Author: Jeremy

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 

“(These insects) seem to be the perfect natural instance of a social system governed by division of labour. Most known species live in colonies consisting of one or more reproductive females, called ‘queens’, who lay the eggs. All the rest, the ones we see flying around, are sterile female ‘workers’, daughters of the queen and the males with whom she mated.

“The colony is not a monarchy. The queen merely lays the eggs. Like many natural systems without central control, these societies are in fact organized not by division of labour but by a distributed process, in which an individual’s social role is a response to interactions with her colleagues. In brief encounters, they use their antennae to smell one another, or to detect a chemical that another individual has recently deposited. Taken in the aggregate, these simple interactions allow colonies to adjust the numbers performing each task and to respond to the changing world. This social coordination occurs without any individual ant making any assessment of what needs to be done.

“For millennia, they have been held up as models for human societies, characterized by coordinated and efficient mutual regard and selfless hard work…”

We’re talking, of course, about ants, in this case as described by Deborah Gordon in Ant Encounters : Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior.   Just as we cite frequently  the occurrences of honey in the bible, or it’s use in pre-Christian Egypt,  myrmecologists have their stories.  Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper celebrates the ant’s capacity for delayed gratification, collecting food to be used later. In The Iliad, Zeus changes the ants of Thessaly to soldiers after a plague wiped out the men, creating the Murmidons, who beat back the Trojans. And when transcrypted into Latin, besides myrmecology(the study of ants,)  myrmidon is the follower of a powerful person who, typically, is unscrupulous and carries out orders  without question. 

History abounds with  the idea of division of labour as a compelling model. Plato admired it, Adam Smith explained how economies benefit from it, and Henry Ford industrialized it. In the 1970s, the biologist E O Wilson extolled the virtues of division of labour; he anthropomorphized  a colony as a ‘factory within a fortress’ in which each ant is programmed to carry out its appointed task.  Much like the traditional Hindu caste system,  an ant’s task is fixed – each worker is genetically programmed to perform a particular task. 

For millennia humans have  used arguments about intrinsic attributes to justify social roles. Some were destined by divine right, lineage, even genetics, to rule, while others were enslaved based on their race or physical attributes.  In a corporation, some people work in marketing and others in management, but since no one is born a salesman or a supervisor, these differentiated skills must be acquired related to one’s inherent abilities, something Karl Marx did not fully allow for. Plato considered these differences a matter of talent as well as preference and argued in favor of specialization. For Smith, division of labour brought the advantage of learning and improvement and argued in favor of efficiency.  Ford didn’t care about talent or learning so much as in speed –  people could work faster if they didn’t have to put down one tool and pick up another.

But it’s not natural.  What Dr. Gordon has found is that, in ant colonies as in bee hives, the process of task allocation is based on a network of simple interactions. We know, for example, that a returning forager bee with a load of nectar will respond to the length of time it takes to pass her cargo on to a receiver bee. This creates a simple form of feedback: if the turnaround is quick, the message is that the demand for nectar is strong. 

This is a  distributed process in that there is no central control, while in a division of labour there might be. In the latter a  leader can decide who makes what, and the extreme example is communism, at least as it was practiced.  This is one of the distinctions between communism and socialism, something that many Americans seem not to understand, an ignorance that is readily exploited in our current politically charged climate.   In a distributed process this happens through local interactions; for example, a demand is filled by an entrepreneur.

The term ‘queen bee’ implies a division of labor in a hive, with the monarch giving the orders, and for a long time that is the way it was thought to be. In reality, and in a distributed process, tasks among individuals are interchangeable, which makes the system more robust and more resilient.  If a forager bee gets lost or a worker bee becomes unfit, another will take her place.  

Robust and resilient? Yes. More predictable?  No.  With a distributed processes  it is possible to say what will happen on average but not in particular. Such uncertainty is inimical to the hearts of engineers who love things to work the same way every time, and indeed, when I travel in an airplane (whenever that might next be!) I want the process and the outcome to be predictable.  In a distributed processes the failure of one small part is not critical – local solutions are good enough most of the time.

Increasingly, distributed processes from nature are being applied to contemporary issues.  Tom Seeley, for example, has shown that there are general organizational principles demonstrated in swarming wherein groups are smarter than the smartest individuals. Other examples include ant colonies as metaphors for computer systems, or the movement of a flock of starlings or school of fish in terms of traffic flow. And biomimicry imitates the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges  Two examples.   When Japanese engineers sought to upgrade their high-speed bullet trains they found that the massive amount of noise created by the displacement of air ahead of the trains, especially when the train entered a tunnel,  would create a shock wave that caused structural damage to the tunnel. The solution? To model the nose cap of the train on the beak of the Kingfisher bird, which has a specialized bill allowing it to dive into water with minimal splash. Utilizing this new nose, the next generation of high speed trains was 10 percent faster, consumed 15 per cent less electricity, and there was no more  noise boom.

And in Harare, Zimbabwe, architects designed an entire shopping center based on the natural convection system of a termite mound  and which uses 10 percent less energy than a traditional air-conditioned facility.

Thus the distributed processes in a honey bees might show us how to adjust to a changing environment at the local level,  whether it is building a home that is environmentally efficient,  deciding when to move, or changing from working inside to foraging outside. 

 A vision of human society ordered and improved by division of labour has distorted our understanding of nature and it can be difficult to let it go. Dr. Gorden offers  genetic determinism as an example. We say that disease, intelligence, psychosis and athletic ability are ‘genetic’;  in reality  stress, sunlight and exercise can equally determine which genes are activated.  It’s a distributed process in that what genes do depends as much on what is happening outside as well as inside the cell.

Why are the traditional images of honey bees and ants as analogous to specialized workers so compelling? First, it’s familiar: a metropolis of insects, each carrying out its assigned job, is a miniature version of a human factory. To envisage instead how a particular task arises from a pulsating network of brief interactions might prompt us to ponder what really accounts for why each of us makes the choices that we do, or why we act in a certain way.

Secondly, explanations are often easier to accept if they invoke internal properties that are invisible and do not require any further introspection. We dismiss them as “That’s the way I’m wired,” rather than struggle with the concept that each of us is a shifting amalgam of impressions and feelings, lacking a defined core.

Thirdly, it is comforting to think that some invisible force has imparted an order that makes everything as it should be. For some that force is natural selection; for others it might be God. Divine right makes one man a king, and for the subjects, all is just as it has been ordained to be.  For centuries, this was used as a form of social control and to justify the suppression and the exploitation of the many by the few. 

The recognition that natural processes work differently from our hierarchies, our corporations, our schools, allows us to see Mother Nature more clearly. After all, ant and honey bee colonies have thrived for millennia in such a way as to enhance our environment rather than plunder it as we have done in a fraction of the time. 

While celebrating their first Christmas together, a husband noticed his beloved cutting off the ends of the ham.  When asked why, she explained that it was something she had watched her mother do.   Mom , duly consulted, replied that it was something Nana had always done.  Nana, consulted in turn, explained that the hams had been too big for her small oven.

Sometimes we do things because ‘that is the way they have always been done,’ and beekeeping is no different.  Before moving to a specific example, allow me to add one further piece of background.  Commercial beekeepers write for, and are cited by, journals and newsletters, even though their objectives may be different to hobbyists, with management strategies designed to meet those targets. Because they work with such large numbers of colonies  we assume that they know what is best for the bees and that we should imitate their methods, even though our goals might be quite different.  Two examples :  commercial beekeepers need to give their colonies a strong start in the spring if they are to meet the pollination contracts  which are vital for their financial wellbeing.  The same methods used by a smaller beekeeper run the risk of  excessive swarming.  Commercial beekeepers need to graft to maintain a strong supply of queens; there are more natural ways using splits and queen cells for smaller beekeepers to get the queens they might need. 

It’s like a mom-and-pop corner store looking uncritically to Walmart for its operational strategies. 

One of the advantages of being a hobbyist, or a mom-and-pop store, is that there is a flexibility that is denied to the larger enterprises, one example of which is the decision as to how and what to feed bees in the autumn.  Two years ago my intuition told me that feeding white refined sugar to the bees was convenient for the beekeeper rather than healthy for the bees.   I decided last fall not to feed, to leave as much capped honey on as possible, and to monitor the outcomes.  If this led to the robbing of the weak by the strong, so be it.  Does it mean not feeding even in a nectar dearth?  ‘Fraid so.   Do I second guess myself in the midst of winter?  Absolutely.   Yet sometimes, to best help the bees, we need to accept nature’s hard stance against the weak. 

The results after one year?  The winter survival rate was high and the varroa levels throughout the summer were low – an average of a little over 1 mite per 100 bees per colony throughout the year.  I’m acutely aware that by putting this in writing I am inviting retribution from the gods of beekeeping, who can be ruthless in their need for vengeance. 

It was a small sample (20 colonies) over a short period, and I intend to repeat the procedures this fall.  In the interim,  and wondering whether I was projecting concerns about the effects of sugar in my own diet, I did a quick search via Uncle Google to see if there was any supporting science.  You may have seen the correspondence between Randy Oliver and myself on this subject in Bee Culture.  The first hits were, in my opinion, from reliable sources – Diana Yates reporting on the work of Drs. May Berenbaum and Gene Robinson, James Zitting writing in Mother Earth News, and a New Zealand based beekeepers’ site, Kiwimana.

One three year study showed that bees fed with honey lived an average of 27 days, with sugar syrup 21 days, and with acid invert syrup only 12 days.  And the New Zealand report cites  Dr Michelle Taylor from Plant and Food Research who concurred that honey bees fed on sugar syrup did not live as long as those feeding off their own honey.   She argues that the minerals and proteins in honey are vital supplements to  the proteins derived from the pollen and are crucial to healthy larval development.  By contrast, white sugar may retain a residue of chemicals from the processing of cane or beet sugar to a granular form. 

A third study concluded that different food sources have differing influences on the digestive tract of bees, especially in the midgut epithelial layer – honey has no harmful effect while adding yeast or malt to sugar syrup had the worst impact.

A fourth study headed by Gene Robinson focused on gene activity in  response to feeding with honey, sucrose and HFCS.  Hundreds of genes showed differences in activity in bees consuming honey compared to sucrose or HFCS, and in particular activities linked to protein-metabolism, brain-signaling and immune defense.  “Our results parallel suggestive findings in humans,” Robinson said. “It seems that in both bees and humans sugar is not sugar – different carbohydrate sources can act differently on the body.” 

In 2013, May Berenbaum concurred  that some substances in honey increase the activity of genes that help beak down potentially toxic substances such as pesticides, substances that are missing in sugar.  

Finally sugar has a different PH to honey and lacks the enzymes of the latter.  “When you change the PH in a bee hive,” James Zitting wrote, “it affects the finely balanced world of the little bugs and weakens the colony. When they track pesticides and fungicides into the hive, the life within the bee bread is affected.” 

In summary, it appears that feeding  sugar syrup creates larger numbers of bees in the spring who are smaller in size, lighter in weight, live shorter lives and are more susceptible to disease.  I have to ask if there is a relationship between sugar syrup and the ability of bees to resist varroa mites.

The point is that hobbyists can conduct these kind of experiments, unlike commercial beekeepers who cannot afford to take such risks because of the potential financial implications. Tom Seeley, for example, begins his  presentation of Darwinian beekeeping by stressing that it is not suitable for a commercial enterprise. And when Dr. Eva Crane made her second visit to the US in 1957, during which she travelled some 18 000 miles by plane,10 000 miles by car, slept in 38 beds and met only one other traveler from Europe (in Mexico!) she observed, after giving one of her 25 lectures to a group of beekeepers in California, most of whom ran 10 000 hives or more, “I felt that the intricacies of individual bees must seem rather irrelevant to them.”  

Incidentally, Eva’s first trans-Atlantic flight in 1953 in a propeller-driven Lockheed Constellation took 18 hours, with re-fueling stops in Shannon, Reykjavik, an  army base in Newfoundland, and Boston, before arriving at New York City.  A similar flight fourteen years later, this time to Halifax, took five hours.  

So, first, why are we feeding sugar syrup?  Is it simply because ‘that is the way it has always been done?’ Secondly, I for one would like to see increased input from hobbyists in the advice columns of journals and newsletters, the majority of the readers of which are small scale operators even if they have less colonies in total compared to the bigger guys.   Bob Tatro’s articles in the electronic edition of this newsletter are a good example.  And finally, when we read articles submitted by large-scale beekeepers, do we ask what kind of operation the provider runs, what his or her  objectives might be, and whether they are pertinent to our own undertaking,  before adopting them wholesale? 

Out of necessity new beekeepers adopt wholesale the suggestions, routines and processes of their instructors and mentors.  A personal example.  In the first of my bee classes we would venture into the apiary to discuss the location of a hive.  I would point out that my hives all face south east (or they did at the time) because I wanted them to get the morning sun, and it happened to suit the layout of the bee yard.  What most new beekeepers heard, and later stoutly defended, is that a hive has to face south east … rather than that this was my decision based on local circumstances.  And I was at fault for not clarifying what is recommended versus what was a personal choice.   

After a while (five years seems to be about average) beekeepers learn to read a frame of bees and make decisions based on the evidence before them  rather than on preconceived notions and procedures.  It is soon after this, I suggest, that beekeepers need to question almost everything they initially took for granted and to make decisions based on their experience, their observations, their reading and their objectives.  

If you decide to feed sugar in the fall, I hope you do so for a clearly defined reason and not ‘because everyone else does it.’  Ask enough questions and you might find that the oven is now big enough after all.