Author: Jeremy

Some ten years ago, when the Florida and North Carolina master beekeeper programs were discontinued and in the absence of such a program in Pennsylvania but before the current Cornell program, and wanting something besides the ‘one-and done’ of the EAS program, our local beekeepers’ organization devised a program by which members could assess and monitor their knowledge and practices in a way that was simple both to implement and to administer and was cost free. We called it the York County Beekeepers’ Guild in honor of the medieval guilds with their four levels – apprentice, journeyman, craftsman, and master. Further details can be found at https://ycbk.org/member-resources/master-beekeeper-program

In the March, 2026 edition of ABJ, two articles independently came up with other descriptors of a beekeeper’s progress. Jim Tew, with his typical insight and humor, lists seven levels of achievement :
The Curious Individual, who asks, for the first time, What’s with all this bee stuff?
The Beginner, who is happily ignorant with a desire to make sense of what seems senseless. Questions come fast and furious.
The Experienced Beginner has learned the terminology, a few colonies might have died but enough have survived to keep the energy level high. He or she will talk ‘bees’ to anyone willing to listen.
The Intermediate Beekeeper is established and confident, their friends are well aware of their commitment, they have given a few talks to schools and meetings and might have experimented with pollination as well as serving as officers in their local beekeeping association. Surplus equipment is building up in the garage.
The Accomplished Beekeeper has taken classes in queen rearing and nuc production, has dependable markets for selling their honey, including comb honey, traveled to national and even international meetings … and their equipment needs painting.
The Advanced Beekeeper. The Eagle Scouts of Beekeeping, with a library of bee books, back issues of bee magazines and items in their bee house that are no longer produced by beekeeping supply companies. They are devoted to their girls without working themselves to death, bee populations are maintained with an air of experienced confidence, and the comfortable relationship between bees and beekeeper is ended only by declining health or death.
Jim’s final level is the sideline or commercial beekeeper whose passion has become a career and whose goal is financial profit compared to the mere fascination and enjoyment of hobby beekeepers.

Later in the same issue of ABJ is an interview with Dr Ralph Büchler, long time head of the Bee Institute in Kirchain, Germany. The article is well worth reading in its entirety. In response to a question about the need for a revolution in education, he observes that pedagogy is as much about motivation as it is about knowledge. I am reminded of Plato’s admonition that the mind is not a vessel to be filled so much as a fire to be lit. After teaching beekeepers for 30 years he divides his students into three categories :
Early inventors, those 1% who read and study and are ready to test new things.
Early followers, those 10% who catch on to an idea, are willing to try it and are soon convinced. He cites as an example the attention being given to what he has labeled biotechnical methods, ie. simple, nature-like management which strengthens the vitality and the resilience of honey bees, or what Seeley has labeled Darwinian beekeeping and what we are calling regenerative beekeeping
Followers, the 90% who continue to do what they have always done. They have to be told repeatedly of the benefits of something new (at least 9 times, he surmises) while they wait for the early followers to fail, and only after some years, when the latter have stronger hives, lower winter losses and lower expenses, do they silently try it.

Recently my wife, Mary, describing a new member of a committee whom she met on a Zoom, called her “a heavy hitter. Clearly she has depth.” Mary had identified her immediately as an early inventor – such attributes are not easily disguised. Similarly just yesterday (mid-April as I write) our doorbell rang at midday and a woman whom we did not know had pulled into our driveway, stimulated by the signs that Mary has hung alongside the road, desperate to talk with someone whom she identified as a like-minded soul. It resulted in an hour’s discussion and our visitor, now very much a friend, left with the outline of an action plan that would connect her with other early inventors in the areas.

So what to make of this? First, I do not see any conflict between the traditional Medieval descriptors and those of Jim Tew or Ralph Büchler. In fact the York participants are probably self-selecting in that it is the early inventors and the early followers (perhaps 1 member in 10) who are attracted to the Master Beekeeping program. The rest stand by and watch, supportive but uninvolved.

Secondly, I wonder as to the impact on an association that is led by an early inventor rather than a follower. In my experience the latter is more evident in leadership roles than the former, partly because the early inventors are already committed to other voluntary organizations. 90% of the membership will feel comfortable with this situation, not being asked to move beyond their comfort zone, but 10% will find motivation in smaller, often separate programs if they are available, or in workshops, conferences and journals. In the alternative scenario, a leader who is an early inventor will challenge the membership with new ideas and the latest research, while at the same time providing enough grist for the mill for the 90% who primarily need affirmation.

Thirdly , I find myself applying Büchler’s terminology to a number of organizations with which I have been involved, not least schools, and am intrigued, with the benefit of hindsight, as to what it explains. For example, in 1995 I volunteered to be a parent representative on a committee formed by the principal of a local state school to evaluate the school’s performance. I was initially enthusiastic, only to realize that the principal was a follower who was simply fulfilling a state requirement; as such he made certain there was no meaningful discussion, that the school was given a good grade and that he could tick off the necessary box as having been accomplished. It was merely a bureaucratic necessity and a failure to grasp a valuable opportunity. My guess is that we have all had such experiences, when the relevant authority decides it is more important to keep the wheels moving than to ask if the train is on the right track.

Finally, putting all humility aside, how would you describe yourself on both the Tew and Büchler scales and how would you describe the leading lights of your association, either at the local or state level? Once so identified, does the bigger picture as outlined in the three scenarios above help you understand some of the observations and feelings you might have as to your own growth and development as a beekeeper?

Christopher Columbus famously had only a vague idea as to where he was going, did not know where he was when he got there, and did not know where he had been when he returned. It is seeing the bigger picture that allows us to appreciate where we are on a particular journey. Or, in the words of Charles Kettering , an American inventor, engineer, and businessman, writing in 1961, “There is a great difference between knowing a thing and understanding it. You can know a lot and not really understand anything.”

On May 8, David Attenborough celebrated his one hundredth birthday. As described by Richard Fisher of the BBC, one moment shaped his childhood – and quite possibly his entire career. 

It was the late 1930s, he was about 10 years old, and had cycled into the Leicestershire countryside near his boyhood home. He began searching through the pieces that had tumbled from a rocky outcrop, and when he found a stone that looked like it might be useful, he carefully split it with his hammer.

“There, perfect in every detail, glinting as though it had just been polished, was a seashell… an object of breathtaking beauty,” he recalled. “And my eyes were the first to see it since its occupant died 200 million years ago.” 

It was a fossil ammonite – a spiral-shelled creature around the size of his palm. Due to their coiled appearance the locals once believed they were snakes, but they were actually cephalopods: a marine mollusc which swam in ancient oceans.

“I suppose it’s true to say that it was one of the key moments of my life,” he recalled in a 1989 series about paleontology.  “I have been repeating that moment, off and on, throughout my life and the thrill has still not worn off. … The moments of success when that rock fell apart and revealed a shell that hadn’t seen the sun for 200 million years, and that I was the first human being to see, seemed to me then – as to be truthful it still seems to me now – to be moments of magic.”

Letters written by David’s father, Frederick, in the 1930s and 1940s, hint at a boy fascinated by geology who wished to pursue the earth sciences as a career. Sir David explained that his father didn’t necessarily know much about rocks and fossils himself, but “he did say, ‘There are ways of finding out: you can go to the museum or there are some good books, you can read about that.’ And so [he] encouraged us to find out for ourselves.”

Good fortune and coincidence played a part, of course. It is a wise parent who motivates self-discovery rather than using his or her affluence and influence to bring the world to a passive child. David was living in one of the world centers of palaeontological treasure, and because in the 1870’s railway workers workers had carved into the sandstones, ironstones and clays, in what is now called the Tillton Railway Cutting, the rock faces were relatively fresh. So, while he had to step over rails and sleepers to reach the rock-face, he was rewarded with abundant ammonites, but also bivalves, brachiopods, gastropods and belemnites.

One item in particular was to spur his interest beyond merely geology. Early in the Second World War his family took in some of the many children fleeing Nazi Germany. One of them, Marianne, came from a city on the Baltic coast where her father, a doctor, had given her one small precious thing as a sign of his thanks to whoever it was who cared for his daughter – a piece of amber.

“It felt surprisingly warm and light in my hand, but what made me fall in love with amber is what I discovered inside it. I found something miraculous: there were insects preserved in astonishing detail. I burned with questions: what sort of world were they from? They must have lived a long time ago, but how long?” 

According to Plato, a mind is not a vessel to be filled so much as a fire to be lit. The young David was afire! Aged 13, for example, he spent three weeks alone cycling to the Lake District in North West England, staying in youth hostels. “I doubt many parents would let children do that now,” he h reflected some 70 years later.

Tilton Railway Cutting is not the only site in Leicestershire that has yielded fossil firsts over the years. Another location nearby would become even more famous, when a fossil was found that changed our understanding of life’s origins. It was discovered by two schoolchildren, only 11 years after Sir David had left school – much to his chagrin later in life. “The rocks to the north-west of the city were of no interest to me…they didn’t contain any fossils. So I didn’t waste my time by looking there. How misguided I was,” he recalled in 2011.

One day in 1957, a schoolboy called Roger Mason cycled with two school friends to climb in a quarry in Charnwood Forest. There, they spotted something curious: a fossil with leaf-like branches that was unmistakably once alive. Mason knew that this shouldn’t have been possible – the rocks were pre-Cambrian in age, which would have made the fossil around 570-550 million years old. The geological consensus at the time was that life’s origin happened later.

Mason’s father persuaded a geologist at Leicester University to take a look, who confirmed it had indeed been a living creature, and published the find in Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society. It was named Charnia mason, after Mason, and despite its appearance it was an animal, not a plant.

“It caused a geological sensation,” Sir David recalled. Reflecting on his own childhood fossil-hunting, “I couldn’t help wishing that I hadn’t paid so much attention to the accepted geological wisdom of the time, and that I had been the schoolboy who found that key fossil in the Charnwood.”

For Sir David, a boy fascination with fossils would shape a life exploring the natural world. His career, which would take him all over the globe, bringing nature’s wonders closer for us to appreciate and wonder at, started with a bicycle, a few local rock faces, and a teenager’s collection of ancient creatures. At a special centennial birthday concert at the Royal Albert Hall on May 9, 2026, host Kirsty Young told him: “Thank you David, not just for joining us here tonight, but for sharing your knowledge and love of the planet. You’ve given nature a voice, and what a voice it is.”

Is he now going to rest? Far from it. At the same centennial confront, the BBC announced that Sir David will soon narrate another new natural history series, Blue Planet III.

So the question is, was there one moment that, with the benefit of hindsight, shaped your life? And, even more specifically, what was the moment that attracted you to a life time passion? Has there been a time when you paid too much attention to conventional wisdom, considering anything beyond it a ‘waste of time’, and have you come to regret it?

A popular analogy is to imagine what our world might look like if it could be reduced to a village of 1 000 people. Not all sources agree but the population might look like this :

579 Asians
150 Africans
120 Europeans
81 North Americans
61 from South America
6 from Oceana

314 Christians
236 Muslims
143 Hindus
71 Buddhists
71 Confucians and Taoists
7 Shintoists
2 Jews
150 would be of a minor religion or atheist

6% would receive half of the village income
16% of adults would be illiterate
40% would exist on less than $2 per day
40% would be malnourished

And who provides honey for this village?
Just one beekeeper.

The final question therefore, and perhaps the most important, is how has your passion (or, in my case, honey bees,) helped you give a voice to nature for the benefit of your fellow villagers?

Part IV of IV

“Ethical beekeeping begins with supporting the well-being of the colony foremost before maximizing the honey yield or anything else. These goals are not mutually exclusive and can realistically be achieved with a commitment to align management practices with the natural life-cycle of the colony and to purposefully refrain from any practices that create unnecessary stress on the colony. This requires a thorough knowledge and understanding of honey bee biology and how colonies live naturally in the wild. Ethical beekeeping avoids toxic chemicals and includes supporting natural ecosystems, plant diversity and local habitats.” (David Papke, Being Observant, PSBA Newsletter, Feb 2026.)

How we think about the nature of human existence dictates the way in which we understand our moral values. Patrick Smith (Somebody’s Else’s Century : East and West in a Post-Western World, 2010) describes the modern Western ethos as a radically individual, hypermasculine character formed during the C19th expansion of the white man’s world. “Bold, conquering and altogether assertive, it was dedicated to action, hostile to reflection, indifferent to community and the environment, and guilty of possessing an undeveloped heart.” By comparison, the Chinese, Indian and Japanese philosophical traditions have different conceptions of selfhood, society, space and time. Rather than put mankind at the center of and apart from nature, they ask what it means to be human in their interaction with their social, historic and natural surroundings.

The time has come, Smith argues, for a stringent reexamination of our “ego-centered subjectivity … we must alter our very relations with the world around us,” otherwise, he warns, “we will not survive the Western notion of the individual much longer.”

These predictions are not new nor have they not done much to move the needle – we are better at being reactive than proactive. But within our own domain, our own sphere of influence, is there anything practical we can do at a beekeeper level? First, as part of the new beekeeper classes, in conjunction with the how-to’s of constructing and managing a hive, we can introduce and discuss an ethical component to our craft. If not now, before habits are moulded, when else would be an appropriate time? It may be as simple as a few questions that would inform our practices as they develop; for example, how can we keep bees with minimal harm, nurture a respectful relationship with our charges and their environment, and develop a mindfulness that does not disrupt the bees’ natural behaviors? Effectively we would be asking at the outset, if we remove ourselves from the center of nature, how does our humanity interact with the social, historic and natural surroundings of honey bees?

Secondly, we might reconsider the sequencing of our Introduction to Beekeeping classes. Currently the orientation is invariably ‘bold, conquering and altogether assertive,’ to cite Patrick Smith again. We start with the components of a hive and basic management techniques designed to keep bees alive and produce honey, with a component on honey bee biology tacked on towards the end. What if we were to reverse that? What if we started these classes with the biology both of the honey bee and of the colony, followed by the question, “How can we manage these insects in a way that is respectful of and consistent with the behaviors they have developed over the millions of years?” What if, instead of imposing ourselves on the bees, the ‘ego-centered subjectivity’ that Smith describes, we allow for the development of a management system that emerges in tandem with the bees’ natural behaviors? The question, “What does it means to be an ethical human in our interactions with honey bees?” allows for a partnership with the bees, rather than an imposition on them. Or, to cite David Papke above, “to align our management practices with the natural life-cycle of the colony and to purposefully refrain from any practices that create unnecessary stress on the colony.”

90% of those reading this will find it inconvenient, uncomfortable or difficult to relate to, but there will be a handful of beekeepers who will see some validity in the proposal. In my first twenty years of teaching, I would see new ideas met by the old guard on the faculty with the response, ”We tried this ten years ago and it didn’t work, but we’ll try it again to please you.” They give it minimal effort, it fails, and the comeback is “See, we told you it would fail.” The system becomes mired in skepticism and controlled by those who are too entrenched to change. Change is an inconvenience; the needs of the learners are low priority.

The most significant advances come from passionate people who demonstrate by example, rather than by diktat from the top. Malcom Gladwell, in The Tipping Point, shows that the implementation of meaningful change takes the support of only 3 per cent of those involved. Where does that minority come from? More on this next month.

How important is it that we consider trying something different? David Papke addressed this in the final paragraph of his Bee Observant column in February. “So much has changed in the world and it seems like we are all just waiting for the next catastrophe. Feeling anxious and overwhelmed is the new status quo. Trouble and confusion permeate so many aspects of our lives. Ethical problems may be inconvenient, but they are not inconsequential. Beekeepers will shape the future of beekeeping — by their decisions, by their actions, and by their attitude. Each beekeeper is in a unique position to advocate and act on behalf of these insects we hold so dear and this dynamic living earth we love and share.”

The gestation period for an African elephant is 22 months and after birth the mother will lactate for an average of 4.8 years. For a blue whale it is 18 months and a calf may nurse from its mother for as long as two years. We are all familiar with similar numbers for dogs, cats, birds, hamsters … the newly-born are vulnerable and are vitally dependent on their parents (and in particular, their mothers,) for survival.

And yet honey bee queens have no maternal instincts; once an egg is laid the queen shows no further interest in it. Even worse, after about a year, and normally when resources are at their peak, she flies off with a significant number of her offspring, abandoning the nest to a successor not yet born. Although not unique to honey bees, it is an unusual, high risk strategy which must have significant evolutionary advantages to have progressed to this behavior.

Jacques van Alphen suggests two such benefits, the first of which is the more obvious. Because a swarm is under considerable time pressure to survive, having a proven queen who can start laying as soon as the workers have drawn out sufficient comb, perhaps two weeks or less, is a significant advantage.

The second reason is more complex and perhaps more intriguing. A bee hive, moist and warm, is a rich breeding ground for bacteria, fungi, microsporidia and viruses, which have shorter generation times and larger populations than do the bees. If, for example, the varroa mite cycle from egg to adult takes 9 – 12 days, depending on factors such as temperature and food availability, the number of completed cycles between spring and fall will be somewhere between 20 and 25. And every time a male mite mates with his sister there is the possibility of new mutations which enable the mites to adapt quickly to the environment within a colony, eg. resistance to a particular chemical in a miticide.

On the positive side for honey bees (and their keepers) varroa mites usually inbreed and therefore build clones, which means there is not as much genetic variation as would otherwise be the case. Dr. Ralph Buchler expands on this at some length in an interview in the April, 2026, issue of ABJ. Less positive is that mites combine with their secondary infections, such as viruses, which genetically are very flexible. It is not the mites themselves that kill the bees so much as the pathogens that adapt quickly to changing conditions in the hive. As Dr. Ralph Buchler explained in the previous issue of ABJ, “It is a really complex system and it always interacts.”

At the same time as the mites are completing as many as 25 reproductive cycles, a honey bee colony completes just one – when the queen leaves with a swarm and the virgin queen mates with drones from different colonies. Because worker bees have different fathers they have different genetic characteristics which in turn increase the chances that some workers will be resistant to infection from the rapidly changing pathogens, at least for the first few months, thus increasing the chances for the survival of the colony. This might explain in part why, after a swarm, mite counts can be temporarily stagnant. But in the long term, the pathogens will always out-breed their hosts, hence Sammy Ramsay’s observation as to how difficult it is, if not impossible, to develop varroa-resistant bees in the long term by breeding programs alone.

In summary, as long as the old queen is present, the genetic make-up is fixed at the colonial level and does not change, even as there is individual variation with eggs fertilized by different drones. Pathogens meanwhile have plenty of time to adapt because of their rapid reproductive cycle. These adaptations are counteracted when a new queen introduces new alleles to the colony. The old queen meanwhile migrates to a new environment, escaping many of the microbes. Thus the polyandry of honey bees (queen mating with multiple drones from a variety of areas) is vitally important to create new genetic variants in competition with the many mutations developed by the rapid rapid productive cycle of pathogens.

Beekeepers frequently violate the third Precept, namely “I refrain from sexual misconduct,” or “I refrain from using the five senses to violate basic rights.” Individual beekeepers, for example, in the name of an increased honey supply, prevent swarming by cutting out queen cells or clipping a queen’s wings, and because the old queen, to whom the pathogens have adapted, remains in the hive, there is a higher risk of infectious diseases for the colony. For queen breeders, the selection of bees for specific traits via artificial insemination threatens genetic variants – rare alleles, vital for adapting bees to new circumstances, may be lost. This partly explains why pedigree bees are less likely to develop resistance to varroa, whereas feral bees, unaffected by a beekeeper’s interference, may do so.

And this, in essence, is the heart of the ethics question. How we think about the nature of human existence dictates the way in which we understand our moral values. So perhaps the ethics of beekeeping means being api-centric to the point of approaching our subject first and foremost from the honey bee’s view point. What this means in practice will be pursued in the fourth, and final, part of this series.

Part ll of lV

“I dedicate myself to study the lesson of avoiding killing living beings.”  Such is the first Precept of Buddhism, as outlined last month.  The second Precept, “I refrain from taking what is not given,”  is  more than simply not stealing; it is a call to live with integrity, respect and gratitude for what we have while honoring the boundaries set by others.  If we take what is not freely offered, whether it be in material terms, time, energy or ideas,  we sow the seeds of greed that fracture the delicate web of interdependence. Exploiting shared resources is to act with a mindset of entitlement that in turn distances us from contentment. 

By comparison, when we cultivate generosity, when we create a life rooted in gratitude,  we find that true wealth lies not in material possessions but in the trust and kindness that we foster.

Honey bees of course take what they need in such a way that not so much as a leaf is harmed; rather, through the act of pollination, that strong desire to endure, common to all species, is converted into action.  And the dynamics of a colony are such that foragers communicate as to the immediate needs of the hive – pollen, nectar, water, propolis, each of which is freely offered to the bees – so that there is a stasis of resources, a balance, without unnecessary waste of materials or effort. Only recently have we realized the vital role of the tremble dance in maintaining this.  

Surely critical to beekeeping is knowing how much of the resources of a hive one can take without affecting adversely the future and health of the bees.  Greedy beekeepers do not, in my experience, last very long. Far from being entitled, we as beekeepers have a responsibility to nurture the critical environmental interdependent web on which both we and the bees depend.  And this, in terms of the second Precept, is the big picture – the environment is telling us, very powerfully even as we still cannot hear it, that for too long we have been taking more than the earth can give. The solution lies in each one of us : if our species is to endure we need to be mindful and compassionate on a constant basis as to what our planet can give and what we can rightfully take.  There are no excuses.  In this, honey bees are our teachers.

The third Precept is often translated as “I refrain from sexual misconduct,”  even as a literal translation of the original Pali, Chinese and Tibetan texts, according to Phra Anil Sakya, suggests “I refrain from using the five  senses to violate basic rights.”   In beekeeping terms, this translates as managing our colonies in a way that respects  the bees’ natural habitats and behaviors as they have evolved over millennia. An interesting debate might be whether we violate such rights by producing queens via artificial insemination, partly to produce more queens and partly to select for certain traits in the colony.  There is evidence that when workers choose an egg to develop into a queen,their choice is not random, whereas ours is based primarily on the age of the larvae and the amount of queen jelly in the cell.   Would this qualify as  sexual misconduct on our part, or does the latter intent (behavioral traits) justify it?  But there is a larger issue which is sufficiently complex yet important enough to justify its own Corner, which I will address next month.  It refers to a beekeeper’s decision to manipulate a queen or a colony (eg. wing clipping, queen larvae removal) and the long term impact on a colony. 

“I dedicate myself not to tell falsehoods,” the fourth Precept, means speaking truthfully and honestly, but it also means using speech to benefit others rather than only ourselves. This  requires first that we are mindful of what is true, and secondly that we examine our motivations when we speak to be sure there isn’t some trace of ego or hidden agendas behind our words, or a need to feel morally superior. We know it when we hear it, and the example that comes to mind immediately is Dr. Tom Seeley. 

Sometimes we need to speak up to stop harm or suffering. More than twenty years ago, riding along with the then bee inspector on his daily inspections, he made a comment that has stayed with me : ”Some people simply should not be allowed to keep bees.” But of course we don’t say so  out loud. The late Chogyam Trungpa called this “idiot compassion,” a form of which is hiding behind a facade of “nice” as a protection from conflict or unpleasantness.  The lesson is that one cannot be honest with others until one is honest with oneself, which is integral self-enlightenment.

We are familiar with  the different moods that a colony can display over the course of a season.  When it goes badly  I blame the weather, the temperature, bad genes, Africanized bees … anything but myself.  And yes, there are colonies that are consistently defensive and need to be acknowledged as such.  It is equally possible that the super-sensitive antennae of honey bees can detect pheromones that we too emit.  Sometimes I inspect a colony because I feel “I should;” it is a begrudging obligation rather than one filled with joy, and neither the bees nor I enjoy it. 

Some five years ago a nephew, who is a neurologist, was visiting and asked to see the inside of a colony.  Normally I don’t wear a veil (although there is one at hand ‘just in case’) and he opted to do the same, insisting he wasn’t scared.  The colony was docile, except for one bee who stung the visitor on the lip, and it hurt!   Afterwards he conceded that he had in fact been scared but ‘was man enough to deny it.’   One bee at least was not fooled, triggered perhaps by the increased amount of carbon dioxide that my guest was emitting.  What might have changed if he had ‘chosen not to tell falsehoods’ from the outset?

What might all of this mean in bigger terms?  The Walk for Peace by the Buddhist monks and their dog, Aloka, begun in November last year in Fort Worth, TX, attracted significant attention – over one million followers on cyber media and the thousands who lined the roadside, some of whom had traveled significant distances to be there. Why this attention?  One possible reason is that the monks, who did no more than walk with gratitude and intent, had an authenticity, both individually and collectively, that we all yearn for, not least in these complicated, conflicting political times. There was also in their every action a simplicity, a purity, a clarity, even an innocence, which we once knew in the honesty of childhood and only now  realize that we miss it.  There was no preaching, no capitalist agenda;  the monks focused on the present, on gratitude, on intent and inner calmness (Aloka has become a symbol of that calmness) and tens of thousands of people found it so compelling that there were many tears as the caravan passed by. It was a reminder that the path to awakening lies not in grand gestures but in the quiet, consistent care we bring to each moment, in association with  the power of human community.

The fifth Precept of Buddhism is to refrain from consuming intoxicants, which can  impair one’s judgment and mindfulness. The emphasis is on the importance of maintaining the clarity of mind necessary to make wise choices and avoid causing harm to oneself and others.  “…the path to awakening lies not in grand gestures but in the quiet, consistent care we bring to each moment …” not least when working with honey bees.  

Beekeeping  allows all people, regardless of faith, culture or background, to come together in a spirit of compassion, mutual respect and understanding. At its best it offers a glimpse into a peaceful, efficient, community, just as nature intended; something that we might have briefly experienced in the innocence of childhood and something that we desperately miss and want to recreate even by proxy, not in grand gestures but in the quiet, consistent care we bring to each moment.  Does this explain the calmness that can come from being surrounded by honey bees?  Or the satisfaction that comes with a greater understanding of our charges and the questions that we are led to ask about the relationship between honey bees in a colony and people in a modern community?  Perhaps, as with many pursuits, beekeeping offers a chance for us to find relief from the pressures of the modern world by practicing these Precepts, even unwittingly, and experiencing the joy, the contentment, the ‘internal journey towards enlightenment’ if we should be so fortunate.

New beekeepers want prescriptions rather than precepts.  How often have we been asked, “What do I do next?” as if there is some kind of specific formula for each occasion.  What if we began our bee classes with appropriate precepts, which set ethical standards in which to operate, and then provided opportunities in which they could be practiced? My intent is to end this four part series with some possible precepts, hopefully as the beginning of a discussion. 

The Venerable  Bhikkhu Pannakara, who led the Walk of Peace,  wrote,  “We walk not to protest, but to awaken the love of peace that already lives within each of us.  It is a simple yet meaningful reminder that unity and kindness begin within each of us and can radiate outward to families, communities, and society as a whole. Our walking itself cannot restore peace in the world. But when someone encounters us – whether by the roadside, online or through a friend – when our message touches something deep within them, when it awakens the love for peace that has always lived quietly in their own heart – something sacred begins to unfold. This is our contribution – not to force healing upon the world, but to help nurture it, one awakened heart at a time.”

Replace the word peace with the word nature, and his words are equally inspirational. 

Part 1

What provokes an idea?  Four things happened in the space of a week. I read Peter Matthiessen’s book, The Snow Leopard, which describes his two months in Nepal in 1972, interacting with fundamental Buddhist cultures in extreme winter conditions; one of the few snow leopards in captivity (Norfolk, England) successfully underwent cataract surgery; in an interview on PBS,  Sadhguru Darshan  described western religions as based essentially on belief, compared to eastern religions which focus on searching; and the media covered extensively a group of Buddhist monks and their dog, Aloka,  as they walk 2300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington DC in what has been labeled “The  Walk for Peace.”

One school of thought suggests that such coincidences are happening around us all of the time; it is when we notice them that we are truly alive.  And in in the back of my mind (of course!) was the question- does this offer any insight into honey bees and beekeeping? 

For Christians, Jesus was a divine being who took human form, is unique as such and will come again.   By contrast, Buddhists believe that Siddhartha Gautama was fully human without any divinity and was the first in a long series of Buddhas (currently, at least in Tibetan Buddhism, the Buddha is embodied by the Dalai Lama.) Whereas Jesus’ divinity came about by the action of God the Father, the Buddha attained enlightenment through intense personal reflection.  Thus salvation for Christians focuses on God’s grace together with one’s on-going works  while the goal of Buddhism is nirvana, or liberation from attachment and worldly suffering. 

Fundamental to both faiths are the principles of love, compassion, patience and tolerance; for example, Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path aligns in many ways with Christian ethical teachings.   Thus the Golden Rule in Christianity (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,”) compares favorably with Buddhism’s “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.”  Similar sentiments can be found in Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Native American religions.

Both Christianity and Buddhism offer a concise list of moral directives—the Ten Commandments for Christianity and the Five Precepts for Buddhism.  Several of the former, which are understood to have been given to Moses by God,  deal with how people should relate to the divine, whereas the Precepts function more as guidelines for seekers of enlightenment. Four of the Christian directives have their quasi-equivalents in Buddhism: no killing, no stealing, no lying and no adultery or sexual misconduct, perhaps because  these actions tear so deeply at the fabric of human community that they demand restraint.

In summary, Christianity is a religion, Buddhism is a practice.  The former emphasizes faith, divine grace, and a Creator God – essentially an external locus – while the focus of the latter is on experiential understanding, the illusion of self, and karma, an internal journey towards true enlightenment. Nor are they mutually exclusive.  The late Thich Nhat Hanh was told by a Catholic priest who lives in a Buddhist monastery in France that Buddhism  made him a better Christian. 

Surely one can find exceptions to these descriptions; after all reliable sources suggest that there are 10 different groups of Christians (Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Assyrian, for example) and more than 45 000 denominations within them, just as there are three branches of Buddhism. So yes, there are many different interpretations and experiences within these generalizations. 

For Buddhists the Five Precepts are ethical directions for lay followers. They are followed by the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, the first a diagnosis of the human condition and the second a practical guide to what the Buddha called ‘the middle way’ to nirvana. 

The first of the Five Precepts is often mistranslated as “Do Not Kill,” but again, the Precepts are not commandments  so much as guidelines for cultivating mindfulness, compassion, and ethical living for the  benefit of self and others.  A more accurate translation, according to Phra Anil Sakya, Deputy Abbot of Wat Bowonniwet Vihara, the Monastery of the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand, is “I dedicate myself to study the lesson of avoiding killing living beings.”  Of course one cannot completely avoid killing creatures – as Sakya explains, a simple walk in the grass, never mind the very act of breathing, will kill other beings.  Even as we eat, other forms of life are transformed into sustenance. The essence of the precept lies in ones intention. 

So if avoiding killing is impossible, the intention becomes cultivating a heart that values life in all its forms, together with a mindfulness of the ways in which we can cause harm through mindlessness, neglect and indifference. Key here is the recognition that all beings treasure their existence, that all life forms have a strong drive to endure.  To align oneself with that universal force of compassion is to cultivate empathy for all living things. 

So how might this relate to honey bees and their management?  For example, should one avoid doing an alcohol wash to check mite counts because it involves killing bees?  (And incidentally, in my experience, sugar rolls also kill bees, just not as quickly, in that vigorous shaking of the bees in a jar of powdered sugar critically destroys their delicate wings.) First, the overall intention of a mite check is the long term health and survival of the colony, which makes the killing of some of the bees ethically acceptable, even perhaps to the bees themselves – in terms of the much discussed altruism of bees, if they could understand that their sacrifice is for the well being of their nest mates, they might accept it. 

Similarly this does not mean that one should not kill wax moths, hive beetles or varroa mites, provided that one’s intent is the health and survival of the colony. 

And what is your intention as a beekeeper?  Denis Vanengelsdorp was the first person I heard use the term ‘the zen of beekeeping,’ which means approaching and working a colony slowly with a deliberate  mindset of compassion.  There are physiological benefits for the beekeeper – when we breathe quickly we exhale more carbon dioxide which is an alarm pheromone to the guard bees, who respond accordingly.  So aligning oneself with the universal force of compassion and humility is to cultivate empathy for the bees individually and collectively, and fewer bees (or beekeepers) get hurt in the process.

The remaining  four Precepts will be addressed next month, together with an attempt to summarize what it all means for ourselves as well as for our charges.

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.”