Author: Jeremy

 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. 

In this season of gifts, both given and received, it is appropriate to consider the bounty we receive from the  bees. The ultimate largesse is to have been chosen by the bees, a process described quite beautifully by Heidi Herman in the 2018 Beekeepers Annual.  “Should a time come when they call you, I fancy that you will heed them and invite them into your life.  They might arrive as a swarm since they are very capable of divining your soul’s inclinations, and they might change your life and you will never look back and will dwell in the joy of it.  I’d say it is probable, and wish it greatly for you.” 

Bee people are significantly more numerous than beekeepers, by which  I mean those who are aware of the presence and significance of honey bees without feeling the need to manage them directly.   History suggests such people were more numerous when agriculture was dominant and bees were sacred, offering a spiritual connection to nature, if not the cosmos.  This was most evident in the late middle Ages, when boles were built into the foundations of most monasteries to hold skeps, the monks lovingly tended to the occupants, and besides the products of the hive, and because there was no knowledge of how they reproduced, bees were symbolic of a mystifying virgin birth. As one Catholic site explains,  “Since virginity is a virtue we find exemplified to its highest capacity in Our Lady, the bee quite naturally becomes one of Her symbols.”

With the Age of Reason spirits were banished  from nature as we supposedly  took dominion over the earth, to the extent that even honey bees fell victim to the laws of industry and the production line. At 1:30 pm on September 21, the climate clock unveiled in New York City by artists Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd, warned that there were 7 years, 101 days, 17 hours, 29 minutes and 22 seconds until Earth’s carbon budget is depleted, based on current emission rates. According to the artists, a total depletion will engender even more flooding, wildfires, worsening famine, increased air pollution, greater concentrations of chemicals, and extensive human displacement.  In October a number of scientific organizations added to the predictions of Sir David Attenborough that it is now too late to stop climate change; we can only hope to mitigate the damage.   

It is my hope that, in this time of great diminishing, the bees will not give up on us in the way that we gave up on them. 

Whether you were chosen by the bees,  became  involved accidentally or made a deliberate choice, there are two significant gifts we can share with the increasing number of bee people.  In an age of rapid environmental degradation that threatens an entire planet, and in the words of the C16th French cleric, St. Francis de Sales, “the bee collects honey from flowers in such a way as to do the least damage or destruction to them, and he(sic)  leaves them whole, undamaged and fresh, just as he found them.” Secondly,  in an age of divisiveness and intolerance, the honey bee offers us a glimpse of the beauty of interdependence in which communal interests and the well being of all are aligned.

Beekeeping, at its best, is both a symbiotic relationship between humankind and the natural world and a gentle reminder of our short time on this earth.  Bee colonies are not necessarily utopian societies but they have flourished for at least four thousand times longer than have modern humans.  The honey bees are our teachers, if we allow them to be so, and in this season of hope and celebration my wish is that we re-discover the gifts that come with a healing of the communal soul and a reminder of what love means. 

I wince every time I hear that bees are responsible for one out of every three bites of food we eat.  The self-focus thus displayed is destructive, penurious and hurtful. 

Surely this assertion has been useful in promoting an awareness of the importance of bees to our food sources, yet I have still to find an explanation as to how that statistic was calculated.  Sometimes the critical word is pollinators, or bees,  or honey bees.  Sometimes it expressly excludes grass-based food sources that are wind pollinated, like wheat, oats and rice; other times fruit and vegetables are specified.  What are the data on which this statement is based, and who did the calculation?  Even David Suzuki wrote, in 2014, “Some experts say one of every three bites of food we eat depends on them,” (my emphasis) without clarifying who these ‘experts’ are. 

It is fast assuming the mythic proportions of the statement misattributed to Einstein : “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” What Einstein did say is that  “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

But there is a bigger reason why that phrase causes me to shudder.  We look at the bees from our point of view only – that they exist primarily to provide us with food, and we have no obligation in return.  It  focuses on what we consume rather than the way the food the bees eat is toxic because of the way we grow ours.

In an essay titled Standing By Words, written in 1983, Wendell Berry describes an article in the spring 1979 issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, in which the authors consider the transformation of American agriculture “from an art form into a science.” They cite the modern history of milk production, in particular the ‘entirely successful’ effort to transform the dairy cow from the original family companion ‘into an appropriate manufacturing unit of the twentieth century for the efficient transformation of unprocessed feed into food for man.’  As evidence they cite the use of ‘nutrition’ to decrease the numbers of cows while increasing the yield of milk, thus producing savings for the public.   The ultimate justification, it seems, is measured in dollars. 

Berry calls this ‘internal accounting,’ and suggests that there is also an ‘external accounting’ which results in a net loss.  Examples include first the small family dairies that were forced out of business and the consequent break down of community forums, secondly the industrialization of agriculture with the consequent soil compaction and erosion, chemical pollution and  obliteration of plant species, and thirdly the loss of any consideration of the cow as a fellow creature, a ‘companion,’ as she was once regarded. 

Considering the honey bees as ‘responsible for one in three of every bites’ is an example of internal accounting.  A more comprehensive view acknowledges our responsibly in maintaining, even regenerating, an environment in which they can operate successfully, as well as the essential part the bees play in pollinating plants that are not food sources for us, notably the  billions of trees that re-process the excess carbon products we produce.  As beekeeping assumes industrial portions in the US in particular, can we maintain our relationship with bees as ‘fellow creatures?’ 

In the 1980’s I would take students on three day excursions to a private game reserve which covered 6 000 acres in the north western corner of South Africa.  It was called Lapalala (Place of the Leopard) and is today a thriving wilderness school. One of the exercises was to collect aquatic species (plant and animal) in the pristine Palala river and develop a diagram to show how each  was dependent on the others for its existence.  The final step was to erase one of the inter-species links and  demonstrate how the interdependent chain quickly began to collapse. 

In the same way all pollinators are a critical part of a healthy, long-term global environment and we reduce their role to food providers at our peril.

Something else that makes me shudder is receiving a mass produced letter that begins, “Dear Jeremy.”   Am I supposed to think that the computer knows and cares for me, rather than operates on totally impersonal  algorithms that spit out my name?  If it is supposed to make me feel cared for it has the opposite effect – I feel manipulated – and such letters are quickly discarded.   This is an ethical issue, one of integrity, which I cannot relate to honey bees, and having thus vented I won’t pursue it further in this chronicle …

For most of our history we have lived under an  omnipresent  consciousness of our mortality. Pandemics  were only one cause of early deaths that haunted day-to-day life.  Only in the nineteenth century, with improvements in sanitation in particular  (at least for the more affluent, who could afford the flushing toilet with a ballcock invented by Thomas Crapper,) did mortal insecurity wane, barring such episodic ravages as tuberculosis and syphilis in the C19th, the Spanish Flu and AIDs in the C20th  and ebola and  corvid-19 in this one. To the mass deaths caused by these diseases we can add war, genocide, terrorism, opiates and guns.

But let’s go back 364 years.  In 1656 the Spanish painter, Diego Velázquez, was commissioned by the Habsburg King, Phliip IV, to paint Las Meninas (‘The Ladies-in-Waiting’) possibly the most closely analyzed painting of all time.  On the surface it is an apotheosis of happiness and confidence; with the benefit of hindsight it captures the tragedy of the age. Its complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted.

The center of the picture is the five-year-old, self-possessed Infanta, Margarita Teresa, attended by two maids, in whom rested the dynastic hopes of the Hapsburg dynasty –  three of her siblings did not survive childhood and the only brother who did (the later Emperor Charles II) displayed the ruinous disabilities that resulted from the family’s inbreeding – Margarita’s father had married his niece, for example. 

Meanwhile, the court of the Holy Roman Empire in Vienna wanted a dynastic marriage to strengthen the Spanish and Austrian branches of the House of Habsburg in the face of the rising French kingdom under the Bourbon King, Louis XIV (who was married to Margarita Teresa’s half-sister.)

Thus, at the age of 15, for diplomatic reasons,  Margarita Teresa was married to the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, who was 30 years her senior, her maternal uncle and her paternal cousin. The Viennese celebrations of the imperial marriage were among the most splendid of the Baroque era and lasted almost two years.

Thus was combined two of the most influential families in Europe and it should have been a fairy tale existence. But, despite having access to the best that medicine could offer, only one of Margarita’s four children survived infancy. The Empress believed that Jews were to blame for her children’s deaths and she persuaded her husband to expel them from Vienna and destroy their synagogue, replacing it with a cathedral. 

In 1672, in a weakened state, she died from complications of bronchitis.  She was 21 years old. 

Ninety years earlier, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Massacre of the Innocents, in which soldiers maraud through a village kicking in doors and raiding houses in search of, it would appear, animals and fowl that are being butchered. But x-ray photography has revealed that someone later sanitized the painting. A package on the lap of a woman was originally a dead baby; a goose dangled by the neck about to be stabbed was once a baby dangled by the arm; a flock of birds being butchered was once swaddled infants.  And so it goes. 

Bruegel’s world was one in  which children died (60 per cent never reached the  age of 16,) soldiers pillaged, sacked, burned and slaughtered, and beggars were leprous and deformed. Yet whoever redacted the painting wanted to show an artist and society of great sensibility who placed small people center stage. 

At one level these masterpieces are a poignant reminder of how well we have it compared to our predecessors, which is not a bad prompt in these dreary days of the pandemic.  

On August 6th, in the series  To the Best of Our Knowledge on NPR,  the author Heather Swan described honey bees as ‘a utopian society.’  A number of books present honey bees as ‘cute, anthropomorphic icons of busy self-sacrificing individuals,’ as Jurgen Tautz writes in the preface to the English edition of The Buzz About Bees. By contrast, David Papke loaned me his copy of The Dark Side of the Hive : The Evolution of the Imperfect Honey Bee, published two years ago by two respected researchers,  Robin Moritz in Germany  and Robin Crewe in South Africa. They acknowledge that while the colony is indeed a marvel of harmonious, efficient organization, it also involves conflict and failure. Like any complex social system, honey bees are prone to error, robbery, cheating and social parasitism, especially at the individual level,  even as the colony gets by remarkably well as a social organism.

The complex and enigmatic composition of a colony of honey bees raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the informed beekeeper and the bees.  As with Velázquez’s portrayal of the Infanta, one can see a sublime superorganism or  a prosaic society adapting to every day pressures. .   One can admire  the sanitized idyll of a small village or, as Tom Seeley does so well, one can strip off the paint and get back to the original, back to basics with all of its imperfections, back to what works for the bees rather than for the beekeeper. 

The Dark Side of the Hive is inspirational reading; for me it stands in the company of Taut’s The Buzz of the Bees or Tom Seeley’s Honey Bee Democracy. I do wish it were not quite so expensive!  It needs to be read slowly, reflected upon frequently, and perhaps shared with a group of like-minded people as it explores the individual mistakes, maladaptations and evolutionary dead-ends of workers, drones and queens.   

The book might have shattered my illusions of a colonial paradise but it significantly deepened both my understanding of and appreciation for these amazing creatures. I have to say that, for me, it serves the same purpose as  the pandemic which has shattered many of the illusions of an omnipotent United States to reveal the shortcomings of a society in denial – the underfunding of public health, an inefficient health care system, policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery, leaving minorities vulnerable, the decades-long shredding of our social safety net, forcing  essential workers to risk their health for livelihood, and social media platforms that sow partisanship, misinformation and conspiracy theories. 

Finally, The Dark Side of the Hive caused me to reflect only own reading history.  When asked to recommend a book to a new beekeeper, I tend towards one that succinctly and coherently outlines the basics. This work by Moritz and Crewe is not one I would recommend to a beginner.  Yet, knowing no better, one of the first bee books I read was The Buzz About Bees, which I would never recommend to a nubee today. Yet it didn’t put me off. I know now that despite how little of it I understood,  there was an  instinctive realization that it was important.  The intricacy of honey bee society was compelling rather than foreboding, and The Buzz went on my list of books to come back to, something I am in the middle of doing right now.  As Richard Taylor writes in his remarkable The Joys of Beekeeping, “Many are  called but few are chosen.”  Perhaps ‘being chosen’ involves one’s acceptance of imperfection and mystery, of fallibility and deficiency, as well as  of idyllic bliss. 

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Latest comments

27.11 | 16:01

Moustache, wax? Of course. Now if all of the drones had mustaches …

27.11 | 12:43

One of our club members says he got into beekeeping in order to mak… 

13.08 | 05:43

Good morning Mr. Barnes, I’m so pleased to see the best of history teach… 

21.05 | 07:18

Its pleasure to read about Boy Scout here. He plays vital role to serv… 

• Dandelions
• A Question of Time
• The Insect World 
• A Journey
• Birds and Bees
• Bees and Joy
• Bees and Computers
• The Birthday Cake
• Our Earth on a DVD
• Bees on Show
• Murphy’s Laws 
• Bees and Community
• Murahwa’s Hill
• World in a Village
• Be Prepared
• Grandparenting
• Natural Disasters
• Teased by my Wife 
• Our Patron Saints
• Many Intelligences
• Sleepy Hollow
• HBAD 
• The Jig Saw Puzzle
• Glacier Nat. Park
• A Gift of Liberty
• Buddha & Power Point
• A Beekeepers’ Traits
• Plants are Important
• Some Fun Facts …?
• Lessons from Chile
• Bees in the Heat
• Note to the Bees
• Learning Disabled?
• Fern Valley
• Baselines
• Beekeeper’s Pupil
• Obsessed Beekeeping
• A New Paradigm
• A Dot on a Page
• Plasticity
• True Value
• Dwight the Drone
• Progress
• The Crazed Beekeeper
• Bees and Children
• Those who Provide
• Good & Bad Actors
• Complexity
• Globalization
• Botany of Desire
• “Non-Invasive” bees
• A Green Cathedral
• Inside Out
• Big, fast and glossy
• A Route Map
• 1 Lb of Honey
• Beekeeping Skills
• Farm Show 2015
• Fail to Succeed
• Anthropocene Age
• Boats and Bees 
• Zen of Beekeeping
• Bees and Maps
• Creativity
• A Papal Message
• A Bee’s Thanksgiving
• Paris 2015
• Learning from Bees
• Local Bees
• A Jar of Honey
• Hierarchies
• A Matter of Time
• Bees & Marriage
• Rat Park
• Eldership
• Raising the Bar
• Balm for the Soul
• Toxic Soup
• Fouling our Hive 1
• Fouling our Hive 2
• Fouling Our Hive 3
• Too Big 
• A New Canary
• Learning Well
• uBuntu
• Carpe Diem
• Small is Big
• Neolithic Rev
• Ode to Joy
• Less Colorful
• Fiddling
• Gandhi
• Beekeeper’s Wife
• The Simple Life
• Battle of the Bugs
• Farming v Population
• Animal School
• Functional Bees
• A Moral Obligation
• Brain Power
• Communalism
• Romanticism
• Nature Works
• Prophets and Wizards
• Books and Bees
• These Truths
• Power of Normal
• The Workers
• The Hot War
• Hot War.2
• Apiholicism
• Fluidity
• If
• An Apiholic
• Tugs and Tankers
• You are a Beekeeper 
• A Toxic Division
• Gratitude
• Jean-Paul Marat
• Peterkin Papers
• Apocalypse
• Perception
• Science and Culture
• Bees & the Pandemic
• Utopia?
• A Test …
• A model for Society
• Cutting the Ham
• Gifts from the Bees
• The Night Before Xma
• One Bite in Three
• Crosswords …
• Gordon’s Ladder
• Regenerative BK
• Right to Life
• Learning in Place
• Grandmothers
• J’Accuse
• Serendipity
• Sugar Blues
• Synergy
• Chaos in Corfu
• Butterfly
• Man and Lion
• Puzzle Solution
• Wolf Eyes
• Drone Brigade
• Terroir of the Bees
• Bald Eagles
• City Trees
• Umwelt
• An Abundance of lies
• Lies Part 2
• Toxic House Syndrome

Below are the directions for a hive inspection.

1. Read the following instructions before doing anything.

2. Write your name on the top of this sheet. 

3. If you are going to wear a suit and veil, it should be black.  The bees are used to animals with black fur checking out their hive. 

4.  Knock on the side of the hive with a stick, then put your ear close to the entrance and listen to see how long it takes the bees to resume a gentle hum.

 5. Do not use smoke.  This way you test the true temperament of the colony.

6. Do not be afraid to gesticulate wildly so as to frighten off any inquisitive bees.

7. Shout out loudly, so the bees can hear you, “I am the leader in following instructions.”  This will let the bees know just who is in charge. 

8. Pull out the middle frame as fast as you can so as not to give the bees a chance to respond.

9. Shake the frame hard so as to knock off the bees, which will allow you to see the cells without any bees obstructing your view. 

10. If you see the queen, throw her into the air to test her ability to fly in the event of a swarm.

11. Replace the frames in a different order.  This prompts the bees to clean up after you more quickly. 

12. Do not test for varroa : the last thing you want to do is to kill the bees which are essential to controlling the invaders.

13. After you have re-assembled the hive, give it another hit with the stick, letting the bees know that you are still the boss.

14. If the bees pursue you as you walk away from the hive, turn and face them.  The last thing you want to do is to suggest to the bees that you don’t know what you are doing. 

15. Now that you have finished reading all of the instructions, do only #’s 1 and 2, and sit quietly by the front of the hive enjoying the activity of the bees as they come and go.

For most of our history we have lived under an  omnipresent  consciousness of our mortality. Pandemics  were only one cause of early deaths that haunted day-to-day life.  Only in the nineteenth century, with improvements in sanitation in particular  (at least for the more affluent, who could afford the flushing toilet with a ballcock invented by Thomas Crapper,) did mortal insecurity wane, barring such episodic ravages as tuberculosis and syphilis in the C19th, the Spanish Flu and AIDs in the C20th  and ebola and  corvid-19 in this one. To the mass deaths caused by these diseases we can add war, genocide, terrorism, opiates and guns.

But let’s go back 364 years.  In 1656 the Spanish painter, Diego Velázquez, was commissioned by the Habsburg King, Phliip IV, to paint Las Meninas (‘The Ladies-in-Waiting’) possibly the most closely analyzed painting of all time.  On the surface it is an apotheosis of happiness and confidence; with the benefit of hindsight it captures the tragedy of the age. Its complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted.

The center of the picture is the five-year-old, self-possessed Infanta, Margarita Teresa, attended by two maids, in whom rested the dynastic hopes of the Hapsburg dynasty –  three of her siblings did not survive childhood and the only brother who did (the later Emperor Charles II) displayed the ruinous disabilities that resulted from the family’s inbreeding – Margarita’s father had married his niece, for example. 

Meanwhile, the court of the Holy Roman Empire in Vienna wanted a dynastic marriage to strengthen the Spanish and Austrian branches of the House of Habsburg in the face of the rising French kingdom under the Bourbon King, Louis XIV (who was married to Margarita Teresa’s half-sister.)

Thus, at the age of 15, for diplomatic reasons,  Margarita Teresa was married to the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, who was 30 years her senior, her maternal uncle and her paternal cousin. The Viennese celebrations of the imperial marriage were among the most splendid of the Baroque era and lasted almost two years.

Thus was combined two of the most influential families in Europe and it should have been a fairy tale existence. But, despite having access to the best that medicine could offer, only one of Margarita’s four children survived infancy. The Empress believed that Jews were to blame for her children’s deaths and she persuaded her husband to expel them from Vienna and destroy their synagogue, replacing it with a cathedral. 

In 1672, in a weakened state, she died from complications of bronchitis.  She was 21 years old. 

Ninety years earlier, Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Massacre of the Innocents, in which soldiers maraud through a village kicking in doors and raiding houses in search of, it would appear, animals and fowl that are being butchered. But x-ray photography has revealed that someone later sanitized the painting. A package on the lap of a woman was originally a dead baby; a goose dangled by the neck about to be stabbed was once a baby dangled by the arm; a flock of birds being butchered was once swaddled infants.  And so it goes. 

Bruegel’s world was one in  which children died (60 per cent never reached the  age of 16,) soldiers pillaged, sacked, burned and slaughtered, and beggars were leprous and deformed. Yet whoever redacted the painting wanted to show an artist and society of great sensibility who placed small people center stage. 

At one level these masterpieces are a poignant reminder of how well we have it compared to our predecessors, which is not a bad prompt in these dreary days of the pandemic.  

On August 6th, in the series  To the Best of Our Knowledge on NPR,  the author Heather Swan described honey bees as ‘a utopian society.’  A number of books present honey bees as ‘cute, anthropomorphic icons of busy self-sacrificing individuals,’ as Jurgen Tautz writes in the preface to the English edition of The Buzz About Bees. By contrast, David Papke loaned me his copy of The Dark Side of the Hive : The Evolution of the Imperfect Honey Bee, published two years ago by two respected researchers,  Robin Moritz in Germany  and Robin Crewe in South Africa. They acknowledge that while the colony is indeed a marvel of harmonious, efficient organization, it also involves conflict and failure. Like any complex social system, honey bees are prone to error, robbery, cheating and social parasitism, especially at the individual level,  even as the colony gets by remarkably well as a social organism.

The complex and enigmatic composition of a colony of honey bees raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the informed beekeeper and the bees.  As with Velázquez’s portrayal of the Infanta, one can see a sublime superorganism or  a prosaic society adapting to every day pressures. .   One can admire  the sanitized idyll of a small village or, as Tom Seeley does so well, one can strip off the paint and get back to the original, back to basics with all of its imperfections, back to what works for the bees rather than for the beekeeper. 

The Dark Side of the Hive is inspirational reading; for me it stands in the company of Taut’s The Buzz of the Bees or Tom Seeley’s Honey Bee Democracy. I do wish it were not quite so expensive!  It needs to be read slowly, reflected upon frequently, and perhaps shared with a group of like-minded people as it explores the individual mistakes, maladaptations and evolutionary dead-ends of workers, drones and queens.   

The book might have shattered my illusions of a colonial paradise but it significantly deepened both my understanding of and appreciation for these amazing creatures. I have to say that, for me, it serves the same purpose as  the pandemic which has shattered many of the illusions of an omnipotent United States to reveal the shortcomings of a society in denial – the underfunding of public health, an inefficient health care system, policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery, leaving minorities vulnerable, the decades-long shredding of our social safety net, forcing  essential workers to risk their health for livelihood, and social media platforms that sow partisanship, misinformation and conspiracy theories. 

Finally, The Dark Side of the Hive caused me to reflect only own reading history.  When asked to recommend a book to a new beekeeper, I tend towards one that succinctly and coherently outlines the basics. This work by Moritz and Crewe is not one I would recommend to a beginner.  Yet, knowing no better, one of the first bee books I read was The Buzz About Bees, which I would never recommend to a nubee today. Yet it didn’t put me off. I know now that despite how little of it I understood,  there was an  instinctive realization that it was important.  The intricacy of honey bee society was compelling rather than foreboding, and The Buzz went on my list of books to come back to, something I am in the middle of doing right now.  As Richard Taylor writes in his remarkable The Joys of Beekeeping, “Many are  called but few are chosen.”  Perhaps ‘being chosen’ involves one’s acceptance of imperfection and mystery, of fallibility and deficiency, as well as of idyllic bliss. 

 Two things caught my eye on November, 22nd, 2021.  The first was a comment by Uber manager Scooty Braun, reacting to the public spat over Taylor Swift’s music : “We live in a time of toxic division and people thinking that social media is the appropriate place to air out on each other and not have conversations.”  The second came  in an address to the Anti Defamation League by the British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen : “Just think what Goebbels could have done with Facebook.” 

Ironically, on the same day 232 years ago in Boston,  James Madison published the tenth of The Federalist Papers  in which he addressed  the question of how to reconcile citizens whose interests were contrary  to the interests of the community as a whole. The nature of man, he suggested, makes factions inevitable— as long as people hold differing opinions, have differing amounts of wealth and own differing amount of property, they will form alliances with those similar to them and will sometimes work against the public interest and infringe upon the rights of others.  Recognizing that the country’s wealthiest property owners formed a minority, Madison feared that the unpropertied classes would come together to form a majority faction that gained control of the government.  A century later Karl Marx was to express the same concern but offered a very different solution. 

Madison’s fear, to steal a phrase from a podcast by Jonah Goldberg,  was too much pluribus and not enough unum.   His solution was a large and diverse republic, in part because it would be difficult to spread dissension over such a vast area.  The U.S. Constitution included mechanisms to slow things down, to let passions cool and to encourage reflection and deliberation by means of elected representatives.  In other words, to bring the ‘crystalized brain’ into play by deliberately and wisely examining issues from a wide variety of life experiences. 

Size and distance did not curtail the  passions that led to the Civil War or the resentments of the slave community in the US, to the feelings of injustice among many women or to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914,  but on the western front of the First World War the vulnerability of telegraph lines resulted in the development of wireless communications, from which emerged the radio.  The success of Adolf Hitler is explained in large part by the invention of the microphone and public broadcasting, which meant that his  voice and his message could reach into every home.   Television followed the radio although, unlike sound movies, the production  of TV sets was  halted by the Second World War; nevertheless  by the time President Eisenhower took office about one half of the homes in the United States had sets in their living room. 

The point is that radio, television and the movies were expected to make the world more connected, thus engendering greater understanding and awareness which would in turn  be good for democracy.  Certainly public media played a critical role in kindling public support for the Civil Rights movement in the US, in undermining support for America’s involvement in the Vietnam War and in cementing opposition to the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe after the Second World War. 

What has been labeled ‘the outrage culture’ can be tracked back to the 1980’s with the increased traction of  cable television and talk radio.  New levels were reached with the appearance of Friendster, Myspace and Facebook between 2002 – 4, each of which was designed to help friends connect, albeit through highly curated versions of themselves.   In 2006 Twitter’s Timeline provided an unending stream of content which unwittingly provided the  spark for contagious outbursts, most of them irate and accusatory.   Facebook followed with the News Feed, the Like button, and in response to Twitter’s Retweet button, the Share button.  The coup de grace came in 2013 with the use of algorithms to find headlines that generated the highest click-through rate. 

Thus was created the metric for the popularity, rather than the validity, of content.  Any post by any producer would remain at the top of the feeds as long as it generated engagement – a personal blog appeared  as credible as a story from the New York Times, a car  accident might appear as newsworthy as genocide in Rwanda, and Donald Trump is masterful at using his twitter feed to capture the news cycle.  

Social media, besides having become a powerful accelerant for anyone who wants to start a fire,  has the feel of too much communication and too little conversation; of too much connection and profound loneliness. And because we get angry before we think rationally, immediate gratification is no longer fast enough. 

Certainly there have been successes, for example the #MeToo movement, but many on-line discussions, often with anonymous strangers, have been shown to be more incensed and less civil.  Networks of partisans create world views that are more extreme, disinformation campaigns spread lies and bigotry,  and violent ideologies lure recruits to some of the most reviled ideologies of the last century – nazism and white supremacy – which have been  given a second life by young people desperate for a sense of belonging. This is the same generation, two thirds of whom have never heard of Auschwitz, which is losing faith in democracy.

The Age of Reason, Cohen argues, is ending.  “Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in trouble.  Autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march.”

Why is this important to us?  First it feels as if we are living in a perpetual state of fluidity, without the necessary  time to process relentless items in our in-boxes in the light of the accumulated and tested wisdom of humanity. The latest cat picture, scandal, political intrigue or public shaming dominates the headlines without an understanding of the longer term context to provide perspective.  Politics in the US has become particularly acrimonious, the Brexit debate and lead-up to the December 12 election in the UK was acerbic, and in the last month there seems to have been a significant increase in mass shootings to the point that there is one every day somewhere in the world, many of which no longer make the headlines. 

The second reason involves another synchronicity.   2006, the year of Twitter’s Timeline, was also the year in which Colony Collapse Disorder hit the headlines, and no doubt the Like and Retweet buttons account in part for the significant public interest in the plight of  honey bees.  Some responded by wanting to keep bees themselves, and those who continued through the initial romantic perceptions discovered, as with many other activities, opportunities for moments of quiet and reflection, of learning age-old skills, of connecting with something that has withstood the toils of time – in the case of honey bees, millions of years – as a counterpoise to the haste and confusion of the post-Reason era.  

This, perhaps, is one of the many reasons why Tom Seeley titled his 1998 book, The Wisdom of the Hive. Wisdom is difficult to define because it encompasses so much – we recognize it when we encounter it – but common factors include an understanding of what is right combined with actions based on knowledge, experience, common sense and insight. 

That sounds to me a whole lot like a colony of honey bees and not much like our human cyber colony.  Nor are there any obvious solutions; indeed it may be easier to help the bees than it is to recover civility in the public forum.