Bee Leather Journal

A five by seven leather journal with a bee worked into the cover. Small enough to carry, big enough to write a real paragraph in.

There is a custom behind the bee that almost nobody knows and that fits a journal better than anything else we could put on this page. Across England, Ireland, Wales, Germany and New England, beekeepers told their bees the news. Deaths above all, but also births, marriages, departures, arrivals. You knocked gently on the hive until you had their attention and then said it out loud. The Nottinghamshire formula runs: the master's dead, but don't you go. Hives were draped in black for a funeral and given a piece of the wedding cake for a wedding.

If you did not tell them, the New England accounts say the bees left, or stopped making honey, or died. A Norfolk family who bought hives at a dead farmer's auction found them sickly and unlikely to thrive, and said they only picked up once mourning cloth was tied on. It is documented from the middle of the nineteenth century onward and it has not stopped. When Elizabeth II died in 2022, the royal beekeeper went to the seven hives at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House, tied black ribbon to them, knocked, and told them the mistress was dead but they were not to go.

The whole custom rests on one idea: that something which happens to you is not finished until it has been said out loud to somebody who will hold it. That is what a journal is for.

Benjamin International source from artisans in Nepal, Indonesia and India, and every one of these is made by hand. That means the cover takes color unevenly and the tooling sits a little differently on each one, so the journal you get will not be the journal in the photograph. That is the trade you are making and it is the right one.

Good to Know

5 by 7 inches. Embossed leather cover. Handmade, so the emboss depth and the leather color vary piece to piece.

Try It With

a quill pen to write with and sealing wax to close a page you do not want reread. Honeysuckle and Bumblebee Jasper if you want to keep the thread going. More in journals and journals and pens.