeeping people from neighboring villages.” In her journal entry of June 7, 1962, Sylvia describes the constituents of the Beekeepers? Society as “a group of miscellaneous Devonians … an assortment of shapeless men in brown speckled bulgy tweeds … [and] two women, one very large, tall, stout, in a glistening aqua-blue raincoat, the other cadaverous as a librarian in a dun raincoat.”