The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Caitlin Hayes has always worked in the margins where scent and composition meet, building fragrance with the precision of someone who understands how a note can carry weight the way a chord carries a melody. The Bees are Flying, her release under the Sorce label, is a 2025 composition that treats honey as an event rather than an ingredient, a substance that arrives already transformed by what surrounds it. Where most honey accords reach immediately for the jar, pulling sweetness forward as the destination, this fragrance sets the honey further back in the structure, letting the minutes around it do most of the talking.
Hayes works against the obvious pull of honey, which in most hands slides quickly toward gourmand territory, the note drizzled over vanillas and tonkas until the whole composition collapses into pastry. Here the honey gets held in tension by Egyptian jasmine absolute, a material that carries its own indolic warmth, almost fecal in its intensity, and by myrrh, cedar, and iris, which drag the structure toward resin and root. The pairing keeps the composition rooted in something earthy and grounded rather than edible.
The evolution
The opening is loud and immediate. Jasmine absolute arrives with a dirty, indolic intensity, and behind it the honey pushes through, dark and resinous and unapologetically animal. The myrrh underneath gives the whole structure gravity, an anchoring sweetness that keeps the top from flying apart. Within the first few minutes the petrichor surfaces, and the composition pivots from something dense and confectionary into something atmospheric, a sudden shift toward wet air and mineral sharpness, like standing near a window while weather moves through. The iris arrives next, dusting the composition in a soft powder that bridges the wet top and the creamy heart. On certain skins this powder reads almost suede-like, a gentle hush between the rain and the warmth.
Cultural impact
The Bees are Flying occupies a distinctive place in contemporary indie perfumery, one where honey gets treated as a structural material rather than a confection. The fragrance sits within a broader ecosystem of niche compositions that resist the easy slide into gourmand territory, and reviewers and collectors have noted its kinship with works like Sorce's own Match Made in Heaven and By Kilian's Love Don't Be Shy, both of which appear in adjacent recommendation lists across fragrance databases.
