Author: Jeremy

Writing in Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Neil deGrasse Tyson explains that sodium is a poisonous, reactive metal that can be cut with a butter knife, and chlorine is a smelly, deadly gas, yet when added together they make sodium chloride, a harmless, biologically essential compound better known as table salt. Hydrogen, he argues, is an explosive gas while oxygen promotes violent combustion, yet the two combined make liquid water which puts out fires. 

We know that bees wax absorbs chemicals from the air – research at Penn State a decade ago year identified 78 different chemicals in bee hives of which 46 were pesticides, including DDT.  The sources vary from industrial pollution, consumer goods like automobiles, agricultural chemicals and genetically engineered organisms, to chemicals that some beekeepers use to control mites.

When chemicals are evaluated for toxicity by regulatory agencies they are studied in isolation and only their lethal rather than sub-lethal effects are evaluated.  When the breakdown products of chemicals interact they can be more toxic and more long lasting than the original chemical itself – sometimes thousands of times more so, and that is no exaggeration.  This is the power of synergy : a cocktail of small doses of several chemicals, each acting on its own, can combine to have significant biological effects that none of the chemicals would have by itself. 

Waiting in Bee Culture almost ten years ago, Ross Conrad pointed out that realistically few chemical combinations are going to be thoroughly tested for safety either to humans or insects before being marketed.  Consider that to test the synergistic actions of just 1 000 toxic chemicals in combinations of five chemicals each would involve testing over eight trillion chemicals and, at one million per year, would take 8 000 years to complete.

Similarly, according to BBC Radio 4’s Inside Science program earlier this year, an analysis of 90 studies found that agricultural pesticides sold ready-mixed into ‘cocktails’ can kill twice as many bees.   “Exposure to multiple pesticides is the norm, not the exception,” said Dr Harry Siviter, from the University of Texas at Austin, who led the study.   “If you have a honeybee colony exposed to one pesticide that kills 10% of the bees and another pesticide that kills another 10%, you would expect, if those effects were additive, for 20% of the bees to be killed,” he said.  But a synergistic effect can produce 30-40% mortality.”

Just how many chemicals are we talking about? In his most recent book,  Silent Earth; Averting the Insect Apocalypse, published in September, David Goulson states that each year we manufacture 144 000 different chemicals weighing some 30 million tons.  Add to this the literally hundreds of new chemicals marketed every year and honey bees clearly have the potential to come into contact with a potpourri of man-made chemicals every day. But it’s not only  quantity that matters; it is also quality, and in particular toxicity. 

David Goulson shows that in 1945 DDT was applied at a rate of 4500 grams per acre, whereas the rate for neonicotinoids is 25 grams per acre.  But because the latter are about 7 000 times more toxic to bees than the former, whereas 1 gram of DDT could kill  about 37 000 honey bees, 10 grams of neonicotinoids can kill 250 millionbees. And let’s not forget that all insects are killed, most of whom are beneficial to agriculture.   

And it is not only honey bees;  humans too, come into contact with those chemicals daily and we have little idea as to the impact this exposure has on the human life form either short or long term.  An example was included in a NPR program, One A, on July 26th of this year, about declining birth rates.  In 1960, the sperm count in males was 90 million sperm per milliliter.  Last year it was 47 million, ie. a little less than half, and it is rapidly reaching 40 million at which point conception becomes difficult.  The main reason, besides life style and obesity, is exposure to chemicals, which the body confuses with hormones.  Most alarming is that these chemicals are present in the womb and can impact the following three generations!

How on earth did this happen?  How did we create a world so toxic that it’s natural capacity for self-renewal has been exceeded?

Most immediate, as we prepare our colonies for winter, is a study from New Zealand which examined how  different food sources have differing influences on the digestive tracts of bees.  The worst was sugar syrup, made even more so if yeast or malt was added.  So what is the synergy when we add pollen patties that contain yeast or malt at the same time as feeding sugar syrup? 

I would suggest that we simply don’t know, and fear that we are playing a honey bee version of Russian Roulette. 

In the early 1930’s the recently widowed Louisa Durrell took her family of five from India via England to Corfu, the latter a Greek island in the Adriatic Sea.  Two of those siblings, Gerald and Larry, became prolific writers, better known in Europe than in the US, (we read My Family and Other Animals in High School much as Americans read Catcher in the Rye)  although the recent Masterpiece Theatre series, The Durrell’s in Corfu, is making a dent in that omission.  As best I recall Jerry never wrote about honey bees directly, although we can look at another of his stories to guess what he might have written … 

“One day I found two queens in a hive.  I was enraptured by this discovery even as we now know it is not uncommon, and I decided to smuggle one of the two into the house and up to my bedroom until I could introduce her into a queenless colony.  With infinite care I maneuvered her into a matchbox, added some worker bees for company, and then hurried to the villa.   It was rather unfortunate that just as I entered the door lunch should be served, so I placed the matchbox carefully on the mantlepiece in the drawing-room, slightly ajar so the bees could get some air, made my way to the dining room and joined the family for the meal.  Dawdling over my food, feeding Roger the dog surreptitiously under the table and listening to the family arguing, I completely forgot about my prisoners.  At last, elder brother Larry, having finished, fetched his cigarettes from the drawing-room, and lying back in his chair he put one in his mouth and picked up the matchbox he had brought. Oblivious to my impending doom I watched him interestedly as, still talking glibly, he opened the matchbox.  

I maintain to this day that the bees meant no harm.  After all, they are defensive rather than aggressive but they were agitated and a trifle annoyed at being shut up in a matchbox and so they seized the first opportunity to escape.  They climbed out of the box with great rapidity on to the back Larry’s hand.  Not quite certain what to do next, the queen  paused at the same time as Larry glanced down to see what it was, and from that moment things got increasingly confused. 

Larry uttered a roar of fright that made Lugaretzia, in the kitchen, drop a plate and brought Roger out from beneath the table, barking wildly.  With a flick of his hand Larry sent the unfortunate queen flying down the table, and she landed halfway between sister Margo and brother Leslie.  Thoroughly enraged at this undignified treatment, the queen flew towards Leslie who leaped to his feet and flicked out desperately with his napkin, sending the queen towards Margo, who let out a scream that any railway engine would have been proud to produce.  Mother, completely bewildered by this sudden and rapid change from peace to chaos, put on her glasses and peered down the table to see what was causing the pandemonium at the same time as Margo, in a vain attempt to stop the queen’s advance, hurled a glass of water at it.  The shower missed Her Highness completely but successfully drenched mother who, not being able to stand cold water, promptly lost her breath and sat gasping at the end of the table, unable even to protest. 

The queen had sought cover under Leslie’s plate, the attendants were trying to get out of the windows, and Roger the dog, mystified by all the panic but determined to do his share, ran round and round the room, barking hysterically. 

“It’s that bloody boy again,” bellowed Larry, referring to me. 

“Look out!  Look out!  They’re coming!” screamed Margo.

“All we need is a book,” roared Leslie. “Don’t panic.  Hit it with a book.”

“What on earth’s the matter with you all?”  Mother kept imploring, mopping her glasses.

“It’s that bloody boy.  He’ll kill the lot of us.Look at the table – knee-deep in bees.”

“Stop screeching and get a book, for God’s sake.   You’re worse than the dog.  Shut up, Roger.”

“By the grace of God, I wasn’t bitten”

“Actually,” I said hesitantly, “bees don’t bite, they sting.”

“Oh, shut up and give me a book.”

“But just how did the bees get on the table, dear?”

“That bloody boy.  Every matchbox in the house is a death trap.”

“Hit it with your knife … your knife.  Go on, hit it.”

Since no one had bothered to explain things to him, Roger was under the mistaken impression that the family was being attacked, and that it was his duty to defend us.  As Lugaretzia, in the kitchen, was the only stranger among us, he came to the logical conclusion that she must be the responsible party, so he bit her in the ankle. That did not exactly  help matters.

By the time order had been restored, and after an impassioned plea on my part, backed up by Mother, Leslie’s suggestion that the whole lot be slaughtered was squashed. While the family, still simmering with rage and fright, retired to the drawing-room, I found the queen and returned  her to the matchbox, accompanied by the attendants who were beating themselves against the glass window panes.

Roger and I spent the afternoon outside, for I felt it would be prudent to allow the family to have a siesta before seeing them again.

The results of this incident were numerous. Larry developed a phobia about matchboxes and opened them with the utmost caution, a handkerchief wrapped around his hand. Lugaretzia limped around the house for weeks after the bite had healed, her ankle enveloped in yards of bandage, which she took off every morning as she brought in the tea to show us how the scars were getting on. 

But from my point of view, the worst repercussion was that Mother decided I was running wild again, and that it was high time I received a little more education. 

Really, it was not my fault.” 

“A man found the cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and could go no further. So the man decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small shriveled wings.

“The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened! In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

“What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand was that the restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening were nature’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.

“Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If we were allowed to go through our life without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as we could have been. And we could never fly. So have a nice day and struggle a little.”

The author of the above is unknown, although a version appears in Niklos Kazantzkis’ Zorba the Greek, in which a man uses his warm breath to hasten the emergence of a butterfly whose wings never unfurl and  which  dies in his hand. 

The physician, psychologist, author, inventor and philosopher, Edward de Bono, also the originator of the term lateral thinking and proponent of teaching thinking as a subject in schools, devised a number of non-competitive games to demonstrate the critical thought process.  One of them involves three bottles, four knives and a glass of water.  The task is to create a platform above the bottles strong enough to hold the glass of water, in which no part of any knife touches the ground, each bottle is further than a knife’s length from any other bottle, and the water is not directly above any of the bottles. 

I would pose this challenge to my graduate group dynamics classes, inviting them to solve it as a group.  All kinds of learning styles were in evidence, all kinds of group interactions, but the key was that, after a while and as tension mounted, I would offer a clue to the solution.  Some, out of frustration,  would say yes; others would decline and want to persevere.  I went with the latter.

Finally, once a solution was reached, the question became, did the group members wish they had accepted the offer of help?  Every time, and without exception, the response was an unanimous ‘no.’ There was a satisfaction that came with having struggled successfully, with having wrestled their way to a solution, and with having done it as a group. 

When I first began this fascinating hobby of beekeeping, and partly out of ignorance, partly out of over-enthusiasm, I threw myself into the deep end, reading demanding literature and going to conferences not only locally but, for example, Apimondia in Montpellier, France.  There was much that I did not understand but the learning curve was rapid and rewarding as each part of the puzzle found a place in the larger picture. Even today, looking back at my notes from Apimondia in 2009, there is invariably something significant which I did not fully comprehend at the time. 

Frequently new beekeepers will lament that they do not understand beekeeping  terminology and concepts, that the information can be contradictory,  that some of the topics at meetings are above their heads.  For me this is not a bad thing, nor should we talk down to them.  It’s part of the struggle from which will come meaningful understanding, a real sense of satisfaction and perhaps even ownership of the learning process. Ultimately the question is, what represents a meaningful challenge,  how do we motivate those who accept the challenge, and how do we acknowledge them once they are successful, if indeed external validation is necessary?  

As a teacher I was creative and energetic; what I lacked at any time in my 42 year career was a mentor who would encourage me to set boundaries, help me set priorities and better manage my time.  The result was burn-out.  I frequently wondered why my job cycle was seven years and now the reason is more clear.    Having not been able to name it made it impossible for me to recognize it in others and mentor them appropriately.

As a school administrator I believed that one of the gifts we can give students is to let them rub shoulders with talented people, whether as peers, teachers or guides, even as I never had such a person in my professional life.  I knew something was missing but was never able to identify it and, in effect, travelled extensively looking for it.  

Realizing this deficit in retrospect reinforces my belief that beekeepers of all ages and experiences benefit immensely from a good mentor, especially if the latter knows when to stand back and when to intervene, when to stay close and when to let go. 

For the caterpillar, the end of the larval stage may well look like a death rather than a gateway to life reinvented,  provided that well-meaning onlookers do not try to hasten the natural process. For us the question might be, what is that precious  substance that, when encouraged to move in the right direction, makes us ready for flight?  

The Man once invited the Lion to be his guest, according to John Newman’s modern fable, and received him with princely hospitality.  “The Lion had the run of a magnificent palace, in which there were many things to admire. Various subjects were represented in the fine specimens of sculpture and painting by the great masters, but the most prominent was of the Lion himself. As the Man led him from one apartment to another, he pointed out the homage which these art works paid to the importance of the Lion tribe. 

“There was however one remarkable feature in all of them, to which the Man, out of politeness, said nothing.  On one point all of the paintings and sculptures agreed : the man was  always victorious and the lion was always overcome. 

“When the Lion had finished the tour, the Man asked how what he thought of the splendors he had seen. The Lion did full justice to the riches and the wonder, but, he added, “Lions would have fared better had they been the artists.”

Historians paint on a broad canvas, ranging from  religious and civil wars, rebirths and reforms, laws and constitutions,  rebellions and revolutions,  parliaments and monarchies, liberalism and autocracy, to heroes and villains, steam and nuclear power, and local and global conflicts. Yet none of these would be recorded if honey bees held the brush, even as research out of the Universities of Oxford and London is recording mounting evidence that insects can experience a remarkable range of feelings. They can literally buzz with delight at pleasant surprises or sink into depression when bad things happen that are out of their control. They can be optimistic, cynical or frightened, and respond to pain just as  any mammal does. 

The focus of our hypothetical six legged archivist would most likely be exclusively on the environment. The first canvas might have depicted man’s controlled use of fire, perhaps 400 000 years ago, and the revolution in agriculture 10 000 years ago, in that both had an immediate effect on the daily lives of feral colonies.   (As a matter of perspective, the first of the above represents less than 1% of the total existence of honey bees in their current form.)  The first depiction of modern times might reflect the mechanization of production using coal, water and steam, the despoilation  of pristine areas of the countryside, and the abandonment of rural hives as cottagers moved to the new factories in the burgeoning cities. 

An observant bee might even have recorded how, in the soot-soiled cities of the industrial English midlands, peppered moths evolved a tone darker in color and thus blended in better with the newly blackened tree trunks.  And even though lighter colored moths prevailed once the air grew more clear and lighter,   our artist might have expressed concern that the basic tenets of industrial capitalism – unending progress and growth – were at odds with a balanced, robust, vigorous environment. Invariably this is more evident to the victims than to the perpetrators, who resort to subterfuge to continue their pursuit of riches, not least by defining economic value in terms of private property and private gain rather than in terms of communal health, environmental resilience and collective well being.  

The Achilles heel of modern economies is the exponential nature of modern growth.  Economists consider a healthy growth rate to be three per cent, which provides a doubling in output every 23 years. That’s absurd.  Imagine the economy of the US or the UK with 16 times the output in 100 years time, or 5000 times in 300 years.  That might be  why, as Kate Raworth points out in Doughnut Economics,  the one diagram in economic theory that is difficult to find is the one that depicts the long-term path of GDP growth. It also describes the limitations of the term ‘sustainability’ – how can we argue in favor of say, sustaining our current agricultural system knowing that it is leading to global desolation? 

The second industrial revolution used electric power to create mass production, the third used electronics and information technology to automate production and now a digital revolution is fusing technologies to blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres at a speed that is without historical precedent. I for one cannot keep up with the constant changes in digital technology yet I see enough to realize that, scientific marvel as it is, the speed of its growth has outpaced the necessary educational, moral and civic sensibilities to make it a solely admirable force in our civilization. Convenient as they may be, I choose not to place these hi-tech intruders into  the homes of the bees; rather both they and I practice voluntary simplicity.  

To cite David Goulson in Silent Earth : Averting the Insect Apocalypse, “Do we always have to look for a technical solution to the problems we create, when a simple, natural solution is staring us in the face?  We have wonderfully efficient pollinators already.  Let’s look after them rather than plan for their demise.” 

Comparing our current culture and society with the pre-industrial world, our bee chronicler might observe that  apparently the soul has no place in a technocratic society. The communal has been shattered.  The concept of the common good has been decimated. Greed is celebrated.  The individual is god.  The celluloid image is reality. Artistic and intellectual forces are belittled. The basest lusts are celebrated as forms of identity and self-expression, and progress is defined exclusively in terms of material advancement. As Nick Offerman writes in Where the Deer and the Antelope Play, “… (I)n modern-day America we have been encouraged more and more to be the opposite of neighborly, because there is arguably no demonstrable financial benefit to acting warmly towards our fellow humans. We have been taught it is a ‘dog-eat-dog world’ and that  ‘time is money,’ so who cares about the neighbors, and anybody else.”

Honey bees put their survival first; everything is dedicated towards the continuation of the colony.  When confronted with an impending challenge to their survival, such as winter, they invest  significant time and effort in preparing for and withstanding it. As do all other species except  human kind.  We have “’a determined commitment to irrelevance in the face of global catastrophe,” wrote George Monbiot in The Guardian on October 30th.   When faced with a chronic threat we seem to devise ingenious, if not trivial,  ways of convincing ourselves that it is not serious, that it may not even be happening.  And if we do act it is in ways that are comically ill-matched to the scale of our predicament, such as reimagining mechanical   drones to pollinate fruit trees in the absence of pollinators, rather than addressing  the fundamental issue as to why there is an absence of natural pollinators in the first place. That is like believing that reducing the use of plastic straws and plastic cups will somehow solve our environmental problems, as opposed to distracting us from the real issues involved in the manufacture, usage and disposal of plastics. 

The bees, by comparison, take what they need and use all that they take in such a way that not only is no harm done but even the most delicate of flowers is cherished and the quality of the environment is enhanced. This in part is what Jonas Salk had in mind when he wrote, “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.” 

Our bee analyst would surely have noticed the alliance between these industrial mores and the agricultural revolution of the twentieth century, partly in the formation of farming conglomerates with their agri-business (as opposed to agri-culture) monopolies, and partly with the industrialized  production of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides that are ruthless in their application and mostly non-selective in their impact.  We use the term ‘decline’ when referring to insects; our bee might use the term ‘genocide,’ as does David Gouland.

A honey bee colony was long envisaged as a monarchy, first ruled by a king and, after the seventeenth century, by a queen.  Instead it is a communal organism in which, rather than having leaders, every individual responds to the immediate needs of their environment and their society in the interests of long term survival. Our bee historian might have looked on in admiration as, in the last century,  the so-called  liberal democracies confronted communist, fascist and nationalist ideologies. Today that admiration might be replaced by concern as not only in autocratic countries like Russia, China, Belarus, Hungary, Venezuela, Syria, Angola and Afghanistan,  but also in the western democracies, extreme right wing forces are using cyber media to make a comeback, in the same way Hitler used the new mediums of the microphone and the  radio to recover from the disaster of the failed Munich putsch in 1923.  But this time there is no pretense at an ideology; it is about personal power and fortune, values that are totally foreign to our bee historian.  “Have you learned nothing?” she might write?  “We evolved our system over some fifty million years, yet you think you are superior after less than three thousand?” 

Can the bees offer a solution?  A worker honey bee, on her twelfth day as a pupa, has to break out of her comfort zone by chewing through the wax that has kept her isolated and protected.  Without breaking through she cannot survive.  We too have to break through, in our case the insistent babble and trivialization of public life.  Successful advances came from those who refused to consent.  Martin Luther, Leonardo, Galileo, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Picasso and Nelson Mandela knew it.  The environmental protestors who demand systematic change, not least  Greta Thunberg,  know it.  It is primarily the younger generation who are refusing to consent. Perhaps our bee blogger will conclude that the most important lesson is that our survival, both hers and ours, depends on disobedience to a capitalistic model that places primacy on wealth and power, neither of which will regenerate an environment which is already well beyond the point of sustainability.   After all, she might ask, what is the use of hoarding money, or storing huge combs of honey,  if there is no longer an environment that allows any of us, bees and mankind,  to survive? 

In 2018, at a meeting around the dinner table of Wendell Berry, the novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural  critic and farmer based in Kentucky,  the host urged Nick Offerman, the author, woodworker and actor (think Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation) to explore the different concepts of conservation as expressed first by John Muir in the C19th, and then by Aldo Leopold in the early C20th.   The result was a series of journeys not only across much of the US but also to the Lake District in England, and the publication late last year of Where the Deer and Antelope Play : The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside.

I was familiar with the names of both men but was shy on their backgrounds, so a little  background reading was necessary.  

John Muir,  born in Scotland in 1838,  moved to the US when he was eleven years old where, when allowed a short break from a harsh work schedule in the fields, he and his brother would explore the rich Wisconsin countryside. When he was 29, and not unlike E.O.Wilson seventy years later, he suffered a severe eye injury; although he was to recover his sight, he determined to focus his vision on the natural world. He had an unquenchable wanderlust, at one time walking one thousand miles from Indianapolis south to the Gulf of Mexico, but it was the Sierra Nevada and the Yosemite Valley that claimed him, and he made his future home in California.  He herded sheep through the spring and summer of 1870 while building a pine cabin where he was visited by a number of prominent  men, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

He married when he was 42 but ten years of relative domesticity could not tame his wanderlust and  he traveled to Alaska, Australia, South America, Europe, China, Japan and Africa.  In his later years he turned more seriously to writing, publishing 300 articles and 10 books describing his travels, his emerging naturalist philosophy and his love of the mountains, which, for many readers,  endowed them with a spiritual quality. 

In 1890, disturbed by the devastation wrought on mountain meadows by sheep and cattle, Muir was instrumental in creating, by an Act of Congress, Yosemite National Park, followed by the Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon national parks.  Two years later, to protect these spaces from cattlemen in particular, he was influential in founding the Sierra Club, and it was as its president that, in 1903, he met Theodore Roosevelt and together they laid the foundations of Roosevelt’s significant conservation programs.  

John Muir died shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, aged 76, having just lost a court battle to prevent the damning of the Hetch Hetchy Valley which created a reservoir to supply water to San Francisco.  Yet the initiative he had started did not end with his death; today there are 63 national parks covering some 81 423 square miles, or 2.1 per cent of the land surface of the United States, and Muir is celebrated as the founder of the environmental movement in the US. 

An uncountable number of people of all nations have enjoyed the national parks, even if , according to Nick Offerman, the average visit may be as little as one half of one day, “which I guess is not that different from hanging out at the mall.”   Even if we treat nature “like an attraction at a theme park,” the impact, however brief,  can be invigorating and stimulating. But there is a cost.  For example, the people who had inhabited those areas for millennia were ruthlessly removed, had no say in the development of the parks then or now, and have not been able to return.  “Our country still has a long way to go,” Offerson observes, “to reconcile the beauty of these park with the way they were acquired …” 

Secondly a mindset has developed which suggests, in effect, that the preservation of those allows us to despoil the remaining 97.9 per cent with a clear conscience.   There is a sense that nature is somewhere outside of us, separate from us, confined to spectacular areas, and is someone else’s responsibility. 

Muir was 49 years old, married for seven years to Louie Strentzel, when Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa, and like the former, Aldo spent much of his early years on excursions in the woods where he learned woodcrafting and hunting and showed an aptitude for observation.  Motivated by Gifford Pinchot’s foundation of the Department of Forestry within the Department of Agriculture, Aldo decided on forestry as a vocation, completing his graduate degree at Yale. 

For the first thirteen years of his professional life he was assigned to Arizona and New Mexico where, among other things, he wrote the first management plan for the Grand Canyon and the Forest Services first game and fish handbook.  Unlike John Muir he traveled outside of the county only once – to the forests of Germany and Austria when he was 48, an experience that was to have a profound impact on his ecological thinking – but when he was 26 he was appointed a professional member of a wildlife conservation  organization founded, ironically,  by Teddy Roosevelt as part of his preservation plans. 

The other event that had a profound impact on him happened early in his career in New Mexico where  he was assigned to hunt and kill bears, mountain lions and wolves at the request of local ranchers.  One day, after fatally shooting a wolf, he reached the animal in time to transfixed by “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.”  That experience put him on a path away from the traditional wilderness ethic that stressed the need for human dominance, towards an ecocentric outlook and ecological ethic which reimagined the term ‘wilderness,’ which he called ‘agrarian,’ and visualized as a healthy biotic community to the point of including bears, mountain lions and wolves.  He envisioned the progress of ethical sensitivity from interpersonal relationships, to relationships with the larger society, to relationships with the land, and a consequent reduction of actions based on expediency, self-interest and conquest.  

Clearly this put him at odds with the utilitarianism of conservationists like John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt. 

Late in his life he purchased 80 acres in Wisconsin, a tract that had been left barren by poor land management, and  put his theories into practice.  A Sand County Almanac was finished just prior to his death, aged 61, from a heart attack after hoping a neighbor battle a wild fire.  Incidentally, all of his five children became notable teachers and naturalists. 

If there is spectrum of conservation, John Muir and Aldo Leopold are on different ends.  Muir was more towards the sustainability paradigm whereas Leopold visualized restoration; Muir preserved specific areas of great beauty whereas Leopold envisaged an all-inclusive, selfless community that some have labeled ‘religious naturalism.’   We are not separate from nature, he would argue, but an integral part of it. I would add that as long as we see nature as somewhere outside of us, somewhere apart from us, it is going to be difficult if not impossible to solve the environmental crisis that separateness has created. 

This relates to honey bees and beekeeping in several ways.  First, we know that all species of bees are in decline and that they cannot sustain themselves in the present environment.  We cannot fence off a fraction of the land, abuse the rest and expect them to survive.  We have to think in terms of extensive rehabilitation from the soil up and not rely on short term technological solutions to individual problems.  We cannot change the gas cap on a vehicle that consumes 25 miles per gallon and believe we have solved the emissions crisis; both the design of the entire vehicle and our perception as to its use have to change.  

Secondly, new beekeepers are often bemused by the intricacies of a colony of honey bees and struggle for several years to make sense of it all.  They see it as an isolated part of the natural world which they can manage.  With time, and if they are fortunate, they come to see honey bees as a superorganism  within a large and complex context, and the reward of being with  them is a feeling of interconnectedness with the natural world.  They and the beekeeper are one; the latter does not ‘keep’ them so much as experience, in Leopold’s terms, a biotic community in which self-interest and conquest (and I would add, a capitalist consumer mentality,) play no part. 

To end as we began, with Wendell Berry : “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

Clearly the American Bald Eagle is not bald – the term is a corruption of the Middle English word balde, meaning white. Nor is it America’s national bird.  There is a national mammal (bison) and national tree (oak) but Congress has never chosen a national bird.  Indeed Benjamin Franklin actively campaigned against the bald eagle, arguing it to be ‘a bird of bad moral character’! 

But in 1782, from the moment when the Continual Congress voted to put the bald eagle on the Great Seal of the United States, distinctive of a young Republic anxious to assert an American-born identity separate from Britain, it became a symbol of national unity and strength. 

Despite this honor and prestige, the eagle was described by a major newspaper in 1905 as “a scavenger, a coward and a thief” and was in danger of extinction.  Primarily a fish eater,  it was accused of carrying away sheep, calves, pigs  and even human babies – all loads that exceeded its lifting power – and it had become as much a target for eradication as were wolves and coyotes. 

By 1923 the absence of the eagles was such that, according to Nature Magazine, “a very large proportion of (our population) has never seen an American eagle in the sky.”  Congress responded with the Bald Eagle Protection Act (1940)  but eight years later DDT became available for general use further adulterating our food with biocides, together with factories and vehicles that despoiled the atmosphere and waste products that fouled our water.   By the mid 60’s the eagle’s nesting population in the lower 48 states had fallen to 487 pairs, less that those seen in any single state before the eradication began. 

This time the people acted and Congress followed suit.  On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, besides the protest marches, 20 million Americans joined in clean-up and tree-planting campaigns.   Within two years Congress had passed the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act, banned DDT and given bipartisan support to the Clean Water Act. 

Much of the above is taken from two articles celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, arguing that “nothing would be more essential to the eagles’ comeback than the restoration of their watery habits.”  Bald eagles are thriving again, with a 200 fold increase in their population to the point that they have recovered to the estimated number in the early 18th century. 

How does this relate to honey bees?   First, just as the quality of water was critical to the recovery of the bald eagle, so the quality of the soil is critical to the survival of not just the honey bee but all pollinators.  Soil quality is basic to all plant life, something the initial agriculturalists recognized and protected, and we have abused it.  To quote Jonathan Powell from last month’s column, because it is worth repeating : “Indigenous cultures have sensed and have respected these connections without the benefit of modern scientific analysis and data.  It is ironic that we know so much more than these ancient cultures, and yet this knowledge does not appear to come with the wisdom to live in balance with nature.” 

Secondly, Dr. Christina Grozinger of Penn State is cited in an article by Sara LaJeunesse in the May issue of the Beescape newsletter : “For more than a decade, my colleagues and I have been studying the effects of pesticides, diseases, and land-use patterns on pollinators. These are all problems that we humans have the ability to manage – to an extent. But our most recent research has revealed that weather and climate change are much more important contributors to the decline of bees.”

Colony Collapse Disorder prompted Christina, then an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, to examine the molecular mechanisms underpinning bees’ responses to stressors such as  pathogens, parasites, pesticides and bee nutrition. In 2008 she moved to the Department of Entomology at Penn State where she developed relationships with local beekeepers and realized that some of the challenges they faced were a result of the broader landscape in which their colonies were housed. “What these beekeepers needed were tools to help understand how various landscape factors affected their bees,” she said.

So, in 2019, she and her colleagues developed Beescape, a software program that enables beekeepers to understand the local and specific stressors to which their bees are exposed. A year later,  together with Dr. Maggie Douglas, a former Penn State graduate student and now a professor at Dickinson College, Christina showed that during the past 20 years insecticides applied to U.S. agricultural landscapes have become significantly more toxic to bees. “We found that increased use of neonicotinoid seed treatments in corn and soy are the primary drivers of this change. This study was the first to characterize the geographic patterns of insecticide toxicity to bees and reveal specific areas of the country where mitigation and conservation efforts could be focused.”

In 2021, however, two studies prompted Christina to extend the criteria in her research program so as to include all the environmental factors that might be relevant to bees.

In the first study, she and a team that included Dr. Sarah Goslee from the USDA Agricultural Research Service based at the Penn State University Park campus, worked with the Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association to collect data on the winter survival of bees. For each participating apiary the team compiled data on landscape variables that influence the availability of floral resources and insecticide exposure risk. Because Sarah has expertise in assessing weather and climate effects on plant species distributions, they decided to add weather to the mix, including temperature and moisture conditions. 

The team found that although the local landscape variables were important, the weather was critical to honey bee winter survival. In particular, winter survival is most strongly influenced by summer temperatures and precipitation in the prior year. It could be that the weather is influencing plants and their ability to flower and produce nectar and pollen, or the time and length of flowering, or the ability of the bees to collect the nectar and pollen, or the amount of pollen and nectar available, or combinations of all of the above.   “It definitely suggests that honey bees have a ‘goldilocks’ preferred range of summer conditions, outside of which their probability of surviving the winter falls,” Christina concludes.

These weather effects are already being felt. Christina has estimated that honey bees suffered overwintering mortality rates of more than 53 percent from 2016 to 2019, a critical loss rate  considering that the economic impact of insect pollinators has been re-valued at  $34 billion in 2012, a figure much higher than was previously thought.

Secondly, the team studied how wild bees are affected by land use and climate factors. Headed  by  former Penn State graduate student Dr. Melanie Kammerer, and involving Grozinger, Goslee, and Penn State professor of entomology Dr. John Tooker, the team analyzed a 14-year U.S. Geological Survey data set of wild bee occurrences from more than 1,000 locations in Maryland, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. Using land cover maps and spatial models, they described the landscape surrounding each of the sampling locations, compiled a suite of climate variables and used machine learning models to identify the most important variables and quantify their effects on wild bees.

“Our results indicate that temperature and precipitation patterns are more important than suitable habitat or floral and nesting resources in controlling wild bee abundance and species diversity,” said Christina. “These findings suggest that addressing land-use issues alone will not be sufficient to protect these important pollinators …  We can study the effects of all these environmental factors on bees, and we can make recommendations for things that can be done to support bees, but we have to understand what people are actually willing to do about it. How can we help them understand this information in a way that allows them to make more informed decisions about their personal and professional activities?”

The bald eagle, as a symbol of national unity and strength, was the eventual inspiration for significant environmental action.  Globally, the honey bee has been used to symbolize a variety of traits, including industry, community, productivity, power, fertility, resurrection and sexuality, by a wide range of people from Napoleon Bonaparte, the Mormons, the Celts, the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Khoisan people, the ancient Egyptians, to the people of Manchester City in the UK as recently as 2017.  Hopefully the plight of the honey bee and pollinators in general will inspire global environmental changes just as did the plight of the eagle.  As an article in the April-May issue of The Smithsonian concludes, “Bald eagles have not changed since the adoption of the Great Seal – they have shown that we can change.” 

Thirty five years ago  in Britain a mining tradition dating back to 1911 came to an end.  Caged canaries, taken into coal mines to detect carbon monoxide and other toxic gases before they hurt humans, were replaced by an ‘electronic nose’, a detector with a digital reading. Although ending this use of the birds was more humane, miners’ feelings were mixed. “They are so ingrained in the culture, miners report whistling to the birds and coaxing them as they worked, treating them as pets,” the BBC reported at the time.  

The idea of using canaries is credited to John Scott Haldane, known as “the father of oxygen therapy.” His research on carbon monoxide led him to recommend using birds because of their vulnerability  to airborne poisons – they need immense quantities of oxygen to enable them to fly and to reach heights that would make us sick, and by holding air in extra sacs they are able to get a dose of oxygen when they inhale and another when they exhale. This way, and relative to mice or other easily transportable animals, the canaries got a double dose of air and any poisons it might contain, thus giving the miners an earlier warning

Britain wasn’t the only place to adopt Haldane’s suggestion – the practice was soon adopted in both the USA and Canada. Pit ponies, the other animal that went underground with human miners to haul coal, were also phased out by automation; the last of them retired in 1999.

The ‘canary in the coal mine’ metaphor is commonly employed to warn of the catastrophic consequences of pollinator demise, where honey bees are (mis-)used as a stand-in for all pollinators. Essentially, the story goes that if honey bees collapse, our food systems will follow. Maggie Shanahan, writing in the Journal of Insect Science in January of 2022, outlines the limitations of this metaphor, not least that focussing on the stressors that cause the canary  to die  allows us to avoid  questioning the system that creates those conditions in the first place. “We see the canary,” she writes, “we know it is unwell, but instead of evacuating the coal mine and bringing the bird up to the surface for the fresh air that it needs, we scientists are setting up a more permanent camp inside the mine, hooking the canary up to oxygen, running diagnostic tests, supplementing the canary’s diet to elevate its hemoglobin levels, and initiating a program to develop a canary that can survive on CO2. Our efforts may allow the canary to live a little longer, but focusing solely on individual aspects of canary health actually keeps us from asking more fundamental questions: Why are we keeping canaries in coal mines in the first place? Why are we still building coal mines at all?”

To translate this into the bee world, by focusing on issues like K-wing disease, bee kills, shortened lives of queens,  increasing queen infertility and over-winter losses, we avoid examining the agro-chemical-industrial world that creates and sustains these conditions in the first place.   Instead, we try to prop up the bees, much like we  nurse weak hives through the winter much to the distress of the next generation of those colonies.   We breed more resilient bees with the genetics and behavioral traits we want; we treat the colonies with a profusion of chemicals in an attempt to negate the damage done by chemicals in the  environment; we feed a variety of supplements because the surrounding environs can no longer provide sufficient quantities of nectar and pollen, and when the bees die, we bring more bees into the same habitat. All are short term solutions that perpetuate an unviable system.

It is the old adage at work  –  focus on the messenger rather than heed the message – and the consequences are dire.  As the late E.O.Wilson wrote so famously : “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

The objectives of  industrial agriculture are increased labor productivity in the form of maximum output per worker, and increase yield in the form of maximum output per plant or animal.  The justification is that an increasing global population has to be fed, and the solution is mechanization and chemistry.  And yet most farming still needs to be financial subsidized, a complex combination of the four P’s (parasites, pathogens, poor nutrition and pesticides) threatens the health of every colony, toxic emissions and monocultures are destroying life as we know it, and over 50 million people in this world are perpetually hungry. 

During the BIP zoom discussion on pesticides, held on November 30 last year, and in response to a question about pesticides in wax, pollen nectar and propolis, one of the presenters (I believe it was Scott McArt) pointed out that all of our food is contaminated, and we accept it without question provided it is below the ‘safe’ levels as set by the FDA. 

There is another way and it is not too late.  In non-industrial, diversified farming systems, complex communities of plants, animals, bacteria and fungi build ecosystems that provide for sustainable food production in the quantities that we need and at a cost we can afford.  Soil quality underlies it all, hence the farmers’ priority is to foster biodiversity.  In so doing greenhouse gasses are reduced, as is water contamination; food security is increased and the quality of  life for farmers and their workers is improved as yield and profit become incidental to making our planet inhabitable for all.  And for beekeepers, all pollinators will be revitalized, reducing the current pressure on honey bees. 

There are increasing numbers of successful models world-wide, normally labelled ‘regenerative agriculture’,  which show this process in action. My fear is that, as with previous examples of tobacco, toxic chemicals and fossil fuels,  there are  well funded, well-heeled, embedded corporations that are inherently opposed to such change because of the profits they are making  from the present system, unsustainable as it is.  Of some comfort is the UN sponsored global meeting on biodiversity (COP 15) which assembled in Montreal last month and attracted more than 10 000 representatives from more than 200 countries.  Hopefully the results will be more specific and more effective than those of the global warming conference that met in Egypt in one month earlier. 

This is not an exercise in blame; it is understanding how this system works at its deepest level so that we can transform it. Ignoring the root causes of colony loss and pollinator decline will not create the change we need. Nor can we solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them, as Einstein stressed.  Maggie Shanahan’s article is addressed primarily to researchers, but beekeepers must join them on the front lines in reframing the debate. Not to do so is akin to ignoring the canary as she expires in her cage in the belief that continuing to exploit the minerals in the mine until the last vital moment is our prime objective.  

Life is not easy for city trees and, like honey bees, they are often unnoticed and unappreciated.  

Hemmed in by buildings and roads, urban trees exist in a polluted environment with limited resources.  When it rains the trees are either inundated with runoff or left thirsty under concrete paving or tar macadam roads that prevent water penetration.  Their roots are squashed into heavily compacted soil  with little space to expand before  bumping into bricks or concrete. 

Like city residents, most of these trees live in cramped conditions, they are riddled with infectious diseases and suffer from chronic stress.  In this unnatural setting they tend to live fast and die young, with mortality rates nearly twice as high as those in rural areas,.  

Writing for the BBC and with specific reference to the British capital, reporter Zaria Gorvett observes that “The City of London may be an urban jungle, but it’s hardly an idyllic environment for a tree.”  And yet some survive, and the London Plane Tree even flourishes.

In the  17th Century, as global trade took off between Western countries and their colonies, explorers and merchants included millions of tiny guests among the crates of spices, silks, stolen artefacts and tea  – seeds. Somehow two plants from continents thousands of miles apart – an American sycamore and an Oriental plane – met and reproduced.  One possibility is that they coexisted on the grounds of the Oxford Botanical Garden; another  is that they hooked up in Spain.  Either way, the result was a large, strikingly beautiful specimen called the London Plane tree with a fast growth rate and an unusually robust constitution, able to survive in one of the harshest environments on Earth –  our cities.

In the nineteenth century, these  trees were used to develop the leafy boulevards  of London and Paris, and later Sydney and New York; despite the harsh living conditions of the Industrial Revolution they survived, in part because of some quirky features that helped them adjust to city life, not least the ability to discard the outer layers of their smog-coated trunks to reveal a fresh patchwork of green and white bark beneath. This is not unlike a feral hive that absconds from its tree cavity very three years, allowing wax moths to destroy the old comb in preparation for a new swarm to move in the following spring. 

But the London Plane is not as dominant as it once was – or quite as robust. When trees are stressed by their local environment, such as warming cities, localized droughts, compacted soil that is the equivalent of junk food,  paved streets that limit water retention, air pollution,  being confined to a concrete street box, or human abuse such as hammering in nails to hold notices and signs, they become susceptible to a range of diseases and fungal infections. 

Just because old trees have made it this far, there’s no guarantee they’ll survive another century,  hence the current emphasis on finding and developing a new generation of  city trees. If urban planners get it right, over the next few decades cities across the globe may soon break away from the monoculture aesthetic  represented by the London Plane tree and pioneer something more diverse and robust.  One of the leading contenders is the gingko, an ancient tree that existed alongside the dinosaurs.

The parallels with honey bees are intriguing.  Polluted environments, limited resources, increasing stress, new diseases and pathogens,  increased mortality rates, the need for biodiversity, the search for better and more robust bees, and even, like the ginkgo, a return to origins and practices that existed eons before we, humans, came on the scene. 

But what strikes me most of all is the expectation that the honey bees and the trees adapt to our cities, rather than other other way round.  Granted there are some developments in urban planning that are nature friendly, such as better use of precipitation, preventing storm water run off, and increased use of green spaces, just as there are beekeepers who are trying to be bee, rather than beekeeper, centric. But behind it all is the expectation that somehow nature must adapt to us, despite the declining environment that this attitude has created.   It feels like an archetypal case of blaming the victim : the perpetrators expect the victims, in this case honey bees and urban trees, to change their behaviors to accommodate us. 

In the 1980’s I would take small groups of high school students to Lapalala, a 6000 acre game preserve in the north western reaches of South Africa, not far from the Limpopo River, erroneously characterized by Rudyard Kipling as “great, grey, green, greasy, all set about by fever trees”   Lapalala means ‘place of the leopard’  and, between lengthy bush walks with a ranger,  one of the activities was to provide each student with a net with which to find the  plants and creatures that existed in the rocky pools besides the Lephalale River.  The results were compiled as a chart on a blackboard to show the role of each living species in this microenvironment – for example, who brought oxygen to the water, who laid eggs, who preyed upon whom – and lines were drawn to connect the different species.  For example, the algae on the sides of the rocks provided food for some of the crustaceans, and were therefore linked; the smaller crustaceans  were eaten by some of the fish species, and were therefore linked …

The final step was to erase one of those links and track what happened.  Everything, in true ecological fashion, was interdependent.  Remove one component and each species was affected, often fatally.  

A more recent example.   The global auto industry has struggled with a shortage of computer chips that has shrunk production, slowed deliveries and sent prices for new and used cars soaring. And now a new factor. Critically important electrical wiring, manufactured in Ukraine, is currently unavailable.  According to a Detroit spokesman, “You only need to miss one part not to be able to make a car.” 

Honey bees too exist in an ecological microclimate, or to steal a word from the French vineyards, terroir, meaning an environment created by local particulars such as soil, climate and topography, which in turn gives a distinctive characteristic to the grapes and to the wine.  

The terroir of the bees is determined by temperature, rainfall and hours of sunlight, which, together with soil type, regulate what kind of plants can thrive in that locality.   Consider a tree adapted to that microclimate which offers not only nectar and the vital yeasts found in pollen which allow for its conversion to bee bread, but also provides a protective cavity and a whole cast of important fungi, resins, oils and invertebrates.  It is reasonable to assume that honey bees adjust their behaviors to accommodate their particular circumstance, even as such adaptation takes significant time. I doubt that it happens in one six week life cycle of a colony. 

All of this is self-evident.  New to me was the concept of an inner terroir, even if it is not labelled as such.  The insight came from an article by Jonathan Powell in the March, 2022, issue of The Beekeepers Quarterly, who in turn was inspired by a talk by Professor Scott Gilbert to the Arboreal Apiculture Salon in Scotland, followed by a visit to the feral bees at the Blenheim Estate in England.   Like those studied by Tom Seeley in the Arnott Forest in New York, the Blenheim bees  come from strong genetic lines, live in tree cavities without human intervention and appear to be free of the pests and diseases that decimate managed apiaries. 

All living animals comprise a complex system of organisms working together to enable them to function.  Of the trillions of cells in the human body, for example,  over half are not human and without them we could not digest food nor would our immune system be effective.  Recently this connectivity has been given its own name – the psychobiome. 

These non-human microbes are symbionts inherited  from our mother (or the queen bee) and are derived from social interaction and the environment.  Interestingly,  in her recent book,  The Extended Mind : The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, (2021) Annie Murphy Paul regiments volumes of research to show how we humans can work more productively and solve more problems by extending our minds through our bodies, our environment and our interactions with our peers.  I have italicized these particular words to stress how non-human and human microbes flourish in similar conditions. Moreover, studies in Australia, Switzerland and Germany show a link between the composition of our gut microbiome and the activities of our central nervous system in functions such as mood, cognition and mental health. There also appears to be a connection in terms of neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and Lou Gehrig’s disease. 

When honey bees are in synch with the immediate locality, as at Blenheim or the Arnott Forest, they do remarkably well. Equally they can become dysfunctional because of the choices made by a beekeeper who operates within an industrial, commercial model.  For example, the manufacturers of glyphosate claimed their product was harmless to insects because it effects an enzyme that only plants and microbes use.   First, what is the honey bee if not a complex organism including microbes which are constantly organizing and working together?  And secondly, research published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by V.S. Motta, Kasie Raymann and Nancy Moran in 2018 showed that glyphosate does indeed distress the gut microbiota of honey bees.  These are the very microbes that have evolved to survive the extremely acidic and fructose-rich environment of the honey crop and which are vital to breaking down the invertase enzymes of nectar into simple sugars – glucose and fructose – which is the beginning of the process that results in honey. Dr. Svjetlana Vojvodic Kruse, a researcher in Rowan University, New Jersey, is investigating the importance of gut bacteria on bee behavior and genetics. “With some experimental creativity,” she writes,  “my students and I have been able to show that gut microbial communities can impact individual learning and social interactions in honey bees.” Her research indicates that honey bees learn better if their guts contain a particular strain of bacteria.

If  it is true that honey bees are smart, complex social organisms not that different to humans – thousands of individuals living together, learning, communicating and working as a community to find food, care for their young and respond to diseases – then it follows that they are as detrimentally affected by disturbances in their psychobiome as are we. 

Just as we can influence the quality of our  microbiota via diet, Jonathan Powell lists beekeeper behaviors that can impact adversely gut microbes in honey bees :

• Replacing honey with sugar syrup.  The latter is an artificial, sterile food that lacks entirely the symbionts that are passed between bees as they feed.
• Management practices that work against the natural biology of the honey bee, including swarm suppression, killing of drone bees, and the annual replacement of queens with imported sub-species. 
• The use of chemicals to control mites, parasites and viruses  which may not harm the bee but do affect the symbionts. 

I would add to that list

• Massing hives together for honey production.  Compare this to the natural balance between feral hives, which seldom threaten other pollinators as they gather enough food to survive in their relatively small nests.
• Moving colonies throughout the year from one climate to another.
• Importing packages or nucs from environments different to where one expects them to survive. 

So what does this mean?   First, that when our bees fail the reason might involve more than genetics.  For example, a mite  treatment may not have visible impacts on the honey bee but what does it do to the microbiome?  Or the particular physical environment  – the medicinal compounds of the trees, the associated fungi and bacteria, and the location of the forest –  may be adverse to the genetic needs of the colony.    Secondly, honey bee species are classified in terms of single race names, eg. Apis mellifera liguistica.     Perhaps it is time to add a geographic component.  I think of my bees as mutts, developed from local survivor stock over years.  Perhaps more accurately they are Apis mellifera orientalum pensylvanica  (Uncle Google tells me the last two words are latin for eastern Pennsylvania.) 

“Indigenous cultures,” Jonathan Powell suggests, “have sensed and have respected these connections without the benefit of modern scientific analysis and data.  It is ironic that we know so much more than these ancient cultures, and yet this knowledge does not appear to come with the wisdom to live in balance with nature.” 

PS. Lapalala, which was real wilderness when I last visited thirty five years ago, is now besotted with commercial lodges and camps. 

It’s a prime ingredient in countless substances from sodas to coffee, from building materials to paper products, cement to glue, from bioplastics to bee hives, and it can extend the life of fresh cut flowers. Consumed at a rate in excess of one hundred pounds per person per year in the US,  it’s as addictive as nicotine and just as poisonous. So argued William Dufty in Sugar Blues, the dietary classic of 1975. Dufty, who also wrote Billie Holiday’s biography, Lady Sings the Blues, labeled sugar a narcotic, defined as ‘a drug that dulls the senses.’ “Heroin is nothing but a chemical,” he wrote. “They take the juice of the poppy and they refine it into opium and then they refine it to morphine and finally to heroin. Sugar is nothing but a chemical. They take the juice of the cane or the beet and then refine it to molasses and then they refine it to brown sugar and finally to strange white crystals.”

Dufty, who was a veteran on WWII, an award-winning investigative journalist and an editorial assistant at the New York Post, died in 2002, aged 86. He had and still has his critics, not least for what is described as ‘a stylistic pungence’ (for example, Lady Sings the Blues opens with ‘Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was 18, she was 16, and I was three’) and hyperbole,  but his passion was undeniable.  For many, the impact of Sugar Blues is comparable to Rachel Carson’sSilent Spring. 

Data are important yet one should not ignore the role of intuition.  More than two years ago my intuition, piqued by Dr. Tom Seeley’s work on feral colonies, questioned the role of sugar syrup in managed  honey bee colonies – it seemed to be yet another example of managing bees for the benefit of the beekeeper rather than for the health of the bees – and I elected  to stop feeding sugar syrup entirely for five years and to monitor the results. The initial results in terms of over-wintering rates and varroa infestations have been sufficiently encouraging to prompt a search for collaborative evidence. 

It’s challenging to identify exactly when it became common cause to feed sugar syrup to honey bees, but the initial impetus is undeniable.  Commercial beekeepers argued that simple economics made it impractical to let the bees consume their own honey; it was more profitable to sell the honey and feed an artificial substitute. 

What was an economic choice for commercial beekeepers has now become accepted as common practice for almost all beekeepers, for which, perhaps, there are consequences we have not fully considered. 

Sugar is sugar, you might argue, but the associated nutrients of white sugar and honey are significantly different. Take enzymes, for example, which are proteins that act as biological catalysts which in turn accelerate chemical reactions.  For eons of time honey bees have been gathering nectar, mixing it with their own special enzymes such as invertase and protease, and placing it in cells where, even after capping, the enzymes continue to work.   Foragers also add enzymes to pollen that cause it to interact with honey (bee bread contains more than 8 000 recorded micro-organisms) which the bees can assimilate better and is thus  more nutritious for the brood.

Just as we cannot live without the microorganisms and flora living in our intestines, neither can the bees, and in the latter case this combination of bacteria, enzymes and fungi has taken millennia to develop.  

There are many charts comparing sugar and honey, and using the one in David Heaf’s latest publication, the former has a different pH and lacks the enzymes evident in honey.    Changing the pH in a hive by feeding sugar syrup affects the finely tuned balance of the honey bee world and weakens  the colony, not least by enabling pesticides and fungicides to reduce the quality of bee bread.  Dr. May Berenbaum has shown that there are substances in honey, by contrast,  that  increase the activity of genes that break down potentially toxic substances such as pesticides and fungicides.   When a laboratory in New Zealand studied directly how  differing food sources have different influences on the digestive tracts of bees, it was no surprise that honey was the least harmful.   The worst was sugar syrup, made even more so if yeast or malt was added.  So what is the impact on the bees of feeding sugar syrup in conjunction with pollen patties that contain yeast or malt?

Another three-year study measured the life span of three groups of bees, each of which was fed only honey, sugar or acid invert syrup.  The average lifespan of bees fed only honey was 27 days compared to 21 days for the group fed sugar  and 12 days for the third group.  In other words, feeding only sugar  reduced the lifespan of a honey bee by 6 days or, in this case, 23 per cent, compared to feeding only honey.   The theory is that, besides the enzymes,  the minerals in honey are vital supplements to the proteins derived from pollen and are crucial to healthy larval development. By contrast, white sugar often retains a  residue of chemicals from the processing plant. 

So what does honey have that sugar does not?  Both are carbohydrates, the glycemic index is similar and sugar has 29% more calories, but what sugar lacks entirely are probiotic bacteria such as lactobacillus, as well as the bacteria that inhibit the growth of EFB and AFB; phytochemical, polyphenols and flavonoids with antimicrobial activity; macro-elements like calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium and chlorine; 47 trace elements (although trace and macro-elements are present in the water used to make syrup;) non-protein amino acids like the phagostimulants found in nectar; and vitamin C and six B vitamins. 

Dr. Gene Robinson studied gene activity in response to feeding honey, sucrose and corn syrup. The activity of hundreds of genes were changed by sucrose and corn syrup, in particular activities linked to protein metabolism, brain-signaling and immune defense.  The first two are important but the questions begged by the third include are we compromising the immune defense system of bees  by feeding sugar, which makes them less able to confront the diseases transmitted by varroa mites?   And might one criteria for raising varroa-resistant queens be a natural diet without either supplements or sugar? 

Clearly much work needs to be done.  The latest US BIP survey, for example, suggests that  there is little difference in outcomes between beekeepers who feed their colonies and those who do not, but the survey questions over the years seem to designate ‘supplementary products’ as Honey-B-Healthy, Vita Feed Gold  and ApiGo rather than as white sugar syrup.  Does giving honey back to the hive count as supplementary feeding? That is what at least three of my colleagues do.

This citizens science project is a smaller part of what David Papke and I are calling Restorative Beekeeping, which is the api-equivalent of Regenerative Agriculture and in which we are attempting to reconstruct those criteria that honey bees have developed over millions of years together with the necessary management techniques that have largely been diminished since the Industrial Revolution.  In my later years I have become more of a scout than a warrior (as described in last month’s essay) with the objective not to defend the status quo so much as to understand its origins and implications, as honestly and accurately as I can, even if it’s inconvenient or unpleasant. 

The down-side of the warrior mindset is that there are winners and losers, victors and vanquished, competition rather than cooperation, short term gains and long terms deficiencies. Honey bees managed themselves for 99.9997% of their history, and they haven’t exactly found comfort and well-being in our recent intervention.