The Day The Bees Came

Jill’s dad was a gardener. Often, especially in summer, he would bring home brightly coloured blooms of roses or gladioli, or bunches of polyanthus in the spring.Sometimes he would bring flowers for Jill’s mother to make into flower arrangements which she would display in the church or at a fete. But most of all Jill liked it when her dad read her stories about the bees.

Jill had a book about bees. It was a story of a man who talked to the bees when they came into his garden. In the story the man stopped talking to the bees and the bees stopped coming into the garden. Jill liked this story, she could not remember seeing a real bee but she knew what one would look like. She liked to try to draw the flowers her dad brought home and always put in some bees.

One warm Summer’s afternoon Jill was playing in the garden when she heard a humming sound. Going to where the sound came from she saw a large number of bees collecting nectar from the open flowers.

She quickly ran indoors. “Dad, dad!” Jill shouted excitedly, “the bees are here, the bees are here!”

Jill lead her dad back into the garden to where the bees were busily collecting nectar from the Lupins, the purple flowered Mallow bushes, the bright red geums, the blue agapanthus and tall delphiniums.

“Look, dad, it’s the bees, like in my book!” Jill ran to find her book to show her dad.

Jill spent a lot of that summer with the bees, she would watch them and talk to them as they buzzed around the flowers. She found they payed no attention to her and just went about their work, humming tunefully. All summer Jill would look for the bees when she was in the garden.

Then, one day, the bees did not come into the garden.

When Jill’s dad came home from work Jill cried, “the bees are not here, I did talk to them.” her voice unsteady and worried.

Behind their house was a footpath at the edge of a field. Jill’s dad took Jill along the path until they could see some gardens behind the hedge at the field’s edge. Here there were some beehives, a few bees flying in and out in the late Summer’s cooling daylight.

“There.” said Jill’s dad, “That is where your bees live, they will sleep in the Winter and come back next year.”

“Does the man talk to them?” asked Jill, anxious to know that the man who owned the bees would know about talking to them.

“I expect he does” smiled Jill’s dad.

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