I Am Not Making Bee Merch

Let me tell you, people ask me fairly often, why I do not have merch. No tote bags with bright yellow bees on, no t shirts, no mugs, no branded hoodies for the true fans.

On paper it seems like an obvious thing to do. I have an audience who cares about bees and there is an entire industry built around turning audiences into customers as quickly and as often as possible. So why not?

Reminder: Bees do not produce a surplus so it can be turned into more ‘stuff’. They produce a surplus so that the hive survives winter, so that a new queen can be raised, so that the whole fragile system keeps going even when forage is limited.

Everything in a beehive has a function connected to survival, not to growth for its own sake. It might be a shock to you but there is no bee equivalent of manufacturing a fourth kind of comb nobody asked for because the quarterly numbers needed a boost.

Late stage capitalism (and I use that phrase with full awareness of how often it gets rolled out incoversations) has made us believe that caring about something and buying a product about that thing are basically the same action. So when you care about the ocean, you buy the reusable bottle. When you care about mental health, you buy the candle. When you care about bees, surely you want a bee mug.

None of this is evil exactly. It is just an incredibly efficient way of redirecting genuine concern into a transaction and then calling the transaction care. Or activism.

If you enjoy reading about bees in this way, you can subscribe to Bees & Beyond. I write about bee science, ecology and all thestrange things we are still learning about them.

If you care about bees after reading something I have written, I want the next step to be looking differently at the verge you walk past, or leaving a patch of your garden a bit messier than you normally would, or simply not reaching for the spray the next time something with six legs turns up uninvited. That is what I want.

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Those actions cost nothing and they actually help. A tote bag however only helps my bank balance and does very little else.

There is also (if I am honest) something a bit exhausting about the constant pressure to monetise everything you love. I love bees. I do not need to also run a small retail operation around them to prove that love and I certainly do not want my relationship with them to be filtered through what sells well versus what does not sell.

The minute I start asking which bee fact will make a better print, I have started making decisions for the shop rather than for the bees and that is a door I am simply not interested in opening (sorry-not-sorry)

I do not want to sell you a bee mug. I want to keep writing articles that help you see bees differently. If you want to support that, you can join the paid membership. Most of my longer writing lives there.

No merch, because for me specifically, adding a shop would mean asking you to buy your way into caring, when the entire point of what I do is to get you to actually look, actually notice, actually change something small and real in how you treat the world around you.

It is a practice. It is NOT a purchase. And I would rather you left this newsletter with slightly dirtier hands from your garden than a nicely folded tote bag sitting in a drawer.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, come and subscribe to Bees & Beyond. The free subscription is always here and it always will be.

And if you want to support my work more directly, you can join the paid membership. This is where most of my longer science articles, bee research and beekeeping stories live. It is £5.55 a month (less than the price of a coffee!) and it helps me keep creating this work without turning every idea into something that needs to be sold.