listing-to-port:

1. Tell the bees of things smaller than a full death; the death of an idea, or of hope, or of a looming worry; the death of an old plan and the birth of a new one; or the slow deaths of cut flowers in the vase.

2. The bees would like to know about any little things that you have found in gardens. About the sunlit crevice behind the statue, or the pool of stagnant water in the old urn where a sly weed is curling out secret tendrils. They like dropped toys in thickets, warm cracks in bark, that place out back that hides the bins. If you tell them well enough, some day you may find a grateful bee there.

3. Tell the bees of any theories that you have come up with. They will forget, poor things, having only insect brains. But in telling them you may come to see any flaws that have heretofore gone unnoticed.

4. Tell the bees if you are lonely. Bees are inveterate matchmakers, and they will endeavour (as far as their busy schedule allows) to find you friends and lovers and fellow-apiarists and the like via the medium of humorous bee-related incidents. Be warned by doing this that you may be subjecting yourself to the bees’ variety of humour. It is somewhat unlike our own.

5. Tell the bees about book contracts, papers published, and kind words from proof-readers. In the evening, too, the bees would like you to read to them as they fall asleep. They prefer romances but will settle for anything new.

6. The bees would like to know of any times that you were swept away in music, of the times you lay back gasping and half-drowned in it, your self all gone and just the music left; or of those times you danced without any care at all, and each step felled an unquiet city. In return, they will hum for you. It is impolite to tell them that they have not got the tune quite right.

7. Tell the bees whenever you thought you were lost but found your way once more. This will help them guide others home, should they need to.

8. Tell them of historical bees, of the bees of your childhood, of stings that saved a ship or brought down a government or of bees whose passing made a tiny breeze on your toddler ear.

9. Then too the bees, being all wrapped up in motion and in doing, these bees would like to hear of your epic sleeps. Tell them how you walked down the far side of the mountain triumphant, and came home to lay like a warm and snoring log for fifteen hours. Tell them of the aftermath of the twenty-third mile, of the drifting fever-dream, of the night after the one you saw the sun rise on. These things are best told to bumblebees, to help them sleep through the Winter.

10. You should not tell the bees about the honey-wine you drank in the old clover meadow after dark, or how it tasted on her lips, or the way the moon slipped between the racing clouds. They would like to know, but it is none of their business.