The impulse to preserve a legacy vies with a counter impulse to embellish or edit it. Sometimes whole swathes are omitted from stories handed down generation to generation. While the desire to preserve may override other impulses including caution, the human capacity to re-write a storyline is limitless. The terrain between the need to preserve and the impulse to edit is fraught with conflict: paranoia, resentment, self-aggrandizement, shame, irony and disappointment. Nothing is “simply forgotten” as if by accident. These opposing tendencies to preserve and discard issue from the same need: to control the narrative and write a facet of history. But the narrative is quite impossible to control in the end. My point of departure for this discussion is the legacy of my late grandfather (1892-1955), an influential Egyptian Romantic poet, scientist and journalist active in the 1920s-40s. A builder of institutions and libraries, essayist and publisher of politically charged tracts, my grandfather was a compulsive bibliophile, archivist and hoarder, an author and thinker whose motivation to preserve his legacy was fueled by his sense of the broad value of his contribution and the desire to prevail against hostile forces both perceived and real. The materials he amassed and passed to his three children reflect an expansive moment between the Egyptian revolutions of 1919 and 1952, and the two World Wars. In his bid to control his position in this narrative, my grandfather took pains to secure the connections between his work and the cultural geo-political landscape. The desire to preserve his legacy was in turn absorbed by his three children, none of whom had an apparent plan or goal beyond the act of hoarding and storage. And while these three compulsively held onto a large amount of ephemera, letters, books, photographs, manuscripts, and other materials left behind by their father and from their life in Egypt, they hid most of this material and seldom spoke of it. After many years of searching for my grandfather (who I never met), obstructed by the official family narrative, I, often by accident, discovered the hidden caches that each of his children left behind. I have gathered those materials together, to organize them once again into a continuous whole: an accidental archive that I call The Bee Kingdom after my grandfather’s eponymous journal published in Alexandria in the 1930s.