Author: Jeremy

Whether technology makes people dumber is a question as old as technology itself. Socrates, for example, 2300 years ago, faulted the invention of writing for weakening human memory.

I have been struggling to articulate my concerns about the increasing use of technology in general and A.I. in particular, not least the cognitive impact on young minds.   Clarification came in the form of an article in The Guardian last month. Two years ago Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at MIT, in response to e-mails from students reporting that their memories seemed to have declined since they started using language models such as ChatGPT, divided 52 of her students into three groups, asked then to write essays, and used electroencephalograms to monitor their  brain activity as they did so.  The first group had no digital assistance; the second had access to an internet search engine, and the third had help from ChatGPT (what Clare Densely of Buckfast Abbey calls ‘Chatty Pete.’)

Immediately after they had completed their essay, the students were asked to recall what they had just written. The vast majority of ChatGPT users (83 percent) could not recall a single sentence. In contrast, the students using Google’s search engine could quote some parts, and many of the students who relied on no tech could quote almost the entirety of their essays verbatim.

In June of this year, even before the experiment was peer reviewed, Nataliya posted it online thinking other researchers might find it interesting. The response was immediate – 4 000 e-mails from across the world, primarily from teachers who worry that A.I. is creating a generation who can produce passable work without either usable knowledge or comprehension of the content.  The more external help the participants had, the lower their level of brain activity, and in particular those neural networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity. 

I wonder what the difference is between using A.I. in such an instance and getting one’s elder brother to write the essay for you.  In the old days we called it cheating.  I wonder too about the implications for people using A.I. chatbots in fields where retention is essential, like a pilot studying to get a license.  The appropriate application of A.I. may be more selective than we currently realize. Clearly research is needed as to how we can use A.I. and retain information. 

Like monitoring a hive of honey bees, writing an essay requires the ability to analyze and synthesize information and to consider several alternatives before committing to a course of action.  Is it possible that future beekeepers will not be able to complete a hive inspection without first entering data into their phone and then following a course of action prescribed by A.I.?

A report in the New York Time on Nov 10, titled How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to Brain Rot,  describes how, last spring, Shiri Melumad, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, gave a group of 250 people a simple writing assignment – share advice with a friend on how to lead a healthier lifestyle. Some were allowed to use a traditional Google search while others could rely only on summaries of information generated automatically with A.I.

The advice from the A.I. summaries was generic, obvious and largely unhelpful — eat healthy foods, stay hydrated and get lots of sleep. Those who found information with a traditional Google web search shared more nuanced advice about focusing on the various pillars of wellness, including physical, mental and emotional health.  Yet the tech industry continues to tell us that chatbots and new A.I. search tools will supercharge the way we learn and that anyone who ignores the technology risks being left behind. By comparison, Dr. Melumad’s experiment found that people who rely heavily on chatbots and A.I. search tools for tasks like writing essays and research are generally performing worse than people who don’t use them.  It is hardly surprising that the Oxford English Dictionary, named brain rot as the word of the year in 2024. 

Yuval Harari , the Israeli medievalist, military historian, public intellectual, popular science writer and history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, (his book, Sapiens : a brief history of mankind, is fascinating reading)  argues that at no time in the past has an inferior species taken control of a superior species. Based on the theory that we learn more from what we witness than what we are told, A.I. will observe closely how, despite what we say, much of human interaction is based on power, lies, greed and manipulation.  He predicts that, in some twenty years time, these will be the norms that will drive A.I. which in turn will bitterly divide the global population, from which there is no recovery –  large language models will have an influence and power beyond the ability of any human to change it.

In his interview with Kirk Webster, as printed in the Dec. 2025 issue of Bee Culture, Ross Conrad writes that “We are creative beings and we need to experience the satisfaction that comes with living our lives through our own creativity and decision making process. If A.I. continues to evolve to the point where some say it is headed, it will be deciding where we live, what we do for work and how we spend most of the day. If this happens, the level of mental illness experienced by society will dwarf the current levels of depression, suicide, and mood, thinking and behavioral disorders associated with smart phones and social media.”

The issue is that we are primed by evolution to use short cuts that make our lives easier. It started with hunter gatherers discovering the use of stones as tools, followed by bronze and iron, bows and arrows, gunpowder, chemicals, aircraft and eventually nuclear power. Each step made it easier to kill first more animals for food and clothing,  then more people, for power.  But our brains need what Nataliya calls ‘friction’ to learn; it needs to have a challenge.  It is mindful of the man who, witnessing a butterfly struggling to emerge from her cocoon, cut away the outer skin to make it easier for her … and the butterfly collapsed to the ground unable to fly .  He did not realize that struggle, or friction, is an essential part of the birth process, in this case allowing the wings to harden. And when we do solve a meaningful challenge, the pleasure hormones such as dopamine, serotonin, endorphins and oxytocin released by the brain provide the stimulus necessary to tackle the next major undertaking. 

The future is not predetermined; there are solutions to the current trend.  For social media, for example, parents can enforce screen-free zones and prohibit phone use in areas like the bedroom and dinner table so that children can stay focused on their studies, on sleep and on verbal communication at mealtimes.  Many schools are now banning cell phones; in a bold social experiment, Australia last month enacted a law to prevent anyone under the age of 16 from having access to social media apps.  Indonesia is poised to follow suit  

As for A.I. chatbots, there was an interesting wrinkle in the M.I.T. study that presented a possible solution on how we can best use Chatty Pete to learn and write.  Eventually, the groups in that study swapped roles : those who had relied only on their brains got to use ChatGPT, and vice-versa.  All the students wrote essays on the same topics they had chosen before. The students in the first group recorded the highest brain activity once they were allowed to use ChatGPT; those in the second were never on a par with their colleagues when they were restricted to using their brains.

This suggests that, at least in the process of writing and learning, we need to  start the process on our own before turning to the A.I. tools for revisions.  As Dr. Melumad explained, A.I. tools transform an active process in our brain – creative thinking skills— into a passive one by automating it.  

So perhaps the key to using A.I. in a healthier way is to be more mindful as to how we use it. Rather than ask a chatbot to do all the research on a broad topic, Dr. Melumad argues, use it as a part of the research process to answer small questions, but for deeper learning of a subject, consider reading a book. Or in the case of a beekeeper, evaluate a colony directly,  knowingly engage in and appreciate the ‘friction’ that Dr. Kosmyna described (what I called in a previous piece ‘the groan zone’), use reliable technology to clarify issues on which you are not clear (eg. the symptoms of EFB) and for that vital big picture, read a book. 

In terms of the very big picture, and if history does indeed repeat itself, we might be entering a neo-Feudal age.  In essence, feudalism was a contract by which the lower classes – vassals  – worked on the lands of their land lord and donated a portion of their crops and animals to him in return for protection from his knights or within his castle in times of danger. In other words, they outsourced their safety in return for their labor.  They were as dependent on the protection of their seigneur as honey bees are on the pheromones in a hive. 

The feudal age was ended by the introduction of gunpowder, which destroyed the invulnerability of a castle.  Until recently, our ‘castle’ was the  digital technology we used to outsource our memory and to store data.  Now we can outsource our thinking itself, at the expense of our own cognition. 

Taking photos on my phone is a challenge. 

The first camera I owned, some 70 years ago, was the Kodak Brownie box version.  It used a spool of eight pictures, purchased from the pharmacist, which had to be loaded in the dark.  I chose with care the subject for each of those eight pictures and, once taken, had no knowledge of  their success or otherwise.  That had to wait until the spool was completed, returned to the pharmacy and picked up two weeks later.

Many of you surely had the same experience.  The next advance was the polaroid, where one could get an almost immediate image, in color, but at the expense of quality.

Those traits – austerity combined with a good deal of patience and an uncertain end product – created habits that are not only entrenched but are also irrationally constraining.   The idea of pointing the camera at short notice at almost anything and clicking away remorselessly, is still anathema to me. It feels like waste. I don’t even attempt it, and I need to be careful about judging those who can, which seems to be everyone else.  The up-side of the box camera was that each successful photograph was carefully preserved  in albums, one of which I still have.  Most photos today seem to be stored in perpetuity on the camera (or, more accurately, in the Cloud) without editing, are looked at once or twice … and I wonder where they will be in 70 years time.  A certain relative of mine, who shall remain nameless for the sake of my longevity and on-going health, has almost 30 000 photos on her phone.  Certainly they are easy to access and replicate, yet I wonder when, if ever, she will have time to look closely at them. 

Apparently, with the preeminence of GPS, the old map-reading skills have all but gone the way of the dodo. I wonder, with the urge to take photos constantly, if we are losing some of the basic observation skills that we used to take for granted.  It is difficult to observe closely while reaching for the camera and peering through its lens, nor is there time to observe before pressing the shutter again.

On a different scale altogether, Jeff Bezos has channeled much of his personal fortune into his spaceflight startup, Blue Origin, on the grounds that small, nimble companies can do better than large, slow, inefficient governments. Paul Kingsnorth, writing in Against the Machine, outlines Bezos’s argument : we use ever-expanding amounts of energy to the point that we will soon need to cover the entire surface of the earth in solar cells to supply our energy needs. Ergo, we will have to leave this planet; indeed there is room for a trillion humans in our solar system, which will mean a thousand new Einsteins and a thousand new Beethovens. 

In comparison with this progress-obsessed optimism, for at least 35 million years and probably much longer, honey bees have been absorbed with a life style that allows for the long term continuity of the species in as strong a form as possible. This means working with and consolidating what they have, with the occasional impetus of a nature-based advance such as a  genetic mutation that is tested through its contribution to their prolonged health and survival.  Without our intervention they reach a state of stasis between what they need and what they offer.  What they lack is ego, greed, cultural parameters designed by Google-based algorithms, and advertising designed to generate perpetual dissatisfaction with one’s current status.

How might the sages in the hive respond to the assumptions that progress is inevitable, even desirable, that growth is necessarily an improvement, that we can trust people like Bezos, who has made an immense fortune often at the expense of others,  that a trillion people is somehow better than the eight billion, and that all of them want a capitalist lifestyle?   And just how much classical music do we need?  My guess is that they would iterate the  astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who suggests that the billions of dollars involved in Blue Origin might better be spent improving conditions here on earth so that there is no need to leave, either by choice or by force.  And he was not alone in this suggestion.  Before Bezos went on his solo journey into space, a petition was circulated suggesting that his return to earth should be prevented.  It attracted more than 200 000 signatures! 

“Progress was all right,” observed James Thurber, “only it went on too long.” As David Papke writes in his Bee Observant column this month, “Change is inevitable; how one6responds to change is a choice… (W)hen technology’s assessment overrides the beekeeper’s nuanced judgement and contextual awareness, something valuable is lost or at least missing.” 

Sometimes less really is more. 

On October 1, 2025, Jane Goodall died of natural causes while on a speaking trip in California.  Even at the advanced age of 91, she was traveling the world non-stop, speaking up for the voiceless and speaking out against the forces destroying them, from climate change to illegal wildlife trade to micro plastics, as eulogized by the wildlife biologist and television host, Jeff Corwin.

She was universally beloved, and seems to have touched in some way everyone who knew, saw or heard her, not least because of her intense compassion.  Initially she was condemned by anthropologists because she did not start her research with a PhD  – Jane took a secretarial course after high school, which explains in part her meticulous note taking . She recorded even the tiniest interaction she witnessed, every hoot and shriek, and every reaction to her, this strange white ape who somehow had what Corwin describes as  ‘a stupendous supply of bananas.’ She proved that one does not need degrees and publications and prestige to make lasting discoveries; first and foremost  one  needs to care. She worked in the field rather than in the laboratory, with humility, curiosity and an extraordinary sense of observation. 

Jane used patience, not force, to build trust.   We forget that when she first met a group of chimpanzees at the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania,  they rejected her.  She sat  with them, from sun-up til sun-down, every day for nine months, until they showed signs of acceptance.  It was a male chimp in this group, David Greybeard, whom she eventually recorded using a tool to gather termites, an observation that was  to change the world of ethology forever. 

And at a time  when her peers prized objectivity, distance and detachment, she chose subjectivity, empathy and connection.  Thus she gave her chimpanzees names, not the traditional numbers. They were individuals, with personalities.

At the same time as we celebrate her legacy, a sense of despair looms. Our climate is warming, rainforests are being decimated, species are vanishing by the hours and micro plastics permeate our very being.   Jane showed us the beauty and the humanity we stand to lose, even as those with the traditional power appear to be blind, deaf and dumb, choosing to accept money from those who drill deeper, burn hotter and exploit further, all in the name of greed and progress.  What does it say about a society that reduces nature to the profit motive, buys and sells our fellow animals, and auctions off our natural heritage to the highest bidder? 

Most beekeepers do not start with a degree in biology or entomology; instead we are driven by a combined sense of curiosity and caring that drives us to do something practical for our shared environs. We start in the field and learn by experience. As modeled by Jane, we talk of the need for patience and the power of observation, of the need for working with the bees rather than trying to impose ourselves on them, and we marvel at the feelings of connection with the natural world that the bees can provoke in us. Like Jane, we realize the extent to which everything is connected, and invariably we come to care for the bees more than we initially anticipated. 

As research moves significantly towards genetics, which involves working with dead, crushed  bees, Jane’s work is a reminder not to neglect the observation of  the working, living biome in all its complexity. As such, she shared the elite air breathed by the likes of Karl von Frisch and Tom Seeley. 

As with David Greybeard fishing for termites with a stick, it is often an unexpected observation of the bees that truly excites us, to the point that we choose to become an activist for the fragile beauty that Jane Goodall helped us see.  She  exemplified how empathy can  save a life, and perhaps even change the world.  As with  Rachel Carson and Diane Fossey,  this is her legacy. 

I began my teaching career in 1969 at a government (ie. state) school in Rhodesia. Twice a year, without prior warning,  an inspector from the country’s capital would spend a few days in my classroom, delivering an oral and written at the end. My colleagues generally did not look forward to these visits; certainly, for the first one, I was apprehensive.  I had no idea what kind of  teacher I was, or might become, or even if it was the right fit  for me, not having received any professional input once on the job. I was fortunate; it turned out to be a positive experience, focusing on my future development rather than on niggling criticisms, from a man with whom I was to become a good friend. My wife and I actually invited him to stay with us on his bi-annual visits, which was unheard of!  Today, the fact that he accepted our offer still delights me.  

I have often thought how different my career might have been had that initial experience between less supportive and how I never again had that kind of external professional support.  For practical reasons I spent the rest of my career in private schools, for the entirety of which I had a total of three people (two department chairs and one principal) sit in on my classes for less than an hour in all, none of whom gave me any direct feedback. The indirect response came at a faculty meeting when the principal suggested that if my colleagues wanted to see a Socratic type of teaching, they might visit my classroom. Of course none ever did.

At the end of my career, as a college advisor to education majors doing their teaching practicum, I attempted to give back a little of what I had received more than thirty years previously.  I have no idea how successful I might have been, nor is that important.

These memories were invoked by a TED talk given by Dr Atul Gawande in 2017, which has attracted some 4 million viewers.  A  surgeon, writer and public health researcher, Dr. Gawande is best known among the wider public for his book, On Being Mortal.  In the  TED talk he describes how, while visiting a birth center in the north of India, he watched as the birth attendants struggled to improve in the face of complexity.  The simplest things were not simple. It is common practice, for example,  for nurses to wash their hands and put on clean gloves between deliveries,  but at this center the faucet was in another room and there were no clean gloves.  The new mothers were dying at a rate ten times higher than was the norm. 

Successful child delivery requires a skilled, coordinated team of people –  the nurses who do the deliveries,  the supervising doctor, the supply clerk and the medical officer responsible for the quality of the whole facility.  In Dr. Gawande’s observations they were all experienced but, in the face of these complexities, they were at their limits. They were no longer getting better, and it’s how good one is going to be that really matters.

This led to a fundamental question. How do professionals get better at what they do?  The traditional pedagogical view is that we go to school, study, practice, graduate, and then go out into the world and make our way on our own. That is the way that most  professionals learn – doctors, lawyers, scientists, teachers, musicians …  But it is 

neither simple nor easy.  We don’t recognize the issues that are standing in our way and, if we do, we don’t necessarily know how to fix them. Dr. Gawande had entered practice in 2003 and the first several years witnessed a steady, upward improvement in his learning curve until he realized he wasn’t getting any better. His prevailing thought – Is this as good as I’m going to get?

By contrast is the sports model, where the view is ”You are never done – everybody needs a coach.” This was evident in the Men’s Singles of the US Tennis Open Championship last month, where the No’s 1 and 2 players in the world, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, met in the finals, and each had a group of three or more coaches in their respective court-side boxes.  Nor was it any different for the women finalists, Alyna Sabalenka and Amanda Anisimova, the previous day. 

So what if Dr. Gawande were to hire someone to come into his operating room, observe, and critique him?  Initially it seemed absurd. Expertise means not needing to be coached. “I didn’t like being observed, and at times I didn’t want to have to work on things,” he says in the TED talk. He ran the idea by Itzhak Perlman, arguably the greatest violinist of his generation. “I have always had a coach,” Perlman responded in the course of a two hour conversation – his wife, Toby.  She had given up her job as a concert violinist so she could sit in the audience, observe and provide feedback.

Eventually Dr. Gawande invited one off his former professors, since retired,  to come to his operating room and observe him.  The surgery went well, there didn’t appear to be much to discuss,  until the observer produced page dense with notes.

“Just small things,” he said.

But it made Dr. Gawande realize that good coaches are onto something profoundly important : it’s the small things that matter. It was a whole different level of awareness. Coaches are our external eyes and ears, providing a more accurate picture of our reality. They recognize the fundamentals,  breaking down one’s actions and then helping build them back up again. “After two months of coaching, I felt myself getting better again,” he says. 

Dr. Gawande also leads a health systems innovation center in India which addresses problems in the delivery of health care and which includes a safe childbirth checklist devised with the help of the World Health Organization. But  just handing out a checklist wasn’t going to change very much, and, reflecting on his own experience in the surgery, he asked, “What if we tried coaching on a massive scale?”

His partners include the government of India with a trial case of 120 birth centers. It involved the training of an army of doctors and nurses which ended up coaching 400 nurses and 100 physicians and managers. The results across 160,000 births were dramatic, with distinct improvements in quality across a whole range of centers.  And this, he says, is just the beginning. 

We strongly promote Beekeeping 101 courses and the value of mentorship, after which  I wonder how many beekeepers ask that vital question, “Is this as good as I am going to get?”  Most hobbyists and many  sideline’s are content if their bees survive the winter and they are able to extract some honey each summer; commercial operators are fully stretched simply to earn an income from their bee yards. For those whose interest is piqued by their exposure to honey bees, there are journals, meetings and conferences, which is very much the traditional pedagogical view.  Is there room for coaching to be part of that improvement, understanding that whereas a mentor is a person with experience helping a nu-bee, a coach and a beekeeper have similar levels of experience and expertise, and interact with mutual levels of trust and respect?  Perhaps the biggest obstacles are trepidation at being watched, apprehension about feeling judged and a lack of awareness as to the value of a coach.

I had always believed that the prime objective  for both  successful teachers and parents was to make themselves dispensable by inculcating habits of thinking and of learning to the point that a young adult can make his or her way in the world without them. Today I would amend that by adding a commitment to life time growth, both in the traditional, pedagogical sense and by instilling the self-esteem and confidence to seek good coaches in all aspects of one’s life.  The result can be beautiful. 

Dr. Gawande ends his presentation with the story of a 23-year-old woman who had arrived by ambulance, in labor with her third child. Everything went well until the baby turned blue and floppy and was not breathing. The nurse kept going with her checkpoints. She dried the baby with a clean towel, then ran to get the baby mask while another used a mouth suction (rather than a mechanical suction because the supply of electricity was unreliable.) Within 20 seconds of clearing out the baby’s airways she got back a green, thick liquid, and soon the  baby started to breathe and, a minute later, was crying. 

This was the result of a coached team calmly following a checklist, with a life saved which otherwise would have been lost.  The team met with the mother a few months later; mom and baby were doing great. The baby’s name is Anshika, which means “beautiful.” 

“She is what is  possible,” argues Dr. Gawande,  “when we really understand how people get better at what they do.”

I remember  vividly how, more than  fifty years ago, a ranger at the Wankie National Park in Rhodesia (now the Hwange Park in Zimbabwe) noticed how, as a herd of elephants was moving towards a water hole in the evening, other herds, often as far as ten miles away, would abruptly  change their direction and head towards the same watering place.  Similarly, it intrigued me as I occasionally watched from a blind that, as a herd left a watering hole, there was invariably another one on the perimeter waiting to take their place. In both cases there seemed to some form of communication involved, but if so, what and how? 

The mystery was solved in 1984 by Katy Payne, an audiobiologist at the Washington Zoo in Portland, Oregon, who, while observing Asian elephants at the zoo, noticed an unusual vibration in the air when she was in their presence – infrasound.  From the Latin (infra meaning below,) infrasound is defined as sound waves with frequencies below 20Hz, and which are thus inaudible to humans. And indeed, when humans are exposed to sufficiently powerful infrasound, the stimulus may be felt in one’s body rather than heard through one’s ears. 

As air flows through the dense folds of the elephant larynx , the relationship between the length, mass, and elasticity of elephant vocal folds allows them  to produce sounds lower in frequency than any other terrestrial animal. In addition, the anatomy of the outer and inner ear of elephants is comprised of large, specialized components which allow them to detect low-frequency sound at long distances.

Infrasound offers a number off advantages when communicating over long distances – coordination of herd movements to improve resource availability (or, as in the first paragraph above, to regulate arrivals at the water source so as to avoid over-crowding,) the avoidance of rival herds and predators, and the facilitation of mate-finding for bulls in musth.

It makes sense in evolutionary terms. In the dense forests in which elephants evolved, limited vision necessitated  other forms of communication. This likely led to enhanced senses of smell and hearing as  early elephants directed their herds, located each other, and warned others of predators.  And why low frequency sound?  Because unlike high frequencies, they are are not blocked or muffled by thick vegetation.

Nor is it limited to communication. It is reported that during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, elephants in Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India displayed unsettled behavior and moved to higher ground before the tsunami reached the coasts of those countries. The supposition is that they were able to react to infrasonic sounds from the massive disturbances long before humans were aware of it.  Similarly, in both India and Kenya, traditional lore has long associated the beginning of a period of rain with the sudden appearance of elephants. Scientifically, both Asian and African elephants have been shown to predict thunderstorms at distances of up to 90 miles. The movements within cumulonimbus clouds produce strong infrasonic signals, and it is thought that elephants may be able to hear these and locate the storm.

The use of sound outside of our ability to hear is not unique to elephants – bats, alligators, giraffes, hippopotamuses, peacocks, rhinoceroses, and whales are all known to utilize infrasonic communication. Incredibly, infrasonic calls produced by blue whales have been recorded crossing the entire Atlantic Ocean, from South America to Africa. And infrasound has natural uses beyond just communication – homing pigeons and migratory bird species may use naturally occurring infrasound as a navigational tool. 

Incidentally, An Immense World by the Pulitzer-winning science journalist, Ed Yong, is a spectacular and fascinating account of the latest research as to how animals perceive the world around them. It ties in neatly with David Papke’s observation elsewhere in this newsletter that “Anthropomorphic … errors in interpreting bee behavior might not be an over-estimation of their intelligence but something entirely different – overlooking completely another form of intelligence that differs radically from our own.”

What is the connection between elephants and honey bees?  Earlier this year a team led by Yossi Yovel at the University of Tel Aviv has shown that plants ‘scream’ when under stress from drought or physical damage, emitting high frequency noises undetectable to the human ear but audible to many species of insects, bats and rodents.  In particular, they found that female moths avoided laying eggs on tomato plants that were emitting ultrasonic noises associated with stress. The researchers conjecture that the moths interpreted the sounds as a sign that the plants were unhealthy.  “This is speculation at this stage,” says Yovel, “but it could be that all sorts of animals make decisions based on the sounds they hear from plants, including about feeding, pollination and shelter.”

Seventy years ago, when Karl von Frishch interpreted the bee dance, he believed that it would lead a forager bee directly to a flowering plant.  Using von Frisch’s own data, we know now that it is not sufficiently specific to do that; it gets the forager out of the hive and flying in the right direction, but there are two further stages before she arrives at the flower, which Jurgen Tautz explores in Communication Between Honey Bees; More than Just a Dance in the Dark. The first he labeled ‘the search zone’ in which returning foragers fly with their Nasanov glands open, thus laying a chemical trail to the food source.  Tautz concedes that this needs more research.  The final stage is when the forager uses the  scent released by the original dancer in the hive to confirm  the flower source.

In the light of Yossi Yovel’s research, is it only scent that finally attracts the bees?  Could it be that plants with available pollen and nectar also emit a sound that is inaudible to us but is a trigger to the sensitive antennae of a honey bee?  After all, we know that plants that have had their supplies of nectar exhausted emit a signal to let foragers know they have closed up shop.  It seems reasonable to posit that plants also signal audibly  to foragers that they are open for business.

 In his book, The Five Invitations, Frank Ostaseski describes the different roles we play throughout our lives. Some are sequential, others might be multi-faceted.  For example, we might move through the progression of daughter, mother and grandmother.  Or we might be a husband, a father, a neighbor, a customer, a teacher and, to our doctor, a patient, all at the same time.  Essentially,  for the first half of our lives, we are concerned with creating an identity, developing a career with its personal achievements, building a family and forging the structures we need to survive and succeed in a complicated world.  These roles can be conflictual, such as a single mother who struggles to balance full-time work and parenting, or exclusive, such as the young man who may chooses to give up a traditional education and social life for the rigorous life of a professional athlete, or even reversed, when a daughter becomes the caretaker for a mother with Alzheimer’s.

For many of us, those initial skills do not alone prove fulfilling for the second part of our journey.  If we have the courage, the inspiration and a role model, we may turn inward, exploring issues like the meaning of life, what makes us happy, the rewards that come from profound relationships, the embracing of mystery and the cultivation of wisdom, all in a more relaxed form of striving.  Joseph Campbell described this as ‘the hero’s journey.’

Laurence van der Post, describing his experiences among the Bushmen of southern Africa (more correctly called the Khoisan people,) wrote that they speak of two kinds of hunger.  The Little Hunger is for food, for the fire in one’s body that must be fed to stay alive. And then there is the Great Hunger, the hunger for meaning, the hunger that lives deeper than the stomach, in ‘the silence behind the eyes,’ as described by the tribesmen.  Happiness is fleeting, they argue, while meaning is enduring.  Once one is doing something that really matters to one’s soul, it doesn’t matter whether or not one feels good all of the time. Rather one feels connected to something bigger than one’s self, that we are not just bodies to be fed but spirits to be fulfilled.

Rachel Naomi Remen, a pediatrician and author who councils people with chronic and terminal illness, describing how life asks that we continually adapt, suggests that  “The ultimate purpose of every life is to grow in wisdom and to learn to love better.” 

In Buddhist lore, “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”  One explanation might be that the hunger for meaning was never modeled for us when we were young, neither at home nor at school, nor among our elders. The poet Robert Bly describes young men who grow  up with the model of John Wayne as the ideal male, and then, in their 40’s  suddenly find it no longer works (referring to John Wayne as a model example dates both Robert Bly and myself!)  But when one is receptive, those teachers can come from surprising sources.  Thus Novak Djokovic, interviewed during the Wimbledon Tennis Championship in July, was asked why he gives advice so freely to younger players who later may be his rival on court.  His response was even though he himself never received such encouragement from older players, it is an integral part of him and he cannot be authentic to himself by not doing so. 

His use of the word authentic struck a chord; perhaps that is what the Great Hunger is all about. I know that I enjoy spending time with others who are searching for authenticity, who want to deepen relationships, explore mystery and  cultivate wisdom in a relaxed setting.

And we used to have our grandparents, not least when extended families lived, if not together at least in the same town or village.  They would model those more quiet, more reflective values while the parents were preoccupied with the Little Hunger as they built a life for their new family.  

Several questions arise. If  education is supposed to prepare us for the ‘real’ world, should we not educate for the second half of life, as well as the first?  And is so, how do we do it?  I don’t think there is a curriculum for it (although I am reminded of the famous curriculum at Harrow in England titled “From the Sperm to the Worm,”)  but perhaps each school might include on its faculty some older men and women whose prime responsibility is to teach the regular curriculum but with the benefit of the wisdom that comes with age and experience.  Hence,  in the absence of grandparents, the power of role-modeling. The students may neither value nor recognize it as such at the time, but it would be available to them when they needed it later in their lives.

I was fortunate to have an uncle who was a RAF spitfire pilot in Britain in the 1940’s.  When the war ended he returned to his town on the south west coast of England, never again to leave.  He declined to learn to drive a car (even though he had been a fighter pilot!) and spent his leisure hours fishing in the local river. When I first met him he was in his late 50’s and I, an ambitious young educator, was in my mid 30’s, I knew immediately that here was a man who was perfectly content, and I was envious. Similarly, another uncle, a tail gunner in a Lancaster bomber in the war, spent several years in a German prison-of-war camp (he was part of the ‘Great Escape’ story from Stalag Luft III in 1944) and he too had neither need nor want for material possessions, although he was great company to be with. 

In writing this I realize how the aptly the word ‘authentic’ describes both men. 

Secondly, for those of us who do believe we are in transition – I use the present tense because, once started, it is a constant process – the question becomes, what was the trigger? Seldom is it planned, nor is it necessarily as dramatic as a world war.  In most cases it involves an unforeseen event that touches something deep within us and leads to a confrontation or a crisis. One theory is that we are reaching back to the very first years of our lives when we were authentic and before we were shaped by parental and societal into what they thought we should be.  Whatever the provocation,  only with hindsight  can we look back and realize what it was and its profound impact on our lives. As David Papke observed when I ask him to review the first draft of this essay, “It strikes me that although our eyesight and hearing diminishes with age, in many ways we see and hear things more clearly.”

That stimulus for me was the movie Dances with Wolves.  The Kevin Costner character is strongly and traditionally male – the warrior – yet in ‘the interior’ he meets both the natural world, symbolized particularly by the wolf, and the strong feminine  in the form of Stands with a Fist. Eventually, having to make a choice, he decides to ride with the Native American clan rather than return to ‘civilization’ with its more traditional expectations of the role he should play. The movie touched me deeply, and it took a little while to understand that it both characterized a deep disconnect within myself and offered a way forward. 

This in turn gives rise to two further questions.  First, are the various, sequential roles that honey bees fill in their short lives an example of this kind of adaptation?   The answer is largely no, in that these changes are genetically inspired rather than conscious choices made by each bee, even as environmental changes, such as a surplus of available nectar compared to pollen, may prompt a foraging bee to change from pollen to nectar collection. 

The second question is, does this explain why many people turn to beekeeping later rather than earlier in life?  It might.  Once one’s family obligations have essentially ended, as we are established in our careers and preparing to be grand parents (an interesting term), as retirement edges closer with its challenges and uncertainties, we might give more conscious consideration to what makes us happy, in particular deepened relationships, what our life has meant and how we intend to spend the rest of it.   There is often a sense of accumulated wisdom as we age, with which we can investigate some of the mysteries we encountered earlier in our life but didn’t have the time to probe deeply.  

Many activities can claim our attention, often with no connection to our professional selves  – gardening, wine-making, art, travel, wood working, community involvement, learning a new language – one of which is beekeeping, with its particular management challenges as well as insights into effective communal relationships in an untamed natural world. The bees, for their part, don’t care a whit as to who we are, where we sent to school or what we did to make a living.  They offer themselves up for our edification, as mysteries to be explored and as a portal  into a natural world to which we are eager to feel reconnected. As the Khoisan people knew, by so doing we feel connected to something bigger than ourselves, that beyond the Little Hunger we are spirits to be fulfilled. For some, honey bees are an integral part of the Great Hunger as we strive to grow in wisdom and learn to love better.

ODTAA is a medical term describing those unfortunate  patients who recover from one problem only to be confronted immediately by another.  One Damn Thing After Another might be a beekeeping term too, in which case one of those ‘things’ is honey extraction.  When we are asked, “I’m thinking of taking up beekeeping, what do I need to know?” the first response might be, “Are you capable of dealing with one damn sticky mess after another?”  This no doubt is what Rudyard Kipling had in mind when he wrote, 

“If you can keep your head when all about you 

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …”

We have all invited visitors to swish a finger through the stream of honey coming out of the extractor, and watched as they dealt with the drippiness and the stickiness –   a twist of the hand, a quick lick, and it’s solved. But it is deceptively simple, as we discover when a child tries the same technique.  We have spent millennia developing techniques to coerce honey from its rightful owners, but have been less effective in developing methods to coerce honey from its rightful home – capped cells – because, to state the obvious, honey has a mind of its own. 

It starts when, inspecting a hive, you remove all of the brace comb which the bees have built, even though you have provided them with nice new foundation only one frame away.  This means honey on the end of your hive tool which, unsurprisingly, the bees are trying to reclaim together with the bits of loose comb which, if you don’t act quickly, will slip between the frames and drop to the bottom of the hive.   In desperation, you grab those bits of comb – you once tried stabbing them with your hive tool before they dropped but, because of the honey already on the tool, nothing would stick to it, even though honey will stick to everything else, including Teflon non-stick pans. 

Now, besides a sticky hive tool, you also have sticky fingers, and because you grabbed your hive tool, that now has a sticky handle. 

Because you have thought ahead and have a bucket of warm water at the ready, you rinse off your fingers and resume the hive inspection, at which point you realize you should have washed your hive tool before you rinsed your fingers. In frustration, you put your hand to your mouth, meaning that your veil is now sticky as well. 

Why are you wearing a veil to extract honey?  Books are filled with instructions describing how to get the best honey crop, but little is said of the requirement that you, the beekeeper, will need to pick up heavy, sticky boxes with small handles weighing  in excess of 60 pounds.  No matter what method you used to move the bees from the frame before removing the boxes from the hive, there are always a small number of bees who refuse to leave and are now determined to take full advantage or your aching back and sticky gloves.  Banging supers on the ground to dislodge said bees does not work; the inevitable result is broken frames and angry bees, hence the veil.

As these same books describe it, extracting honey  is a straight forward process: remove the caps from sealed honey comb, spin the frames, collect the honey and pour into jars. In practice it is inviting retribution from the honey gods to so much as think that this is something that can be done quickly in between other jobs. 

Most extracting is done in the ‘honey house’ – ie. the family kitchen – and preparation is key.   First, arrange for your family to be suitably distracted for at least twice as long as you think it will take to complete the extraction. To steal from Stephen Bishop’s  column in the June issue of Bee Culture, “Be advised.  You should only attempt (honey extraction) outside of the earshot of small children because your wife will will likely erupt with words that will stunt their growth as morale right individuals when she discovers the condition of her cookware …”

Secondly, plenty of clean damp cloths is essential, as well as a source of running  water from a faucet that can be turned on either with an elbow or with sticky hands, and is easy to clean – unchanged water in a bucket, used a couple of times, becomes a weak honey solution so its continued use means spreading a thin syrup over everything in the kitchen. A word of advice – immediately you see a drip it must be wiped  up. Given half a chance even the smallest drop can attach itself to a host, eg. the family dog, in which case you have to catch and clean the offending animal before starting to clean up the sticky paw prints.  

 Some beekeepers proactively cover the floor with newspaper, but the thought of traipsing through the house with sticky bits of newspaper attached to my shoes prevents me from trying this.  I do know (and don’t ask me how I know this) that using one shoe to try to remove sticky newspaper from the other shoe, does not work.   

Before you can extract you have to uncap. According to all the videos that you watched beforehand, the  bees will produce combs packed with honey on both sides of the frame which is perfectly flat and just above the wood of the frame. The trick is to skim off the cappings by gliding a warm knife along the edge of the frame, tilting the frame at a suitable angle so that the cappings fall neatly into the uncapping tray.  Simplicity itself.   In reality the knife goes cold so that both wax and honey stick to the blade. You scrape the knife on the edge of the tray,  dip it into the now cooled water and try again. Eventually you give up trying to keep the knife hot and just slice and scrape. The uncapping tray now has globules of wax and honey around its edges which are starting to drip down the outside, which in turns acts as a magnet for bees  (the scouts were watching when you forgot to close the kitchen window. )

Nor are you finished uncapping. Rather than flat, level comb that is easy to uncap, invariably the frames have peaks and valleys reminiscent of a miniature Zion National Park with its unpredictable combination of mesas and canyons.   The mesa’s are decapitated by the knife, but what of the canyons?  First you try using the tip of the knife but quickly  resort to an uncapping fork. A bundle of sticky wax honey rolls up the tines, and although you stop frequently to scrape it off (on the edge of the tray, where else?) eventually, it reaches the fork handle.   So now your hand is a sticky mess at precisely the moment that you realize you have to scratch your nose which has become unexpectedly itchy. But there are still five supers of frames that need to be processed before nightfall, so to hell with it;  you bash on with sticky hands, sticky knife, sticky fork and itchy nose and more honey on your veil; just don’t let anything sticky get on the floor.

Faucets on honey extractors also have minds of their own.  It may be taking a long time for the honey to dribble though a filter becoming clogged with wax, but even the mere thought of  wandering off to check your e-mails is tempting fate. 

Eventually all the frames are uncapped and have to be manoeuvered into the extractor, after which all those stickies have to be dealt with, the gooey cappings have to be strained, the wax separated and all that washing-up to do, very little of  which will  fit in the sink.  The honey itself has to be bottled, jarred, labeled and eventually liquified after crystallizing.  It’s ODTAA.

One honey bee, in her life time, will collect enough nectar to make 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.   That 1/12th of a teaspoon is enough to provoke barrels of frustration in the life of a beekeeper.  Such is the honey bee’s revenge. 

If you knew you were going to be marooned for 4 weeks, would have all the fresh water you needed, and could go to the grocery store beforehand and choose as much as you wanted of just one item to take with you, what item would you choose?  This question was put to a panel of nutritionists, and their answer … tinned cat food!  You may not be particularly healthy after 28 days, but you would survive.

I first heard the above as an explanation of the importance of a variety of pollen sources in the diet of honey bees.   They can survive on one or two sources, but it takes a variety of pollen to remain healthy, precisely  because different pollens contain different nutrients and in varying quantities.  Similarly, I believe that  bees may survive on doses of sugar syrup when they are ‘marooned’ (ie. in the dearth or over winter) but their health is impacted. 

Sugar has played a vital role in evolution because it fills an important  biological need for calories.   Psychobiologist Gary Beauchamp suggests that “the most important thing in an animal’s life is consuming enough calories to survive.”  And, for most of evolution, finding sufficient calories was a challenge but, when available, sugar provided a way to consume them in bulk.  Apes, for example, gorge on calorie-dense fruit whenever it is available as a survival technique for the next drought.  Bears and honey is another example. Children are notorious for having a sweet tooth during their developmental, high energy stages of growth, both mentally and physically. And for humans there was an added  benefit – foods that taste sweet in nature are generally not poisonous. 

So we, like most animals, are evolutionarily hardwired to consume sugar.  This presents two problems.  First, food science has advanced to the point that, calorically speaking, we no longer have those lean times.  Indeed, calorie-dense foods are almost unavoidable – think of the variety of chocolates next to the till at a gas store. Secondly, the nature of sugar in our food has changed. For most of human history, consumption of sugar in refined form was virtually zero; people used honey, sweet beans, glutinous rice, barley, or maple syrup as sweeteners. This began to change about 2,000 years ago when peasants in Bengal learned how to boil cane juice into a raw dark sweet mass. Even so, sugar remained a rare commodity, and only some 200 years ago, with an industrial refinement process, was there a sea change in both quantity and quality. Consumption by the average American went from  one spoonful per week in 1800 to almost  two and half pounds today.  And this figure does not include High Fructose Corn Syrup, a caloric sweetener widely used by the U.S. beverage industry.

Clearly there are significant differences between natural sugars such as honey and 

refined, white sugar.  The complicated nutrients found in honey – a combination of bacteria, enzymes and fungi that has taken millennia to develop – contrast with the lack of nutrients in white sugar; indeed the latter often retains a  residue of chemicals from the processing plant, one of which is arsenic!  Agreed, it is in minute quantities and is omnipresent in our food and environment (including beer!) but we measure toxicity in chemicals in parts per billion.  For example, in the Dec. 2024 issue of Bee Culture, and citing a study from Cornell, Ross Conrad states that the lowest concentrations of neonicotinoids to have an impact on bees is 0.1 ppb at the physiological level, 0.9 ppb at the behavioral level (eg. grooming) and 5 ppb at the reproductive level – queens are less likely to survive and lay fewer eggs.  So what about arsenic in sugar at 4 ppb?

These differences are outlined in greater detail in a forthcoming article in The American Bee Journal.  Suffice to say that what jolted me into action five years ago was research which showed that bees over-wintered on sugar syrup emerge greater in number, smaller in size, lighter in weight and with their immune systems compromised.

In 2020, piqued by Dr. Tom Seeley’s work on feral colonies, my colleague David Papke explored the concept of  Regenerative Beekeeping, which is the api-equivalent of Regenerative Agriculture, and invited me to join him.  We are attempting to reconstruct, within practical limitations, the environment  that honey bees have developed over millions of years, together with management techniques that are primarily  bee centric. There are three critical  aspects of Regenerative Beekeeping : using locally adapted bees, modifying the conventional Langstroth hive structure with an associated  management strategy, and not feeding sugar or sugar syrup under any circumstances. 

Does this mean we should not feed weak colonies in the fall or winter, and rather allow them to die. Far from it.   First, if you do feed sugar, know what the impact on the bees might be.  Secondly, if you do have to feed, why not give them honey?   At extraction time, put a number of honey frames uncapped in the freezer for 72 hours to kill off  any small hive beetle eggs and then set them aside in a cool, dark room.  If there is a need for emergency feeding in  the fall or late winter, replace one or two of the depleted frames in the colony with one or two of those with uncapped honey.  Or you can use the same methods you use to  feed sugar, eg.  Boardman feeders, upturned jars or plastic baggies. 

Five years later it is time to share some initial results.  My annual colony loss numbers have remained consistent – about 10 per cent.  This most recent winter I lost one hive out of 20 because of a mechanical failure – in one of the severe February storms water got into a hive (two boxes not fitting together tightly!) and the bees died. Mite counts are generally low – last year, for example, only two hives out of  20 required treatment. And honey production has remained the same – I extract one medium super of honey from each of 20 hives, leaving the rest for the bees.  In other words, not feeding sugar syrup has not affected adversely either colony losses or honey production, and appears to have impacted mite counts favorably.  

David wrote, 

“I stopped feeding sugar syrup, fondant, or sucrose in any other form beginning in 2020. Although I had already stopped practicing stimulative feeding of sugar syrup and pollen supplements in the spring, now I have also stopped fall feeding for overwintering colonies or any kind of emergency feeding using sucrose. Instead, I left on the hives sufficient stores of honey harvested by the colonies themselves, generally amounting to a full medium super in addition to whatever honey was stored in the brood nest area. And, although I have no quantifiable data, in the spring the colonies overwintering on honey appeared stronger and healthier.”

In 2022 David ceased all mite treatments and lost 22 out of 25 colonies. Those losses were replaced by splits made from the surviving colonies; since then his winter losses have been between 10 and 25 percent.

As always, one question leads to more.  For example, does the feeding of queens by workers who are raised on sugar syrup or who are consuming stored ‘honey’ that is basically processed sugar syrup, explain in any way diminishing queen longevity and productivity? 

If you are intrigued but also wary about ending sugar syrup entirely in your apiary (after all, sugar syrup is what we were told to use in those first bee classes, when we knew no different,) you might consider selecting one or two colonies from which to withhold all sugar treatments, and monitor (and share!) the results. 

Now please excuse me while I get my daily intake of honey.  I can’t help it.  It’s the bear in me. 

… in which honey bees use humans as a model for a well run colony. 

Guess who the boss fired first ?  The original worker  bee, of course … “Because she showed lack of motivation and had a negative attitude.”

With acknowledgement to Joseph Noone.

British Society as a Bee Hive, George Cruickshank, 1840,

the year in which Queen Victoria was married.