Author: Jeremy

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. 

On August 21, as part of International Honey Bee Day, several local beekeepers  took a single frame observation hive to a local farmers’ market.  Two bees hitched a ride by ‘hiding’ in the air ports on either side of the hive, and on arrival they walked around the glass trying to find an entry point.  No one seemed bothered by their presence so we let them be.  

Soon there was a young lad – my guess would be that he was about 6 – gently persuading one of those  bees to climb on to his hand, from which it walked up and over his arm.  Standing beside him I asked how many legs, wings, eyes, she had, after which the question was, “Why is she not scared of you?”  “Because I’m so still,” he answered.  

He wasn’t exactly still but his movements were slow and careful, and we had a chance to talk about pheromones, even if that was not the terminology we used.

Meanwhile an older man, perhaps in his 30’s, watched in amazement from the other side of the table.  “I’ve always been afraid of bees,” he said, “and normally I would be running as far away as I could.  Do you think a bee would stay on my hand?”   

Gently, we moved the second bee on to the back of his hand and she crawled up his well-tattooed arm. 

He was grinning from ear to ear as he described the sensation of those six legs on his arm.  For several minutes he watched, and smiled, and beamed, and then gently and proudly returned her to the outside of the hive.  

There was so much happening here, besides the example of a child overcoming the life-long fear of an adult.  How often do  we sanitize our environments ‘just in case?’  What might we have missed if all the bees had been brushed off before the observation hive left the apiary?  Or if, on seeing those two miscreants, we had disposed of them ‘in case someone got stung?’  

Sometimes unpredictability, uncertainty and insecurity are, within reason, vital aspects of significant learning.  I recall reading more than fifty years ago, in a book about revolutions (the title escapes me,)   that most significant historical discoveries were not the intended result at the outset. Call it serendipity, an open mind, fortuitousness or a paradigm shift,  but for today I don’t want to detract from the joy of  this little victory on International Honey Bee Day. 

For 12 years, beginning in 1894, France was divided by a political scandal that began when Captain Alfred Dreyfus,  a 35-year-old French artillery officer of Jewish descent, was convicted of treason.  He was sentenced to life imprisonment  for allegedly communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris and  spent the next five years imprisoned on Devil’s Island in French Guiana.

In 1896, evidence came to light,  primarily through an investigation instigated by Georges Picquart,  head of counter espionage,  which identified the real culprit as a French Army major, Ferdinand Esterhazy. High-ranking military officials suppressed the new evidence, a military court unanimously acquitted Esterhazy after a trial lasting just two days, and the Army used forged documents to bring  additional charges against Dreyfus. 

In 1899, Dreyfus was returned to France for another trial, in part because of a public outcry initiated by Emile Zola’s public letter, J’Accuse …!   The result was yet another conviction and a 10-year sentence, but Dreyfus was pardoned and released, exonerated in 1906, reinstated as a major in the French army, and served honorably during the First World War, culminating with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

The affair, which  bitterly divided France into pro-republican, anticlerical, Dreyfusards and pro-Army, mostly Catholic, anti-semitic “anti-Dreyfusards”, gives rise to the question, why is it so difficult,  in the face of all of the evidence,  to acknowledge that one has been wrong about something and to put aside one’s ego without shame and without acting defensively?  

Julia Galef, co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality  and the host of the podcast Rationally Speaking, offers an analogy to help understand this dilemma.  Suppose, she asks, that you’re a soldier in the heat of battle. My imagination  went immediately to the eve of January 21, 1879, and the battle of Isandhlwana when the adrenaline ran high in the camps of the British redcoats  and the Zulu impis as they waited to engage.    As with most battles, the actions of soldiers on both sides stemmed from  deeply ingrained reflexes  to protect themselves and their comrades from ‘the enemy.’

Rather than being a warrior, Julia invites us to imagine adopting the role of the scout. Our job is not to attack or defend so much as  to understand. We have to reconnoitre the terrain, identify potential obstacles, choose routes of communication and report back with accurate information. The scout wants to know what is really there, without bias or preconception, and the generals rely on him or her doing just that.  

In an army, both mindsets – the warrior and the scout – are essential. And if war is too extreme an example, think of a sports team : the quarterback who depends on tactics developed from scouting the opposition.

The soldier mindset is when our unconscious motivations, our desires and fears, shape the way we interpret information. The driving force is our reptilian or primal brain, which controls our innate and automatic self-preserving behavior patterns, thus ensuring our survival and that of our species. Some ideas feel like our allies – we  want to defend them and for them to win. Other ideas are the enemy and must be shot down. To return to our sports analogy, when the referee judges that our team committed a foul we are highly motivated to find reasons why he’s wrong. But if he judges that the other team committed a foul — awesome! That’s a good call … just don’t examine it too closely. 

Our judgment is strongly influenced by which side we want to win. And this is ubiquitous. It shapes how we think about our health, our relationships, how we decide for whom to vote, and what we consider fair or ethical. And it is totally unconscious.

By contrast is the scout mindset and, in the Dreyfus Affair,  Georges Picquart is a prime example. It’s the drive to find what’s out there as honestly and accurately as one can, even if it’s inconvenient or unpleasant. 

The question then, is what determines the difference?  Julia’s answer is emotion rather than intellect;  in fact these mindsets don’t correlate very much with IQ at all.  Just as the soldier mindset is rooted in emotions like defensiveness or tribalism, scout mindset is rooted in sentiments like  curiosity.  Scouts are more likely to say they feel pleasure when they learn new information or are driven to solve a conundrum. They’re more likely to feel intrigued than defensive when they encounter something that contradicts their expectations. Scouts also have different values in that they’re more likely to believe it is virtuous to test one’s own beliefs, and they’re less likely to say that someone who changes his or her mind seems weak. And above all, scouts are grounded, which means their self-worth as a person is not tied to how right or wrong they are about any particular topic.

Just how does this relate to honey bees and their keepers?   Clearly the house bees who defend the colony quickly and instinctively are warriors, compared to the foragers who go daily scout the terrain, identify potential obstacles, choose routes of access, report back with accurate information to their sisters, and in return receive information  about what the hive needs most – pollen, nectar, propolis or water – and then adjust their behavior accordingly. And to an extent the  roles are interchangeable : scout bees can become warriors (guard bees) if the colony is under threat, but  worker bees cannot suddenly become foragers, because that role requires knowledge and experience they do not yet have. 

When a swarm selects a new home, the scouts want to know what is available without bias or preconception, and to agree on which is most preferential. The future of the colony depends on them doing just that.  Meanwhile the house bees in the swarm, normally gentle, can quickly become warriors if the swarm is threatened. 

And beekeepers? There are invariably a few warriors  in most associations  who are wedded to old ideas, reluctant to accept a different point of view or a new approach, defending their point of view defiantly. I recall vividly being told as a young teacher that when a new idea was introduced into the faculty room, the old guard would explain that it had been tried ten years earlier, had failed, but they would try it again anyway.  They give it 5% of their effort, it fails, and they say, “See, we told you so!”

In my case I have long defended the vital role of the honey bee, believing her almost exclusively to be the essence of successful pollination and vital food resources for an expanding population. And I hung my warrior hat on the statements of a few, often expressed in no more than a paragraph.  Dr. Margarita Lopez-Uribe of the Department of Entomology at Penn State  was instrumental in changing my mind set by the use of data,  first in a bee club presentation and secondly in an interview in Bee Culture.  And she did it in such a way that I felt proud rather than ashamed when I realized I had been wrong; exposure to information that contrasted with my prior conviction evoked feelings of intrigue and excitement rather than defensiveness,  and I feel excited as I begin to scout out a new terrain using data that has long been there – I simply had not been able to see it before. 

To illustrate the power of emotional mindsets, in particular the importance of vision as inspired by the scouts, Julia Galef quotes Saint-Exupéry, the author of “The Little Prince” : “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up your men to collect wood and give orders and distribute the work. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”  I still believe in the importance of the honey bee, but not exclusively so.  I am now a beekeeper more than exclusively a honey beekeeper, in the belief that there is a synergy between all pollinators that is the essence of a successful future. That is the ‘vast and endless sea’ about which I am now curious. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chronologically there appears to be two ways to compare the life spans of honey bees and humans.  The first is to contrast the period of gestation with the working life.  In this way a worker bee spends approximately 21 days in the cell, 28 days in the hive and 14 days as a forager.  Roughly speaking, that is 1/3 of her  lifetime in the cell, 1/2 in the hive, and 1/4 foraging.   One could argue that we spend 9 months in the womb, although unlike the bee we emerge vulnerable and dependent; it might be more accurate to say that we spend the first quarter of our life in gestation, half in the work force in which we are expected both to contribute to the colony and to forage for ourselves and our family,  and the final 12 years in retirement, the original focus of which was to help care for and transmit the culture to the younger generation.  

The second way is to compare gestation v total life span.  Thus a honey bee spends about 1/3 of her life time from egg to emergent pupa, and if we accept the average human life span as 77 years, and extend the gestation period to include tertiary education, we too spend almost 1/3 of our time preparing for the rest of our lives.

This calculation was provoked by an essay titled Vulnerable Yet Vital, written by Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, in which she argues for the vital role that grand-parenting plays in our evolutionary story.  As one who frequently probes his role as a grandfather, my immediate question was, can the role of worker bees in tending to the eggs, larvae and pupae be seen as a form of grand parenting?

All life forms are shaped by the forces of evolution, which select organisms based on their ability to survive and reproduce in a particular environment. An  evolutionary enigma, emphasized by a pandemic which reminds us how much we need to take care of the young and the old, is why we have evolved to be so vulnerable and helpless for long stretches of our lives, unlike say honey bees. We in in the prime of our lives, put significant time and energy into caring for those who are not yet, or no longer, productive? Similarly, younger honey bees devote themselves to the care of the brood, in which their very survival as a colony is invested, but older bees literally work until they drop. 

On an evolutionary timescale Homo sapiens emerged relatively recently, with  varied sources of caregiving to deal with their vulnerable  babies, including alloparents (other people who help to raise children) such as post-menopausal grandmothers. Incidentally we are the only mammals who  outlive our reproductive capacity.  One idea is that our long, protected childhood gives us a chance to develop the skills we need to thrive as adults, namely to learn and invent, to communicate and cooperate, and to create and transmit culture.   “If childhood is designed to enhance learning,” Dr. Gopnik writes,”extending that period would be a good strategy for a species that needs to learn more.”  Thus, she argues, there is an intimate relationship between our vulnerabilities and our greatest strengths.

Children are especially motivated to explore their environment   Rather than imitate the cosmopolitan ways that adults acquire knowledge, children are generally better at exploring, the success of which depends partly on caring adults and partly  on the cues that indicate how much care they will get. When young animals detect that they are cared for, they take their time growing up and invest in large brains with the consequent enhanced learning. Indications that care is in short supply might lead to a different ‘live fast, die young’ pattern of development, one that is less intelligent but requires less caregiving and is better adapted to a harsh environment.

For humans, tribal elders appear to have played a crucial role in this evolution. The anthropologist Kristen Hawkes has labeled this ‘the grandmother hypothesis’, and has shown that, in forager cultures, post-menopausal grandmothers are a crucial resource, especially for toddlers. Since humans have babies at relatively short intervals, a mother may well  be nursing an infant even while the older sibling still needs significant attention.

This sharing of responsibility to raise children necessitated social interaction, communication and cooperation,  Yet it is more than this.   Traditionally, anthropologists have argued that humans cooperated in order to hunt more effectively – relatively weak men, in cooperation, could defeat a larger and more powerful animal.  But recent studies of forager cultures suggest that grandmothers quietly digging up roots and tubers not only provided more calories than did the hunters but they also talked as they toiled and, with their charges near by, passed on information from one generation to another, with which came the transmission of cultural norms and mores. Grandparents may not have been as strong or as effective hunters as the 20-year-olds, but they were more likely to be teachers. Several studies suggest that we get more gratified, more at ease,  as we age,  and stay that way as long as we remain healthy. Losing the single-minded drive of our middle years might actually make us better suited to the role of caretakers and teachers, guardians of tradition and bearers of wisdom.

Multiple caregivers pose a challenge for babies, too. Before they are a year old, babies are socially adept, not least at attracting attention and charming adults into taking care of them,  thus beginning the social sensitivity important in adult life. A longer, smarter, more social childhood combined with an extended old age allows for the development of more skilled adults, who produce more calories, provide  more care and cooperation, and so allow for an even longer, smarter and more social childhood in the next generation.

So, childhood and old age – those vulnerable, unproductive periods of our lives – turn out, biologically, to be the key to many of our most valuable, deeply human capacities.

The COVID-19 crisis has underlined the importance and difficulty of caring for those at the beginning and end of their lives. And we have to ask, with 15 months of covid-forced quarantine, will we see a generation of adults who are socially impoverished?  Nor were we necessarily doing a very good job of this even before the virus – especially in the richest countries on Earth. Not only do childcare and eldercare workers have little pay and less status, but we isolate children and older people from each other and from the rest of us. Once the pandemic is over, suggests Dr. Gopnik,  “Perhaps we can begin to appreciate the young, brilliant and fragile human learners, as well as their wise, vulnerable, older human teachers – and genuinely bring the grandchildren and grandparents back together.”

That answers one question – my potential role as a grandfather – but what about the bees? Can the role of worker bees in tending to the eggs, larvae and pupae be seen as a form of grand parenting?  Sadly no.  Much as we tend to anthropomorphize bees, the queen shows no maternal instinct and the worker bees show no signs of emotion towards their charges.  The successful gestation of a bee is based primarily on the provision of resources such as bee bread to the larvae by worker bees. The larvae and pupae are not in a form that is able to communicate and socially interact, and on emergence they get straight to work. Like them, we reach a state of physical maturity one third of the way into our lives;  unlike them, it is at that point that our emotional growth begins in earnest.  Meanwhile the elder bees  are so focused on foraging for the resources essential to the survival of the colony that they have minimal if any interaction with the young. 

Bees are driven by genetics.  There may be minor behavioral differences but there is no room for emotion or culture in a bee colony.  Even as that simplifies life immensely, I rather like the challenge that grand parenting presents :  to be a caretaker and a teacher, a guardian of tradition and a bearer of wisdom.

Greta Thurenburg is familiar to most of us, not least when in 2019, aged 16, she was named Person of the Year by Time Magazine.  Less well known is Carlos Roberto Mejía Chacón, even as the impact of his actions influences some 100 countries globally. His story and its implications are told by the environmental journalist Katarina Zimmer.

In a small town near San José, the capital of Costa Rica, and in the absence of a proper waste management system, locals would throw their garbage into a nearby stream.  In 1992, Carlos Chacón, then 10-years old and with help from his family, filed an appeal with Costa Rica’s constitutional chamber against the local municipality. Allowing the stream to be used as a garbage dump, he argued, violated the human right to life, which requires adequate living conditions and clean waterways.

One year later the chamber ordered the municipality to clear up the garbage and start managing residents’ waste properly. But the judges came to a much deeper recognition : a clean and healthy environment is a basis of human life, and, like food, work, housing and education, an all-round healthy environment is a human right.  Two years later this right was written into Costa Rica’s constitution, subsequently reverberating through the country’s landscape and culture, as was only too  evident when Mary and I were fortunate to visit several years ago.  It was apparent not only in the countryside itself, but even more so in the pride the people take in their environment.  At no time, for example, did we see the kind of road side trash that is all-too-common in the US. Rather, 98% of Costa Rica’s energy comes from renewable sources,  one quarter of its land is protected as national reserves and large swaths of once-degraded land have been reforested. Individual laws suits have ruled that the killing of the endangered green sea turtle is unconstitutional, as is felling the mountain almond tree, which is critical habitat for the endangered great green macaw, and moratoria have been placed on oil exploration and open-pit mining. Ecotourism has become a major source of income for the country. 

In Slovenia, a country with abundant greenery and extensive recycling programs (I recall vividly being startled to see a cigarette butt on a trail to a remote waterfall) the right to a clean and healthy environment has shaped the country’s mentality towards nature, as evidenced by an education system which includes extensive curricula on sustainability.  Our young guide when we visited  the botanical gardens in the capital, Ljubljana, was intimately aware of the pollinating potential of all the plants she showed us, and the gardens were full of groups of young school children examining the local flora. 

Since the right’s first mention in the Stockholm Declaration in 1972 – a result of the first major environmental conference – some 110 countries have written it into their constitutions, recognizing that human welfare and the natural world are closely linked, to the point that nature, in the form of clean and balanced ecosystems, rich biodiversity and a stable climate,  is a keystone of a dignified human existence.  Today, in Latin American and African countries in particular, and to its credit, India, the right to a healthy environment has created a powerful bulwark against a rising tide of habitat destruction.  But some of the world’s richest nations – the UK, United States, China and Japan – lag behind, as has the United Nations.

In the US, the Declaration of Independence famously mentions three rights which human beings possess by birth or by nature – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. No one may rightfully be denied these things, nor, since they are “unalienable,” may they be rightfully surrendered.  Yet the same document does not mention the right to clean air, or clean water or untainted food …

As with other human rights, there’s an implementation gap.  In South Africa, for example, where the right is written into its progressive constitution of 1996, the country remains starkly unequal (Nelson Mandela famously said in 1994 that to educate every child in the country would require the building of one school per day for the rest of the century.  That was doable; what was not attainable, after three centuries of effective apartheid, was finding the teachers to staff them.) South Africa has some of the world’s most polluted air,  many communities suffer from respiratory diseases and few people have the resources to  go to court to enforce their constitutional rights, even as the right to a healthy environment  allows courts to hold violators responsible. 

Human rights, it is often said, have their roots in wrongs. The UN Declaration on Human Rights in 1948 emerged out of the ashes of the Second World War at a time when a global environmental crisis was unforeseeable; the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 came out of the turmoil of the 50’s and 60’s, after people of all races had fought and died to oppose fascism only to face entrenched racism at home;  and it feels like the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (2021) will be recognized as a lodestar after the many accusations of police atrocities in the last two decades in particular. 

As beekeepers we argue for a healthy environment for honey bees because of their  value to the environment and in particular to many of our food  sources.  It might be more effective to make that argument more expansive and advocate for the rights of all living things, ourselves included, to a healthy environment, not least clean air and water. That way we all benefit, not least the honey bees.

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

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

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

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

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

In the following decade there were a series of stimuli, one of which, in 2018, was what Tom Seeley calls Darwinian Beekeeping, and which I prefer to think of as Regenerative, or Restorative,  Beekeeping. The latter terms were inspired by a few visionary farmers who reject the term Sustainable Agriculture on the grounds that our present farming techniques are not sustainable, neither for the planet nor for long term food production; instead these farmers are focusing  on restoring and regenerating the quality of the soil, on which ultimately everything else depends. 

Dr. Seeley suggests that beekeeping has become increasingly designed for the benefit of the beekeeper rather than the health of the bees, and he has examined feral colonies to survey  the conditions that bees choose for themselves, given their druthers.  David Papke, who  had been similarly inspired, was a step ahead of me in coming up with a hive design that was more bee friendly and we spent a year re-designing our hive bodies and presenting, with differing levels of success, our reasoning to some local bee organizations. The reactions ranged from outright dismissal to skepticism to enthusiasm to excitement.  

 It is important to note that at each of the three occasions on which I have been fortunate to hear Tom Seeley present his findings, he stresses that this is a concept for hobbyists rather than for commercial beekeepers – the  objectives and financial commitments of the latter are less likely to allow for experimentation. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My initial results are encouraging, but it is a small sample and early days –   the survival rate this winter, for the second consecutive year, was 85%.  And there is a close and self-evident connection between hive design and management choices, thus for example the increasing survival of the bees has led me to choose not to feed sugar syrup either in the fall or the late winter these last two years.   

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

 The difference between a talent and a skill is significant.  The former, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is ‘the natural endowments of a person, a general intelligence or mental power, a special aptitude’ and is derived from the ancient Greek, talanton, meaning the pan on a scale, which in Latin became talentum, a unit of weight or money. The implication is that a medieval Englishman saw a talent as one side of a balance, the latter acting as a metaphor for what we bring with us into this world. 

A skill, on the other hand, is defined as a learned power of doing something competently, a developed aptitude or ability, and is derived from the Old Norse skil, meaning distinction.

Thus we are born with certain talents, or what  Howard Gardiner has called multiple intelligences, presumably genetic.  Mostly we take them for granted – we are unconsciously talented. – and one of the joys of parenthood is watching those talents, or gifts, emerge in one’s children. Skills, by comparison, develop as we grow, either through personal endeavor or coaching.  My supposition is that it is easier to develop a skill that is related to one’s talents. 

As a personal example,  I realize that I have a talent for experiencing the natural world and for writing (as a means of getting my thoughts in order) and with the benefit of hindsight I can see how both played a significant part in my education.  My mother recognized my joy of writing and provided both feedback and encouragement, nor did my parents discourage the long hours I spent alone in the Rhodesian bush despite the risks, an attitude that is difficult to imagine in an age of helicopter parenting.   I vividly recall a third grade teacher choosing to read to the class an essay that I had written as part of a homework assignment. I cannot recall the subject matter; I do recall the  feelings that were evoked, and now, some 65 years later, I am beginning to understand why.  Much of the time in between has been spent developing the skills of writing and observing, to the point that they have merged through the medium of the honey bee. 

Incidentally that third grade experience may also have spawned a desire for an audience and for recognition!

As I have written about before, and to steal Billy Wilder’s phrase,  I have van Gogh’s ear for music. The years spent trying to develop basic musical skills have been frustrating and fruitless. Learning to play the piano is an example,  an area in which my mother’s support and tuition was totally unsuccessful. Don’t dare get me on a dance floor!  You won’t recover from laughing and I won’t recover from the humiliation. 

In the 1960’s, Dr Thomas Gordon, a Californian with three Nobel Prize nominations, developed his Skill Development Ladder,  a four step process describing how we acquire a skill.  We are all initially unconsciously unskilled.  Take the example of flying a kite.  At first glance  it seems simple – go outside, throw it in the air and run, a la Charlie Brown.  Fishing might be another good example – sit on the bank, throw in a line with a worm on a bent pin and reel them in.   It’s when we actually try it that we realize there are artifices involved that we don’t have but which, with persistence and guidance, can be learned. Dr. Gordon called this consciously unskilled. 

My guess is that when a talent and a skill are in harmony it is easier to persevere through the initial disillusionment. 

The third stage is  one of being consciously skilled as one’s patience and tenacity are rewarded, until eventually one flies a kite on the beach while talking to a group of onlookers, or sits by a line in the water while reading a good book (or, in today’s world, checking one’s phone.)  The skills are taken for granted and one is unconsciously skilled.  

I recall my granddaughter, Nora, several years ago asking from the back seat if driving a vehicle is difficult.  I tried to explain that mostly I did it without thinking – changing gears, pushing the gas pedal  braking – and when she looked uncertain (perhaps concerned?) we discussed how she had watched her youngest brother learn to walk, the amount of effort that initially went into each step, and how now he skipped and ran without conscious effort.

How does this relate to beekeeping and to bees?

First, CCD has drawn significant attention to the plight of honey bees and the enrollment in new beekeeper classes has been prolific.  In my experience about 25 per cent of those who sign up will persevere after the first year, and the reason may be tied to talent. All are well meaning – “I must do something to help the bees” – and managing a hive first comes to mind.  Many are unconsciously unskilled and as the reality becomes apparent and the romantic expectations fade, they decide on alternative  means of helping the girls.  Then there are those who, whether they know it or not, have a nature-based talent for whom beekeeping ties into the bigger picture. Being consciously unskilled is not fearful so much as a challenge, they quickly see connections, are undaunted by failure and approach the learning process as one of constant enlightenment.

Many of us have witnessed this first-hand as mentors.  Some new beekeepers move confidently through that vital first year, absorbing everything they experience.  Others, should they persevere, keep  asking the same questions in subsequent years and doing the same repetitive things, constantly appealing to their mentor to visit.  How  gently to encourage them to let go is something I have never successfully managed to do. 

Secondly, I recall being told as a young teacher that good students are humble because they realized how little they know, whereas poor students are over-confident because they are unaware of how little they know. One of the challenges of a mentor is to persuade good beekeepers, in the latter steps of their learning, that they have become unconsciously skilled, that they know more than they realize and have much of value to share either with the public or with colleagues who are tentatively putting their first foot on the ladder. 

This is not to suggest that the learning stops – ever.  Once we have reached that top step and got our breath back, invariably there is another ladder waiting to be climbed. It is when I was unconsciously skilled in hive management that I began to focus on queen quality, something of which previously I had been blissfully unaware, or in Dr. Gordon’s phrase, unconsciously unskilled. 

And what about the bees?  Do they go through this same process?  Not at all.  They are not thinking, reasoning animals with talents and skills, despite having a surprisingly large brain for their size (which primarily receives and organizes stimuli from the various ganglia) and despite our attempts to anthropomorphize them.  We do know that some bees work harder than others, some sleep more, some drones fly higher, but in essence they are superbly tuned, genetic creatures, honed and refined over millions of years of  evolutionary struggle, who emerge from their cells programed to perform a series of tasks for the common good until they die. 

The equivalent might be having a baby which, immediately after birth, cleans out the delivery room so that it is ready for the next occupant!

A clue in a recent Sunday edition of the New York Times crossword  was “Not black and white” and I had three of the seven letters : _  N  C _ _ _ R.  Clearly, the answer was UNCLEAR

However none of the four down clues would fit.  After a brief struggle I put it aside and sometime in the  night I realized that, obvious and appealing as ‘unclear’ was, perhaps it was incorrect.  Once this possibility was recognized an alternative arose which immediately accommodated the four down clues.  This new response is at the end of this piece in case you want to come up with it yourself before reading further. 

There are many things that we assume are correct because they are appealing and seem obvious but which may in fact prevent the completion of the full picture.  For example, keeping honey bees side-by-side in 3/4” white pine boxes, or using open bottom boards, or feeding a syrup made from white sugar in the fall or winter (I have to ask, were I  in danger of starving, and was fed nothing but white bread for a month or more, I would survive but how healthy would I be?)

The question that arises is why do some beekeepers search for  alternative management strategies whereas others (I would suggest the majority) accept the basics without question?  

Our education system inadvertently preaches obedience and repetition.  Initially, it is important for survival (“Don’t touch that hot plate – it will burn you”) but too often it continues unchecked into middle and high school, even tertiary education. To succeed, students are encouraged to repeat on a test what they have been told in class and, rather than  trust their own judgements, to accept that an external authority will decide whether they are right or wrong, whether their thoughts have value.  The risks of disagreeing, of thinking outside of the box, are a bad grade and ‘failure.’

I witnessed this first hand when a student teacher was required to come up with a one week syllabus for a section on the Caribbean for a 9th grade social studies class.  He devised a creative video based on Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean, in which students would travel from island to island in search of treasure.  His  supervising teacher rejected it out of hand because she did not know how to grade it, instead handing out work sheets in which the students had to fill out the capital, population, currency, etc. of fifteen islands.  It was mindless busy work with minimal educational value …but it was easily graded.  Of course every student got an  A – how could they not? 

There is significant research and evidence which shows that much work and testing at the post-secondary level is not much different. 

In an age of search engines it is more difficult to write with originality in that most college students today submit say, an essay, without actually ever having read a book on the subject.  The search engine takes them to a variety of specific sources which they stitch together in the form of an essay.  Ironically, when 327 members of Mensa were asked to describe the major environmental factors responsible for their intelligence, the foremost consideration was reading : “Intelligent people tend to be heavy readers throughout life.  They read for information and for entertainment. Although the reading habit should ideally be established during childhood … it is possible to develop a love for reading at any age.”

I too am guilty of over-use of a search engine, primarily as a fact-checker, and like to think that years of reading have provided a larger context into which the cyber-data will fit. 

We have not lost our ability to think so much as created a culture in which thinking is regarded as unnecessary.  Most things – news, information, entertainment, medical care, food, merchandise – are provided in neat packages , prewrapped, preconditioned and predigested.  For example, with the prevalence of GPS many adults concede that their map-reading skills have declined.  For some unknown reason, some GPS systems take delivery vehicles to an address one block and a side street from our house.  They blithely drive by our mail box with the address in large letters, faithfully following the voice in the box, and then call to say they are lost.  I don’t know whether it is a matter of trusting GPS without question, or losing the skills of observation as they drive. 

Twice a year in the 1960’s I would drive 28 hours to university, the first 400 miles of which passed through one town. There was no radio in the car (nor any radio stations for most of the journey) and no tape deck or cassettes.  Sometimes I drove alone, sometimes I had a companion.   And yet I cannot remember being bored, or dreading the trip.  In retrospect I realize it was a great time for reflection, and although time is available to all of us equally, without exception, we choose to fill it with neat packages of sound. 

And yet, despite this, there are some people who rise above it, who trust their own thought processes and have the self-confidence to act on them, accepting failure as an essential part of that process. Why do some of these ‘initiators’ emerge?  After all, “Loyalty to petrified opinion,” Mark Twain wrote in his Notebook, “never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.”

As with almost any aspect of human nature, some of the answer comes down to our genetically inherited disposition, but increasingly, psychologists are realizing the important part that early life experiences play, not least,  the way our parents behaved towards us.  The intentions behind helicopter, or bulldozer parenting, may be those of protection but, according to Dr. Judith Locke of the Queensland University of Technology, by ensuring children do not face uncomfortable challenges there might be  unhelpful effects, including making them less confident and less capable of facing difficulties, therefore leading them to exhibit weaker leadership skills.

Chinese psychologist Yufang Bian and her colleagues at Beijing Normal University  surveyed 1,500 teenagers at 13 schools in Beijing and assessed their leadership potential while at the same time the teens rated the extent to which their parents had been overprotective. After controlling for the influence of factors such as family socioeconomic background and the teenagers’ academic achievements, Bian and her team found a clear pattern. The more overprotective their parents, the less the teens were perceived as having leadership potential by others, and the less likely they were to be in leadership roles. Teens with helicopter parents, it was surmised,  tend to have lower self-esteem, are less willing to take risks, and are less confident about their leadership skills. 

Studies at Florida State and Miami universities arrived at similar conclusions. 

Yet there are those who trust their own thought processes and have the self-confidence to act on them, accepting failure as an essential part of that process. These initiators, or leaders, reflect the less protective  parenting style of their parents which made them more confident of their abilities in the face of adversity and more willing to accept the consequences of taking risks.  The good news is that, with the benefit of age and experience, those who were over-parented can choose to see themselves as more independent and practice making autonomous decisions, build their emotional and decision-making skills, and slowly build their confidence

This clearly has major significance as we face international crises like climate change, but how does tit relate to beekeeping?  It was Clare Densely at Buckfast Abbey who first suggested to me that it takes five years for a new beekeeper to learn how to read a hive, and that this need to be the main focus.  It is equivalent to the “Don’t touch that hot plate – it will burn you” phase of childhood.  I recognize that people manage bees for different reasons, and some want to invest as little time as possible; for those who want more it is after those first five years that one can choose either to continue the ‘you throw, I catch’ methodology we too often see in schools, or one can choose to conduct some citizen science with one’s bees, knowing that, besides the girls themselves (and they are remarkably forgiving and resilient)   you are the judge of your levels of success. 

In my case, the trigger to this transition is described beautifully by Grant Gillard in the January issue of ABJ.  He describes how initially he micromanaged his colonies ‘as if the bees had no clue’ and could be ‘domesticated to best serve our human objectives.’ Over time, and a million mistakes later, Grant ‘began to appreciate the basic foundations of honey bee biology and what drives the colony’s development …  I watched how the bees took their cues from what was happening around them and how it informed their behavior.” His role was to trust the bees to do what they do best while providing the colony with what it needed. “The successful management of a beehive is more about collaboration rather than manipulation,” he concludes. Or as Brother Adam said to Lotte Moller, the author of “Bees and Their Keepers,” Remember, you have to listen to the bees. They follow their own desires and not ours.” 

Ed Colby has said more than once in his column in Bee Culture,  “The world doesn’t  need more beekeepers. It needs more good ones.” Sometimes that means having the self confidence to question what is unclear; you might just replace it with something that is IN COLOR