Bee Meadow

Bee Meadow is a small summer smallholding seen from just above, painted in loose watercolour on a sheet of cold-pressed paper. The grain of the sheet comes up through every wash of green, the hedgerow round the edge is one soft mass of pigment, a stream runs down the eastern side and a stone cottage with a honey stall sits at the top of the footpath. Seven wildflowers grow here — clover, poppy, lavender, borage, apple blossom, sunflower and heather — each with its own nectar, its own time to open and its own weeks of the year, and each painted as a loose clump of blooms rather than a tidy row.

The bees do the work and they do it where you can see it. Every hive holds a colony that grows on what its foragers bring home, and those foragers fly real paths: out along a bowed line to a patch within range, a moment at the flowers, then back to the landing board. Watch the threads and you can read your own meadow — a box with gold running to it from six directions is thriving, a box with nothing leaving the door is hungry. Put too many hives round one patch of clover and they divide the nectar between them until the weakest starves out, so the game is really about where a hive goes, not how many you can afford.

A day lasts about two minutes and a season lasts a week of them, repainting the whole sheet as the year turns and changing which flowers will take. Showers sweep through and grey the paper; the bees stay in and the ground drinks. A swarm drifts over now and then and moves into any empty box you have waiting, wasps come for the fattest hive unless guard bees are posted, and the village fair asks for jars of one particular honey at a price the stall will not match. Everything saves in your browser, and the meadow carries on without you — come back and it tells you what the bees got up to while you were away.