Author: Jeremy

During the roughly 300,000 years that Homo sapiens wandered the earth, nature dictated the rhythms of their daily activities as they hunted and gathered.  And the relationship between work and the seasons became even more distinct after the development of agriculture –  planting and harvesting in the spring and fall  with the objective of an excess that was essential for winter survival.  

That relationship and dependency ended some 300 years ago with the Industrial Revolution and its increasingly urbanized population.   Not only were workers in the mills and factories, as well as in the offices,  protected from the worst of the weather,  but with the  capital incentive there was a clear  relationship between time, effort and reward.  The more hours the factory was in operation,  the more productive it was – the intensity of the work was regardless of the season.  Initially that fervency was from 8 am to 6 pm six days a week, until labor unions compelled  regulatory innovations like a 40 hour week over 5 days with a standard of minimal pay.  Ironically, today, with the techno-computer revolution, and because we can work from anywhere, many of us are working longer hours than did our grandparents but in better surroundings. 

But what is meant by productivity?  We tend to measure it in terms of numbers and profits, which is a bar that keeps rising ever higher and requires increasing busyness – faster responses to e-mails and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours.  What is missing from the equation is quality. 

An example is Boeing.    A report into the company’s safety culture by an expert panel after two recent accidents found a “disconnect” between senior management and regular staff, with the latter being hesitant  to report problems for fear of retaliation.  Multiple employees interviewed by the panel stated that the pressure from management came in the form of increased production at the expense of quality. 

One only has to read Charles Dickens to realize just how miserable life was in the mills and factories.  Cal Newport , an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, argues this form of work is also ineffective. “The process of producing value with the human brain … cannot be forced into a regular, unvarying schedule. Intense periods of cognition must be followed by quieter periods of mental rejuvenation. Energized creative breakthroughs must be supported by the slower incubation of new ideas.”

He  cites the work habits of many successful creative people outside the traditional work place (eg. Georgia O’Keefe, Lin Manuel Miranda, Marie Curie and John McPhee) for whom taking time off or varying the pace of their efforts was not just about relaxation or escape but also about improving the quality of their output over time.

The disruptions of the coronavirus pandemic allowed some workers, no longer committed to an office regime, to  discover for themselves more radical ways of organizing their work life, such as fully remote positions and four-day workweeks.  First, we need to recognize this is more difficult for those involved in essentially manual occupations, and secondly, some jobs can’t support long breaks from intensity – the host of a weekly podcast cannot easily take breaks from releasing new episodes, for example.  Thirdly, there have long been examples of this concept on a grand scale. In academia, for example, professors are typically offered a semester free from teaching responsibilities roughly once every seven years, an idea borrowed from Jewish Scripture, which commanded that one leaves one’s farm fields fallow one year out of every seven. The idea is that the sabbatical will be used to refresh oneself and explore new ideas in one’s field. In a corporate setting, this might translate as rewarding work on particularly hard projects with mini-sabbaticals, perhaps two to four weeks long, during which one is freed from attending meetings or working on difficult tasks.

I was fortunate to experience two sabbaticals, each of which radically changed not only my professional life but my personal relationships as well. 

Smaller-scale variations in effort can equally make a difference. If an episode of a podcast is published on Friday, maybe the following Monday is kept clear of appointments, allowing a slower start each week to better balance out a more harried end. At first this might feel as though one is ‘wasting time’ on Mondays, but what is being gained is a more sustainable pace that sidesteps burnout and keeps quality high.

For those steeped in the virtual-factory mind-set, Cal Newport argues, these seasonality strategies might be unsettling. “In the industrial context that shapes so much of how we currently think about work, the game played between employer and employee is zero-sum: time not spent busy is revenue lost. But in the knowledge sector … extracting value from the human brain is not something that can be regularized like installing a steering wheel on a Model T.   Introducing more variation into the pacing of our work is not a concession made to labor but a smart recognition of how to produce the best results over time … It’s the grinding regularity of manufacturing that’s the outlier, not our instinctual attraction to a more natural pace of work.”

Again, as is so often the case, honey bees offer us a model of an ‘instinctual attraction to a more natural pace of work.’  They are superbly adapted to the seasons, namely  colony build-up in the late winter,  colony reproduction in the spring,  food collection and storage in the summer, and preparation for winter survival in the fall. 

In the first bee class that I took, more than 25 years ago, it was stated categorically that it was the length of daylight time that determined a colony’s behavior.  Thus, for example, outside of the tropics, it was the increasing length of daylight in late January which prompted a queen to start laying after the winter recess.  Unfortunately environmental degradation is making this less simple, not least the correlation between warming temperatures and blooming plants, which has significant implications for the bees,   A study released last month by Washington State University showed that, with warmer autumns, forager bees are working longer than had been the case – something we have all witnessed.  The consequence is that with the disintegration of their wings these winter bees are dying earlier, to the point that models suggest that by early February there will not be sufficient numbers to maintain the new brood, and colonies will collapse.(1)

Wayne Esias  using NASA satellite photos of foliage cover, showed that, in Maryland,  over the space of 40 years, the onset of leaf emergence in early spring had advanced by  28 days.  Consequently many colonies have not reached their ideal numbers of bees and brood at the onset of the pollen, and later the nectar, flows. (2) 

The three principles of ‘slow productivity,’ as defined by Cal Newport, are 

• do fewer things;
• work at a natural pace;
• obsess over quality.

That is what honey bees, and pollinators in general, do instinctively, and is another lesson as we struggle to find an equilibrium in a world that changes more rapidly than we can understand. 

 (1)  https://news.wsu.edu/press-release/2024/03/25/honey-bees-at-risk-for-colony-collapse-from-longer-warmer-fall-seasons/?

 (2)   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241431221_Honey_Bees_Satellites_and_Climate_Change

In January I was forwarded an article from the March, 2023 edition of Science Robotics titled  A Robotic Honeycomb for Interaction with a Honeybee Colony, by  Rafael Barmark et al.  Using the language of the report, it described ‘a robotic system designed to observe and modulate the winter bee cluster using an array of thermal sensors and actuators . The robotic system was able to observe the colony by continuously collecting spatiotemporal thermal profiles of the winter cluster, to modulate the bees’ response to dynamic thermal stimulation, and, after identifying the thermal collapse of a colony, to create a “life-support” mode via its thermal actuators.’ 

In layman’s language, these sensors,  embedded in the comb, not only measure and observe the movement of the winter cluster but, in the case of a weak colony, can be activated  to modulate the temperature in the cells, supposedly to augment their survival. 

This is the culmination, but not the endpoint, of what Randy Oliver calls the 4th Agricultural Revolution.  The first was the invention of agriculture some 12 000 years ago, followed by its industrialization starting in the late 18th century and culminating in the use of the  internal combustion engine in the form of tractors and trucks. The third is what  Randy calls the Green Revolution, which in my estimation started when the Soviets successfully launched a manned space rocket, Sputnik.  Besides emphasizing math and science in schools (often at the cost of art and music) American farmers were encouraged to ‘farm fencerow to fencerow,’ so that the US would be agriculturally self-sufficient; this meant, among other things, that the hedgerows, so vital to birds, insects, animals and wild flowers, were plowed under. Perhaps the best known aspect of the Green Revolution was the production of high yield crops, especially rice and corn, not least in India,  but with it came some significant downsides – a population explosion, heavy use of synthetic fertilizers, cheap labor, heavy use of water and increased use of pesticides, not to mention increased costs which affected many small farmers dearly – and which I described at length in a previous column.

The fourth revolution introduced electronic technology in which Randy includes the internet, Artificial Intelligence, biotechnology, gene editing, robotic labor, precision dispensing of chemicals, vertical farming and alternative energy sources. 

And we cannot expect honey bees to be unaffected by this process. 

On the same day I received the article from Science Robotics, I read Anne Murphy Paul’s description of Charles Darwin’s famous voyage starting in 1831.  The 22 year old,  torn between following a career as a doctor, a parson, or one that allowed for his burgeoning interest in natural history,  received a letter from his former tutor at Cambridge University informing him of a position as a naturalist on a two year expedition aboard the HMS Beagle.  

He had never kept a journal before but began to do so under the influence of the experienced ship’s captain, Robert FitzRoy,  whose naval training had taught him to keep a precise record of everything happening aboard the ship and of every detail of the ocean-going environment. Each day the two men ate lunch together, after which FitzRoy wrote up both the ship’s log and his personal journal. Darwin followed suite : his field notebooks, his scientific journal and his personal diary were updated daily as  the two years of the expedition turned into almost five.   

Recording such data requires close observation of one’s surroundings, the ability to run through a mental checklist of features that might be recorded, and the skill to organize them clearly.   In addition, the process of taking notes in the field requires us to select, discriminate and evaluate (ie. higher order thinking skills) which in turn lead to deeper observation. 

Beekeeping technology is rapidly becoming more copious and more intrusive, yet each of us has access to pen and paper.  When asked, most beekeepers acknowledge the importance of keeping good notes, and yet only a minority actually do so.  It’s like checking for varroa – we know the importance of monthly mite checks,  yet only a few do it.  And taking notes is the first step; what is critical is using that recorded data to make decisions for the benefit of the bees as well as for one’s own professional awareness and development. 

HMS Beagle returned to  Plymouth Sound on October 2, 1836.  Darwin spent the next three years processing  those boxes of note books and another twenty  years discussing and refining his conclusions, until the eventual publication of The Origin of the Species in November, 1859.

With the plethora of technology available today, it is easy to forget that a pencil and a notebook in the hands of a young Charles Darwin were key to developing a theory that would change our perception of the world, even as it did not seem so at the time. 

If asked to describe a honey bee, you might say that is has three distinct body parts, antennae, six legs, four wings and that it flies.   So if I were to gather from different sources the head, thorax and abdomen of a bee, two antenna, four wings and six legs, and threw them in the air, it would be a honey bee, right?   After all, these are the component parts, and they fly, so why not? 

Descriptive knowing is the way in which we typically delineate and define things – by their various parts  – but thinking we know something because we can describe it is only partly true.  It lacks what is called structural functional organization – the way things are structured so that the parts function as a whole or, as is commonly cited, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  There is no adequate word for this in English, so we use the German gestalt, or less commonly, the Greek, logos. 

Describing the gestalt of a honey bee is not easy, not least because our grasp is intuitive rather than explicit. We need to describe the form and at the same time identify the patterns that make up the gestalt. This is participatory knowing, meaning that our mind conforms with the shape, the form and the behavior of the honey bee;  we develop the same patterns as the bee to the point that the very structure and functioning of our being can be changed. These are those rare brief moments when we feel ‘at one’ with the world. 

Four famous lines from William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence best describe the feeling of gestalt : 

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower;

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour

The left and right hemispheres of the brain are generally recognized as having differing functions.  The right brain is more focused on art and creativity,  on visualizing the whole picture, on seeing itself connected to the larger world, the gestalt.  The left brain is more analytical, methodical, orderly and linear.    We need both but Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and his Emissary : The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, argues that the left hemisphere with its focus on function has become so dominant that we are in danger of forgetting everything that makes us human. The left hemisphere, he argues, has grabbed more than its fair share of power resulting in a rigid and bureaucratic obsession with structure, self-interest and a mechanistic view of the world, at an enormous cost to human joy.  Clearly the gestalt emanates from the right hemisphere, the one that we are using increasingly less frequently. 

Why is this significant?   Supposedly, honey bees are the most written about insect in the world, even as I have been unable to find independent confirmation of  this.  Yet the overwhelming majority of this writing is descriptive – in the journals, the scientific periodicals, the newsletters, the books.  We describe the various issues that bees face and how to remedy them.  We examine in detail the genome of the species with all of its implications for bee management.  We describe how to get more honey from a hive, how to help the bees through winter, how to split colonies and introduce new queens … 

And yes, all of this is important – it has to be mastered if one is to manage honey bees successfully  – but too often we stop there. 

A pervasive current topic is ‘the Meaning Crisis,’ a term devised by Dr. John Vervaeke, professor of cognitive science at the University of Toronto.   In a series of podcasts, 48 hours in all, he describes how today’s mental health crisis is the consequence of a deeper cultural historical crisis.   This is evidenced by the increasing numbers of people who feel disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future, as expressed in increases in anxiety disorders, depression, despair, and suicide rates. He argues that we need to understand and transform the meaning of our lives, our culture, and our world if we are find a way forward.

How to do it?  Where and how do we find coherence, significance and purpose in our lives and our culture, these being the vital components of meaning?   

For me,  beekeeping is a touchstone of reality.  It provides those vital times when the modern, manufactured world fades into the background and I interact with creatures who not only have a history that is beyond my ability  to comprehend but who stand in defiance of the stresses of a world of greed, envy, and what Professor Vervaeke calls ‘the pornography of affirmation.”  Those precious moment when time slows down, when the patterns in the hive conform with the patterns in my mind, when I am ‘in the flow,’  are not only the ultimate pleasure of beekeeping but also the moments of great awareness and insight.  May every one of us have something in our lives which offer such an interaction.  

 If Ian McGilchrist is correct, an experience of the gestalt, in this case with a colony of honey bees, is a vital step to recovering that critical  balance between knowledge and wisdom, the first of which is  factual and the second experiential.  Such an experience cannot be taught but has to be discovered,  and having encountered it once, the feeling of awe never ends. It is one transcendental way in which I for one can enlarge that continuing search for meaning, can feel connected to the natural world as well as  my fellow like-minded beings, and as such is possibly the ultimate reason why, for some, beekeeping is a life-long passion and reward.  

On September 26th,  2023, Shawn Fain, the head of the UAW,  stated on a television news program that the average auto worker would have to work for 400 years to earn what the average CEO was paid in one year.  He added that no one is worth 36 million dollars a year, that no one has the right to that kind of annual reimbursement.  Besides wondering how anyone spends that kind of money, unless it is for the benefit of the greater community, I would add that the CEO cannot do his or her job without the workers, whereas the reverse is not the case.

That same day, on the NPR program 1 A,  Jen White  interviewed the Brothers Osborne, (not to be confused with the Osborne Brothers of the 1960’s.)  John and TJ Osborne, who have been performing for some 20 years and have a list of awards including a Grammy, said in part that “We live in a capitalist system – you’ve got to drive, got to go, got to get more and more and more …. and yet, after getting so many things we thought we wanted and needed, it turned out  we had all the things we needed all along.” The more you get, said John, “the less happy you are because you lose perspective.  I have learned more  from my six month old twin daughters than I learned in there last twenty years of my life – how simple life is, how perfect it already is, how to stay present.” 

The freelance writer and investigative journalist, Christopher Ketcham, argues that a basic tenet of western civilization is the idea that economic growth can continue forever on a finite planet. “Illogical as it may be, we hear this deluded fantasy in the decrees of elected officials, in the laments of economists about flagging GDP, in the whirligig of advertising, at the World Bank and on Wall Street, in the prospectuses of globe-spanning corporations and in the halls of the smallest small-town chambers of commerce. Growth is sacrosanct. Growth will bring jobs and income, which allow us entry into the state of grace known as affluence, which permits us to consume more, providing more jobs for more people producing more goods and services so that the all-mighty economy can continue to grow.” 

First expressed as ‘The American Dream,’ it has now gone global not least as a moral imperative in the developing world where, they are told, it will free the poor from deprivation and disease, enrich and educate the women, reduce birth rates, and provide the means to pay for environmental remediation—to clean up what so-called progress has despoiled. This was most evident to me in Nairobi ten years ago with huge roadside billboards of modern American washing machines, even though the majority of the city’s population live in what can only be  described as slums.  Or in Zimbabwe twenty five years ago when we saw a television set in a one roomed house in a small rural village that did not have, and still does not have, electricity. 

Sadly, the American Dream, as expressed in terms of living a better life than did one’s parents, is measured solely in financial and material terms. 

Not as well known as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,  or George Orwell’s  Nineteen Eighty Four, is the work of  Aurelio Peccei.  He  had fought for the resistance in Italy, where he had been captured and tortured by the Fascists, and then in industry where, as an executive at Fiat, he began to question the legacy that industrial civilization was leaving its children. His book, The Chasm Ahead, published in 1968, expressed concern about the “suicidal ignorance of the human condition” on a planet of dwindling resources, rampant population growth and material consumption, mounting pollution and waste. In 1970 Peccei connected with a professor of system dynamics at MIT, Dennis Meadows, who had helped design the World3 computer program, and who led a  team of researchers questioning the orthodoxy of growthism.  Using the new gigantic mainframe computer, they emerged two years later with The Limits to Growth. Its message was commonsense : if humans propagate, spread, build, consume, and pollute beyond the limits of our tiny spinning orb, the ultimate result will be a collapse of civilization, which would mean the loss of human life, culture, and capital on a scale unimaginable. The World3 business-as-usual model suggested that the collapse would likely begin around the middle of the 21st century.

This was not what Americans indoctrinated in growthism had been accustomed to hearing—and never had they heard it from PhD.’s marshaling data at one of the world’s citadels of learning.  Not surprisingly, The Limits to Growth was the subject of vicious attacks by the defenders of growthism because it dared to question the viability of the American Dream. It was an affront to the credo of mainstream economics – that the combination of profit and innovation will always save us – and cited as evidence how the Green Revolution and genetically modified organisms had innovated a route around predicted world hunger, and deep drilling had provided access to previously untappable aquifers. 

Over the last decade, Limits has attracted renewed interest from ecologists and economists, using new methodologies to gauge its accuracy. The conclusions ranged form “the alignment of data trends with the LTG dynamics indicates that the early stages of collapse could occur within a decade, or might even be underway,  “ to “ The projections are quite on target. We are not aware of any model made by economists that is as accurate over such a long time span.” 

And if you want a version of what lies ahead as we blunder along with business-as-usual, driven by the false promises of  free markets and individual profits, I would recommend a novella of futuristic science fiction, The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014) by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, historians of science at Harvard and the California Institute of Technology, respectively.  What stuns the future chronicler  is that the smartest scientists in the world, employing the most advanced analytical and technical methods available, had charted the trajectory toward climate doom long before it was a fait accompli.  ”Virtually all agree that the people of Western civilization knew what was happening to them but were unable to stop it,” says the narrator. “Indeed, the most startling aspect of this story is just how much these people knew, and how unable they were to act upon what they knew.”  

The report from COP28 that met in Dubai last month (sub-titled by some as Cop Out or Cash In) suggests that we are not much closer to committing to sustainable global solutions.  

What brought the above to mind was one  of the comments that followed Ketcham’s article. It read, in part, “We need to wind back the social decay of our modern societies, where individuals have become separated, isolated, alienated and purposeless. We need to reconnect with each other to form intentional self-sufficient communities that permit a synergy of our efforts, supporting each other and increasing our chances of survival.”

My first response : he’s describing a colony of honey bees!  This is not to suggest that we should live like bees; rather that there are principles at work in a bee hive that we can emulate.  ie. Biomimicry writ large. As beekeepers, we know the power of the collective society that is ‘the colony’ –  a super-organism of individuals united in common purpose. We know our bees communicate with each other in several ways (and undoubtedly other ways that we don’t yet realize.) We understand the importance of the queen pheromone in giving a colony it’s identity. We know the bees produce enough raw food not only to survive but also to grow, to flourish and to share.  Honey bees work together, share information and identify with a unifying purpose.

The question becomes whether our global society can organize itself to live within its means while providing a peaceful, equitable existence for its people. There  is enough to go around, so long as we all agree not to want too much,  a terrifying notion for those who are entrenched in the free-market capitalist mindset, who have been assured that we will never need to share our piece of the pie provided we just keep on growing the pie.

The industrial revolution escalated the economic differences between classes of society, and some converted their new wealth into power which was then used to protect their privileges and affluence under the justification of the myth of perpetual growth.  ‘A rising tide lifts all ships,’ it was argued,  and recent times have shown this clearly is not the case.  If wealth is to be divided more evenly among a  growing global population, the per capita material affluence of the global north will have to drop.  Can a civilization indoctrinated in selfishness do this?  I fear not.  As Ketcham writes, “It would be a process of social maturation on a scale never before seen. Because in order to retain our humanity in the face of limits, we would have to confront inequality head on.”

Literally, we would rather die than share our toys. 

In October of 2002, John Allen Muhammed and his nephew, Lee Boyd Malvo, terrorized the Washington DC neighborhood with a series of random sniper attacks, eventually killing 10 people.  At the site of the first shooting, a gas station, a white van was seen racing from the scene of the crime.  It was assumed to be the vehicle used by the shooters and for several weeks, as many readers will remember, police road blocks nation-wide focused on white vans.   

At one of the crime scenes investigators found a magazine clip with fingerprints on it.  These were subsequently identified as belonging to Lee Malvo, who was known to associate with John Muhammad, who, in turn, had purchased a former police car, a blue Chevrolet Caprice, one month previously.  The vehicle was spotted parked at an Interstate rest stop in Maryland and the two suspects were arrested. 

The significance of this story is that on three occasions the blue Caprice had been stopped at police road blocks and allowed to proceed.  Why?  Because the misconception of the white van so colored the perception of both the police and the public that they could not objectively see what was in front of them. 

Broadly speaking there are two types of beekeepers, what I am choosing to call Programmed and Reactive.   The first is typical of new and commercial beekeepers.  Most of the former are looking for an annual cycle in which certain actions are required on all colonies at specific times.  Thus, for example, if they believe that it is customary to switch boxes in the spring, they will switch all boxes, irrespective of the position of the brood or the strength of the colony.  If they believe that most beekeepers replace queens annually, they will replace their queens irrespective of how well she is performing.  If they believe it is necessary to treat for varroa late in the summer, all colonies will get treated irrespective of whether the bees are themselves controlling the mites or not.  Hence the term ‘Programmed.’

The point is that they are so focused on a particular manipulation that they cannot see what else is happening in the hive.   Preconceptions outweigh reality.  “Just tell me what to do and when to do it,” is a request I receive from many who are new to this wonderful hobby.  In response it is important to explain what the options are, and the reasons for choosing one option over another. 

In the case of commercial beekeepers, as Charles Linder makes clear in a recent series in The American Bee Journal, most are acutely aware of the conditions of their colonies but the sheer size of the operation and the pressures of time and profit minimize their choices.

With good mentoring, confidence, and experience of both the annual  life cycle of a colony and the biology of a honey bee, most new beekeepers become more responsive to the needs of particular  hives. Thus, for example, they might question whether it is really necessary to switch boxes, and if so, which ones.   They will evaluate each queen before making a decision to replace her, and will complete a mite test on each colony before deciding if and when to treat. 

They have a tool box of management strategies at their disposal, with the confidence and experience to use them.  They react to, are respectful of, and are guided by, the bees, rather than imposing themselves on their charges. Hence the term Reactive.

Certainly there are some beekeepers who never move from program to reaction, and I don’t know why.  Certainly it has nothing to do with intelligence as we traditionally understand it. 

Proud as I am of my powers of observation, I can be as willfully blind as anyone.  David Papke and I meet several times a month over a cup of coffee to discuss honey bees, review journal articles, and share stories and experiences.   In mid-September I arrived five minutes early at the Village Coffee Shop in Shrewsbury and, not seeing David’s silver-colored truck, assumed that I was first there, only to see him seated at one of the tables as I entered.  On this occasion he had driven the white sedan, which was only two bays away from where I had parked.  Yet based on my presumptions it was effectively invisible.  My expectations outweighed reality. 

The same happens when I am looking for a particular can or package in the pantry based on my preconception of what it looks like.  When I summon Mary for help, she points out  that it is right in front of my nose but in a different looking container. 

This autumn Mary has been making a delicious sauce from our apple drops. Last night I remarked on how well the sauce complimented the rest of the dinner.  “Jeremy dear,” she replied,”That’s mashed potatoes, not apple sauce.”   Only then did I taste the potatoes.

There are many reasons why some people become committed to managing honey bees.  For me, a significant one is the constant challenge of reading a hive and then reacting appropriately.  It is like a living Sudoku puzzle or an animated crossword.  The parameters may be the same each time  but the specifics are unique, neither can be solved based on preconceptions, and the sense of satisfaction when one responds successfully never diminishes. 

I began keeping honey bees in 2004, two years before the discovery of Colony Collapse Disorder.  I recall vividly Dave Hackenberg describing, at a PSBA conference, his  discovery of dead-outs in his Florida apiaries, and how later meetings were preoccupied with news of the latest losses and potential causes. 

With the benefit of hindsight this was the start of the ‘Save the Honey Bees’ campaign as the public responded enthusiastically to a media barrage based on a mixture of fact, fiction and scare tactics, labelled by one writer as ‘bee wash.’   Always willing to help in a crisis, individuals  assumed that the best way to help the bees was to start some hives, and they did so in ever increasing numbers, as seen, for example, in the membership of the York County Beekeepers’ Association from 2000 to 2023 (by comparison, the average membership for the twentieth century was 35.) My guess is that most beekeeping organizations show a similar trend.  

Synchronistically, three articles made their way to print in the last week of August this year – one in The New Yorker, one in Beekeeping (a British publication) and one in the New York Times.  Their theme is the same: not only have many people bought bees without the knowledge to look after them (the prime example was an e-mail I received several years ago from a lady explaining that she had just purchased a honey bee queen on e-bay and asking  “What do I do now?”)  but the numbers of managed bees has risen to a level that threatens wild pollinators, which are equally important to a healthy, balanced environment.   Essentially, we can intervene to house, feed and reproduce the former whereas the latter depend on natural forage and habitat for their survival.

Urban areas in particular have been promoted as a ‘safe haven’ for honey bees with varied year-round forage and fewer pesticides than in rural areas with its industrialized  agriculture. It is not that simple. For example, according to Richard Glassborow,  Chair of Greater London BKA, in London, England, where colony numbers have doubled in the last 10 years,  there is  an impressive 47% of green space, but it is mainly grass. There are 3.8 million gardens, many of which are hard surfaced. GLBKA’s research indicates that in an urban area like London, 3 colonies per square kilometer is reasonable in relation to the needs of other pollinators (which coverts to 8 colonies per square mile, or one colony per 80 acres,) but problems of forage availability are exacerbated by the uneven distribution of those colonies – some areas are densely populated with 50 colonies per square km. Consequently, London bees are fed sugar syrup all year around, which equates to factory farming. Congestion not only brings problems of disease spread but also raises the ethical question of just what is in that very expensive honey sold and served in London shops and restaurants.

The desire to help honey bees by starting a hive is well-intentioned but misguided; we need a more balanced message to encourage a focus on measures that support the welfare of all pollinators. To turn this tide requires a change of narrative.

In 2016  Mary and I met Gorazd Trusnovec, in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia.  As the founder and sole employee of an organization which translates as “Rent-a-Hive,”  he places bee hives in available spaces, including on hotel roofs, which is where we met him.  In the last seven years his sales pitch has changed : “If you overcrowd any space with honey bees there is a competition for natural resources, and since bees have the largest numbers they push out other pollinators, which actually harms biodiversity.  I would say that the best thing you could do for honey bees right now is not take up beekeeping.”

 Self with Gorazd Trusnovec (right) on the roof of the Hotel Park, Ljubljana, 2016

That’s a jarring message, not least because of the widespread and now deeply rooted belief that the global population of honey bees has been running dangerously low for more than a decade. “(CCD) was the first time that a large number of people started talking about pollinators, which was great,” says Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Oregon.  “The downside was that there was no nuance. All anyone heard was that bees were declining, and so I should get a hive.” The fact is that there  are now more honey bees on the planet than there have ever been in human history.  Figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations show that the number of  bee hives around the world has risen by 26 percent in the last decade, from 81 million to 102 million, but other pollinators are declining.  The decline in the US, from almost 6 million hives in 1940 to less than 3 million today, is explained in part by the unique emphasis on commercial operations : there is a shortage of beekeepers willing to replace the large producers as they retire.

Still, the save-the-bees narrative persists,  its longevity stemming from confusion about what kind of bees actually need to be rescued. There are more than 20,000 species of wild bees in the world, and most people remain unaware of their existence and importance, in part because they don’t produce honey and in part because they are all but invisible, living in ground nests and cavities like hollow tree trunks. But they are indispensable pollinators of plants, flowers and crops, in particular those that are not cultivated; for example, the many species of indigenous trees that are vital in moderating climate change.  

Asking people to dial down their enthusiasm isn’t easy. Honey bees are the celebrities of the insect world, a source of fascination since ancient times, admired for their efficient social structure and referenced in nearly every world religion.  Yet there are ways in which it can be done and the time might be ripe for action.  As a matter of necessity rather than of choice, we are in the process of reacquainting ourselves  with nature.  The current global climate crisis is increasing our awareness of the importance, fragility and power of the natural world, which in turn provides an opportunity to promote more accurate information about pollinators and pollination in general.  

To help the bees one does not have to start a hive so much as plant a pollinator-friendly garden which,  besides deliberate plant choices,  is less reliant on chemicals and includes ‘pollinator hotels’ for non honey bee species.  

And those who do decide to start a colony might be encouraged to investigate the concept of Natural, Darwinian or Regenerative beekeeping, which has an increasing number of proponents. Gareth John, a retired agricultural ecologist in Oxford, England,  argues that natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture. They believe that mainstream beekeeping, like most human-centered interactions with the natural world, has lost its way, and that an alternative path requires the unlearning and dismantling of almost two centuries of bee husbandry, invoking resistance from those who are invested in the current system.

Natural beekeepers, in their enthusiasm if not sense of self-righteousness,  are akin to the first owners of a Toyota Prius almost twenty years ago (of which I was one.)  Not only do they treasure the bees for their own sake—like a goldfinch that nests in the yard—but, like many visionaries, they have an evangelical spirit, as if they have stumbled on a great secret. They defer to the bees for guidance and often speak of the colony in somewhat spiritual tones, as a single, sentient organism that has evolved in parallel to mammals like us.  Yet their fervor and ardor should not impede the veracity of their message. 

In the words of Roger Patterson, who maintains dave-cushman.net, one of the better sources of apiculture information, “Lots of things are changing. People are changing. The bees are changing. The environment’s changing.”  If nothing else, I would hope that, in the coming year,  the challenges and opportunities presented by these changes are the topic of an on-going conversation at every level of local state and national beekeeping organizations, and that we can promote a new vision with a new media onslaught to which the public can respond as enthusiastically as it did to CCD  seventeen years ago. 

Lars Chittka’s Mind of a Bee,  and Stephen Buchmann’s What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories and Personalities of Bees”, examine the question of sentience in plants and animals, an issue made more complex by the challenge of understanding minds that process information in ways  profoundly different from our own, as described by Ed Yong in An Immense World.  Perhaps the critical  question was posed two hundred years ago by  Jeremy Bentham: “The question is not can they reason. Nor can they talk. But can they suffer?”

In place of a nervous system, plants have a chemical pathway  in the form of glutamate, a neurotransmitter at the point of leaf separation.   Furthermore, plants having their leaves nibbled on by a  herbivore can release volatile organic compounds through interconnected root systems to the point that nearby plants release antifeedant molecules, thus making their own leaves unappealing to the herbivore, thereby preventing over-feeding in any one area. In her remarkable book, Wildscape, Nancy Lawson describes on the one hand how, in Iran, marigolds and salvias growing next to a busy highway had elevated levels of stress hormones, and on the other hand, in Israel, a species of primrose as able to increase the sweetness of its nectar in the presence of bees’ wingbeats.

Clearly  plants physiologically can  distinguish between stimuli, but whether this sensation is pain or pleasure as we understand it remains an open question. 

Many animals, including us, are vertebrates with similar nervous systems and  the capacity to remember, the latter quality often termed instinct because we do not have the ability to probe the emotional state of these sentient beings.   Lars Chittka, a professor in sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London,  argues that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities which not only make them profoundly smart with distinct personalities, but allow them to recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness. 

What made the headlines was Chittka’s experiment to  determine if bees could learn to avoid predators purely as an adaptive response. The experiment employed a robotic crab spider that lurked in flowers, briefly grabbing a bee and then releasing it unharmed. After that negative experience, the bees learned to scan the laboratory’s flowers to make sure they were spider-free before landing. But much to Chittka’s surprise, some bees also seemed to exhibit what he describes as a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. “The bees not only showed predator avoidance but they also showed false alarm behavior,” he wrote. “After scanning a perfectly safe flower, they rejected it and flew away, seeing a threat where there was none.”

Buchmann and Chittka also argue for bees’ self-awareness and emotions, including their ability to suffer, meeting Jeremy Bentham’s minimum parameter for sentience.  This could have significant implications for agriculture. Previous research has focused on the role of bees in crop pollination, but the work being pioneered by Chittka’s colleague, Stephen Buchmann, currently an adjunct professor in the Entomology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology departments at the University of Arizona in Tucson, could force an ethical reckoning with how honey bees are treated.

In the US, commercially managed bees are considered livestock by the Department of Agriculture  and are treated as a workhorse for food production, just as cattle in feedlots serve the beef industry. Because a bee’s brain is so tiny the assumption was that there could not be much going on in something so small and with so few neurons. Insects  were considered to be semi-robotic, with no capacity to feel pain or to experience suffering. Instead, writes Buchmann, “Bees are self-aware, they’re sentient, and they possibly have a primitive form of consciousness.”  This raises practical and existential quandaries. Can large-scale agriculture practices continue without causing bees to suffer, and is the dominant western culture even capable of accepting that the tiniest of creatures have feelings, too?  “We are blasting bees with huge amounts of agri-chemicals and destroying their natural foraging habitats,” says Buchmann. “Once people accept that bees are sentient and can suffer, I think attitudes will change.”

it is only in the last decade that research technology has become sophisticated enough to analyze the  neurobiology of the bee brain.  Two examples.  A recent study (May, 2023) at the University of Sheffield in Yorkshire, England, was designed to discover how honey bees excel at quick decision-making. They are the only pollinators that must get enough food for themselves as well as harvest large amounts of pollen and nectar to support their colony, which means memorizing the landscape, evaluating flower options and making quick decisions in a constantly changing environment. Chittka likens it to shopping in a grocery store, where you are rushing up and down aisles comparing products for the best deals and keeping a mental account before you return to the product you ultimately decide to buy.

The task of the Sheffield group was to study how this might apply to improving artificial intelligence systems and devices  – the aim was to ‘develop skilled machines that can think like bees,’ according the the study leader, Dr MaBouDi. 20 bees were trained to recognize five different colored flowers –  blue flowers contained sugar syrup, green flowers contained bitter tonic water and the remaining colors sometimes had glucose. The bees were then released into a custom-built garden where flowers contained only distilled water to see how they performed.

The experiment found they made a bee-line for flowers they thought would have food – landing there in an average of 0.6 seconds, which is faster than another other animal – and were just as quick to avoid flowers they thought would not have food.  Next, MaBouDi et al. developed a computational model which could faithfully replicate the pattern of decisions exhibited by the bees, while also being plausible biologically. This approach offered insights into how a small brain could execute such complex choices ‘in the moment’, and the type of neural circuits that would be required.  “What we’ve done in this study is reveal the underlying mechanisms which drive these remarkable decision-making capabilities. We can now use these to design better, more robust and risk-averse robots and autonomous machines that can think like bees – some of the most efficient navigators in the natural world,” according to Dr MaBouDi.

Secondly,  Chittka and Buchmann studied bee behavior in response to fluctuations in the feel-good neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin. Mood-regulating chemicals increased when bees received a surprise reward of sucrose, similar to when humans enjoy a sweet treat. The improved mood led bees to have more enthusiasm for foraging compared with bees who received no reward. Alternatively, when bees were shaken in a tube or otherwise put in an anxiety-producing situation, dopamine and serotonin decreased. Buchmann reports in his book that studies have discovered bee brains “have their own internal opioid pleasure centers”.

Such findings have forced some to reconsider how bees are treated in a laboratory setting. Chittka says he would not run a traumatic experiment like the crab spider test today, but that he did not know such an outcome was possible back then. While Chittka now only conducts experiments he considers “ethically defensible,” this is not the case for others in his field, particularly when it comes to research on farming and pesticides. Part of the problem is that there are no animal welfare laws here in the United States protecting insects – or any invertebrates – in a lab setting, unlike mice and other mammals. Indeed, experiments are deliberately designed to stress and kill bees in order to figure out how much the insects can tolerate in the fields. “Many of my colleagues do invasive neuroscience experiments where bees have electrodes implanted into various body parts without any form of anesthesia,” Chittka says. “The current carefree situation that [invertebrate] researchers live in with no legal framework needs to be re-evaluated.”

In the US, the untold numbers of bees killed for scientific research pales in comparison with the number that die while pollinating mass-produced crops, particularly almonds. But finding a way to mass-produce crops while reducing pain and suffering for bees is a daunting undertaking. If vegetarians and vegans who avoid eating animals for ethical reasons were to apply the same standards to foods pollinated by bees, they would have very little on their plates.

Commercial pollination is also big business. The California almond industry rakes in more than $11bn a year and is the third-most-profitable commodity in the state.  While some agricultural operations have tried to improve the survival rate for bees by reducing pesticide use and planting more diverse forage beyond a single crop, a California startup called BeeHero is among the first commercial pollination services to directly address the issue of animal welfare.  The company uses electronic sensors that are placed in hives to monitor the sounds and tonal vibrations of the colony, which BeeHero says reflect the bees’ emotional state. “There is a throb or hum to a colony that is similar to a human heartbeat,” says Huw Evans, head of innovation for BeeHero. which  is pollinating approximately 100,000 acres of California almond groves. “Our sensors feel that hum the way a doctor hears a patient’s heartbeat with a stethoscope.”  The data from the sensors is collected and analyzed for any variations that could indicateharms being caused by the surrounding environment. 

Both Buchmann and Chittka say they have been profoundly changed by their discoveries of emotion-like states in bees. The mysterious, alien mind of a bee fills them with a sense of wonder as well as a conviction that creatures without a backbone have rights, too. “These unique minds, regardless of how much they may differ from our own, have as much justification to exist as we do,” says Chittka. “It is a wholly new aspect of how weird and wonderful the world is around us.”

So how likely is the unveiling of these ‘unique minds’, of our increasing awareness of sentience not only in honey bees but  probably in all animals, likely to change our attitudes and behavior towards them?  To come back to Stephen Buchmann’s statement,  “Once people accept that bees are sentient and can suffer, I think attitudes will change.” Based on our current behavior as well as our history, I’m not holding my breath.  Here are three examples from the thousands that I might have chosen; two are historical, one is current.  

In the first few hours of July 1, 1916, in the Battle of the Somme on the Western Front of the First World War, the British Army suffered more than 57 000 casualties,  with almost 20 000 dead, the bloodiest day in its history.  Their commander, Field Marshall Douglas Haig, whose statue today dominates Whitehall in London, had sent the flower of British youth to death and mutilation, yet neither in his public manner nor his private diaries did he show a trace of awareness of or regret for the human suffering he had caused.

Most Americans are familiar first,  with the ‘forty acres and a mule’ story, the promise General Sherman made to newly freed slaves at the end of the Civil War, only to have it reversed by Andrew Johnson after Lincoln’s assassination, and secondly with the 368 treaties signed with Native American tribes, often coerced, often broken.  And yet here is an account of which we are probably less familiar.  In 1918, when American soldiers returned from Europe, they were welcomed as heroes, and Congress voted to award them a bonus of $1.25 for day they had served overseas, to be paid in 1945.  But in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, some 15000 penniless veterans camped on the Mall to petition for their bonuses.  One month after the Senate refused to pass the appropriate bill President Hoover ordered the army to clear the encampment.  Using tanks, police, cavalry, fixed bayonets and tear gas, a force led by General Douglas MacArthur did so … and the veterans never received their payments. 

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of  The Body Keeps Score : Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, writes that “(R)esearch by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engage in physical violence.  A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or  hit …  For every American soldier who serves in a war zone abroad there are ten children who are molested in their own homes.”  

If we, as a ‘civilized’ people, are willing to molest and beat our children and spouses, often under the influence of alcohol, to dismiss mass annihilation in front of enemy artillery, and to deny veterans what they had been promised, what chances do honey bees have without a voice to express their suffering? If we are arrogant enough to call ourselves “wise” (as per the sapiens in Homo sapiens) then we should be wise enough to watch, listen to, learn from and empathize with these animals who have been there, done that, but don’t wear their feelings on little t-shirts. 

My background is in European and African history, and in education. In my years of high school and graduate work I was never required to take so much as one course in US history;  instead we came across the US obliquely.  The American Rebellion, for example, (as it was called) while studying the reign of George III; Woodrow Wilson’s role at the Treaty of Versailles; Truman and the two atomic bombs in the context of the Second World War; and Americans in Vietnam during the Cold War.  I guess many Americans have done the same with unwanted gaps in their education, perhaps as regards Africa, South America, the Middle East and the Far East. 

I am reasonably well traveled, by circumstance as much as by choice, and  am acutely aware not only that most readers are intelligent, highly distractible, able to stop reading at any time, do not necessarily care about this month’s topic, and  know more about a multitude of things in a wide range of fields than do I. 

The question is how to get such readers to care about something that they would otherwise not pay heed.  Spoiler alert : the answer is stories.

History, after all, is a story.  Often reduced to dates and events, it is the saga of humanity, of how we have related to each other, to ideas and to power, over time. In essence, it is the story of complex relationships with the elements of  failure and success, of joy and frustration, of quests and mysteries.

It has been suggested that when I come up with a bee topic for any particular month, I look for a ‘hook’ (often history-related) on which to hang it. In fact the reverse is mostly true.  While being exposed to a concept or event, I realize that there is a connection to the world  of the honey bee. Last month it was George Mitchell’s comment that “It was 700 days of failure and one day of success” that led first to the association with Socrates, and secondly to the concepts of the Socratic method,  induced confusion, and their application to the learning process as experienced by a beekeeper. 

The opening story has another function: as a local beekeeper shared with me, it aroused his curiosity along the lines of, “I wonder how Jeremy can possibly make this story relevant to honey bees?” 

Here is a current example. For the first week of July Mary and I were in County Donegal, Ireland. We had lunch and dinners in pubs, as well as mid-morning and mid-afternoon teas in small cafes, of which there were a proliferation.  I was struck not only by the absence of fast food outlets (granted, Donegal is one of the most rural of Ireland’s counties) but also by the leisurely time in which local people ate and the sociality of the meals (which perhaps is the difference between a pub and a bar.)  Frequently we struck up a conversation with those at a nearby table, or watched the inter-table visiting between customers who clearly knew each other. 

In the first week after our return to PA we went out for lunch.  The meal I ordered came with two sides, which I didn’t need   When I declined both, the gentleman behind the register said in some amazement, “But why don’t you want them?  They’re free!”. The insinuation was that I had to have them simply because they were free, whether I wanted them or not.

These events in combination prompted a recall of the Slow Food Movement, and to question if and how it relates to beekeeping. 

The former was founded by Carlo Petrini, a journalist and gourmet, 34 years ago.  Having studied at Berkeley and getting a taste of the university’s famed counterculture, he returned to his home town of Bra in Piedmont, Italy, which to his concern had been infiltrated by American culture.  He was incensed when, in 1986, McDonald’s announced it was building a Golden Arches in Rome, adjacent to the Spanish Steps in Piazza di Spagna.  Would it threaten the traditional food culture of Rome – local trattorias and osterias, the dining establishments of the working class?  As a means of protest he organized a festival of cooking and eating titled Slow Food, with an accompanying Manifesto proclaiming that food is the joy and heart of life, and that it is threatened by the trend to commodify, industrialize and destroy its essence, which is Taste, with a capital T.  In the twentieth century, modeled on industry, the  machine and profit,   speed became both our unit of  measurement and our shackles. We are willing victims of a  fast life that assails us in our homes,  fractures our customs and threatens our environment with a tempo that propels us down the road to stress, tension and anxiety. Food is a matter of necessary calories, absorbed as we rush out the door or drive to the next appointment, rather than a source of conscious pleasure and community. 

Petrini’s initiative piggy-backed on the organic food movement as well as the more generic trends towards individuality, sensuality and rebellion.  As the movement grew, Carlo added slow food conventions, feasts and seminars and an international conference in Paris.  Today, Slow Food has in excess of 150,000 members and is active in more than 150 countries.

In 2004, Slow Food co-founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy, which offers undergraduate and master degrees in food studies, and in 2008, the University of New Hampshire, inspired by a visit from Petrini, launched the first U.S.-based “Eco-Gastronomy” major in 2008.  Today there are more than 170 chapters and 2,000 food communities in the United States.

Is there merit in the concept of Slow Backyard Beekeeping,  with an emphasis on the rich varieties and aromas, rhythms and tempos, cadences and inflections, wisdom and experience, of the bee hive?  After all, the honey bee is the key to so much of our sustenance, both  body and soul. With Slow Beekeeping the emphasis moves from how to manipulate a hive as quickly as possible to the zen of beekeeping by which we consciously  exercise patience and observation, thought and reflection, wonderment and awe, through significant connection with the natural world. I have been one to stress the need to keep a hive open for as short a time as possible, in terms of minimum disturbance to the bees, and I wonder if the decorum with which it is opened is as important as the time.

Honey, rather than simply a resource for the bees and for us,  becomes the United Nations of the food world in its infinite global variety, the closest we can get to tasting the energy of the sun though the miracle of photosynthesis, a complex product of the evolution and adaptability of plants, the joy and heart of life  And we cherish the Taste (with a capital T.)  

Beekeeping and honey reveal our history –  ‘the story of complex relationships, with the elements of  failure and success, of joy and frustration, of quests and mysteries’ – if only we can take the time to slow down, reflect and rejoice in our privileged position as guardians of the honey bee.