Author: Jeremy

At Frankfurt Motor Show in 2009 Volkswagen unveiled its L1 model with an  estimated 170 miles per gallon.  The light chassis (it weighed 837 lbs) with a one cylinder yet surprisingly powerful diesel engine could cover 416 miles on one fill-up of its 2.6-gallon fuel tank “if the driver has a foot as light as a moonbeam,”  one of the reviewers wrote.    German engineers were justly proud of what they alleged to be a level of fuel efficiency never seen before in the auto world.  

The ordinary honey bee, by comparison, can convert fuel with an efficiency that might humble the wizards at Volkswagen.  In 1957, Brian Hocking, an English entomologist who was an associate professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, set out to calculate Bee Miles Per Gallon. He gave a beeall the honey she could eat before tethering her to a pole which, he alleged, neither harmed nor seemed to disturb her. She flew round and round until she ran out of fuel. It was not difficult to calculate how far the bee traveled on a belly of fuel and then to scale up to an imagined gallon-sized fuel tank.

Hocking died in 1974 but his experiment was repeated by the entomologist, Stephen Buchmann, at the University of Arizona.  Buchmann, who is the author of eleven books including The Forgotten Pollinators and The Reason for Flowers, has called bees “the ultimate hybrid mini-vehicles.” Millions of years of evolution have produced muscles across the animal kingdom that are consistently more energy efficient than even the best human-built machines, he suggests,  but until he came across Hocking’s data, he did not realize how much more efficient.

Buchmann concluded that on one sip of honey, our bee could fly continuously for approximately 5 miles; on a full stomach of honey, 50 miles.  And when he scaled up bee fuel intake to a gallon, he came up with an astonishing number – almost 5 000 000 miles.

In all transparency one has to point out differences of size, weight and durability but, said Buchmann, “that does not negate the fact that honeybees are super, super efficient, far more efficient than any kind of internal combustion engine that human engineers have ever devised. So yes, we’re cheating a little bit, but if you want to think in terms of miles per gallon, no denying it: She got almost 5 million miles per gallon. Pretty darn impressive.”

Meanwhile what happened to the Volkswagen LI, later the XLI?  As best I could find out, the last limited production of 200 cars was in 2014 and they were primarily electric, but the mileage was no better (they were two seaters with a bigger engine) and the price was in excess of $120 000. 

I think I will stick with the Honey Bee over the VW Beetle.  

For my 70th birthday I got to choose where we would vacation and decided on Slovenia, in part because it has an ancient tradition of beekeeping and in part because it has the highest ratio of beekeepers per population of any county in the world. One out of every 210 Slovenians is a beekeeper, compared to 1:3250  in the US and  1:4100 in Pennsylvania. In other words the density of beekeepers is almost sixteen times greater in Slovenia than in the US, and beekeeping is an integral part of both the landscape and the culture. This was made evident by an area map at a bus stop in a small village in the foothills of the Alps, the legend of which included a symbol to show where local beekeepers and their products could be found within a twenty kilometer radius of the hamlet.  One of the reasons offered as explanation is that the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which Slovenia was a part (or the Duchy of Carniola as it was then known) was never a colonial power, never had sugar plantations nor a cheap supply of sugar, and so preserved a long relationship with honey.

We spent a morning with Marija Sivez and her husband Dusan Zunke who, between them, run 500 colonies (or ‘families’ as they are called in Slovenia.) Over a delightful lunch that she had prepared for us, Marija explained a little of the country’s recent history in the following way : her grandparents were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and her parents in the new Yugoslavia that was created after the First World War.  She and Dusan were born in the Second World War when Yugoslavia was occupied by the Axis powers, and because she was born in the western region, and he in the east, she had to learn Italian and acquire an Italian name, and he similarly but in German.  Her children were born in communist Yugoslavia, ruled by Josep Tito, and her grandchildren in the new independent republic of Slovenia created in 1993 which, in 2004, became part of the European Union. 

So it is not all that rare for an elderly Slovenian to have lived in six different countries in his or her lifetime without every having to leave the village of his or her birth.

Incidentally, at the Slovenian Beekeeping Center, the Secretary General, Anton Tometz,  described with much pride how, despite the turmoil of the past century, beekeepers had kept in constant contact with their colleagues throughout Europe. 

Two of the intriguing concepts were bee-air therapy and apitourism. The first is the belief that the environment produced in a bee hive is therapeutic and can be accessed via a variety of devices by which one can inhale the emissions of a colony.  Certainly, one of our traveling companions, after only a few minutes of such intake, awoke next morning to find that, for the first time on the trip,  her sinuses were clear. One of the missions of Franz Sivic, perhaps the leading apitherapist researcher in both Italy and Slovenia, is to find scientific support for these phenomena, beginning with having all experiments and operations monitored by medical doctors who administer both pre and post tests. 

The second involves using beekeeping and the products of the hive to promote tourism.  The beautiful painted bee houses (cebeljnaks, pronounced chebelnyaks) ) were omnipresent, as were road side signs selling med (ie. honey) and attractive displays in stores promoting honey bee products, including medica (fortified mead, pronounced medusa.) 

The focus of much of this activity is the Čebelarska zveza Slovenije, or Slovenian Beekeeping Association, a comprehensive organization centered in an impressive four story building alongside one of the major highways east of the capital, Ljubjlana. There are 16 employees, three of whom are full time – the President, Vice-President and Secretary General.  It was the latter, Anton Tometz, who gave up his morning for us, sharing his knowledge and passion for Carniolan bees through the good auspices of our guide and translator, Janez (pronounced Janie) Strasizar.

The first records of beekeeping in the Duchy of Carniola, now Slovenia, go back to the 10th century, the national current organization was founded in 1873 and the new headquarters were opened in 2008.     The 5000 square meter, three story building sits on the hilltop of a large acreage with gardens that demonstrate active hives as well as bee forage.  The library, with its 3500 books and journals, all of which were donated and most are digitalized, as well as the restaurant, beekeeping shop, reception area and office space, were 80% self-funded, primarily by dues from membership – annual dues are 40€ per annum, which is about $45.  To put this in perspective, the average annual income in Slovenia is the equivalent of $20 000, less than half of that of the USA.  The state helps with maintenance and running costs of the property in return for a share of the nectar flow information which comes from the more than 40 stations based in apiaries throughout the country.

The objectives, as described by Secretary General Tometz, (and I’m relying on Mary’s notes here because the web page is not available in English) are to advise and educate Slovenian beekeepers and to promote positive public relations for beekeeping, not least through apitourism and apitherapy.  The challenges facing the association are no different to those in the US : declining natural resources as the number of bees increase, varroa and it’s associated pathogens and diseases, and the effect of toxic sprays on honey bees. 

There are 400 native bees and 325 bumble bee species in Slovenia, and the emphasis is on preserving the integrity of  Kranjska Cebela – the Carniolan, or grey, or silver honey bee, which is native to the area and is the second most popular bee in the world, second to Italians.  It is the only bee that Slovenian beekeepers are allowed to keep, nor is any other type of bee allowed into the country.  This leads to interesting dilemmas.  One beekeeper we visited has a major apiary in the foothills of the Alps, very close to the Italian border.  Her queens are open-mated and she cannot control where they fly, nor are they respectful of international borders.  So progeny that have a light appearance are sold in Italy, and those with the Carniolan darker features go to Slovenian or German beekeepers!

The average age of a beekeeper in Slovenia is 58, compared to a national average age of 51, but Anton stressed that a number of younger Slovenians were getting involved in leadership roles.  And there are plenty of such roles available with 207 local beekeeping organizations (literally one per town) in a country the size of New Jersey and a total population of only 2.1 million.  There are about ten commercial beekeepers, two of whom are women  (‘commercial’ meaning having more than 150 hives) and  the largest operation is some 2500 hives.  These figures might be misleading in that the registration of hives is mandatory but free, and there is a tax of  2.50€ on every colony after the first 40, so beekeepers register any colonies over 40 with neighbors and family so as to avoid the taxes. 

The cost of a Carniolan queen is similar to the price of a queen in Pennsylvania, the average honey production is about 40 pounds per colony,  but the price of honey is only about half of what we get in the US.

Also impressive was the strong focus on children.  The  Beekeeping Association offers three day beekeeping camps throughout the summer, which attract some 2500 children every year. Over those three days they study pollinator plants, paint the attractive front boards that distinguish each hive, and make products from wax and propolis. 

The energy and enthusiasm in that building was evident and contagious, as was the professional level of leadership, and my recurring thought was, how can a country that is so relatively small, with a population equivalent to that of New Hampshire, think so big?  And this is despite the traumatic, unsettled history of the last century.  It is no coincidence that a study out of Yale placed Slovenia in the top five environmentally successful countries in the world, and the capital, Ljubjlana, was the green capital of Europe in 2016.  

If they can do it – apitherapy,  apitourism, extensive beekeeping, professional organization, education of the young – with relatively limited resources, why can’t we, who have so much by comparison? Perhaps it says something about the priority they place on the environment, the bees, and honey as a food source, as well as their pride in their agricultural traditions and in being self-sufficient (almost every urban home we walked past had a vegetable garden and chickens.) 

Perhaps their philosophy is summed up in one delightful tradition.  Slovenia is home of the famous Lippizaner horses, and every time a foal is born a tree is planted. In this modest way the cycles and interdependence of life are honored. 

Despite this turbulent past, or perhaps because of it, we found the people of this beautiful country to be proud, gentle, kind and generous to a fault.  It is almost as if the present age of peace and relative prosperity is appreciated all the more because of the tumultuous times that preceded it.  And this is expressed in the absolute cleanliness and quietness of the countryside,  qualities that were reinforced on a walk along a gravel path to a waterfall when I saw a discarded cigarette butt and found myself feeling outraged, even violated. 

Like many millions of people I have had my fair share of pain, failure and losses in my life.  As a twenty year old I imagined working, retiring, and eventually dying, in the country in which I had grown up.  I did not anticipate, for example, having to leave in the middle of a civil war and eventually working in five countries on three different continents.  But I did, and in retrospect I see it as a rare opportunity.   Like many Slovenians, I now treasure and seek kindness, gentility and generosity in contrast to the turmoil and upheaval of earlier life events. 

In his book, Second Wind : Navigating the Passage to a Slower, Deeper and More Connected Life,  Dr. Bill Thomas draws a distinction between adulthood and elderhood.  In contrast to “the mania for adultish independence and achievement,” elders have a life experience and an awareness of their own mortality that provides wisdom, serenity and an ability not only to be at peace with themselves but also the skill to be peacemakers among others. 

Thomas suggests there are three perspectives as one approaches the end of adulthood. The first, and most vociferous, are the Deniers who proudly reject the changes that come with aging and posit a future where one can be forever young. Secondly are the Realists who admit they are changing but dislike the process and are committed to resisting them.  The third and smallest group are the Enthusiasts who openly acknowledge the difficulties that lie ahead but are eager to explore the new opportunities for growth that the passage of time provides. 

Can this perspectives apply to a country and to honey bees?   If so, perhaps what Mary and I experienced in Slovenia was a culture of Enthusiasm in which the painful past is accepted, current difficulties are accepted and there is an excitement about the future.  And without wanting to be overly anthropomorphic, my guess is that most animals, insects and birds, including honey bees, live fully in the present (it has been suggested, for example, that for a dog there is no such thing as a good or a bad walk) and in so doing nourish the longevity of the species. 

Certainly the three perspectives – Denial, Realism and Enthusiasm – provide the necessary paradigms as I start my eighth decade of life, together with a determination to be consciously more of a grateful Enthusiast.  The honey bees  are an essential part of that determination, whether as an example, a comfort or an inspiration.

Most of mankind’s noble endeavors have a patron saint, a man or woman who lived a long time ago and achieved notoriety often by torture and death.  St. Barbara, for example, lived in Egypt in the fourth century AD  and was decapitated by her father when she refused to denounce Christianity, after which daddy, sword and all, was laid waste by a bolt of lightening.  Barbara, naturally, became the patron saint of explosions involving gun powder, of which, in the early days of firearms, there were many, presumably keeping her very busy.

A century earlier, also in Egypt, a mob seized Apollonia because of her position as a Christian Deaconess. She was tortured, had all her teeth pulled out one by one with pincers, and when given the choice of renouncing her faith or being burned alive, leapt into the fire and was burnt to death.  Predictably she is the patron saint of dentistry.

I will never be a candidate for sainthood, either willingly or unwillingly, even if bees are frequently associated with such posthumous honors.   In C15th Italy, for example, the day after baby Rita was baptized, her family noticed a swarm of white bees flying around her as she slept in her crib. The  bees peacefully entered and exited her mouth without causing either harm or injury, which left her family understandably mystified.  This did not prevent them for arranging her marriage to an abusive nobleman when she was twelve years old.  St. Rita is the  patron saint of impossible causes.

Beekeepers have several saints to watch over us and to whom we can appeal. The legend in Milan, Italy, is that in the 3^rd century, when Ambrose was an infant, a swarm of bees settled on his face while he was lying in his cradle and rather than stinging him, they left behind a drop of honey. His father declared this to be a sign that Ambrose would become a sweet-tongued preacher of great significance; indeed he was to gain the title “Honey Tongued Doctor” because of his speaking and preaching ability, and bees and a beehive became his symbols.  Perhaps it was from this that bees are often associated with wisdom and learning.

The Catholic Encyclopedia describes him as having an “enthusiastic love of virginity which became his distinguishing trait.”  Indeed he wrote, ” Let, then, your work be as it were a honeycomb, for virginity is fit to be compared to bees, so laborious is it, so modest, so continent. The bee feeds on dew, it knows no marriage couch, it makes honey….”  

This was at a time when the mating procedure of the ‘king bee’ (as the queen was known)  was unknown.  For some,  bees were the smallest of birds, born either from the bodies of oxen or from the decaying flesh of slaughtered calves in the form of worms which formed in the flesh and turned into bees. For others, baby bees were the result  of some form of mysterious virgin birth, which gave them both a purity and a spiritual significance, hence in part the use of bees wax for candles in Christian church services.   St. Ambrose is the patron of candle makers, chandlers, domestic animals, learning, school children, wax melters, wax refiners, but not virgins,  and unlike many of his fellow saints, died peacefully in his old age.

There are many beautifully carved life sized hives in the shape of St. Ambrose in eastern Europe, with a cavity in the middle for the bees, entrances via a small hole in the front, and access via a door in the back.  Brightly painted, they formed an inviting avenue as one approached the conference center in Montpellier, France, where Apimondia  was held in 2009.

Gobnait, by comparison,  was born in County Clare, Ireland, sometime in the 5th or 6th century. Gobnait is Irish for Abigail (meaning “Brings Joy”) and has been anglicized as Deborah, meaning “Honey Bee.”

One of the miracles attributed to Saint Gobnait was that she protected a parish by unleashing a swarm of bees, and she was known for her care of the sick, using the properties of honey in the treatment of illness and the healing of wounds.  She founded a convent and was reputed to be a skilled bee-keeper and,  according to local tradition and history, she cured the ailments of her own monastic community and the people of West Cork. Reputedly she kept a terrible plague away from Coolea and Ballyvourney and changed a colony of bees into an army to drive away a local marauding chieftain.  Now there’s a talent I could use.

Interestingly, on the island of  Mont St. Michel off of the west coast of Ireland,  the small stone huts in which monks lived for several hundreds of years while vandals invaded Britain, were build in the shape of skeps.   Mary and I were able to visit them some years ago and it is one of those places that makes the hairs on the nape of one’s neck stand on end.

Other saints are well represented. In France, Saint Bernard of Clairveaux, a 12th century abbot,  is listed as a patron of beekeeping and workers of wax, again for no apparent reason. Maybe he just wanted a candle discount.  St. Gregory was responsible for opening the flowers on March 12th and nine days  later, on March 21st, St. Benedict summoned the bees to search for nectar. According to legend, St. Bartholomew was martyred by being flayed alive and because of this fate he became the patron saint of tanners. But for many in the UK  he is also the patron saint of beekeepers, probably because his feast day, August 24th , coincides with the gathering of the honey crop. Indeed, until the 1950s, the village of Gulval in Cornwall celebrated St. Bartholomew’s Day with a ceremony for Blessing the Mead, while the annual St. Bartholomew’s Fair in London was famous for its honey-coated apples.

The Catholic Church has strong links with bees. The monks were fine beekeepers, providing honey for sweetening, not least to make herbal remedies more palatable, producing wax for the alter that burned without smoke, making mead for communion wine, and providing propoplis for use in the sanatorium. The late Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey is renown for his work in selecting traits from global resources for a better bee. 

And bees were believed to be the souls of the dead returning to earth or on their way to the next world. This probably led to the widespread custom of “telling the bees” when the beekeeper died, a tradition that was prevalent in Pennsylvania. If the bees were not asked to stay with their new master or mistress it was believed they would abscond.

Beekeepers seem to have as many patron saints as they do answers to questions concerning the bees.

The power and the majesty of Glacier National Park were both invigorating and exhilarating  when Mary and I were fortunate to visit for two days in July, 2012.   In part the amazement came from the preconception created by the term ‘glacier’, which suggests icy, frigid, arctic-like.  Instead the Park in summer is warm, green, verdant and inviting, rich with waterfalls and colors, hidden lakes and enchanting trails, magnificent vistas and feats of human engineering.  Rather than chilling the spirit, Glacier National Park warms the soul.

You know that I looked for honey bees throughout the park, without success.  I also googled beekeeping associations in the nearby towns of Whitefish and Kalispell, equally unsuccessfully.

Timothy Egan‘s book, The Big Burn, which describes the first major wild fire involving a national park, presented itself instead.  As in 2012, the summer of 1910 was excessively hot and dry, resulting in dry vegetation which was set alight by lightening and by hot cinders flung from locomotives.  By mid-August there were 1,000 to 3,000 fires burning in Idaho, Montana, Washington and British Columbia, covering some three million acres which burned over two days and led to the deaths of 87 people, including 78 firefighters. It is believed to be the largest, although not the deadliest, fire in recorded U.S. history.  By comparison, the California wild fires of 2017 destroyed just over one million acres.

A system of national parks had been the dream of President Theodore Roosevelt, supported by his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot.   The national forests, they argued, belonged to the ages. The proposal inspired immense opposition from the mining and agricultural industries in particular, castigated by Roosevelt as ‘robber barons and plunderers of the public domain’  who used their considerable influences to solicit support in Washington.  By the time of the great fire the forestry budget had been squeezed so tight that on average a single ranger was responsible for more than three hundred thousand acres of forest. 

The creation of the National Parks Service in 1905 attracted some of the best young minds in the country, fresh out of the Yale School of Forestry (derisively called ‘Teddy’s Boy Scouts’) but no one had anticipated or experienced a fire such as that of 1910 and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to control it, which in turn gave further fuel to the mining and agricultural industries who argued that academia was no preparation for the realities of  environmental conservation and preservation.  To the enemies of the Forest Service the fire was a chance to kill the crusade of conservation, made easier by the fact that the previous year Roosevelt had left office to go to Africa and Europe, leaving the presidency in the hands of the befuddled William Taft. 

The battle seemed to be won, but fast forward to July, 2012, and the lines of vehicles waiting at the gate to pay $25 to enter Glacier National Park.   The occupants of those cars, trucks, motor bikes and camper vans presumably took the existence of the park for granted, not realizing that this magnificence exists only because a handful of men and women persevered with their passion in the face of significant hostility which thought in terms of dollars rather than of nature, which measured short term financial gains at the expense of long term environmental losses. 

Fast forward another 100 years to 2112 and I wonder what ideas that appear radical today will seem obvious in retrospect because a small handful of people believed in them sufficiently to fight and persevere.   Hopefully honey bees will be on that list. 

March 20 is the United Nations International Day of Happiness.   UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, observed that “The pursuit of sustainable happiness (a term I equate with Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s use of the word joy) is serious business.”Keshav Shiwakoti is more explicit.  A former communist revolutionary from a small village in the high mountains of eastern Nepal, he was one of seven children who grew up in stark poverty. He moved to Kathmandu in search of employment, learned English and became a high-end cook specializing in European cuisine. “The small, fleeting moments make me happy,” he said, “like the child I just saw on the street being breast-fed by her mother, or watching my baby goats play. It’s the joy in sunshine or rain. Sometimes I cry because I feel such great happiness.”

Sarah van Gelder, writing  in Sustainable Happiness : Live Simply, Live Well, Make A Difference, stresses that there is confusion as to what sustainable happiness looks like, sounds like and feels like, at least here in the USA.  In the 1920’s business leaders worried that Americans had all the appliances and consumer goods they wanted and that if they spent time enjoying life rather than working more and buying more, the economy would stagnate.  Thus the advertising industry joined forces with Freudian psychologists to link our universal desires for status, love and self esteem with the new gospel of consumerism.  

The postwar period was considered an economic success – growth as measured by GDP rose steadily and the gap between rich and poor diminished.  But in the 1970’s wages stagnated and purchasing power diminished.  The result was the inception of credit cards so that consumers could spend money they did not have to keep the economy  moving.  But buying ‘stuff’ has consequences. There is the burden of debt that goes with a bigger house or a new car, the ‘buyer’s high’ (that initial exuberance that follows a big purchase, spikes and then disappears, but which can be addictive) and the extra work hours needed to pay off the debt with less time for friends and family. 

Advertisers tell us unrelentingly that shangri-la is one purchase way – plastic surgery, anti-depressants, a holiday home.  Yet for the majority of the population, on limited incomes, the implication is that happiness is out of reach, that they are falling short of the good life, and that somehow it is their fault.  

It needs to be stressed that the internet has created a historically unique situation. Never before has there been such easy, uncontrolled, unlimited access to so many different products and opinions; never before have marketeers, as well as zealots, had access to such an audience.   And as the story of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica demonstrate, never before has there been such an opportunity for massive abuse of personal data.  Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the West, in combination with potentially catastrophic climate change, is the recovery of enlightened values in the face of rampant technological advances driven more by profit than by civility. Ironically one of the most eloquent spokesperson for such a recovery is Monica Lewinsky in a TED talk titled The Price of Shame.

“Through our scientific and technological genius,” argued Martin Luther King Jr,  “we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.” 

Van Gelder suggests that sustainable happiness is built on two pillars – a vibrant and fair society and a healthy natural world. It endures through good times and bad because it starts with the fundamental aspirations of being human.  It cannot come from a quick fix and it cannot be achieved at the expense of others.  It is available to everyone and because it begins by assuring that each of us can obtain a basic level of material security, after which more ‘stuff’ is not the key,  it does not have to cost the planet. 

And let’s understand that Facebook does not build community; indeed a 2014 study of American college students showed that their level of empathy was on average 40% lower than their peers of the previous generation. Instead joy, ie. sustainable happiness,  comes from loving relationships, thriving communities and meaningful work, which in turn stimulate positive emotions like love, gratitude, respect and appreciation.  These are hardly new objectives; they have been the focus of most of the world’s major religions for a thousand years or more, and I would suggest that they can be found in the process of managing honey bees.  

 Nikiah Seeds, as cited in Mark Winston’s book, Bee Time, relates three messages from the bees.  First, the need to pay more attention to the environment in which they, and we, live; secondly, to be calm, to be still, to take a breath and slow down (what Dennis Vanengelsdorp has called ‘the zen of beekeeping’) and thirdly, a hive is not a set of individuals so much as the consciousness of one collective group or superorganism.  Without wanting to anthropomorphize honey bees by describing them as happy, clearly they exist best in a vibrant, shared community, and their work is life-creating – by the act of pollination bees literally connect one generation of plants to the next and enhance the continuation of a healthy ecology.  We too need to consider ourselves as connectors, part of a chain that passes on civil values and a sense of belonging both to each other and to the generations to come. 

We need consciously to become civilians again rather than consumers. First, we can choose to do no harm, which might mean choosing not to produce, look at, read, support anything that demeans the inherent worth and dignity of other people.  We can work to re-build meaningful communities within a more equitable society – more equitable both in an economic sense and in terms of the empowerment we each have to determine our own lives.  We can protect the integrity of the natural world; it is an illusion to pretend that humans are separate and apart from the living world.  Rather our future is tied to the fate of the planet : a healthy earth means clean water, wholesome food, a stable climate and the possibility of sustainable happiness and, dare I say it, thriving honey bees, for generations to come. 

We can speak out against abuse in all of its forms,  welcome the gifts of everyone in our community and develop a mindset that cultivates basic human qualities like gratitude, appreciation, compassion and love while refusing to be controlled by fear and power. 

Is it easy?  Absolutely not.  Is it likely to happen?  The cynic will quickly say no, but it is more likely to succeed if these behaviors were modeled by our current authorities, not least the politicians and the media. And if they refuse to lead from above we can lead from below, with individuals making decisions that collectively will change the world … after all that is the way honey bees do it.   We did it with tobacco and cigarettes and we can do it again. 

How different it would be if children were to witness countless acts of loving kindness every day rather than the tirade of random acts of violence, verbal abuse and endless advertisements? As one of the placards said in the March Against Gun Violence in Washington, DC, in March, 2018, “When leaders behave like children it is time for children to become leaders.”

Honey bees remind us that only by working together with nature can we guarantee our prosperity and survival, and yes, our sustained happiness, in humanity’s largest hive, our planet. 

 Here are some little known facts about beekeeping; the reason that they are little known will quickly become apparent. 

The term ‘beekeeper’ was invented by Mr. Bernard Edward Erasmus Keeper in 1782 in England 

The best way to get wild flower honey is to fill an empty super with dried flowers and put it on the hive – the ‘potpourri principle’

A forager who grows strong from all her dancing is bearing waltz fitness

Next year the Supreme Court will finally rule on ‘Honeybee’ v ‘Honey bee’

The hive at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave is known as Bee Force One

A super is so-called because of what the beekeeper says when it is full of honey 

In his/her lifetime, the average American will eat 1/12^th of a teaspoon of honey 

The largest hive every assembled contained it’s own Starbucks

Because honey is sterile no calories can survive in it 

  CCD is caused by cell phones –  when bees use their cell phones while flying they have accidents 

Progress is a double-edged sword.  On the one hand we have made tremendous advances in combatting the things that hurt us, damage our crops and blight our environment; on the other hand we have invented painful ways to harm ourselves and our surrounds, the ultimate of which is global climate change. 

This dichotomy is evident in many spheres, not least agriculture.  Modern agribusiness depends on extensive inputs : chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are applied to the seeds, to the soil and to the plants themselves, and undeniably affect the food we eat, the air we breath and the water we drink at levels that we do not fully understand.  An oft-remarked irony is that these chemicals, together with extensive monocultures,  are killing the insects that the farmers rely on to pollinate many of their crops. 

Similarly we hear ad nauseam that honey bees pollinate one third of what we eat.  It’s a misleading statistic in that our diet is based largely on grasses (corn, wheat and rice in particular) which are not bee-pollinated.  Remove those three and the percentage of our foods that are honey bee dependent rises significantly.   Secondly, what the bees do pollinate is most of our commercially produced fruits and vegetables, which are top of the food pyramid.  Without the bees these products become scarce and the cost rises considerably.  Less fruits and veggies means reduced rates of wellness with incalculable increases in health care. And thirdly, bees, together with other species, pollinate the millions of acres of flora that extract carbon dioxide from the air and reprocess it as oxygen.  It is estimated that one mature tree may reclaim as much as twenty tons of carbon dioxide per year. That is not insignificant in an age of dramatically increasing levels of a gas that threatens our very existence.

It requires a certain humility to recognize that sometimes the natural way is better than what we deem as progress.  For example, nature is a self organizing and adaptive network of complex relationships. As with a colony of honey bees, disrupt one part and we disturb a system that has been finessed over millions of years.    But when she is recognized and honored mother nature creates yet more life, more relationships that are both competitive and cooperative and are unimaginably diverse. 

We live in a culture in which it is easy to accept that we have the right to conquer, displace, drain our natural resources; to believe without question that human acumen, together with modern technology, will take us on a guilt-free trip to a brighter future. But as we approach the limits of what life on earth can tolerate we are compelled to realize that there are other ways of being on this earth.  Fortunately there are an escalating number of resources which offer humility rather than hubris, which provide inspiration as to how, together with like-minded citizens of this planet we call home,  we can re-connect with the natural world in a way this is respectful and mutually beneficial. Honey bees are such a resource, and the more we interact with them the more we realize that they are our teachers and we are the students.  

In a recent and rather rare interview, Bill Moyers asked Wendell Berry (farmer, philosopher, poet and novelist) what he has come to understand as ‘the natural logic of capitalism.‘   Wendell replied, “That you have a right to as much as you want of anything you want and by extension, the right to use any means available to get it. I’ve been talking for a long time about leadership from the bottom and I’m convinced perfectly that it’s happening…. The world is full of people now who see something that needs to be done and start to do it, without the government’s permission, or official advice, or expert advice, or applying for grants or anything else. They just start doing it.”  

That sounds like most of the beekeepers I know. 

Rumor has it that an Englishman, flying to Australia, was asked by an Australian immigration official if he had any felonies or convictions.   “I didn’t know it was still a requirement,” he replied. 

Many seventeenth and eighteenth century emigrants to Australia did not go by choice, compared with many Europeans (not Africans) who chose to cross the Atlantic to the New World.   One hypothesis is that those who made this choice were the risk takers; those who were more cautious stayed behind believing they could accommodate to or co-exist with the dominant religious or governmental paradigms that were causing others to depart.    And the current American society reflects this in that the pace of life is quicker and more finite.  Thus checkers replaced chess as the most popular board game, poker v bridge, baseball v cricket.   A cricket match at the traditional international level lasts for five seven-hour days and often ends in a draw.  Indeed, in some circumstances, it is honorable to play for a draw and there is no means of forcing a result – no overtime or sudden death. 

I do not have an intimate knowledge of baseball, football or basketball but I am intrigued by the skills of the athletes.  As Mark McClusky documents in Faster, Higher, Stronger, the old presumption was that good athletes had the basic skills, and practice was about getting to work with your teammates. Today, innate athletic ability is the base from which one has to ascend, and with the help of science and technology we are witnessing some of the best athletes in history. McClusky argues that it is not that the best are so much better as that so many people are so extraordinarily good to the point that the performance curve at the top is flattening out, possibly because we are nearing our biological limits. 

There is specific technology for every sport, an example being Nike’s Vapor Strobe goggles  which periodically cloud over for 1/10th of a second intervals  so as to train footballers’ eyes to focus in the midst of chaos. Add to this the use of biometric sensors. Chris Hoy, who won two gold medals as a cyclist in the 2012 Olympics, was followed by a team of scientists, nutritionists and engineers who monitored what he ate and how he trained (an $80 000 carbon fibre bike helped too!) and because his competitors were doing the same, he won in both cases by only a fraction of a second.  Novak Djokovic, for many months the top ranked male on the professional tennis circuit, has a retinue of coaches to cover every skill, Ben Hogan was the first golfer to practice regularly while Tiger Woods introduced a physical training regime which most professional golfers now follow rigorously.  Using computers, chess players today can practice consistently against the grandmasters, and classical musicians routinely play pieces that once were regarded as too difficult for all but a few. 

In the decades after the Second World War American manufacturers faced little competition; they were profitable but complacent about quality until Japanese products began to mount a significant challenge.  In 1969 one third of people who purchased a new American vehicle found it to be unsatisfactory on delivery, and growing up in Rhodesia the first vehicles I knew were European – Citroens, Peugeots, and Renaults – which were considered more reliable. Even today, turn on a safari documentary and the chances are the vehicles will be made by Toyota, never mind the Tacomas driven by ISIS and Taliban fighters in Syria and Afghanistan!

Similarly in the 1970’s service calls for American-made TV’s were five times greater than for Japanese-made sets, and the production time in American factories was three times as long. 

The Japanese emphasized quality control as part of the process rather than a response to customer complaints, an ethos captured by the term kaizen or ‘continuous improvement.   The forces of competition as well as an increasing global market compelled American companies to adapt quickly to the point where although products are more complex today they are also more reliable.  Before I could own my first car (a Peugeot 203) my father insisted that I knew how to strip and re-build the engine.  Today I wouldn’t know where to begin, but the average age of a vehicle on the road is double that of my 1959 Peugeot.

Playing catch-up is neither easy nor fast.  Of the ten vehicles that head the list of most reliable in the November 2014 Consumer Report, only one is US based (Buick) and this is in 6th place.  There are other fields that are equally lagging.  In an article in the New Yorker of Nov 10, 2014, James Surowiecki suggested that they include customer service (poorly trained workers,) medicine (high levels of medical errors and wasted spending,) and education (our teacher training programs lag behind  those of the rest of the developed world.)

And I would add beekeeping to that list, in two respects.  First, reading the Lancaster Farmer every week I am struck by the professionalism of the dairy, beef, chicken, sheep and goat industries; they have a professional staff, a coherent policy and an effective marketing campaign. Yes, I know that most of their members are full time producers with larger financial resources, but their industry relies on ours.  Without honey bees they could not effectively feed much of their stock.  In Pennsylvania we rely on volunteer beekeepers for our common good and in effect the state organization is as strong as the President who is giving of his or her spare time in any one year. This was brought home when I visited Wales and was forcibly struck by the professionalism and presence of advertisements and displays for bees and honey in almost every town we visited; it was no surprise to stumble on a center from which it was coordinated by full time, professional staff.

The second is that beekeeping as a whole has not changed much in recent years, despite the challenges of pesticides, diseases, viruses and monocultures. 96% of us are hobbyists, doing the best we can, which is not always good enough for the survival of the bees. For many beekeeping is still the preserve of a quirky, quaint, mildly eccentric minority and, as one wag put it, if pilots were allowed to start flying with the same amount of skill that beekeepers start keeping bees, no one would step onto a plane. 

Most beekeeping conferences are rewarding and gratifying – there is a sense of kaizen, of self improvement.  Disappointing is the turnout.  Certainly here in Pennsylvania, the annual conference in November attracts less than 5% of registered beekeepers in the state over the two days the conference is held. Many reasons are offered for this, but ultimately we have to show up, no excuses offered.  Local mentors are vital yet there is nothing quite like the energy generated by 10 000 people from across the world, with different languages, different customs, but one unifying passion – honey bees.  This is what happened at Apimondia in Montpellier, France, in 2009 and occurs every second year with Europe and somewhere else in the world taking turns as host. Not all of us can go to Apimondia but we can support the many state and county conferences where nationally respected  researchers and beekeepers share so generously. The speakers are  normally excellent and on point, the information is relevant and based on current data, the presentations professional and accomplished, the vendors increasingly diverse, and the informal conversations are sparkling and informative.  It’s a veritable hive of information and fellowship where very beekeeper, like every athlete,  is given the means to build on his or her innate ability.  Unlike athletes, even the best apiarists don’t yet see a flattening out of the performance curve. 

In the 1970’s, before the civil war in Rhodesia escalated, I devoted occasional weekends to taking small groups of high schools students to a Tribal Trust Land (not unlike an American reservation) where, by arrangement with the District Commissioner,  we would meet the tribal elders, especially the tribal historian, and record as best we could their oral traditions before they were lost.  Later, we were able to check some of those traditions against the archival record in Salisbury (now Harare)  and were invariably impressed by their accuracy. 

At one of those meetings a young lad sat with his back to a tree and wrote down  the answers given by his uncles to the questions we asked (indeed, just as we were doing.)  His initiative was admirable; the downside was that once we learn to write our oral memories fade as do the traditional stories that connect us with the natural world.  This was reinforced three decades later on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.  An impressive flock of colorful birds was present every morning in the local experimental apiary, and when I asked a Kenyan college student what they were, she smiled and shrugged.  I was at fault for assuming that she would be familiar with the native wild life –  I would not have made that assumption about an American student on the outskirts of an American city – and she might have realized how her ‘education’ had separated her from her immediate natural environment. 

In retrospect I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have experienced a small part of rural and traditional Africa at the time I did.  I have  written before about the distinguished game guide who was frightened by the flashing lights on my car, or the villagers who took me in when it rained, or the elderly man on his bicycle who was deeply concerned when my sister and I were involved in a minor vehicle incident  

The oral and archaeological records suggest that  the ancestors of these Shona-speaking, Bantu people arrived from the north perhaps as long as one thousand years ago, which suggests there is a continuity to their history that we in the US lack.  The questions, for me, are what does a culture learn from living in a place for that length time without written records, and (of course) does this relate in any way to beekeeping?

Stephen Muecke,  professor of creative writing at Flinders University, Adelaide, has spent many years walking with the indigenous people of Australia, and it was his book, Reading the Country (1984) that provoked these recollections. 

The oral stories that we heard in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe,) handed down from the ancestors,  not only tied human and nonhuman worlds together but also animated those connections. They had been learned by deep listening and by applying them to an environment with which each person was intimately familiar.  As with the Native Australians and the Native Americans, children learned experientially; rather than ask a lot of questions – respect for elders entails not bothering them too much  – they learned to pay attention and acquire practical knowledge-based skills, rather than the ‘pure’ knowledge we often teach in our schools. 

When Mary and I  walked behind our Zulu game scout in Mkhuze Game Reserve on the trail of black rhino and he casually identified tracks in the sand made by various  antelope,  his skill was not sharp eyesight or a special psychological attribute so much as something embedded in generations of practices involving animals and the land. 

Here’s a bit of handy know-how for you. Should you run out of food in the southern African bush, and wonder what fruits and berries are safe to eat, check the ground for  evidence that the baboons and monkeys consume them. 

We regard knowledge as acquired cognitively, immortalized by Rene Descartes – cogito ergo sum – whereas indigenous people remind us that knowledge is environmentally embedded, that learning happens best after students have their curiosity aroused.  (Sherry Turkel, writing in her Empathy Diaries, suggests that, considering Facebook et al., the modern equivalent of Descartes, is “I share, therefore I am”!)

So how do we create an environment that provokes interest, and then cultivate the relationships essential to good learning?   Sometimes it is easy : a beekeeping class or workshop, for example, normally consists of people who are already interested; when they  meet in an apiary and work on a hive as a group, they are further intrigued and can explore their feelings and their discoveries with class mates. 

Teaching Western Civilization II at 8:00 am to college students who simply needed the credits was a very different challenge.  The difference was relevance, something which has to be nurtured and demonstrated.   The norms of western civilization were seen by these college students as barely germane to their professional schedule, yet I would argue that, in the light of recent events, they are more important than ever. 

Good learning happens slowly,  not in 45 minute segments, and goes both ways; it is not a one-way transfer so much as shared excitement.   I wince every time I read that bees are responsible for three out of every four mouthfuls of food we eat, an assertion  that focuses on what we eat rather than the way the food the bees eat is poisoned because of the way we grow ours.   It is this self-interest which is so destructive, penurious and  hurtful.  

Stephen Muecke calls this ‘living in one place, while living off another’ and offers the following example.   “When multinational corporations arrive in Australia’s North-West to drill for gas and oil, they claim what they are doing is ‘good for the country’. But they don’t mean the local territory, they mean something more abstract, such as Australia and its GDP – or, more specifically, their shareholders, whose lives might be marginally improved as they live in cities or on yachts in the Caribbean. That is the difference between living in one place while living off another.”

Beekeeping is one of those activities.  To do it successfully, one has to slow down, listen to what the bees are saying and observe what they  need to survive. Like all living beings they have their own nature, and if we pay close attention we realize that that we are part of it: we breathe the same air, drink the same water and share the same nutrients. There is no escape; there is no better world. 

David Papke shared with me an extract from Mark Winston’s Bee Time. “Initiating a dialogue requires the same attention as entering an apiary.  Both stimulate a state of deep listening, engage all the senses, hearing without judging … Understandings emerge, issues clarify and become connected … Those too rare moments of presence and awareness, when deep human interactions are realized : they too, are bee-time.”  

Whether under a tree in  a Zimbabwe kraal, on a walk-about in Australia, on the outskirts of Nairobi, or looking for rhinos in Kwa-Zulu, that’s not a bad definition of good education, and we find it all with the bees. 

No doubt everyone’s adventure with beekeeping is different.   Ideally it starts with a good beekeeping class, combining the theory and the practice, followed by a five year period in which, with the help of a mentor, one becomes familiar with the various  storylines of a colony of honey bees.   What happens next depends first on why one keeps bees, secondly on one’s level of curiosity, and thirdly the extent to which one  exposes oneself to current research, thinking and practices. 

In retrospect, the class I took initially was not a good one. The presenter was knowledgable but did not have the communication skills that are an integral part of  inspired teaching, and there was no logic behind the curriculum.  The tip-off was the number of participants who were taking the class for the third, fourth and even fifth time.   This is a  reminder that we need somehow to assess the skill levels of those who volunteer for presentations under the banner of our various associations.  Their willingness to give of their time and share their knowledge is cherished; the question as to gauging their levels of competence is delicate but consequential.  

Also involved with this class was a local supplier who had preordered all the paraphernalia, including packages, that the participants might need.  I can recall no discussion of alternatives, nor of the pros and cons of packages. 

I was fortunate to stumble on the assistance of a mentor during my first year, which proved vital.  It was not a service provided by the local beekeeping organization which, at the time, was a rather small, stolid group which did not offer much outside of the once-a-month meeting. 

After six years of practical, hands-on experience supported by a reasonable amount of reading, and with Mary’s support, I committed to attending Apimondia in Montpellier, France, in 2009.  It was inspirational, stimulating and self-affirming; I returned not only with increased knowledge but also with the determination to take my honey bee management to a new level and to share both with others. 

In the following eleven years there were a series of stimuli, one of which, in 2018, was what Tom Seeley calls Darwinian Beekeeping, and which I prefer to think of as regenerative beekeeping.  In essence, Dr. Seeley suggests that beekeeping has become increasingly designed for the benefit of the beekeeper rather than the health of the bees, and he has examined feral colonies to survey  the conditions that bees choose for themselves, given their druthers.  David Papke had been similarly inspired, was a step ahead of me in coming up with a hive design that was more bee friendly, and we spent a year re-designing our hive bodies and presenting, with differing levels of success, our reasoning to some local bee organizations. The reactions ranged from outright dismissal to skepticism to enthusiasm to excitement.  

Initial results are encouraging, but it is a small sample and early days.  The question is, what kind of changes in management might supplement the re-design of the hive?   It is important to note that at each of the three occasions on which I have been fortunate to hear Tom Seeley present his findings, he stresses that this is a concept for hobbyists, possibly for sideliners, but not for commercial beekeepers, whose objectives and financial commitments are less likely to allow for experimentation. 

Too often Darwinian beekeeping  is interpreted as survival of the fittest, requiring a ’hands off’ or ‘ live and let die’ approach by the beekeeper.   Far from it.  In fact, if the goal is to keep locally adapted, healthy bees without resorting to chemicals, it is right in line with my objectives at this point in my calling. If people can be seen as either butterflies (sitting still, spreading their wings, displaying their beauty and attracting attention) or bees (flitting from flower to flower, cross-pollinating) I am the latter,  consistently attracted by different ideas and visions, flying to them to enlarge my foraging area and the diversity of food in my brood nest. 

Earlier this year David came across a series of three articles written by Terry Combs and published in ABJ, August, 2018, and Jan and Feb or 2019, and which fused all that I had learned over some 20 years and gave it a distinct focus under the bigger umbrella of restorative beekeeping.  This is the most recent stimuli in my beekeeping  journey, I have committed the next three years to it, and am enthusiastic as to the challenges and opportunities it presents. 

None of the fundamentals involved are particularly difficult or different.  The first is to keep good records in order to assess queen quality and colony sustainability.  Terry, having once bred guppies, gives example of the complex evaluation sheets he uses; we have devised something a little more simple, with a quantitive assessment, that can be used with each colony over a year, culminating in a numerical decision as to how to proceed with those bees the following year.

The process begins by critically selecting the colonies one wants to over-winter, to the extent of culling the queen in any colony that lacks the  resources or mass of bees to survive successfully and combining the remaining bees with a strong colony.

In the spring, the beekeeper selects breeder colonies for queen propagation, which might be either ones own hives that have a persistent record of success (hence the importance of those records) or a feral swarm. Ideally, once established, a beekeeper  should never have to purchase a queen; indeed, the active sharing of queens by local beekeepers   committed to this program is the best source of all.  If a new outside queen is needed, perhaps for genetic diversity,  it is vital to realize that ‘locally adapted,’ means more than simply having survived one or two winters.  The queen supplier needs to explain the  testing, evaluation and selection processes the bees have undergone.

Swarming is an integral part of the honey bee cycle.  Rather than trying to prevent it, one can use the swarming impulse to make splits once there are queen cells with larvae.  The thinking  is that bees make specific choices when it comes to developing queen cells, whereas  our choices via grafting are random. The nucs made by these splits can contain either the queen from the original colony or well developed  queen cells.

Drone quality is an increasing topic of conversation. Terry argues in favor of establishing drone mother colonies that have the desired traits.  In York County we do have a community apiary which could conceivable serve as a modified drone mating yard as established by Brother Adam on the moors of Devon, but he was breeding a specific sub-species of honey bee and therefore he wanted his queens to mate with drones of a certain type.  That is not our issue.  We simply want our queens to mate with quality drones.

That leads to the question, what is a quality drone? We know what qualities we want in a queen, but those in a drone are more difficult to quantify.  

Indeed, does it matter?  Jurgen Tautz , writing in The Buzz About Bees, argues that the desired quality comes in the drones that succeed, among hundreds, of mating with a queen, and then again in the selection of sperm to mate with queen’s gametes. He further points out that queens transported to a different area (eg. a mating yard) had a much lower success rate than those in local mating stations (eg. an apiary.)  The reason, he suggests, is that the queen is accompanied by a retinue of forager bees who know the area and escort her to and from the DCA.

Terry is not specific in terms of ‘desirable traits’ but does stress the need for active feral colonies and to introduce occasionally new stock for genetic diversity. 

The takeaway is that if we follow the Darwinian process of not needlessly removing drone cells, and as we develop better and stronger colonies using Terry Combs’ selection procedures, we can assume that the drones will be equally robust and will provide the quality that we need without having to develop specific drone mother colonies. 

The final step is to re-queen each original colony with the best young queens from the splits. Each new queen can be evaluated after a full brood cycle, realizing, as Terry writes, “Rigorous and timely culling is hard but necessary.  If you truly want to help bees, you’re going to have to adopt nature’s hard stance against the weak, deformed and inferior …”

We should stress that this system does not preclude the use of organic chemicals as part of an integrated pest management system.  In the  specific case of excessive varroa counts, options include freezing the brood, replacing the queen,  combining with a resistant colony,  using an organic treatment, or in the worst case scenario, eliminating the entire colony. 

So that is where I am at.  The next three years seem to be taken care of, but as we all know, if you want to make God laugh, tell Her your future plans …

In 2011 the South African government, in response to pressure from China, refused to grant the Dalai Lama a visa so that he could celebrate Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s 80th birthday in Capetown. Four years later the Dalai Lama invited his spiritual brother to spend a week at his residence in Dharmasala in India to discuss the concept and achievement of joy.   The resulting book describing that discussion, compiled by Douglas Abrams, is called The Book of Joy : Lasting Happiness in a Changing World. 

Americans focus on happiness (the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is listed as one of three ‘inalienable rights’ in the 1776 Declaration of Independence)  whereas the Danes relish contentment, but joy is bigger than both, Desmond Tutu argues.  “While happiness is often seen as being dependent of external circumstances, joy is not.”  “The ultimate source of joy is within us,” the Dalai Lama agrees.   “Not money, not power, not status… which fail to bring inner peace.  Outward attainment will not bring real inner joyfulness.  We must look inside.” 

The title of the book is insightful : the conscious cultivation of joy within us can lead to long lasting happiness despite the external challenges and traumas of a world that is changing beyond our control.  The reverse does not apply : happiness from an external event, say the purchase of a new car, does not lead to long lasting joy.  An example would be how quickly the elation of a child opening gifts under a Christmas tree can dissipate. 

Both the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama have suffered deeply, and in the midst of pain and turmoil each has managed to discover a level of peace, of courage , even exuberance.  “Discovering joy does not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak,” said the Archbishop, whose prostate cancer has returned. “In fact we may cry more easily but we will laugh more easily too.  Perhaps we are just more alive.  Yet as we discover more joy we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters.  We have hardship without becoming hard.  We have heartbreak without being broken.”

Working with honey bees can bring happiness (and sadness!) but does it reinforce our discovery of and adventure toward, joy?  Paul Ekman, a psychologist and pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions, and a friend of the Dalai Lama,  has written that joy is associated with a variety of feelings.  The question is if those feelings relate to beekeeping.  For example …

• Pleasure of the five senses : initially looking at bees becomes observing them,  gradually we learn to hear and smell them, and it is not unknown for beekeepers to dip drone pupae in honey and eat them.  They taste like chicken!
• An original feeling of relief at overcoming anxiety and fear can lead to a sense of excitement : there is an understandable apprehension and nervousness as one first approaches the art, science and craft of beekeeping, and as the challenges of keeping bees healthy and alive increase, so does the sense of achievement, which in turn leads to joyful feelings like contentment, pride and delight at having accomplished a challenging task. 
• Wonder, ecstasy and bliss : the bees never fail to astonish, and the more we learn the greater the amazement until eventually we are transported outside of ourselves and imagine more closely the life of a colony.  This in turn can provoke feelings of gratitude for what the bees offer and a sense of pride at being a small part of this vital process. 

The feelings of joy thus evoked were valued particularly by the romanticists of the nineteenth century, who, as materialism and empiricism became manifest, asked if the sensual can be entwined with the scientific, and of what value is a technology that enriches the understanding but robs the imagination. In the 1820’s Alexander von Humbolt, the Prussian geographer, naturalist, explorer, and influential proponent of Romantic philosophy and science, wrote to his friend, Johann von Goethe, “Nature must be experienced through feelings.” 

A modification is provided by Douglas Halladay, a professor of business at Georgetown University, who adds ‘meaning’ to the equation. Is there a vital difference between happiness and meaning? “Is child rearing a happy task?” he asks.  “Well, yes and no.  Is it the most meaningful role one could do?  Yes.”   Beekeepers find meaning not only in the lessons of the superorganism but also in making a difference at an individual level to local and global  environmental challenges. 

And joy has a value!  In 1922, Albert Einstein was in Japan having been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, and not having cash with which to tip the hotel porter he wrote two notes on a piece of hotel stationery, one of which read, “A calm and modest life brings more joy than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.” That note was sold at auction in October, 2017 for $1.56 million. 

Ultimately the daunting graphs, tables and technical language with which researchers churn out data-filled reports assessing the perils we face are too often devoid of poetry and imagination. When we obscure the intuitive, sensual feelings that we experience with, say, a colony of honey bees or an exuberant family, we also obfuscate the feelings of wonder, pleasure, excitement and gratitude that can drive the perseverance needed to find solutions.   As Henry Thoreau asked rhetorically in 1851, “With all your science can you tell me how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?”