Design & the Bees

Photo by Meggyn Pomerleau from Unsplash.

When I was in my early twenties, I spent a few years discerning religious life in a contemplative monastic community. During my time there, the community decided to start keeping bees. I was there when we picked up our first hive.

They arrived at the post office. In the mail. (Yes, apparently you can ship bees through the U.S. Postal Service — a queenless colony in a wooden cage, supplied with sugar water for the journey, humming away, waiting to be united with their future queen.)

When we went to pick them up, there was a straggler on the outside of the cage. A single bee that had apparently joined somewhere in transit, clinging to the exterior even though she had no access to the sugar water inside and no connection to the colony.

The sister I was with tried to shoo her away. She wouldn’t leave.

The postal worker said, “That one’s not going anywhere.”

And she didn’t. She rode back with us, still on the outside of the cage, all the way to the monastery. No hive, no queen, no logical reason to stay — just an inexplicable commitment to something she couldn’t fully access.

I think about that bee a lot.

Why a bee, specifically

I was afraid of bees when I was little. My great-grandfather kept them.

I remember watching him work his hives — he only kept one or two, in his yard. No suit, no gloves, no smoker. Just him, moving slowly among the bees like he belonged there. They buzzed around him, unbothered, and he was unbothered back. When I asked him how he wasn’t scared, he told me bees aren’t afraid unless they smell that you are.

I don’t know if that’s entomologically precise, but it was true enough. I watched him long enough to believe him, and the fear left.

Bees have shown up in my work for years. Sometimes literally — I’ll reach for a bee motif in a pattern, or a honeycomb structure in a layout, without really deciding to. Sometimes more quietly, in the way I think about making things: slowly, collaboratively, in small precise pieces that add up.

That’s the work I want to do.

I’d loved bees since that experience with my great-grandfather. But my years in the monastery taught me to appreciate them more deeply. Monastic life is structured around the same principles I keep finding in the honeybee: patient rhythm, collaborative work in service of something larger, attention to small precise actions that compound into something beyond the individual. Both monasticism and beekeeping ask you to work within ancient patterns, trusting that the structure itself will produce something sweet and fruitful.

I’m not in the monastery anymore. But I’m still trying to build something in that posture.

On the outside of the cage

I’m venturing more intentionally into freelance after a number of years as an in-house designer for a non-profit, designing within an established brand. Articulating my own voice, choosing a symbol, deciding what I want this to be — it’s a lot like clinging to the outside of a cage. The hive isn’t built yet. The queen isn’t installed. Most days, I don’t have full access to the thing I’m committing to.

It would be easy to be afraid of that.

But I keep thinking about my great-grandfather in his yard, and the postal bee on the outside of the cage. Both of them were doing something unreasonable. Neither of them seemed worried about it.

And neither of them were alone, really. My great-grandfather had his bees. The postal bee had a colony she was following, even from the outside. Bees don’t make honey alone — a single bee produces about a twelfth of a teaspoon in her lifetime. Everything meaningful they make is collective.

Freelancing can feel like the opposite of that. One person, one laptop, one quiet desk. But the longer I do this work, the more I notice that nothing I make is really mine alone. The client’s vision. The photographer whose image I’m typesetting around. The writer whose words I’m making room for. The reader on the other end of the design, who completes it by paying attention.

Design, at its best, is hive-making. Hives have a beauty to them — but they’re not made to be beautiful. They’re made to fulfill a purpose. That’s how design is, too. The work is in service of something. The form follows from the function, and if care goes in, it shows up as a kind of beauty.

Slow symbols

I’m a designer, so people assume I’d have my own logo locked down before launching anything. I don’t — not yet. The honeybee is a through-line in my thinking, not a finished mark on a business card.

This feels important to say out loud: I’m taking my time with it.

The truest brands I’ve worked on — and the ones I’ve most admired from a distance — weren’t assembled quickly. They were recognized over time. A symbol earns its place by refusing to leave. You keep coming back to it, trying to outgrow it, and finding you can’t. That’s usually a sign you’ve found something real.

The bee keeps showing up. I keep letting her.