Author: Jeremy

In August, 2013, Mary and I were in Alsace, France, for a family wedding and had the opportunity to take a guided tour of the medieval center of the city of Colmar.   It involved a small locomotive with three open carriages and attached to each seat was a headset.  There were fourteen  languages one could choose from, with English third on the list behind French and German.  There was Chinese and Japanese but no Arabic or Balkan languages.   It was a truly multi-ethnic group of passengers and Mary observed how everyone was dressed so similarly, the result no doubt of the outsourcing of the clothing industry to Asian factories where it is mass produced and then shipped back to the US, Europe, the Middle East, Asia …

In 1995, in a small rural town in Zimbabwe, there was only one general store and it  stocked almost everything in a quaint yet orderly way, including a shelf of school bags above and behind the storekeeper, each with the logo of the Chicago Bulls imprinted on it.  Michael Jordan in rural Zimbabwe, where very few houses had electricity, never mind television?  To the school children it was an intriguing but meaningless design.

In the same year a BBC film crew was anxious to document the effect of the war in Rwanda on the gorilla population and, because of the turmoil in East Africa, it had to approach from the west, which meant a week long trip by boat up the Congo river followed by several more days in canoes beyond the Stanley Falls.  One night they stopped at a camp of pygmies, probably of the Mbuti clan, in a quest to find guides who could lead them through the forests to the northern edge of the Mitambu mountains in Kivu province where the great apes could be found. As the camera panned over the camp fire in this remotest of areas, a woman came into the picture.  It was difficult to assess her age because, being small of stature anyway, the T-shirt she was wearing swept to the ground.  On the orange T, in large black letters, was inscribed “FREE OJ.”

The theme running through these experiences is the unintended effects of globalization.  As writers like Wendell Berry, Michael Pollen and Bill Cronon point out repeatedly, most of us have become very good at doing or producing one particular thing and at consuming everything else.  Ironically, the further one gets from the actual product the greater the chance of economic success; one has to think only of the extravagant wages of many CEO’s compared to those on the shop floor, even though ironically the latter probably have the practical skills to survive without the former, but not vice-versa.

It is painful that the millions of American workers laid off in the recent recession are desperately seeking re-training so that they can re-enter the job market. Their previous experience and expertise appear to have no value of their own.  And that initial expertise was the result of choices we made, often unwittingly, at a young age that determined much of the rest of our lives. I can recall vividly, in the 1960’s, a wise man predicting to a group of assembled high school boys that  two thirds of the jobs that we would end up doing as adults did not then exist.  We scoffed, and yet today I would estimate that two thirds was a conservative estimate.  I recall too the adage that if there had been a computer in New York City in 1900 to predict what the city would look like in the year 2000, the answer might have been, “Six feet deep in horse manure.‘    

This firewalls between labor pools can make us despair of ever changing the way we live. It is easy to feel that change can only come from outside, perhaps proactively from a higher authority like government or reactively after some kind of disaster, because we no longer feel we can effect significant change ourselves.  

Part of the frustration is that in this new outsourced economy it is difficult to know how things are grown or made, and to relate to those who grow and make them.  Beekeeping, like gardening, cannot be outsourced.  Putting aside queens and drones, who together make up about 3% of a colony in the summer, bees are not  specialists.  Each worker bee undertakes a series of tasks during her brief life, starting with cleaning the cell from which she emerged and ending as a forager. Each worker bee gets to experience almost all of the functions of a hive; all are multi-skilled generalists and none is a specialist.

Many of us are finding relief from this feeling of dependence on people and events outside of ourselves by turning to activities which show that we can still self-provide, we can still create, manage and control a mini ecosystem.  Gardening is one such activity; beekeeping is another. As Al Summers said in an interview with Boulder’s Daily Camera newspaper, “Bees are a portal to a much wider view of the environment.  Much as I like bees, and they do have a nostalgic appeal, that’s not my dominant reason for beekeeping.  It’s my style of being environmentally responsible.” 

Being attentive to the needs of the bees leads to greater appreciation of the intricate work and interactions that makes life possible, an awareness of the complexity of the many systems involved in producing say, an apple for the table, water from the faucets or a teaspoon of honey for our morning cup of tea.  This in turn changes our relationship to the environment, both immediate and wide spread, and renews our appreciation for the people who provide  what we otherwise accept unthinkingly as the necessities of life.

The phrase carpe diem, extolled by Robin Williams in the movie Dead Poets’ Society and by songs from Metallica and Green Day, was first coined by the Roman poet Horace more than 2,000 years ago and as such ‘seize the day’ is one of the oldest philosophical mottos in Western civilization. 

Roman Krznaric, in a book titled Carpe Diem Regained : The Vanishing Art of Seizing the Day,  found a range of definitions “…from seizing opportunities, to spontaneity, to hedonism, to being in the present moment; as well as a collective political form of carpe diem. They’re all different ways of having agency in the face of death, of feeling that you’re fully alive.”

The popularity of carpe diem in modern culture has been sabotaged by the language of the advertising slogan and the hashtag ‘Just do it’ or ‘Yolo’ (You Only Live Once) and as such has helped strip the concept of its true meaning. “The hijacking of carpe diem is the existential crime of the century – and one that we have barely noticed,” Krznaric writes.   “That idea that instead of just doing it, we just buy it instead: shopping is the second most popular leisure activity in the Western world, beaten only by television. Instead of seizing the day, we’re seizing the credit card.”

Carpe diem has also been commandeered by our culture of hyper-scheduled living, he argues.  ‘Just do it’ becomes ‘Just plan it’ as we fill up our electronic calendars weeks in advance with no free weekends, to the point that we no longer realize how our spontaneity has been stolen from us. 

People had more spontaneous lives in the Middle Ages  “… partly of course because death was so much closer,” he says. But the Reformation argued that wasting time is a sin as the churches, both Protestant and Catholic, banned carnival and summer fairs, public dancing and games. 

“Then came the Industrial Revolution with its great weapon, the factory clock,” says Krznaric, with an emphasis on measured productivity and our to-do lists.  An antidote for Victorian Britain was a craze for ‘the East’ , which was far more than a fad for Persian carpets and Japanese lacquer furniture. The Orient evoked fantasies of sensuality and passionate carpe diem living that were the opposite of sober Victorian Christianity.

One of the key texts was Edward FitzGerald’s loose translation of verses by the 11th century Persian poet and mathematician Omár Khayyám,  which took the form of a poem called the Rubáiyát of Omár Khayyám. After a copy was passed to the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who shared it with his Pre-Raphaelite circle, there began a cult of Omár Khayyám that lasted at least until the sobriety of World War One. The poem was an “outcry against the unofficial Victorian ideologies of moderation, primness and self-control”, in their place offering “sensuous embraces in jasmine-filled gardens on balmy Arabian nights, accompanied by cups of cool, intoxicating wine”. The Rubáiyát even appeared to be rejecting religion itself, suggesting there was no afterlife, its message being that since human existence is transient and death will come much faster than we imagine, it is best to savor its exquisite moments. Oscar Wilde described it as a “masterpiece of art”, placing it alongside Shakespeare’s sonnets as one of his greatest literary loves. 

And the late 19th century witnessed the era of organized sport and entertainment as we became increasingly a society of watchers rather than participators, which fed neatly into the age of television, of i-Pads, i-Phones and digital distraction.

It is interesting to muse on how honey bees experience time.  We know that they have a sense of the seasons based primarily on day light time, and a sense of day and night based on temperature and a light source.  It was intriguing to see the bees retreat into their hives during the eclipse on August 21st, 2017, responding instinctively to the lack of light rather than any 24 hour clock. I doubt that they have a sense of passing daily time as we perceive it, even if they know, as Diane Ackerman writes in Dawn Light, 

“… dandelions and water lilies open at 7:00 am, marigolds at 9:00 am and evening primroses not until 6:00 pm.”  Rather they respond to a series of stimuli (pheromones, nectar and pollen intake and the presence of brood, for example) and their natural biorhythms, (such as the duties of a worker bee) rather than any internal clock.   For them they are probably not conscious of either past or future, and potentially they are always ‘in the moment.’

Leaning on the rail of a yacht in 1968, looking at the “rocky cliffs, rolling seas, dazzling sky” of the Dalmatian Straits, Jerry Mander had an epiphany. “It struck me that there was a film between me and all of that,” he wrote in his 1977 book, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. “I could ‘see’ the spectacular views. I knew they were spectacular. But the experience stopped at my eyes. I couldn’t let it inside me. I felt nothing. Something had gone wrong with me … I felt dead. Nature had become irrelevant to me, absent from my life. Through mere lack of exposure and practice, I’d lost the ability to feel it, tune into it, or care about it. Life moved too fast for that now.”

As beekeepers we can rush through a hive inspection, conscious of the to-do list on our phone, or take time to treasure the moment and be truly present with these marvelous insects that reflect so much of ourselves.  The joy that can come from watching forager bees return to the hive laden with pollen is wonder-full. It’s the zen of beekeeping writ large. 

Is this an argument for hedonism, for self-indulgence and self-gratification? Or for sheer escapism, savoring so many exquisite moments as to leave all of one’s responsibilities behind? Not at all, argues Krznaric.  It’s not about excess so much as rediscovering the senses, rediscovering direct experience, whether it is honey bee society, a renewed awareness of the small things found on a walk, or appreciating the subtle flavors in honeys collected at different times of the year. 

Its was 50 years ago that Jerry Mander reflected on his reaction, or lack thereof,  to the cliffs, seas and skies of the Dalmatian Straits.  The pace of life has been accelerating since, and what Mander described is increasingly widespread.  “Human beings have always had mediated experiences, ever since the invention of reading,” said Krznaric, “but now things like TV have so removed us from direct experience of life that we’ve almost forgotten what it’s like.”  His solution?  “It’s vital to try and recover this carpe diem instinct which is in all of us.”

Honey bees are, for me, vital agents in that recovery process.

The observation hive on my desk, with access for the bees to the outside, provided countless hours of pleasure, instruction and amazement, not least by contemplating the combination of even-temperedness and sense of purpose exhibited by the bees despite the constant presence and pressure of their peers.  All day and night there are bees going over, under, around and on top of each other, yet there are no signs of frustration (what would ‘road rage’ in a honey bee look like?)  Rather the colony seems to find comfort, support and reassurance in the constant presence of others of its kind.

The closest I have come to experiencing this kind of pressure was at Apimondia in 2009 at Montpellier, France,  as we pushed and struggled and grappled and wriggled in columns of six deep trying to get to see the hundreds of vendors in the short intervals between presentations.  If this is ‘bee space’ it is much too confining for my liking.

Much has been written about bees as a superorganism, not least by Jurgen Tautz, and many of William Longgood’s essays as collected in The Queen Must Die stress how each bee exists primarily for the good and survival of the larger community. In his book, Bee Time : Lessons from the Hive, Mark Winston writes that “Underlying all the physical sensations are collaboration and order, communication and common purpose, each bee submerging her individual nature for the colony.”

We used to be like that.   There was a time when we got to know people because we had both to ask for and to offer help. In the absence of a health system, unemployment insurance and public housing, charity was an integral part of life and indeed was central to all of the world’s major religions.   And yet today how many of us, when approached by the sick, the frail, the homeless or the confused, choose to look the other way, or cross the street, or say “He will only spend it on drugs,” or blame the individual for his or her predicament.  “If only they would work harder …”

My guess is that this is especially evident in the USA because the country chose to pass on the social revolution of C19th and C20th Europe, which means that the sick, the hurting and the disadvantaged of this society depend all too often on random acts of kindness.  Yes, we are still warm hearted, well meaning and generous, but to preserve a sense of balance we either turn our metaphorical backs on, or put fences between, the millions of human beings who are all around us all of the time, whether needy or not.  The public spaces in which we are forced to rub shoulders with our many neighbors –  busses, lifts, pavements, shopping malls, restaurants – throw us into the mix in a way that denies our individuality and can make us feel insignificant, trivial, if not irrelevant.

If one wants to start a commotion, try starting a conversation with a stranger in an elevator!

Honey bees go into a cell occasionally for a little privacy, a little sleep, whereas we retreat increasingly into our private cocoons to retain our dignity and our sanity. And technology has provided us with plenty of recesses in which to hide – our cars, our computers, buying with a credit card over the internet, Facebook, detached houses with fences …     And, as a general rule, the wealthier we are the more easy it is to be isolated with bigger houses and taller fences. Sealed away it is easy to forget or deny the inherent worth and dignity of every individual in the face of a media that emphasizes the murderers and swindlers and unethical politicians and vain celebrities and abusive pedophiles.

Honey bees have been living a life virtually unchanged for millions of years, a life style that is now being threatened by the technology we espouse so loudly.  A pertinent example was the 2010 ban on honey bees being imported from Australia to the almond trees of California because of the mites and diseases that might come with them on the Boeing 707, or indeed the debate in Britain about the risks of small hive beetle inherent in imported bees or the Asian hornet crossing the Channel 

Do I want to live like a bee? Could I survive in the organized chaos of a bee hive?  Absolutely not.  But I do want to keep the ‘virtues ‘ of technology in perspective. A poignant reminder is the technology available to the world’s great teachers compared to the power and longevity of their messages. 

 A popular analogy argues that people can be viewed  either as butterflies – beautiful, and sitting in the sun with their wings spread as others gather around them – or bees, out in the garden cross-pollinating. I know that I need meaningful interactions face-to-face, emotion-to-emotion, with other people,  those foragers who are out collecting nectar and pollen  and then coming back to tell us where the good stuff is.  And, even as a drone,  I need to feel that, to paraphrase Mark Winston, I am collaborating and communicating our common purpose, although fortunately, and unlike the bee, I don’t have to submerge my individual nature to do so. 

Keeping track of the value of my honey in the belief that this is one of the few hobbies that comes out on the plus side of a cost/benefit analysis.

Spending a day at the local Fair repeating the same basic facts again and again …  and enjoying doing so. 

My old, wide-brimmed, green netted bee veil. Hey, it keeps the sun off my ears and the bees out of my face. 

Getting yet another hive tool for Christmas – and truly appreciating the thoughtfulness.

Looking forward to a morning of surrounding myself with insects who (she thinks) want to sting me. 

My brother-in-law’s fondness of referring to me as the “wacko bee guy.”

Replacing damaged hive bodies every winter while being totally satisfied with the 15-year-old carpet in the living room.

Finding different creative ways to answer the question, “Do you ever get stung? ”eg. “Only once a year, by the IRS” 

Looking like a drowned, filthy, swollen,  red-faced rat after getting caught with a hive open in the rain. 

Being unable to go on a walk without peering at every large tree looking for a feral colony.

On Sept 24th, 2015,  Pope Francis addressed the assembled Congress of the United States.  It was a superbly structured speech, delivered eloquently and gently by a wise and loving soul.  It was not a sermon in the traditional sense so much as a moving reminder of the best of human values.  

What might Francis have said to the bees (after all, he chose his papal moniker in honor of St. Francis of Assisi?)   We get an inkling if we take a few extracts from his 55 minute presentation and change some of the  nouns (eg. colony for country or nation, worker and drone for son and daughter, etc.)  

Imagine an elderly drone who has lost much of his hair dressed in a white cassock and zucchetto with slippers on four feet, leaving two front feet free to hold his notes, addressing an assembled throng of honey bees. 

“Honorable Members of the Colony, Good Friends:

    “Each drone and worker of a given colony has a mission, a personal and social responsibility. Your own responsibility is to enable this colony to grow. You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your bees in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good.   A colony endures when it seeks, as a vocation, to satisfy common needs by stimulating the growth of all its members, especially those in situations of greater vulnerability or risk.

   “I would like to take this opportunity to dialogue with the many thousands of worker bees who strive each day to do an honest day’s work, to bring home their bee bread – one step at a time – to build a better life for their families. These workers,  in their own quiet way, sustain the life of society. They generate solidarity by their actions, and they create an organization which offers a helping hand to those most in need.

    “These bees, for all their many limitations, are able by hard work and self-sacrifice – some at the cost of their lives – to build a better future. They shape fundamental values which will endure forever in the spirit of the hive. A colony with this spirit can live through many crises, tensions and conflicts, while always finding the resources to move forward, and to do so with dignity. Building a future requires love of the common good and cooperation in a spirit of subsidiarity and solidarity.

   “We must move forward together, as one, in a renewed spirit of fraternity and solidarity, cooperating generously for the common good.   The challenges facing us today call for a renewal of that spirit of cooperation.  All activity is an expression of our compelling need to live as one, in order to build the greatest common good: that of a community which sacrifices particular interests in order to share, in justice and peace, its goods, its interests, its social life. 

  “In recent centuries, millions of bees came to this land to pursue the dream of building a future in freedom. We are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners. Tragically, the rights of those who were here long before us were not always respected. Those first contacts were often turbulent and violent. Nonetheless, we must resolve now to live as nobly and as justly as possible, as we educate new generations not to turn their back on our “neighbors” and everything around us. Building a colony calls us to recognize that we must constantly relate to others, rejecting a mindset of hostility in order to adopt one of reciprocal subsidiarity, in a constant effort to do our best.

   “Let us remember the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  This Rule points us in a clear direction. Let us treat others with the same passion and compassion with which we want to be treated. Let us seek for others the same possibilities which we seek for ourselves. Let us help others to grow, as we would like to be helped ourselves. In a word, if we want security, let us give security; if we want life, let us give life; if we want opportunities, let us provide opportunities. The yardstick we use for others will be the yardstick which time will use for us. 

  “This common good also includes the earth. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all.  I call for a courageous and responsible effort to avert the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human activity. I am convinced that we can make a difference.  Now is the time for courageous actions and strategies, aimed at implementing a culture of care and at the same time protecting nature. 

    How essential the family has been to the building of this colony.   And how worthy it remains of our support and encouragement. Yet I cannot hide my concern for the family, which is threatened, perhaps as never before, from without. I can only reiterate the importance and, above all, the richness and the beauty of family life. In particular, I would like to call attention to those family members who are the most vulnerable, the young. For many of them, a future filled with countless possibilities beckons, yet so many others seem disoriented.  Their problems are our problems. We cannot avoid them. We need to face them together.

   In these remarks I have sought to present some of the richness of your apis heritage, of the spirit of the home of the honey bee. It is my desire that this spirit will continue to develop and grow, so that as many bees as possible can inherit and dwell in this hive.”

Our mythical drone would have been preaching to the choir because these are values and lessons the bees have learned only too well and practice every day.  We, on the other hand …

If infants were taught to walk and talk in the same way they are later taught mathematics and English, this country (and many others) would be populated with sedentary mutes.  In the same vein, rewarding children with pizzas for the amount of books they read leads to over-weight kids who like short books.

Learning to walk and talk involves a number of factors.  For example, a high tolerance for failure.  Imagine an eighteen month old refusing to try to walk because the first attempt ended with him plopped on the floor, even if his behind is protected by a well padded  diaper.  It’s a slow learning curve that requires persistence.  Fortunately  two year olds don’t refuse to talk because the words did not come out perfectly the first time.  It requires consistent encouragement from those who can, an absence of judgement (imagine grading an infant every time she opened her mouth,) frequent rest periods before trying again, and the ultimate reward is the sense of accomplishment when the task is mastered to the point that most of us walk and talk without giving a second thought to the complicated mechanisms involved. 

It’s a kinesthetic tactile process involving a willingness to experiment and to delight in small incremental achievements.  Again, imagine tiny tots having to listen to lectures and watch videos on how to walk. 

By comparison how many of us, in a traditional classroom, felt judged when we did not master, or even understand, a topic immediately?   How many of us felt that our success depended on the opinion of an external authority whom we ultimately had to please if we were to ‘succeed’, or that a grade was not a fair reflection of the work done or the comprehension achieved? Or that there was no time for persistence because the teacher had to progress to the next item on the curriculum ?   Score well on a test that requires short term recall and one is presumed to have understood the material.  Start a sentence with words like mathematics, or art, or singing, or another language  and our anxiety levels escalate. For me that word is Latin. For reasons I cannot recall, possibly simple immaturity, I never got the basics (and having a first year graduate student as a teacher did not help.) Letting go was not an option, so for four years I endured ignominy and humiliation as the material got progressively beyond my reach with no offers of help and my lacking the necessary courage and confidence to ask for it.  

A honey bee responds primarily to pheromones and instincts, the latter triggered by day light hours, temperature, pressures of space and food in the hive, and hormonal and glandular changes in her body.   As she transitions to becoming a forager there is an increase in the levels of juvenile hormone as well as in the size of the ’mushroom bodies’ in her brain. The latter include neurons and glia, are involved in learning and memory and their size is correlated to the capacity for complex behavior; the worker bee, who has been confined to the hive for the first four weeks of her life, now has to recognize and memorize landmarks if she is to successfully return to the colony with her loads of water, nectar, pollen and propolis.

This is finely tuned, situational-dependent learning based on communal needs.  We by comparison have lost many of our finer senses, tend to learn in isolation, feel distanced from the natural world and rely on others to teach us using techniques that are increasingly  called into question. 

Please understand, I am not condemning the role of audio and visual learning nor of qualified instruction. Rather, and as one who learns best from tactile experiences, I am appealing for the use of effective and varied instructional styles accompanied by efficacious learning strategies. For example, Annie Murphy Paul, the author of Brilliant: The New Science of Smart, argues that “In a world as fast-changing and full of information as our own, every one of us — from schoolchildren to college students to working adults — needs to know how to learn well. Yet evidence suggests that most of us don’t use the learning techniques that science has proven most effective. Worse, research finds that learning strategies we do commonly employ are among the least effective.”

In a report released in January, 2017, by the Association for Psychological Science, the authors, led by Kent State University professor John Dunlosky, examine ten learning tactics and rate each from high to low utility on the basis of the evidence they’ve amassed.  Highlighting and underlining , for example, offer no benefit beyond simply reading the text. Some research even indicates that highlighting can get in the way of learning because by drawing attention to individual facts it may hamper the process of making connections and drawing inferences. Nearly as bad is the practice of simply re-reading. 

More effective is distributed practice, which  involves spreading out one’s study sessions rather than engaging in a marathon. Cramming information at the last minute may get one through that test or meeting but the material will quickly disappear from memory. It’s much more effective to dip into the material at intervals over time and the longer one wants to remember the information, whether it’s two weeks or two years, the longer the intervals should be.

The second recommended learning strategy is elaborative interrogation, meaning  asking “why” as one reads, investigating the text in detail instead of passively reading it over, and practice testing. Research shows that the mere act of questioning information, of massaging it and calling it to mind, strengthens that knowledge and aids in future retrieval.

So, how do we help new beekeepers to ‘learn well’, to use Annie Paul’s term? The Introduction to Beekeeping Class I took some fifteen years ago consisted of six evenings of listening to a beekeeper talk, and thirty minutes, at the end of the class,  watching him manipulate a hive.  No wonder some of the students were taking the class for the third, fourth or even fifth time. More effective are those  classes that continue over a full season rather than the traditional six weeks, with each session related to what is happening in the colonies at that particular time (colony build up, nectar flows and brood rearing, honey extraction, disease detection, winter preparation, for example.)  Between these sessions are reading suggestions which encourage students to comprehend more deeply what they had experienced in the class session, with some questions at the end for self-interrogation and, at the next class, an opportunity to share and discuss thoughts and concerns that might have arisen.

The idea of a comprehensive weekend bee class consisting of two 8 hour days may be convenient for attendees but ineffective for learning, and much as I enjoy going to conferences about honey bees I invariable feel overwhelmed and my recall is poor; without note-taking it would be zero.  The reason is that there is no time to assimilate, to examine, to discuss what one has heard in one presentation before one is exposed to another, and another.  Similarly, when beekeepers explain in detail over the phone the manipulations they have done in their apiary and then ask for an opinion, I find it difficult to respond meaningfully; I need the full sensory exposure if I am to have more than a superficial understanding of their situation.  

A bee’s life is short and everything she does is oriented towards the long term health and survival of the colony.  Our lives are relatively long, all being well, and life-long learning as an adult requires passion, commitment, persistence, resilience for failure and the fulfillment that comes from both incremental and long term progress. We don’t need others to judge how well we are doing, to grade us, but rather to encourage, acknowledge and appreciate, which also describes how we learn instinctively as a child and how we mentor  successfully new beekeepers. 

Sometimes one sentence can stimulate a series of thoughts which invite comparisons with honey bees.

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan chooses four plants (apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes) to suggest not only that humans act on nature to get the results we want but that plants too evolve to gratify certain human desires so that we in turn help those plants to spread and proliferate.

In the chapter on marijuana he describes how different cultures have reacted to substances that have the power to alter our thoughts and feelings, citing as an example the different reactions to alcohol in European and Muslim societies.  And he notes that, until the Industrial Revolution,  alcohol and tobacco were confined to a small, privileged elite in Europe who eventually shared them with the burgeoning proletariat to help them tolerate the monotony and drudgery of industrial urban life. This was the sentence that began the thought process.

One of the reactions to the Industrial Revolution in Europe was social and political unrest. 1848 brought the first practical experiments in socialism which argued that it was the responsibility of the state to share corporate and national profits with those who labored to produce those earnings.  Profit was shared as benefits (subsidized housing, health, education and unemployment insurance) rather than income.    Whereas Social Democrats believed this could be achieved peacefully through the democratic process, in 1867 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels argued in Das Kapital that the financially privileged would not voluntarily share the benefits of their positions and that it was the duty of the workers to seize by force what the authors saw as their just rights.   

Across the Atlantic it was feared that if Europe sneezed America might catch a cold. 

Watching the spectacle that is the Oscars leads one to wonder about the emphasis placed and the money spent on these extravaganzas, and postulate that perhaps the emphasis on sport and entertainment, which seems to me to be more prolific in the US than anywhere else in the world, was originally a means of providing the working classes with either relief or distraction from their industrialized working conditions.   The first theme park, for example, was built on Coney Island in 1896.  The North American Baseball League and the American Baseball Association were started in 1876 and 1882 respectively.  The first professional basketball league was formed in 1898, the NHL in 1917 and the NFL in the 1920’s.  This was the same period of the first black-and-white movies while the first feature film presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, released in 1927.

Nor was this confined to the USA.  In England the National Football (ie. soccer) League was founded in 1888.

In other words organized mass entertainment evolved at the same time as the bleak social consequences of the Industrial Revolution became increasingly evident.  Is this purely coincidental? 

And then there is the question of financial rewards as a reflection of societal values.  For example, the contract signed by Joe Flacco after the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl in 2012 is more than 300 times greater than the President of the United States earns in the same period and 2400 times greater than the income of the average teacher, policeman or fireman, who in my opinion are the real heroes.  We no longer question a typical movie budget of $200 million while myriads of American children live in poverty. 

Listening to the interviews with movie stars on the ‘red carpet’ of the Oscars provokes the question as to why we give their pronouncements so much weight – after all they are very good at reading and performing lines and roles written by somebody else, so is it surprising that what many say is inane – and why we place so much emphasis on what they wear, considering that they are invariably dressed by someone else?

I’m not a late night owl but stayed up one night to watch the late night talk shows, all  in the interests of research, you understand!   The overwhelming majority of guests are actors, musicians, athletes.  Is that all we have to talk to and about? 

My experience in local classrooms (for many years I observed and mentored college students who were doing their ‘student practice semester’ as the last requirement before graduation) stressed the emphasis on obedience and compliance.  There is a game that we learn to play in school – “What does teacher want?”  One route to a good grade is figuring out what sir or ma’am likes, and students are good at responding appropriately.  In other words, they are satisfying an external authority who will tell them how good their work is and ideas are, rather than referring to their own judgments and satisfaction. 

In my college classes the students were offered a choice at the beginning of the semester.  There is much evidence to suggest that stress promotes short term memorization at the expense of long term learning, and that quizzes, tests and exams cause the most stress.   So the choice was either regular quizzes and tests with a final exam, or a major, open-ended project in which the students were required to apply the material we were covering in class.  (I should say that I was teaching a class on western civilization – the second option would not work in say a math or language class where constant reinforcement is necessary.  And I would not want my doctor or airplane pilot to have classes taught only by me!)  Eventually every class chose the project option but there was always a group of nay-sayers who argued for tests and exams because it was a game they knew how to play and they could track their grade as the months progressed – stress and a grade trumped higher order thinking skills and long term learning.

So, how does this apply to beekeepers?  Professional sports and entertainment set unrealistic expectations.  We know that less than 1% of those who set out to make football or baseball or music their career will succeed.  Rather we become passive spectators of TV or the movies – our involvement is vicarious, experienced second hand. 

Beekeeping is not a passive activity.  Success requires a combination of knowledge and action, and even then things might not go well.  Nor is it an activity of compliance; ultimately every successful beekeeper has to take responsibility for the management of his or her hives, has to take the data and develop a personal management style.  It is similar to an open, on-going project rather than a series of quizzes and tests.  And of course the ultimate satisfaction comes from goals that one sets for oneself, not from pleasing the President of the local bee club. 

In his delightful monthly column in Bee Culture, Ed Colby comments (November, 2017) that we don’t need more beekeepers so much as better beekeeping, and we don’t need more bees so much as more healthy bees. Which begs the question, how do we make new beekeepers aware of the realities, the commitment and knowledge required to start down the road of better beekeeping without dampening their enthusiasm?  One doesn’t fear the rain once one is wet. We need to be clear up front.  Those who are truly committed will accept the challenge gladly and be excited by the passion exhibited by proven beekeepers; the others will shy away from something they should not have started in the first place, which is fortunate for the health of the honey bees.  

Most new beekeepers believe they can cover their start up and maintenance costs from the sale of honey.  Not only have I never achieved that but I’m increasingly convinced that it is near impossible for a beekeeper, commercial or otherwise, to make a living from honey sales alone.

The  current price of a one pound jar of local honey in Pennsylvania averages about $8, and my guess is that some of us feel a little hesitant asking even this price, especially when a customer states that he or she has seen honey in the supermarket for less than $5.  This leads to the inevitable discussion about local, verifiable, authentic honey with it’s own terroir (to use a French term) and we might even throw in the word ‘organic’ as compared to honey of unknown origins with undisclosed chemical components and which might have been heated and strained. 

“I want to support local beekeepers,” replies the customer,  “but it’s just too expensive.”

The beekeeper responds with the bit about bees flying 54 000 miles to collect the nectar to make the honey in the jar, and visiting somewhere between two and three million flowers.  We seldom include the cost of the beekeeper’s time, skills and labor but we might explain that one bee makes 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime and that this jar represents the life work of some 600 bees. 

The customer nods as the beekeeper continues.  Worker bees are foragers for the last two weeks of their lives and let’s presume that half of them are collecting nectar, the other half pollen.  So if they work 8 hours a day a week and we had to pay each bee the current minimum wage, each forager would earn $392 per week.

We know it takes twelve bees to collect sufficient nectar to make one teaspoon of honey.  So  $392 x 12 means that, using minimum wage as a measure, a teaspoon of honey costs $4704.   It takes 50 teaspoons to fill a one pound jar (yes, I counted) so the cost of a jar of honey is $235 200 … and that is for the nectar collection only. 

I have no idea how to calculate the amount of time spent on reducing the moisture content of the stored nectar nor for producing the wax and capping each cell, yet it is safe to say that, at these rates, we would be paying the bees in excess of $500 000 for each one pound jar of honey.

$8.00 a pound is an absolute bargain.  

The customer is still not convinced so the beekeeper keeps going.   If a forager averages 30 flights a day for two weeks, averaging one mile from the hive, the total distance she will fly is  840 miles, which is a little further than the distance from  Pittsburgh to Wichita, KS,  or from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, FL.  And the end result of all that flying,  besides the pollination that she does, is enough nectar to make one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. 

“So to collect enough nectar to make the teaspoon of honey that you will put in your tea every morning,” the beekeeper concludes,  “the bees fly 5040 miles, which if they went east from here would take them to Madrid, Spain, and if they went west, almost to Hawaii.” 

At this point our customer buys one jar, not because he or she is convinced but partly out of a sense of guilt and partly to end the broadside. The same customer will not question the asking price of a Ford Mustang, or a luxury hotel charging $500 for a night’s stay, or a Rolex that keeps the same time as a $5 wristwatch, or a $150 pair of sneakers, or a 55” TV screen.  Incidentally, have you tried to get rid of a five year old TV set, or lap top computer recently?  It’s  hard to so much as give them away.  And I have to mention an advertisement that appeared in the local commercial gazette for four weeks : ”Thick book on history, $5.”!  

We have been conditioned to expect cheap food to the point that we minimize the connection between price and quality.  We forget that most food in the supermarket is discounted by government subsidies and that the bigger the farm the bigger the subsidy.  We don’t ask how many thousands of  miles the food had to travel to get to the supermarket, nor do we place freshness and quality above price, yet believe we can make up for any deficiencies with cheap supplements that are often unproven and unregulated.

Those who lament the loss of local farm land to residential development or the closure of a commercial bee yard don’t necessarily make the connection between  their buying habits and the decline of the country life that they profess to admire. 

Perhaps our argument would be more effective if we challenged our customers to spend a year maintaining a colony of bees, harvest the honey, factor in their expenses, add a modest profit margin, and then sell the honey. I did this exercise for myself.  I won’t bore you with the math, but the expense side of the balance sheet is based on maintenance costs for the year 2015 (no packages or nucs purchased, no new hardware, no new queens bought that year,)  five hours of management per hive per year, which is conventional wisdom but a conservative estimate, and minimum wage for labor costs. 

Based on a harvest of 200 lbs of honey, and  I stress minimum wage rates,  the cost works out at a little under $12 per pound.  With a 20% markup so that I can continue operating next year, each one pound honey jar would cost $14.50.  That’s Economics 101. And if I include ancillary expenses like the cost of the jars and lids, transportation, conferences at which I can improve my knowledge and skills, that figure is closer to $16.00

So $8 for a one pound jar of honey works out, conservatively,  at 50% of my production costs.

I have two things in my favor.  First, I am not in it for the money; keeping bees brings rewards for which there is no monetary value.  And secondly, I can keep the Chairlady of the Family Finance Committee happy by making up the deficit through offering classes, selling the occasional nuc, filling a few small pollination contracts and writing the occasional article for bee journals.

And yet I have to ask, why is it that the public expects beekeepers, and many others involved in the agricultural community, to have to supplement their income because the market will not support a fair price for their products? The solution lies in education –  educating the public that good food, as with everything else, has a price attached, and with the concomitant improvement in public health, that increased outlay is still relatively inexpensive. That implies, correctly, the argument that honey is a health food, a life enhancer, more than it is a commodity, a sweetener, that can be sourced from many places and easily substituted with sugar, corn, rice or agave syrup.  The Europeans understand this and willingly pay more for honey than do North Americans. 

Education, by good and consistent communication, is the only way we can bring others along on the journey, so that they walk beside and not behind us.

Winter is a thoughtful season for beekeepers if not necessarily for the bees.  We have survived the  brisk energy of spring when the colonies break their cluster for the last time and explore the bouquet of nectar and pollen surrounding them.  We have labored through the summer making splits, checking for mites, moving hives and finally, if all is well, extracting honey.  And we have fed the colonies through the fall as temperatures cooled and changing foliage transformed the landscape. 

Cold days and long nights are the time to think, to imagine.  ‘Next year will be better’ is the beekeeper’s mantra; we are perpetually hopeful people and, by the very nature of our avocation, are invariably looking forward to the next season.

Not all of those thoughts are reverent.  It occurred to me, for instance, that keeping bees is much like raising children. Although a little intelligence goes a  long way, one does not have to be a genius to do either.  And thank goodness for that. Imagine if one had to achieve a GPA of 4.0 in a BCR  (Bachelor of Child Rearing) before one could have children. Instead it’s amazing how many successful people have come from humble, even deprived, families. Similarly at every bee meeting I am struck by the wide range of backgrounds and professions evident in those who attend.  And none of those backgrounds make one a better beekeeper than anyone else.  Bees, like children, are great levelers.  

Children learn to walk and talk by never-ending practice, by consistent trial and error, by falling down and getting up again.  All too often, later in life, if something doesn’t work the first time we give up on it.  Beekeeping too is about getting one’s hands dirty, about never-ending practice, about persistence.  In both cases there are mentors, examples to inspire and follow, but in the apiary no matter how much one has read, ultimately one has to get over that initial fear so that one can start to ‘see’ what is really happening on the comb.  Some give up when their romantic expectations are not met; others persevere, accepting trial and error as a necessary part of the process and realizing that the bees are remarkably tolerant of our mistakes, as were our parents.

With both bees and children the act of stewardship can be so engrossing that years fly by imprinted with certain landmarks – the first tooth, the first swarm, the soccer lesson, the new queen, the prom, a successful nuc. Both pursuits are things one has to do in order to appreciate how challenging but  also how incredibly rewarding they can be. Only other people who are parents or beekeepers want to hear about one’s various struggles and triumphs.   I am often asked “How are the bees this year?” and the last thing the questioner wants is a detailed response.  He or she hopes for a quick, positive affirmation that will absolve them for feeling responsible for or concerned about the news they hear of bees ‘disappearing.’ Their eyes glaze over as we tell stories about winter losses, mites and failing queens. It’s the same glassy stare that one receives as one proudly describes the newly acquired hand-to mouth cup-handling skills of one’s youthful pride and joy.

And with children, as with bees, one has to be vigilant.  Just as one thinks one has everything covered along comes the unexpected.  The three year old who slams his fingers in the car door (as my grandson did) or the colony that, without warning,  absconds half way through the fall with no  chance of survival in the big outdoors (as one of mine did in September.) 

You can do everything right and still end up with less-than-ideal results, or you can screw up right royally and end up with a successful product.  I shudder at some of the things I did in my early years of beekeeping and yet the girls seemed not to mind; by comparison I felt that my colonies went into the winter of 2017 stronger and more healthy than at any previous time, and yet I had had higher losses early in the spring of 2018 than ever before. Similarly it’s astounding how children from the same parents, like  two neighboring hives, can have very different temperaments.  I like to think that my occasional successes as a grandparent and beekeeper are due to skill, loving attention  and untiring efforts, yet I suspect it’s really a matter of dumb luck. 

No matter how hard one works, as a parent or as a beekeeper, one is never really finished, either in the ‘doing’ sense or in terms of learning.  The failures can be heart-breaking, like that first dead-out in the spring, and the rewards are sweeter than nectar.  The only ones who think that either task is easy are inexperienced, lucky or suffering from dementia. 

with acknowledgments to How to Grow Broke Farming, as issued by the Division of Extension, University of Tennessee, in 1922 

1. Recognize that the needs of the beekeeper are clearly paramount to those of the bees.  
2. Treat all of your colonies the same – after all, they’re only bees. 
3. Don’t plan the operations in your apiary – thinking is hard work. 
4. Eliminate all ‘competitive’ species in the nearby environment,  eg. feral bees, solitary bees, bumble and carpenter bees.
5. Use herbicides to create a ‘perfect’ lawn
6. Cut down all trees, especially those that are dead, and plant either a maintenance-free green hedge or a mono-crop like corn.  
7. Ignore the bees except for the annual extraction of all of their honey; after all they are there to serve us. 
8. Insist that if the methods used by your grandfather were good enough for him, they are good enough for you. 
9. Be independent; don’t consult with the local beekeepers, don’t contribute to your local beekeeper association, and don’t read the research of so-called experts.  
10. When a colony fails, rather than analyze the reasons (again, too much thinking involved) simply replace it with a package from somewhere with a sub-tropical climate, using the money you would otherwise spend on your family if you had followed a good system of beekeeping.