When I first became keeper of a colony of honeybees, I was thinking more than anything of escape. I’d just turned 30 and had recently moved from Brighton to Oxford, having taken a job on a whim, again, moving out of one rented house in one city and into another as I had done throughout my 20s. But the new job was stressful. I spent long hours at the office in front of a screen. I was under pressure from company targets and deadlines, thrown into frenetic communications with colleagues who sounded as stretched as I felt, and disconnected from the world — the world! — I glimpsed as I cycled to and from work each day.

Our garden was little more than a slim patch of weeds within spitting distance of a busy road, but it was secluded enough that I could go there and remain hidden, and so I began imagining a hive out there; imagined myself finding some respite among the bees, away from the hecticness of the city.

Of course, things rarely turn out as we imagine them, and when later that year I was given a honeybee colony as a gift by a group of friends, it was not respite, and not quiet that I found at first. Quite suddenly I was made accountable to another creature, many of them, really — responsible for ensuring the bees were healthy, free from predators and disease. If all went well, I might take a little honey at the end of the season; but for the first few weeks, eyeing the hive at the end of the garden, I was more concerned that they’d either die or fly away.

The thing is that honeybees are so strange. When you look at a dog or cat — the arrangement of eyes, nose, mouth and ears — you are able to recognize and relate to a face. But with a bee you’d need a microscope, and even then the body is so alien that you might have to reach for diagrams to make sense of her: she has five eyes; her “ears” are in her antennae and in the crooks of her knees; her teeth are like pincers, arranged outside and to either side of her head. Which is to say nothing of the colony. A colony is nebulous and shifting; when it takes flight as a swarm it can seem to belong more to the air than anything in the material world. You can’t draw a ring around it; can’t make a body out of it. How, then, to begin relating to a superorganism of this kind — one I’d been tasked with keeping?