When we named this perfume, we took the line as tender. It isn't.

"It's a' for the hiney he'll cherish the bee" comes from Robert Burns's song "My Tocher's the Jewel". The speaker is a young woman describing a suitor who wants her dowry. He looks after the bee because he wants the honey. In the song it is an accusation, not a compliment.

We had it wrong on this website for a good while. This post sets out what the song actually says, why we have kept the name anyway, and what any of it has to do with how the perfume is made.

What the song says

A tocher is a dowry: the money or property a bride brought to a marriage. The song appeared in volume IV of James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum in 1792. It has two stanzas, sung by a woman who has a tocher worth having and a suitor who has noticed.

This is the first:

O meikle thinks my luve o' my beauty, And meikle thinks my luve o' my kin; But little thinks my luve I ken brawlie My tocher's the jewel has charms for him. It's a' for the apple he'll nourish the tree, It's a' for the hiney he'll cherish the bee; My laddie's sae meikle in luve wi' the siller, He canna hae luve to spare for me.

Meikle is "much". I ken brawlie is "I know perfectly well". Siller is silver, meaning money. Hiney, also printed hinny, is honey.

In plain English: he thinks a great deal of my looks and my family, but I know perfectly well it's my dowry he finds charming. He tends the tree for the apple and the bee for the honey. He is so in love with the money that he has no love left over for me.

The apple and the bee make the same point. Nobody feeds an apple tree out of affection for the tree. Read on its own, the bee line sounds like a proverb about care. In its place, it describes a man whose care is entirely for what he can get.

There is a complication. Burns probably did not write the couplet. Early editors of his songs record that the apple and bee lines were older than him, traditional material that he built the song around, as he often did. So the line is in Burns, but not strictly by him. Whatever its origin, its meaning in this song is not in doubt.

In the second stanza she turns and speaks to him directly. His offer of love is "an airle-penny", the coin handed over to seal a bargain, and her tocher is the bargain he wants to buy. She tells him that if he is crafty, she is cunning, and he can try his fortune with someone else. She compares him to timber from a rotten wood and bark from a rotten tree, and says he will slip from her "like a knotless thread". The last line warns him that he will ruin his credit with more women than her.

Burns wrote a good number of songs in a woman's voice, and this is one of the sharp ones. She does not plead with him. By the second stanza she has moved to dismissal. She has worked out what she is worth to him, and she prices his offer the same way. The words give it away: tocher, siller, airle-penny, bargain, fortune, credit. It is a song about love written almost entirely in the language of money.

The line gets misread because it gets quoted alone, cut off from the stanza around it. "Cherish" does most of the damage. It is a warm word, and nobody expects to find it in a sneer. That is how we read it.

Why we kept the name

The suitor's fault is that the bee only matters to him for the honey.

The wildflower meadow at Tarhill Farm is kept the other way round. It wasn't planted as a honey crop. It was made as habitat for bees and other pollinators, and our own hives sit beside it. The perfume came after the meadow, as an attempt to put down what it smells like on a warm afternoon.

So we now read the name as a reply to the line, not a quotation of it. In the song, cherishing the bee is a means to something else. Here it is the point.

The woman in the song would be entitled to say that we sell a perfume with honey in it, so we can hardly claim to be above the honey. That's fair. The difference we would claim is the order things happened in: the meadow first, the perfume afterwards.

The honey problem

Honey is one of the harder smells to put in a bottle.

You can't steam-distil honey into an essential oil the way we distil lavender. Honey is mostly sugar and water, and sugar has no smell. What you recognise as honey comes from very small amounts of other compounds, some carried in from the flowers and others formed as the bees process and store the honey. So perfumers usually build the smell from other materials.

One of the classic materials is phenylacetic acid, along with a few close relatives. In a small dose it smells warm and honeyed. In a larger dose it turns animalic, even urine-like. If you have ever tried a honey perfume and wondered why it smelled faintly of a cat's litter tray, that may be the reason: the same kind of material, a little over the line. Noses differ a good deal in where the line is.

The easy way out is to retreat into vanilla and sugar. That avoids the animal edge, but what you get is a pudding. Honey is not only sweet, and honeycomb less so. A convincing one needs wax, pollen, something dry like hay, and a slight sharpness underneath.

Cherish the Bee has honeycomb at its centre with cinnamon beside it, wildflowers on top, and vanilla underneath. The honey note is vegan and a beautiful recreation of natural honey.  

The meadow

The meadow is beside the lavender fields. It has been sown every year since 2020. In summer it is mostly cornflower, poppy, corn marigold, and chamomile, with Chicory and Meadowsweet ocassionally appearing. 

On a warm afternoon, with no wind, you can smell it from within the lavender fields. It is a soft smell: warm pollen, something sweet, dry grass. It is home to a range of bees, butterflies and other pollinators. 

That is the smell Cherish the Bee is after. It is the gentlest of our seven perfumes.

Cherish the Bee, 50 ml. If you would rather smell it before buying a bottle, it is one of the seven in the Discovery Set.