Telling the Bees

A daughter's grief.

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.

Bees and the afterlife are deeply intertwined. They are known as psychpomps- their role is to guide souls from the world of the living to the afterlife. Psychopomps can be deities, spirits, animals, or symbolic guides, they are known as BOUNDARY-CROSSERS, tiny messengers between worlds, moving freely between life and death. They don’t judge or punish; they simply accompany the soul on its journey, ensuring it reaches the next realm safely. I like to think the bees accompanied my Mum on her travels. 

When the matriarch dies, everything shifts. The rhythm changes. The structure changes. The hive feels it.
My mum was the glue of our family. The quiet force holding things together in ways people rarely acknowledge until she’s no longer there to do it. She held generations together through care, routine, sacrifice, softness and sheer endurance. And after she passed, I felt the weight of everything collapse downward, carrying responsibilities that had always lived on her shoulders. The unspoken duties women inherit without discussion. Organising. Holding people together. Meeting people's expectations. Absorbing everyone’s emotions while trying to survive my own.

And unfortunately, grief inside traditional patriarchal dynamics can become another kind of exhaustion entirely.
Mum taught me that love often looked like sacrifice, resilience, endurance -she was surviving the only way she knew how. That women feed everyone else before themselves. That your needs come after the men, after the elders, after the children, after the house. You are praised for being selfless. Rewarded for surviving quietly. Loved most when you are useful. These are terms and conditions.

Women mourning while still cooking. Still hosting. Still caring for others. Still running a business. This season of my life revealed people clearly. Their intentions. Their character.  Their depth. Their capacity to care. The love that was real. The love that was performative. But grief strips you raw.

During the most devastating period of my life, it was women who held me.
My aunties. My sisters. My cousins. My friends. (You all know who you are and I am forever grateful)
We, the worker bees, overextend ourselves trying to stabilise what has been disrupted.

The women who cooked nourishing meals so nobody forgot to eat. The women who cleaned the house while people came and went endlessly through the doors. The women who made tea while I sat there dissociating. The women who sat up with me until 3am while grief clawed through my chest. The women who let me sleep because my body was inflamed with exhaustion. The women who arrived with tea, flowers, cake, stories, silence…a safe space.

The sisterhood held me together. And that, too, reminds me of bees.
Because a colony cannot survive in isolation. Bees thrive through community, through labour, through care, through collective survival. And grief taught me the same thing. On the days people couldn’t lift me out of the pit, the real ones climbed down into my dwelling of depression, just to keep me company.

Like worker bees protecting the colony, they stepped in instinctively.
Not because they were asked to. Because women know.

Some days I wake up exhausted even after hours of sleep. Grief lives in the body. In the bones. In the nervous system. People see you smiling, showing up, still giving, still functioning - and assume you must be okay. But very few people see the actual weight being carried…until you have been through the motions.

But grief changes you.
It doesn’t leave. You just grow around it.

I am an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter. A lineage of women who continue to break cycles of oppression. If you know anything about eldest daughters, we become extensions of our mothers through matriarchal conditioning. We learn to anticipate everyone’s needs. To read the emotional temperature of a room within seconds. To hold tension quietly. To overfunction. To organise. To carry. To nurture. To absorb. And like my mother, I kept standing even when I was shattered. She taught me resilience simply by continuing despite the pain coming from every direction.

So when my mother died, something inside me cracked open. Suddenly I was not only grieving my mum, I was inheriting her duties within the hive. The emotional labour. The responsibility. The silent expectations.

And the frightening thing is, I stepped into that role instinctively. Automatically. Like something ancient and inherited moving through my bloodline. But grief has forced me to question that inheritance too.

Because bees do not survive by one bee sacrificing itself entirely for the colony. A hive survives through collective care. Shared labour. Interdependence. Protection.

And maybe healing, for me, looks like learning that I do not have to earn love through exhaustion.

And I think somewhere along the way, the eldest daughters become the keepers of the hive’s memory. The ones who remember the recipes, the crafts of the hand, the stories, the birthdays, the emotional histories, the fractures no one speaks about aloud.

Now her eyes are mine.
Her magic is mine.
Her power lives through me.

And while some people may feel uncomfortable watching me, a woman, fully step into herself, there is only room for one Queen Bee.

Her legacy lives on through me.

Not through perfection. Not through pleasing people. Not through survival. Not through endless sacrifice. But through boundaries, authenticity, intuition, softness, rage, love, creativity and truth. By creating a life she sacrificed for me to have.

Being her daughter has taught me that the mother-daughter bond is one of the most complex and powerful relationships there is. It’s full of love, lessons, and legacy. I’ve seen how Mum broke cycles - she changed things for the better.

My Mum was creative through and through. But back then, creativity didn’t pay the bills, so she became a nurse. Because of her dedication and love for her work, I’ve been able to live the creative life she once dreamed of. She allowed me to create and play and her spark runs through everything I make. Only now do I realise that’s how she helped me build my creative foundation.

She was always my biggest cheerleader. A huge support for my work. She loved following my journey from afar, and although she is not here to do that anymore, her voice will always be at the back of my head.

My mum didn’t raise me to depend on her for everything. I saw her value beyond what she did for others. Beyond cooking, cleaning, organising, caregiving. I saw her child like spirit. Her pain. Her grief. Her quirks. Her wisdom. Her ability to make a house a home. Her ability to continue through impossible things. I saw the cycles she broke for me.

And now I understand something else:

Protecting your own colony is sacred.
I choose my peace.
I choose my community.
I choose rest. I choose boundaries.
I choose the people who pour back into me unconditionally.

Some days I wake up exhausted even after sleeping for hours. Grief lives physically in the body. Inflammation. Fatigue. Ache. A dysregulated nervous system. My body is rewriting itself after grief. I feel it every day. The universe tests me daily, but I am still here. Still standing. Still learning how to rebuild a life after loss.

Some days grief feels loud.
Some days it is eerily quiet.
But it is always there.

Despite everything, bees continue.
Even after disruption.
Even after storms.
Even after loss.

They rebuild. They adapt. They protect what remains.

Survival does not mean the absence of grief, but learning how to carry it collectively. With friends, with family, with strangers.

I think that is what the ritual of telling the bees was really about.
Not superstition.
Not fear.

A collective remembrance.
Acknowledging that a loss so profound should not pass through the world unnoticed. That death echoes through every living thing connected to it. 

As we pass through the warmth of spring, the bees are swarming. They are the bearers of good fortune and a symbol of new beginnings.

Today we will celebrate Mum by making some Dhal puri using some frozen dhal she left in my freezer and a good old curry. I’ll tell the bees it's Mum’s 72nd birthday, but I am sure they already know.

In honour of her caring spirit, we're inviting donations Bees Abroad: supporting sustainable beekeeping projects in East Africa that help families and Communities build better futures. These initiatives help families and communities build better futures -a fitting tribute to Mila's lifelong commitment to helping others and my work she always supported.

https://milabayedajee.muchloved.com/

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Wild Bee Company (@wildbee_co)