The questions never to ask of TikTok are “why this?”, and “why now?” It marks you out as a person who will never understand, whose very concept of time is a bit last century. So, there’s a trend: if a person in their 40s or 50s, looking fit, ripped, rugged, with a confident bearing, a certain ease in their skin, appears on TikTok, there’ll be a swarm of comments underneath saying “beekeeping age”.
It derives from a Rick and Morty episode three years ago: Summer is hanging with her friend Tricia Lange, who’s watching Summer’s dad tend – or, if you like, keep – bees. She calls him sweet, she calls him dorky, she calls him “beekeeping age, I guess”, she lands on: “Summer, I want to fuck your dad.” A working definition: beekeeping age is anyone who should, on society’s cruel terms, be too old to be attractive, and yet is attractive anyway. Summer’s dad is actually 35, but let’s not dwell on the fact that, to gen Z, people in their 30s, 40s and 50s are pretty much interchangeable.
