Author: Jeremy

In Pennsylvania, the annual Farm Show, held in January, is a big event. To judge from the front page of the local newspaper, it consists primarily of an expansive food court, tractor pulls, the butter sculpture, horse-drawn carriages, cosseted animals and wall-to-wall crowds.  Yet behind the hoop-la there are at least four premises on which the Show is based. The first is to showcase the range and quality of agricultural products in the state; the second is to create a window through which the public can gain an appreciation of the work done by an increasingly diminishing proportion of our population for the benefit of all; the third is to provide an experience by which visitors can renew contact with a rural life style which many yearn for and miss without realizing why.

There is a fourth and it can be explained this way.  I live in an area rich with milk weed, which is host to the monarch butterfly in its annual migration.  For five years Mary and I could count on the fingers of one hand the numbers of monarchs we have seen, nor have there been signs of  eggs and larvae on the undersides of the milk weed leaves. In 2017 we saw perhaps a dozen, each sighting being an event of note.

There was a brief segment on TV in 2013 describing a federal initiative to recognize the breeding grounds of the monarch butterfly as protected areas, the main implications of which would be restrictions on the use of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides in these locals. It was the subject of a year-long study and the main opposition came from the Department of Agriculture and various farming associations on the grounds that such regulations would restrict further their ability to work the land effectively. 

Another study in 2015 showed that neonicotinoids, introduced via pesticide-soaked seeds, leach into the surrounding soil and water system. Their presence can be detected in native plants 50 feet beyond the point of introduction at a ratio of 64 parts per billion.  That is seven times higher than the tolerance level of the larvae of the monarch butterfly on milkweed.

And a study out of Cornell in 2017 focused on fungicides like chlorothalonil which control plant pathogens in crops and which largely have been overlooked because they don’t targets insects. This study showed however that the residues are picked up by the bees when foraging for pollen and nectar. “While most fungicides are relatively nontoxic to bees, many are known to interact synergistically with insecticides, greatly increasing their toxicity to the bees,” the report concluded. 

So there are ethical issues involved which might be posed thus : What responsibility does agriculture have over and beyond the production of food?  Does the end justify the means?  Is anything OK that results in greater yields or lower food prices? Does agriculture have long term responsibilities in addition to the pressure to meet immediate needs?

For the large part, farming is about making money rather than about the quality of the soil, the water or the air.  This is understandable as conglomerates incorporate small family farms which cannot compete with the scale of agri-business.  And these corporations, not being locally based, do not have the same investment in the immediate environment as does say a family operation being run by a fifth generation of farmers. This is evident  in my farming neighbors who are compelled into unhealthy land practices (eg. no longer planting a winter cover crop, or using a two crop rotation of corn and soya beans because the price of winter wheat has fallen off) in an attempt to keep costs low so they can make enough money to pay off the loans used to buy seed, fertilizers and equipment.  It is no surprise that farmers use chemically-adapted strains of corn and beans so as not to have to find additional funds to suppress diseases and infestations of ‘weeds’ and insects. 

A striking example is Haiti where, according to a report by Marc Lacey in the New York Times of April 18, 2008,  the small, age-old family farms cannot sustain themselves in the face of the competition of imported rice which sells for less than half the price of the more labor-intensive, more nutritious, native variety.  The local suspicion is that the destruction of farming as a livelihood was a strategy to push  women in particular to the city where they would be sufficiently desperate to work all day in hellish sweatshops, sewing some of the four billion tee shirts made globally each year, for which they would be paid one half of one percent of the retail price of each garment they sewed. A 1996 documentary revealed that the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, for whom most of the shirts were being  made, was being paid $101 000 an hour.

Those Haitians who stayed on the land are trying to make a living growing organic mangoes for a small, western, gourmet market.  

Honey bees, and thus beekeepers, stand at the nexus between these two worlds – the pressure to provide food for an increasing global population and the long term needs of environmental health and survival.  Our bees expose both sides : effective pollination is essential for most of the agricultural process yet the bees are threatened by the environment to which they are exposed as they go about their business. 

Perhaps State Fairs are not the right venue to raise this dilemma yet we more than many others have the responsibility to initiate the discussion. It is important to rail against the darkness while also lighting a lamp of hope, however feeble the light might seem.

The paradigm through which we view the major challenges facing humanity, in which broad category I would include climate change, soil depletion, the availability of fresh water, continued population explosion and the future of organisms like the honey bee that are vital to our existence, reflects a philosophical debate that has simmered over four centuries. 

With the advent of the scientific revolution in the C17th, inspired by giants like Galileo, Newton, Kepler and Descartes,  came an attitude called  reductionism, the essential notion being that phenomena can best be understood by breaking them down into their component parts. Certainly this works effectively in many situations; for example, studying the molecular structure of materials so that we can better understand their physical attributes, or studying the genome of the honey bee to better understand the triggers that activate certain behaviors and diseases.

Some attributes of complex systems, however, and living systems in particular, are hard to understand through an inventory of their  separate parts.  One cannot understand consciousness, for example,  by studying the molecular structure of the brain.  Another often cited example is that table salt is composed of atoms of sodium and chlorine, neither of which by itself has any hint of a taste of saltiness.  Nor, I would argue, can one understand the operation and behavior of a colony of honey bees by studying a worker bee, a drone or a queen in isolation. 

The human brain, salt and a honey bee colony are examples of what is  called emergent properties, ie. something that ‘emerges’ when component parts come together in relationship to form a higher-level aggregate object with properties that cannot be predicted by a knowledge of the constituent parts alone.  It’s a form of synergy, and the result in honey bees is  a superorganism,  or complex system with functions determined by its individual parts, by the character of the whole that they compose, and by the relations of the parts to that whole.

The study of complex systems and their emergent properties is known as holism, from the Greek word holos meaning whole or entire, and was coined by the South African statesman and philosopher Jan  Smuts in his book, Holism and Evolution, first published in 1926.  A good example of inherent holism is the science of ecology, another word with Greek origins that means literally, ‘the study of our house.’ Ecologists study the relationships between organisms and their environment, in particular how ecosystems emerge from the sum of their parts, whether living or inert. 

By comparison, medicine historically has tended to be more reductionist.  First year medical students are typically immersed in studies of chemistry and anatomy, and perhaps in their third year, introduced to actual patients.  I recall on a visit to McGill University in Montreal in the late 90’s, being impressed by their emphasis on students working with patients from day one, on the grounds that they needed to see the latter from the outset as complex, emergent human beings (biological, social, economic, psychological and linguistic) rather than as the aggregate of a bunch of anatomical parts. 

Both reductionism and holism can be useful pathways to understanding provided we don’t rely on one exclusively at the expense of the other.  It is tempting to look for that silver bullet panacea that will magically resolve problems with climate change, health care or honey bees; indeed simple reductionist solutions are relatively easy to explain (and sell) and the public can relax in the belief that science will solve it for us, even though the sciences have their own ethical complexities and for centuries have been integral to the problem itself. One has to think only of the phenomenal development of the oil industry over the last one hundred years, made possible by developments in geology, physics and chemistry, the many bi-products that have resulted from oil, not least plastics,  and the repercussions for our environment and global climate. According to an article in The Guardian  in 2015, ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, was aware  as early as 1981 of the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, as well as the potential for carbon-cutting regulations that could hurt its bottom line, seven years before it became a public issue, Despite this, according to Greenpeace,  the firm spent $30 million over the next 27 years to promote climate denial. 

Shades of the tobacco industry and their denial of the relationship between smoking and lung cancer.

Holistic solutions are more difficult to explain in thirty second sound bites, but more importantly they require changes in individual or societal behavior.  Rather than being passive on-lookers, we become an essential part of the solution.   To apply these two models to climate change, for example, the reductionist school of thought sees it as resulting primarily from the technical problem of carbon emissions, so why not continue burning fossil fuels but somehow capture the carbon?  If scientists  can design huge machines that will suck excess carbon out of the atmosphere, we can maintain our current economy and way of life. 

The holistic school of thought views climate change as it  relates to complex  disorders that plague our global ecosystem, including soil degradation, desertification, species extinction, decline of marine life, deforestation, overpopulation, fossil fuels and unlimited economic expansion.  To the holistic thinker, climate change will continue to worsen until we either deal with all of the systematic causes or until it overwhelms the biosphere and, with it, civilization as we have come to know it.   In the first scenario we can choose to change; in the second, change is forced upon us.  We can be proactive or reactive, with very different consequences for each.

A honey bee colony is holistic – a eusocial superorganism.  One finding of the sequencing of the honey bee genome provides a good example.  Individual bees have relatively few genes that code for immune response, fewer than the common house fly.  That number may grow as research continues, but the explanation, as Jamie Ellis outlined in the March, 2016, issue of the American Bee Journal,  is that the colony is the unit of selection.  Thus it is in the colony that the most significant immune responses occur, not in individual bees. 

So we can study the genes of specific honey bees (reductionism) but immune response in this case is an emergent property, something that manifests itself when the component parts synergize to form a conglomerate, and which cannot be predicted by a knowledge of the constituent parts in isolation.

Whereas only Beethoven, working alone, could compose any of his 722 various arrangements, it takes an average of two hundred support personnel to put one military pilot into the sky, or thousands of people working together to sustain astronauts on a space station.  And in a good marriage, two healthy people bring the best of themselves to the relationship, so that, like a good bee colony, one + one is more than two.

If our world could be reduced to a village of 1000 people 

what would it look like?

There would be 

579 Asians

150 Africans

120 Europeans

81 North Americans

61 from South America

6 from Oceana

314 Christians

236 Muslims

143 Hindus

71 Buddhists

71 Confucians and Taoists

7 Shintoists

2 Jews

150 would be of a minor religion or atheist

6% receive half of the village income

16% of adults are illiterate

40% exist on less than $2 per day

40% are malnourished

And who provides honey for this village?

Just one beekeeper

Thank you to my friend and colleague, David Papke, who found the original in some old files dating to pre-1990.  The statistics have been up-dated using 2011 data

Plants make all forms of higher life possible.

The first algae scum probably formed on land 1.2 billion years ago and it took another 800 million years for the first land plants to appear.  800 million years … that’s beyond my capacity to imagine. To put it in perspective, it has been calculated that if you counted to one billion, working eight hours a day, five days a week, spoke aloud every number and started at the beginning of the Christian era, you would not yet be finished.   Put another way, it takes a clock 31.7 years to tick 1 billion times. 

40 million years later these primitive land plants began to diversify and their petrified remains are found today in volcanic springs with their cellular detail clearly preserved. 

The establishment of a land-based flora caused oxygen, a waste product for plants,  to accumulate in the atmosphere. When this concentration rose above 13%, wildfires became possible, as documented in the fossil record some 440 million years ago by charcoalified plant fossils.

400 million years ago  most of the features recognizable in plants today were present, including roots, leaves and secondary wood, and 50 million years later seeds had evolved enabling  plants to reached a degree of sophistication that allowed them to form forests.  It was early in this period that the oldest definitive insect fossil is found, estimated to be 396-407 million years old, and 50 million years later amphibians, from which mammals would evolve, were common.

A report in Science describes an international effort to map the thousands of physical traits and genetic clues that trace the lineage ofall the placental mammals – a huge group of 5000 species. The results indicate that we, together with whales, elephants, dogs and  bats, arose from a small, furry, insect-eating animal that lived after the demise of dinosaurs.

Simple flowering plants probably first appeared 200 million years ago, proliferating 100 million years later in the angiosperm revolution, during which time a species of hunting wasp developed a taste for nectar, became a vegetarian and gave rise to the modern honey bee. 

The latest major group of plants to evolve were the grasses, of which there are some 10 000 species. They first appear in the fossil record about 80 millions ago and became prolific around 40 million years later. Over the last 10 million years the grasses, as well as many other groups, have evolved new mechanisms of metabolism to survive the low carbon dioxide and warm, dry conditions of the tropics.

Flowers, like trees, are rooted in one spot and thus rely on other agents to transport their seeds.  The wind, birds and insects are major actors, and plants evolved to attract them by color, odor and thin stems that wave in the breeze.  The honey bee in return developed the ability to see infra-red colors which direct her to the center of the flower where the nectar is contained and protected, and in so doing she collects and transports the male pollen for pollination. 

Pollen possesses two characteristics that make it particularly useful for studying plant evolution:  it is resistant to decomposition and so can be found in ancient soils, and under the microscope it is very distinctive between plant families and species. An examination of the contents of fossilised dung of plant-eating dinosaurs, for example, revealed types of cells that are only found in the epidermis of grass leaves; thus presumably the last of the dinosaurs dined on grass.

10 000 years ago human intervention played an important role in  plant evolution in the form of the neolithic shift from an economy based on hunting and gathering to a system based on the domestication of plants and animals. Early farmers, for example, selected forms of wheat that could be easily husked, making the flour-making process more manageable, and in so doing inadvertently hybridized different strains.

 So yes, plants are important. First, they take in carbon dioxide and emit oxygen, vital to the survival of most living species.  Secondly they are crucial to both water and soil quality – think of the desertification of the soil and the fetid, rancid water that occurs when plants are absent.  Ken Burns’ documentary, The Dust Bowl, illustrates this dramatically. Thirdly, when plants die they decompose back into the soil, providing a source of nutrients to sustain further life.

Plants are the major food source for most insects, reptiles, birds and mammals, which in turn provide a food source for those higher up the chain, humankind included.  And diversification is important.  We know, for example, that whereas honey bees can survive on one pollen source, to be healthy they need a variety of sources, each with its own specific chemical composition.

“Our mistake,” according to Wendell Berry talking on the Diane Rehm show in 2014, “is that we think we can save the people by abusing the land.”  Not  only does population growth place more demands on decreasing areas of farmland but the urban revolution of the last one hundred years has removed most of us from an intimate awareness of the health and well being of that land.  Beekeeping is a profound and frequent reminder of the vital connection between one species of insect and the land.   It might even be an ominous connection because, as Wendell Berry added, “We all share the same fate.”

My stroke box contains a cutting from the local newspaper of a column written by Leonard Pitts in 1997  in which he describes a television commercial featuring a man arriving for a basketball game.  The stride of the latter is easy as he walks the gauntlet of fans, his smile secretive and knowing.  He walks like a winner.   Yet in the voice-over he says, “I’ve missed  more than 9 000 shots in my career.  I’ve lost more than 300 games.  26 times I’ve been trusted to take the winning shot – and missed.  I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.  And that is why I succeed.” 

The man is Michael Jordan who, in the words of Pitts, “shackled gravity and courted flight, who made the impossible seem routine and the merely difficult look easy.”  And, ignoring for a moment the fact that the commercial was for over-priced athletic shoes, Jordan was arguing that  failure is why he succeeded.  Failure is the price of excellence.

This is the time of year when, with our hearts in our mouths and with feelings of apprehension,  we open the hives after a long winter.   Most of us are going to find that some of the girls have not survived and I for one never quite get over the feelings of sadness that come with the sight of those little motionless,  fuzzy butts sticking out of the cells in unison, often with a frame of capped honey only inches away, and the pile of blackened dead bees on the bottom board. 

The truth is it happens to us all, and some would argue that it is an essential weeding-out process by mother nature. But often it is the first major obstacle faced by a new beekeeper.  In terms of the Gartner-Hype Cycle, after our ’peak of inflated expectations.’  (the bees who came with the package survived, the queen laid in a good pattern, the girls took all of the sugar syrup we fed in the fall)  many of the colonies die.   This ‘trough of disillusionment’ is where as many as 50% of new beekeepers decide not to continue.  The heartbreak, the disappointment, is too much.

Those  who continue cite two things for their decision to do so.  The first is a mentor, a fellow beekeeper, who assures them this is the norm, that they are not ‘bad people’ because their charges died.  It is striking how Jim Tew, writing in Bee Culture, describes his failures without being shamed by them, as if to give us permission to fail as well.  The second is a local bee association where new beekeepers can hear stories from experienced pros about winter losses, told without rancor or guilt.  The message is “Welcome to our club – having lost a colony you are now truly one of us” and there is support for the self-doubt that can understandably accompany these losses. 

I would add a third – an ability to see failure as an integral part of success – and rather than become despondent, to see this as motivation for a revitalized effort with the renewed confidence that comes from a challenging experience.   Those who make this transition move on to ‘the slope of enlightenment’ which is when the real learning begins.  It is gradual, it is real and it is experiential.  

 Pitts describes a scene from a  Michael Jordan clip : “He fakes left, goes right, elevates to the hoop, finds a man in his path, spins in midair, throws the ball backwards over his head and scores.”   The crowd roars, the announcers are breathless, and the viewer wonders … how?   I don’t know the beekeeping equivalents of faking, blocking, spinning and shooting, but I do know that better beekeeping practice comes from constant work – reading the newsletters, the journals and the books, talking with one’s peers, going to conferences, reflecting on the notes one makes in the bee yard… all good winter tasks.   We talk about talent, we nod our heads to luck, but so often we ignore the most important things – the hard work,  the unceasing push to be a little better than the day before … and the many failures.

In Michael Jordan’s case that moment was built on thousands of others that only he can know, those moments in which he paid his dues away from the cameras so that he can walk like a winner on his way to the locker room.  

In the February, 2014, issue of Harper’s Magazine entitled Tunnel Vision : Will the Air Force Kill its Most Effective Weapon?  an Air Force colonel describes a conflict in Afghanistan involving predator drones. “If you want to know what the world looks like from a drone feed, walk around for a day with one eye closed and the other looking through a soda straw.  It gives you a pretty narrow view of the world.”   Experienced A-10 pilots use the soda straw analogy in describing the video images from their targeting pods.  “You can find people with the targeting pod,” said one such pilot, “but when it’s zoomed in I’m looking at a single house, not anything else… If you’re looking only through the soda straw you don’t know everything else that’s going on around it.”

Once upon a time our learning started with the narrow and became increasingly broad – the typical Classical education of the nineteenth century, for example.  Today the tendency is to start with the generic after which we become increasingly focused on minutiae. 

New beekeepers begin with a narrow focus, understandably and rightly so.  They focus on basic management skills, ask rudimentary questions, learn the terminology.  There is normally a romantic reason for getting involved – doing one’s part to save the bees, wanting an individual source of honey, wanting to increase pollination in one’s garden …Nothing wrong with any of those motivations.   

And then typically there is a major obstacle, a disillusionment.  The bees swarm, the queen is poorly mated and the bees wither, the colony does not survive the winter,  varroa mites and wax moths take over the hive.  In the face of what  Gartner and Hype call ‘the trough of disillusionment’ many new beekeepers, perhaps as many as half, decide not to continue.

Those who those who persist do so partly because they had realistic expectations and knew in advance that all beekeepers, no matter how good, lose colonies, heart wrenching as such l oss always is, and partly because they have a good

mentor who can encourage them despite the disappointment. These survivors enter the ‘slope of enlightenment’ where gradually they open themselves to the complexity of this fascinating hobby, and with that enhanced, deepened and broadened awareness comes the real fascination and wonder that the intricate world of honey bees can provoke.  This gradual slope leads eventually to the ‘plateau of productivity’ which is when the most profound learning occurs, when  meaningful interpretations and predictions of colony behavior can be  discerned, and when the beekeeper interacts with the larger environment in which the bees exist. 

There is no shortcut.  It’s a hands-on learning process with trial and error as a demanding teacher.  

Successful beekeeping, as with so many other things in life, is the gradual process of moving from simplicity  to complexity. I suspect that effective beekeeping classes and good mentoring follow the same pattern.  Yet ultimately it is up to the individual student to embrace complexity, to open himself or herself to the variety and apparent confusion of the different worlds behind the book covers, and to resist the temptation to accept the quick and easy solution.  “The test of a first-rate intelligence,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

A colony can be viewed in the same way.  At one level the life progress of a worker bee is relatively simple – her cycle from egg to maturity and the tasks she completes in a hive are easy to comprehend.  But when one begins to ask what stimulates her to change activities from say collecting nectar to collecting water, or how she responds to the pheromones emanating from a larva in an uncapped cell, it gets a little more complex, and even more so when one looks at the colony as an entity with the numerous individual interactions that make up the superorganism and the complex social and behavioral organization that enables the effective use of available material and energy.

For me, the greater the complexity the greater the sense of wonder, even more so as I see honey bees as metaphors and teachers for the Gordian Knot that is our current world.  The constant challenge, whether talking over the phone to a nu-bee or addressing queries at an open forum, is how to convey both the necessary simplicity and the amazement of the complex without confusing or dampening the enthusiasm of the listener.  Typically the decision as to whether to move to more complex answers is determined by the questions from the audience, which disclose their level of interest and comprehension and determine whether the rejoinder invites them to open a book of self-discovery or is a more direct googlesque response.  

For the first 25 years of my teaching career a student assignment came with the assumption that it would involve time spent in the school library; indeed I would work closely with the librarian in preparing the assignment. In more recent years, with a laptop or even a smart phone, students can comfortably complete an assignment without having to leave their dorm rooms.  And when I get to visit the college library today the majority of the students are sitting at computer terminals rather than looking at books on the shelves.  (Those not at the computer are asleep on chairs in the corners!)

Those books on the shelves, like bee hives, can appear at a casual glance to have a ‘sameness’; one has to look behind the covers to realize how different each one is. 

My concern is that as one searches for a book in a library, as one pages through the index or flips through the chapters, knowledge is found in a larger context.  A Google search, by comparison, takes one straight to the requested page or paragraph; it’s a direct but narrow search.  The student is taken to the precise phrase or word he or she is searching for without any reference to background or theme or context.  The result, all too often, is a good final paper with minimal understanding of the bigger picture.

This came to mind reading an article in the February, 2014, issue of Harper’s Magazine entitled Tunnel Vision : Will the Air Force Kill its Most Effective Weapon?  Describing a conflict in Afghanistan involving predator drones, an Air Force colonel is quoted as saying, “If you want to know what the world looks like from a drone feed, walk around for a day with one eye closed and the other looking through a soda straw.  It gives you a pretty narrow view of the world.”   Experienced A-10 pilots use the soda straw analogy in describing the video images from their targeting pods.  “You can find people with the targeting pod,” said one such pilot, “but when it’s zoomed in I’m looking at a single house, not anything else… If you’re looking only through the soda straw you don’t know everything else that’s going on around it.”

Once upon a time our learning started with the narrow and became increasingly broad – the typical Classical education of the nineteenth century, for example.  Today the tendency is to start with the generic after which we become increasingly focused on minutiae. 

New beekeepers begin with a narrow focus, understandably and rightly so.  They focus on basic management skills, ask rudimentary questions, learn the terminology.  There is normally a romantic reason for getting involved – doing one’s part to save the bees, wanting an individual source of honey, wanting to increase pollination in one’s garden …Nothing wrong with any of those motivations.   

And then typically there is a major obstacle, a disillusionment.  The bees swarm, the queen is poorly mated and the bees wither, the colony does not survive the winter,  varroa mites and wax moths take over the hive.  In the face of what  Gartner and Hype call ‘the trough of disillusionment’ many new beekeepers, perhaps as many as half, decide not to continue.

Those who those who persist do so partly because they had realistic expectations and knew in advance that all beekeepers, no matter how good, lose colonies, heart wrenching as such l oss always is, and partly because they have a good mentor who can encourage them despite the disappointment. These survivors enter the ‘slope of enlightenment’ where gradually they open themselves to the complexity of this fascinating hobby, and with that enhanced, deepened and broadened awareness comes the real fascination and wonder that the intricate world of honey bees can provoke.  This gradual slope leads eventually to the ‘plateau of productivity’ which is when the most profound learning occurs, when  meaningful interpretations and predictions of colony behavior can be  discerned, and when the beekeeper interacts with the larger environment in which the bees exist. 

There is no shortcut.  It’s a hands-on learning process with trial and error as a demanding teacher.  

Successful beekeeping, as with so many other things in life, is the gradual process of moving from simplicity  to complexity. I suspect that effective beekeeping classes and good mentoring follow the same pattern.  Yet ultimately it is up to the individual student to embrace complexity, to open himself or herself to the variety and apparent confusion of the different worlds behind the book covers, and to resist the temptation to accept the quick and easy solution.  “The test of a first-rate intelligence,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

A colony can be viewed in the same way.  At one level the life progress of a worker bee is relatively simple – her cycle from egg to maturity and the tasks she completes in a hive are easy to comprehend.  But when one begins to ask what stimulates her to change activities from say collecting nectar to collecting water, or how she responds to the pheromones emanating from a larva in an uncapped cell, it gets a little more complex, and even more so when one looks at the colony as an entity with the numerous individual interactions that make up the superorganism and the complex social and behavioral organization that enables the effective use of available material and energy.

For me, the greater the complexity the greater the sense of wonder, even more so as I see honey bees as metaphors and teachers for the Gordian Knot that is our current world.  The constant challenge, whether talking over the phone to a nu-bee or addressing queries at an open forum, is how to convey both the necessary simplicity and the amazement of the complex without confusing or dampening the enthusiasm of the listener.  Typically the decision as to whether to move to more complex answers is determined by the questions from the audience, which disclose their level of interest and comprehension and determine whether the rejoinder invites them to open a book of self-discovery or is a more direct googlesque response.  

It’s hard to say exactly when beekeeping moved from being a healthy pastime to an all-consuming passion.   One day I’m inspecting a few frames in my only hive and  the next thing I know I’m frantically making splits to populate an entire apiary.  

So how does one know if one has crossed the line into this treacherous, precarious territory? 

• For example, a sane beekeeper  won’t leave town in the first week of the nectar flow; an obsessive compulsive  beekeeper won’t leave town in the second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth week of the flow. 

• Do you have a credit account with a beekeeping provider, and does your spouse use if for all of your Christmas, anniversary  and birthday shopping? 

• Do you use one hive tool, or do you have spares in the garage, the honey house (ie kitchen) and the car in case of emergencies?

• Do you value all living things or did you cheer when the robin that was pestering a few of your bees got pounced on by a hawk? 

• Do you watch the bees going and coming every day, or do you hourly measure the internal temperature of each hive? 

• Are you surprised by how much hive equipment you ordered this winter,  or do you feel that it isn’t enough?

• Can you recite the Latin names for the various genuses of bees, and do you use them in conversation with the girls in the hive?

• Would you like to plant more bee friendly plants?  Gardening?  Who has time to plant a garden?

• Are you proud of your newly hatched bees, and do you replace the pictures of your children in your wallet with photos of each new bee?

• Can you crush a small hive beetle with your hive tool and love the sound it makes as you do so?

• Do all of your friends, all of your neighbors and your extended family know that you don’t use chemicals in your apiary?

• When you had the wax from the comb in your hives tested, did you study for the test? 

• In anticipation of feeding the girls with sugar syrup, did you plant your own sugar cane and beets?

• When you want to preach to your children about the virtues of beekeeping, do you suddenly recall your decision that 60 000 kids in each hive was more than enough to have to look after, and that you passed on having children?  Besides, having to come up with 60 000 new names every six weeks is challenge enough. 

• And when you spouse accuses you of loving your bees more than anything,  is your immediate response “What’s wrong with that?” 

If  the above doesn’t clarify your status, be mindful of the medical research group that recently advertised for participants in a study of obsessive-compulsive disorder.  The response was gratifying; they got 3,879 responses, all of which  came from one person – a beekeeper. 

Talking of which, excuse me why I go and check on the girls … I haven’t looked at them  for at least an hour.  

Part 2

With apologies to Raymond Chandler

It was two o’clock in the afternoon, late May.  The sun was shining as I stood on the steps of a high rise, studying the blue blue sky.  I was neat, clean and gassed up with fuel stored by my sisters (half-sisters, actually – same mother who chose not to share the proceeds of her sugar daddies with me.) I was a cool dude and I didn’t care who knew it. 

It was time to go.  I flexed my muscular, toned thorax and stretched my lustrous wings so that the sun reflected off the sheen, dazzling the sisters, foolish slaves to their genes, who were returning home from a shopping expedition.  With one kick I was airborne and back in the hunt.

I headed south west; previous jaunts had showed that was where the best dames hang out.  Cruising at 65’ with the speed control set at 15 mph, it took only 12 minutes to arrive at my destination. 

I recognized it as soon as I saw it.  It was big, the ceiling was high, and the carpet was as rich and deep as the blood of a wounded deer seeping into snow.   Once again I regretted not being able to see red.  

I circled the room, casing the joint.  Rivals, petty and inadequate as they were, circled and spiraled; clearly I had no competition to speak of.    I sat back, watching and waiting for the right opportunity. 

And then I saw her.    She was trouble but she was worth a stare.  Her six legs streamed behind her – they seemed to be arranged to attract attention.  They were visible well above the knee and one of them to the abdomen, which itself was small and compact and capable of expansion.  The legs were dimpled and clean, not like the hairy  corbicula of my half-sisters, dappled with carelessly strewn bits of pollen. Ms Regina was slim with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was rangy and strong-looking.  Her 2500 eyes were open and alert.  She had a good proboscis and a sulky droop to her lower maxilla.

She was worthy of being the mother of my two million children, her lack of maternal instinct notwithstanding. 

I made my move.  With an alluring RAM (rapid antennae movement) I launched myself in her direction.  I’m discrete – as tight as a vault with a busted lock. Valor is the better part of discretion.    As a suitor, better never than late. She was coy, turned her back and flew higher, abdomen waggling suggestively.  I followed, rival suitors falling by the wayside.  Her conditioned proboscis response was increasing; I knew she was interested. At 80’ she slowed and I circled.  She spiraled upward and I trailed behind.  At 100’ she leveled out and not being one to mince words or waste time, I moved in.   

There was evidence of a previous suitor blocking my final approach. I cursed silently, a gentleman to the core (so to speak.)  Ms Regina clearly was not one to limit her favors.  Deftly I removed it, backed up, re-set my sights and approached again.  This was the moment I lived for, the culmination of my mission in life, my gift to eternity, the reason I was born, and the first of many sorties vindicating my superiority as a male. 

I twisted over, flying upside down, made contact and …

✞

RIP

Dwight the Drone

b. May 3, 2022, d. May 24 2022

I have long been proud of my sense of direction. It is probably a guy thing but I am confident that I can find my way most anywhere, especially if I have had a chance to glance at a map beforehand.  Having to stop and ask someone for directions feels like a personal failure; Mary is the one who has to get out of the car and ask the appropriate questions.  The only exception,  or so I thought until recently, was riding the underground, or subway, or tube.  Here I lose all sense of direction and, emerging at the surface after a couple of stops, I struggle mightily to get reoriented, which had led me to believe that, like a honey bee,  my sense of direction is tied to the sun.  Once above ground I will look for clues to figure out the next step forward. 

In August, 2014,  Mary and I were in England for a family wedding and took the opportunity to visit Buckfast Abbey, home of Brother Adam and the Buckfast bee.  I hadn’t realized until recently that my father’s village of origin (now almost a city) is less than half an hour’s drive from the abbey.  After a wonderful visit we made our way cross-county via Glastonbury, planning to stay overnight in Oxford.

England has a major traffic and parking problem and as we approached Oxford the traffic slowed up significantly.  I was driving, concentrating on staying on the right (ie. left) side of the road.  Mary was navigating, using a large AAA atlas and finding a route to take us away from the worst of the back-ups.   Eventually we crawled into the outskirts, found a hotel, parked our bags and set off to walk into the town center to find somewhere suitable to eat. 

I began walking the wrong way.  Totally the wrong way.  Going west when I needed to go east.  I could not get myself oriented.  Something was wrong.  I contested Mary’s gentle coercion but sure enough, she was right – the town center appeared exactly where I least expected it.  

Looking at a map in a store window the reason became apparent.  We had planned to enter Oxford from the south, which was the route I had looked at on the map beforehand, but in our attempts to avoid the traffic we had entered from the west. Mary knew this because she had the atlas on her lap as we twisted and turned. 

That one factor, that one unknown, had thrown me completely. 

The question therefore is, when we start beekeeping, what is the route map we have in our heads?  What gets us disoriented, and what leads to that sudden realization when we can distinguish ‘west’ from ‘east,’ when the center appears suddenly but delightfully in front of us?  

The emphasis of the Buckfast Abbey apiary has moved from queen breeding to education, and the head beekeeper, Clare Densely, who offers a number of classes, suggests that a nu-bee maintains his or her hives for five years before taking a more advanced level class.    In part this is so that the beekeeper understands the many inter-relationships and nuances of the amazing lives and behaviors of honey bees.  But it also provides the time and space in which one can find a definite direction, a route map with a clear goal in mind, amid what initially appears as a chaotic bevy of bees. 

No doubt everyone has a different story but for me it was three years into my beekeeping career when someone, and I can no longer recall who or where, said that honey bees, unlike wasps, are passive not aggressive. That they will defend their home and their kids if they feel threatened, but in most instances they are too busy, too focused, to worry about the likes of me.  It was the proverbial light bulb, a paradigm shift, a turning around in the right direction.  The way I managed bees shifted, any residues of fear dropped away, and I like to think that the girls know that, even as they feel the need to  remind me when I get over-confident. 

What was that moment for you?  What was your Oxford moment?  Or to ask it another way, what did you have to find out for yourself which, if someone had told you early in your career, might have made the art and skill of beekeeping a whole lot more rational a whole lot earlier?  In 2014,  having set out in the wrong direction, gotten reoriented, knowing again where I was going, I was relaxed, ready to explore, ready for another adventure, and this city in particular, like beekeeping,  was well worth the journey. 

Twenty years ago, when a college class was given an essay to research and write, the presumption was that the students would go to the library and, by searching among the index cards and shelves of books,  get to see the topic in a larger context.  Who knows, they might even be positively side tracked by something unexpected.   In more recent years the presumption is that the student will go back to his or her dorm room, open a lap top or smart phone, google the topic and be taken straight to the material without any awareness of (and often not any curiosity for) the larger surrounds.  

Students are getting better at writing good papers on specific topics without an awareness of the larger context. Or in terms of the old adage, they know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing. 

Something similar happens with maps v GPS.   Maps present the larger view, the bigger surrounds, with the potential to discover a lake that lies just over the hill, or a spectacular view at the end of an unmarked lane.  Because maps have to be read in conjunction with the surrounding physical environment, whether it is as simple as reading a sign or as challenging as looking at the contours to determine the degree of a slope, we are engaged with the environment, with the habitat, which creates both memories and knowledge. 

This became clear when talking with a recent visitor about his journey from Philadelphia.  He asked where York County began and I mentioned the Susquehanna River, once a frontier with ‘Indian country’  in the days of the thirteen colonies, crossed today by a bridge that is almost a mile long. “Yes,” he said, “I do seem to remember crossing a bridge somewhere.”  Because it was not mentioned by the GPS voice, it made little impression on him. 

Some years ago Mary and I were driving up Rte 1 in Oregon State and Mary noticed on the map a potentially interesting monument only a short distance off of the highway.  It led us to a redwood tree and a beautiful story.  In 1944 a Japanese submarine surfaced at night off of the Pacific coast, a sea plane was assembled in the water and a young Japanese pilot strapped his family’s samurai sword around his waist, tied a Japanese flag around his head, and flew over the Oregon forests, dropping two fire bombs.  The intent was obvious.  One of the bombs was ineffective and the fire caused by the second was quickly extinguished.  

Fifty years later an elderly Japanese man walked into the museum at Portland, Oregon, to donate  his family’s samurai sword, where it is presently on display, and then drove into the forest to the site where his second bomb had fallen and planted a redwood tree. 

He died shortly thereafter.

The point is that this little side adventure would have been unlikely were we following directions on GPS.  Maps open the world,  they engage us,  whereas GPS narrows our view, removes our choices and often misdirects us without our knowledge.  A GPS system is a dictator; a map is a guide.  The former is a partner to our intellect, not a replacement for it. 

For all of the above reasons I like maps and have declined to get a GPS for my vehicle. I will concede that for some it is very useful, those undertaking frequent deliveries, for example, but I want to keep thinking, rather than have technology do the thinking for me.  And as a curmudgeony admission,  I’ll acknowledge not having a smart phone.  Perhaps I’m intimidated by the rapid advances of technology but people who would never dream of coming to one’s house unannounced think nothing of calling or sending a text and expecting it to be  picked up or read immediately.  

The May, 2015, edition of Orion listed some of the words that were removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.  They include acorn, bluebell, cowslip, fern, hazel, heather, dandelion, heron, ivy, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter and pasture – all words concerned with nature.   The words introduced included attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, chatroom, cut-and-paste and voice-mail.  Are these latter words important in a technological society?  Absolutely yes.  The tragedy is that they replace, rather than interact with, words from nature.  

I received a phone call earlier this year from a person who had purchased a queen bee on Craig’s List and wanted to know what she had to do to start beekeeping.  Numerous e-mails from ‘wannabees’ state they have decided to keep honey bees and ask where they can buy the necessary equipment.  How is it that we have come to believe that  working with nature is so easy, requires so little knowledge or preparation?   Yes, sites on YouTube have good (and bad) visual examples of techniques like installing a package but beekeeping is an art as much as a science, it requires perseverance, commitment and patience, and false expectations created by technology in isolation explain in part why more than half of new beekeepers give up within the first year. 

Consider the new Flow Hive, hyped as the biggest technological breakthrough in hive design in the last 150 years.  The impression created is that one sets it up in the backyard, installs bees, waits a few weeks, and then turns the tap to get honey straight from the colony.  Many don’t realize that one still has to do brood inspections, deal with mites and diseases and hive moths and small hive beetle and swarming,  remove it for successful over-wintering, and know how to ‘read‘ a colony, not least the health of the queen.   No doubt the Flow Hive has value in the right hands; my fear is that many potential new beekeepers will spend a lot of money to purchase one and the heightened expectations will quickly lead to the trough of disillusionment.

As we become more detached from our surroundings, the honey bee remains intimately connected to the environment; indeed, her survival and those of the colony depend on it.  Ours does too, but we are still at the stage of paying lip service to that interdependence rather than demonstrating the actions and behaviors that are the root cause of meaningful change.