Echoes Through Generations
Holding space for Tradition
Author’s Note: this essay is part of the Reports from the High Wood series, a weekly premium report from our homestead that offers you enduring lessons for living well in a wounded world. It does not have my normal narrated voiceover because it features two videos I want you to watch and pausing a voiceover to do so felt cumbersome.
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Here are some of our past beekeeping posts that will give context if you are new here:
My grandfather, Mel Hammond, was a beekeeper in Wellfleet, Massachusetts for decades. He was practical, pious, and reserved, deeply connected to his craft. In a video created by the Wellfleet Library, he guides viewers through a beekeeper’s year, the Atlantic wind in his voice clear as he speaks of the seasons with intimate familiarity.
Beekeeping was his way of life, a tradition he earnestly embodied. As his grandson, I try clumsily to carry this forward, tending hives in our little humming meadow with my young daughter, parents, and wife. We learn from his video, not only for its practical lessons but also to understand our place in this quiet, intergenerational chain.
Earlier this week, I found myself repeating his movements, decades later and a few hundred miles north, as I stood in my bee yard and added a second deep super to a booming colony. The bees needed more room. Without it, they would leave, off to find a space that could hold the life they are working so hard to build.
I filmed the process for you and chuckled reviewing the video after I had filmed it because I unintentionally mimic his introduction he gives at the 17:17 mark.
Tradition is not just the passive observance of memory, it is action. It is careful quiet movements, it is the crack of a hive tool prying open wood, it is birch smoke in the air. Watch this short video and see our family’s beekeeping legacy in motion.
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