“The mind is not so much a vessel to be filled,” argued Plutarch more than two millennia ago, “so much as a fire to be lit.”
David Papke and I have been discussing the role of curiosity in education and, by extension, in beekeeping classes.* In an e-mail David wrote, “(T)here is an expectation of how instruction is typically structured, traditionally presented, and partially learned. We both sense the problems with this common approach and I wonder if there may not be some ideas here which point in a different direction – one which values curiosity as a direction, a life-long path, to becoming a beekeeper, or better yet, a master caretaker of honey bees. Maybe that’s overly-ambitious but placing the student’s natural, innate curiosity closer to the center of instruction would be a step in the right direction.”
Why, at school, is one attracted to a certain class, even to a particular career? Ideally the answer includes a correlation between one’s personal traits and those of the subject matter, accompanied by a desire, a curiosity, to extend one’s knowledge in that particular area. I also believe that we prefer classes where the teaching style of the instructor (aural, verbal and kinesthetic) coincides with the learning style of the student, which explains why we ‘like’ certain teachers above others. Ironically I was attracted to history classes in high school despite having very conventional teachers and, in particular wanted to delve deeper into the many names which would merit only a cursory mention in the text book. Marshal Ney, Napoleon’s charismatic general, was the first such name I can recall, and the fact that despite his military achievements he was executed by firing squad aged 46 only made his story more enticing.
I could not have verbalized this at the time, but in retrospect I believe too that I was curious as to how the world works and how I might come to understand what my place in it might be.
Surely someone whose curiosity has been aroused by ecology, by the natural world in all its complexity, could never cease being intrigued by honey bees. And is it this curiosity that drives some to conquer those inevitable obstacles of one’s early beekeeping experience while others take the exit route?
To return to the observation by Jacques van Alphen cited on these pages last month, that in many beekeeping classes the danger is that age-old practices are either not called into question or re-evaluated and brought up to date. Yes, we can tinker with the occasional detail in the syllabi – like changing the hub caps on a Model T Ford and calling it a Cadillac – or we can consider a revision of the critical philosophy behind what and why we are teaching.
For example, increasingly we are recognizing that many practices of our current culture, including agriculture, are unsustainable. Starting with ourselves, our schools and communities, we need systems based on love, respect, harmony and community, systems that work with nature and each other rather than exploit them for purposes of greed and power. If these qualities – love, respect, harmony and community – are to be ‘regenerated,’ a reliance on AI seems to be misplaced. Can we expect technology to solve subjective problems that require benign, munificent changes in our individual choices and behaviors? A strong set of values precedes behavioral change, and such values are inspired invariably by a strong teacher, by example rather than by technology. I am old enough to believe that teaching is first and foremost about relationships; in the words of Nikos Kazantzakis, “Ideal teachers use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross. Having facilitated that crossing, they joyfully collapsed, inviting them to build bridges of their own.”
Essentially curiosity as to what is on the other side of the bridge is sparked by inviting students to investigate before the teacher explains. Too often (and I know this only too well from personal experience) we the teachers are keen to instruct, which in part is showing off our knowledge and our competence to earn the admiration of the class members. There is no necessarily an equivalency between admiration and meaningful learning.
Consider how typically we approach a beekeeping class. At its essence is an explanation by the instructor as to how we can manipulate honey bees to produce what we want, whether it is the products of the hives, more bees to sell, or an income on which we can survive. In other words, the needs of the beekeeper are primary. Thus the first class is often a display of the equipment the beekeeper needs followed by descriptions as to how to manage the bees within it.
Increasingly there is a move towards being more bee-centric, at least at the hobbyist level, which is where most of us are and which allows the most room for change and adaptation. What if the first class was the study of a natural hive, say as in the hollow of a tree, with a discussion of the essential properties within it, such as insulation, entrance size, bee space, even comb construction, as shown recently by New Zealand beekeeper, Kyle Atkinson, who showed that in a new feral hives bees start building comb bear the entrance so they can guard and control it more easily?
And what if the second class consisted of the close examination of an observation hive, or perhaps a video of bees working on the comb, with the students asking questions as to the how and why of what they see? This was made clear when a colleague and I took an observation hive to a National Bee Day event at a local orchard and invited the younger visitors to focus on a particular bee, describe what she was doing and suggest why she was doing it. None of the results were flippant; all had a solid base from which a discussion could ensue. And some of these observers were so young that mom had to write for them …
The dominant question would be, how can we recognize and utilize the natural behaviors that honey bees have developed over millennia, for the mutual benefit of both them and us? This, in the larger sense, is what David and I understand by the term regenerative beekeeping. It’s a matter of working with, rather than imposing our will on, the bees. This is not to deny the need for a knowledge of bee biology and behavior, indeed it is the very opposite, but the emphasis is on careful observation of the bees at work and making decisions based on those findings. It is much easier of course to have a preconceived plan of action; it takes confidence to believe that one can build a tool box of options and then make decisions based on observation and the particular needs of a colony, all within the bigger picture of the seasonal challenges faced by honey bees.
In practical terms, how does one use a student’s natural curiosity to foster a long term bee-centric approach? This will be the subject of next months Corner. Hopefully your appetite has been whetted, your curiosity aroused, even challenged – the “this-sounds- very-nice-in-theory-but-how-do-you-do-it-in-the-real-world?” kind of challenge.
oooOOOooo*In terms of credibility, David and I have 68 years of teaching experience between us, mainly in secondary schools and colleges, in different parts of the world. We have both facilitated beekeeping classes and workshops, are both Master Beekeepers in the York County Beekeepers’ Guild and have both been Pennsylvania’s Beekeeper of the Year, in 2017 and 2022.
