3yr olds, 103yr olds and the bees between them.

World Bee Day always sneaks up on me a little bit.

Not because I don’t care about bees, obviously I do, but because bees are so stitched into my everyday life that sometimes I forget they are extraordinary. I see them every day. I hear them before I’ve even had my coffee. I absentmindedly step around sleepy bumblebees on pavements and spend entire afternoons watching honeybees come and go from hives like tiny commuters with very important jobs to do.

And if I’m honest, I think I take that for granted.

It took spending time with people aged 3 and people aged 103 to remind me just how magical bees really are.

This week started in a residential care home, where I brought along an observation hive so residents could safely watch live bees up close. I always wonder how people will react the first time the bees arrive in a room. Sometimes there’s nervousness. Sometimes curiosity. Usually there’s at least one person who says, “You’re braver than me!”

But what I love most is how quickly bees unlock memories.

One resident told me about her father keeping bees when she was little. Another remembered helping polish wooden furniture with beeswax as a child, carefully rubbing it into tables until they shined. Someone else talked about the smell of warm honey on toast during rationing years. One gentleman described sitting in clover fields listening to bees while pretending to help with farm work.

The stories just kept coming.

It struck me that for many of them, bees weren’t a “save the bees” campaign or an environmental headline. Bees were simply part of life. They lived alongside them. Bees belonged to gardens, allotments, orchards, churchyards, washing lines, vegetable patches, summer evenings and polished dining tables.

At one point, everyone fell quiet watching the bees move across the hive together.

And honestly? It felt a bit emotional.

Then, a few hours later, I was in a nursery classroom wearing a bee outfit and doing the waggle dance with a room full of 3 year-olds.

Which is not a sentence I ever expected to write about my life.

If you’ve never tried explaining bee communication to toddlers, I can highly recommend it. They accept everything immediately and with complete seriousness. “So the bees dance to tell their friends where flowers are?” Yes. “Can I do the dance too?” Absolutely. “Do bees have best friends?” Potentially. “Can bees eat pizza?” No, but thank you for asking.

We buzzed around the room pretending to collect nectar. We wiggled. We “pollinated” fake flowers. We looked at the live bees with huge wide eyes and the kind of awe adults sometimes forget how to express out loud.

One little girl whispered, “They’re beautiful,” in exactly the same tone people use in art galleries.

And she was right.

That’s the thing bees seem to do better than almost anything else: they connect people.

They connect generations. They connect memory and curiosity. They connect science and storytelling and nature and play. A bee can remind a 103-year-old of polishing furniture with beeswax seventy years ago, and five minutes later inspire a three-year-old to spend the afternoon pretending to fly between flowers.

Same insect. Same wonder.

I came home from both visits thinking about how lucky I am to spend so much time around bees. Not everyone gets to open a hive and hear that low steady hum. Not everyone gets to watch children instinctively protect a dandelion because “the bees might need it.” Not everyone gets to hear elderly people revisit childhood memories they perhaps haven’t spoken about in years.

Bees create moments.

World Bee Day is often about statistics, pollinators, biodiversity, food systems, environmental decline, and those things matter enormously. But this week reminded me that bees matter on a human level too. They are part of our stories. Our childhoods. Our gardens. Our grandparents’ memories. Our future.

And maybe the most hopeful thing of all was realising that the excitement was exactly the same in both rooms.

3 year olds and 103 year olds reacting with the very same expression:

Wonder.