Honora, the youngest of we three sisters—and favourite of the bees who inhabit the roof space of Plas yn Rhiw—would stand in the orchard covered in bees, who shouted in her ears louder than you can imagine, drumming geographical facts and ancient languages, resulting in the most intensively educated woman in Gwynedd, and honey oozed through cracks in our walls and we placed bowls underneath to catch the drips and it was the best honey, plastery and delicious in spoonfuls or with a piece of Battenburg cake.

At last we died and were ourselves consumed by worms, but felt only tickles like bees crawling over our skin, and remembered the dead lion as pictured on the Lyle’s Golden Syrup tin (before we moved to Plas yn Rhiw from Nottingham), and Honny flew back and forth in her bee-endorsed gold suit, recording fragments of bee gossip and distilling them into elliptical poetry hard to understand if you weren’t a bee, and so the decades.

Slate roof being replaced (Honny mentioned) and since Welsh black honeybees protected in law and by our earnest wish, bees being moved to temporary hives, annoyed but revising their schedules, so we three arose from our grave at Llanfaelrhys in womanly semblance (even Honny) and walked in single file along the coast path and across fields, and reached the house, and told the colony we’ll oversee the transition, ensure all goes well, but the bees said sorry we can’t possibly accommodate three more queens.