Author: Jeremy

On June 5, 2019, a ceremony was held in Portsmouth to mark the 75th anniversary  of the launching of the flotilla that was to become known as D-Day.  A number of world leaders were at the ceremony, including Angela Merkel from Germany, but the focus was on those who served, including some two hundred veterans, those who built the landing craft, manned the radios and the radar, deciphered the German codes, packed the parachutes, and flew the planes that pulled the gliders carrying the parachutists (one of whom, aged 97, repeated his drop into Normandy the next day.)  Yes, Donald Trump read a poem and Theresa May read a letter from a soldier who did not survive, but there were no self-serving speeches – the focus on ‘the workers,’ whose courage, heroism and sacrifice was unquestioned, gave it an emotional power that was universal. 

With remarkable simplicity, Queen Elizabeth, herself 93 and of that generation, said “It is with humility and pleasure … that I say to you all, thank you.”  

Similarly the third week of July was the 50th anniversary of Apollo XI and the moon landing. The space suits worn by the three astronauts were composed of 21 layers of nested fabric, meticulously stitched together by teams of women from Playtex, the company that brought us the “Cross Your Heart” bra.   The capsule was heat-proofed by filling 370 000 cells with a special epoxy, sealed one at a time by ‘gunners’ who trained for two weeks before having access to the heat shield.  With re-entry speeds of 25 000 mph and temperatures of 5000 degrees Fahrenheit, just one bad cell could have been fateful.  Apollo’s parachutes were sewn and folded by hand; the three people licensed to do this were considered so essential that NASA forbade them from traveling in the same car together. 

The story of the race to the moon is told invariably from the perspective of the astronauts, which is enthralling and adventurous but also narrow.  More than 410 000 people worked on the Apollo mission (more than the number of Americans who fought in Vietnam over the same period,) yet their various roles have been largely forgotten.  Every hour of the spaceflight was supported by one million hours of preparation, (the latter is equivalent to the work of ten individual life times) and each of those workers, in each of those hours, knew that their product had to be perfect if the mission was to be successful.   Which is was. 

Two weeks prior to the D-Day celebrations and seven weeks prior to the Apollo commemoration, Mary and I were in Rochester, NY, for a wedding. Mary toured the Susan B. Anthony Museum (the house in which she spent the latter part of her life) after which we went in search for Ms. Anthony’s grave.  Born into a Quaker family, Susan was a social reformer, abolitionist and women’s rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage  movement  ( 2019 is the centenary of women gaining the right to vote in the US.)  In recognition of her many achievements  Susan’s 80th birthday was celebrated in the White House at the invitation of President William McKinley and she became the first female citizen to be depicted on U.S. coinage when her portrait appeared on the 1979 dollar coin.

She is buried in the Hope Cemetery in Rochester, a 200 acre plot with literally thousands of graves, most of them marked with steles 20 feet high, big gated crypts, or massive blocks of engraved granite.   Susan, by contrast, lies next to her sister, their headstones perhaps 2’ high with no more than their names and dates of birth and death on them. Apparently this had been her insistence before she died. 

Coincidentally Frederick Douglas, the nineteenth century civil rights campaigner,  is buried not far away, and he too had a simple memorial although his children later enlarged it. 

The irony was startling.  Susan B. Anthony is surrounded by the massive tombs of clearly affluent people and yet she, who had achieved so much of national importance, lies in humility, allowing her achievements to speak for themselves.   She was a Quaker to the core – modest, lacking in pride or vanity, her pleasure coming from the work she did for the benefit of others.  ”I do not care what you believe,” Thich Nhat Hanh has written;  “I do care how you behave.”

The term ‘queen bee’ is a misnomer in that she does not rule the colony; rather she is a superb ovipositor with no maternal instincts. Control of the colony rests with the workers : they are the ones who determine cell size and thus the ratio of workers to drones; they select the larvae to feed extra amounts of royal jelly if a new queen is needed; they determine when to swarm and who will leave the hive with the existing queen; they determine if and when new queens should be released from their cells; it is they who control the proportions of resources brought into the hive, and it is they who keep the queen and the drones alive. 

This is not to say the queen is not important.  After all she carries 50 per cent of the genes that will be transmitted to her female progeny, and the traits of those genes, together with her fecundity, are vital in determining the success and health of the super organism. But my heroes are those ‘workers’ who have made a significant difference in my life – parents, teachers, colleagues and friends; it is they who I celebrate with both ‘humility and pleasure.’  

While casualty figures are notoriously difficult to verify, the accepted estimate is that the Allies suffered 10,000 total casualties on D-Day itself. The highest casualties occurred on Omaha beach, where 2,000 U.S. troops were killed, wounded or went missing; at Sword Beach and Gold Beach, where 2,000 British troops suffered similar fates; and at Juno beach, where 340 Canadian soldiers were killed and another 574 wounded.

In terms of the larger campaign, “9,388 Americans, husbands, fathers, sons, brothers, sweethearts either died at Normandy or in the liberation of France” according to Mark Shields, on the NPR Newshour program  one day after the D-Day anniversary,  “And it was a time in this country of the we generation, not the me generation.  We had 20 million victory gardens that civilians built that provided 40 percent of the vegetables for the whole country.  We rationed everything from gasoline to liquor to cigarettes to butter to meat. And we did it. And all Americans were part of the collective effort, the collective sacrifice.”   The same can be said for Britain and most of the Commonwealth countries.

That sounds like a bee hive to me – the we generation with both a collective effort and a collective sacrifice. 

There is one critical difference.  Unlike a bee hive, those at the top of the we generation set a personal example that was hugely influential..  Consider, for example, the decision of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to stay at Buckingham Palace in the fall of 1940 during the London Blitz, against the advice of the king’s ministers.  In the US, the four sons of President Franklin D Roosevelt all served in combat with distinction. Or the millionaire son of a multimillionaire who asked his father to use his contacts to get him into combat.   That son, who did not qualify physically to serve,  was John F. Kennedy.

We have a young border collie, Seamus, who is a bundle of energy and curiosity, constantly exploring the world through his nose.  He enjoys  long walks and fortunately, as part of the farm, we have a 30 acre field planted with natural grasses, surrounded by 20 acres of woodlands and bounded by a creek.  It’s his playground, and fortunately he is quick to come when called even if that means abandoning reluctantly a fresh pile of deer scat.  

Last week he and I walked to the top of the first rise, a place we have been many times before, and immediately there was a sense that something wasn’t normal. I don’t pretend to have particularly good eye-sight – that ship has long since sailed – nor do I wear glasses for long distance vision, yet I noticed, some 200 yards away,  in the north-east corner of the field where an old timber road enters the woods, a small brown object that normally would not be there.  That’s all it was – an indistinct brown blur – which would have remained unnoticed had I been talking on the phone while taking our walk.

Seamus and I sat down to await developments. 

Part of the skill of beekeeping is recognizing instinctively when something is not right with a colony, and that in turn requires knowing what is normal.   I recall vividly some ten years ago when Ross Conrad was staying over with Mary and I before giving a presentation to our local bee association. A nu-bee came by and joined us as we opened one of my hives.  Ross talked Laura through the inspection and asked insistently if she was certain that the queen was not on the frame before she put it back in the brood box.   Laura looked, and looked again, virtually scanning every bee, before confidently asserting that the queen was not on that piece of foundation. 

I guess we have all done that at one time. Pulling a frame means looking at a blur of activity, none of which seems to make sense initially.  It’s confusing, intimidating, a little scary, takes a long time to move through a  colony, and even then we are not certain what we have seen or whether we have made the right decisions. 

Do it often enough and gradually things fall into place.  Patterns emerge, images become typical, our confidence increases, until eventually all of our senses combine to tell us quickly that all is well with the world.  In other words, we recognize what is normal, and equally important, know instinctively when something is amiss. 

An analogy would be learning to walk.  It’s a trial and error process until eventually we do it so well, so naturally, that it is instinctive, and we give it no further thought until we notice someone with an unusual stride, perhaps a limp, or an awkward gait.   Many years ago Mary and I visited Rory, a nephew of hers, in Vermont, and went for a hike in some of the lower foothills outside of Stowe.  Rory’s girl friend, Lindsay,  had that unusual ability to appear to tread very lightly on the earth.  I have no idea how that impression was created but, following behind, I was fascinated by the illusion. It was the diversion from normal that caught my attention.

Honey bees instinctively know what is normal.  In the swarming process, for example, scout bees search for a new home and, on their return, demonstrate the success of their search by dancing on the outside of the cluster – the more suitable the home the longer and more vigorous  the dance.  This means that each bee has in her mind an image of what is normal – the volume of the space, the size of the entrance, the height above the ground, – irrespective of the dimensions of the home they have recently left. How they develop this ideal is one of the many things that is awe-inspiring about bees, together with how they know when the moisture content of nectar is such that it can be capped, or the long term planning needed to collect and store nectar for the survival of a future generation, or their interpretation, in the dark, of the meanings of a waggle dance.

And what of the brown blur that had originally attracted my attention?  After a short while it trotted into the woods, sporting the distinctive tail of a red fox. I guess that, to him, Seamus and I stuck out as not normal.  And it was a ‘he’ – my eyesight is not that bad. 

Occasionally one is fortunate enough to stumble upon a real treasure trove, one that is not marked with a cross on some dubious map of a Caribbean island. 

Shortly after I joined our county beekeepers’ association I enquired as to when it was founded.  No one knew.  The old timers thought it was some time in the 1950’s – in retrospect they were possibly confusing it with the founding of the Eastern Apicultural Society in 1955.   

Then Judy Brenneman, who had been Secretary/Treasurer for 23  years, mentioned that at the back of one of her cupboards was a box of papers, she wasn’t sure what they were, and would I like to look at it.  The ‘papers’ turned out to be all of the minutes, membership files and financial records of the previous 90 years, including the minutes of the founding meeting, dated March 8, 1919. Five men had met in a house downtown and had voted to form the York County Beekeepers’ Association, with dues of 50c a year.  Dr. Sterner gave a talk on “How to transfer ones colony of bees from an old box hive to a modern hive”  and they agreed to meet again in a month’s time.  By the year’s end there were 22 paid up members.

All of these documents are meticulously recorded in neat, cursive handwriting, and one has to wonder what chronicles the cyber era will leave behind. What resources will members have in one hundred years time to muse over, evaluate and honor the past?  Do we value the present and respect the future sufficiently to make the effort to keep such records? God bless those who did so in York County starting  in 1919. 

One of the results of this discovery was that on March 8, 2019, exactly one hundred years to the day after that first meeting, we held a celebratory centennial banquet, meeting in a venue that is very close to the house in which the first meeting was held, and in a building that was surely familiar to, if not frequented by, those five men.  Hopefully the candle that was lit at that first meeting has been refueled for another one hundred years. 

Papers and documentation are an appropriate analogy for the mystique and fascination of beekeeping.  In The Honey Factory, published last year,  Jurgen Tautz and Diedrich Steen write, “Bees are never boring. A bee colony is a complex organism, rather like a book that one can read again and again each year and find new and interesting stories at each reading.”

And it is more than stories.  The image that comes to mind is a Shakespearian play – hopefully not one of the ten tragedies, nor Much Ado About Nothing, A Comedy of Errors,  or Love’s Labors Lost, appropriate as they might be for some of our experiences with bees. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or A Winter’s Tale would be more uplifting.   

Let’s take the first of the above as an example.  On first reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one is fascinated, if confused, by the story.  As Duke Theseus prepares for his marriage to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, he is interrupted by a courtier who asks the Duke to intervene in a dispute. His daughter, Hermia, will not agree to marry the man her father has chosen because she loves a gentleman named Lysander. The Duke offers Hermia one of two options: she must either die or accept a celibate life as a nun in Diana’s temple.  Naturally upset with the offer, Lysander and Hermia plan to elope; they share their secret with Helena, who is in love with Demetrius, the man whom she was supposed to marry but who seems to have abandoned her in favor of Hermia. At night, Lysander and Hermia escape from Athens but they lose their way in the woods, followed by Demetria, who is followed by Helena.

Are you following along? 

Meanwhile, a group of working men are preparing a play of the tragic love-story of Pyramus and Thisbe to present before the Duke Theseus on his wedding day. Two of those men are Nick Bottom, the weaver, and Flute, the bellows-mender. Nearby, Oberon,  King of the Fairies, has recently quarreled with his queen, Titania. She acquired a magical child from one of her waiting women, and now refuses to hand him over to Oberon to use as a page. To get his revenge on Titania for her disobedience, Oberon sends his fairy servant, Puck, to fetch a purple flower with juice that makes people fall in love with the next creature they see. When Oberon overhears Demetrius mistreating Helena, he tells Puck to anoint Demetrius so that will fall in love with the next person he sees. Puck mistakenly puts the flower juice on the eyes of the sleeping Lysander, who when he is woken by Helena, immediately falls in love with her and rejects Hermia.

And that’s only the end of the second act; there are three more to go, involving, would you believe, Titania falling in love with Nick Bottom who is wearing the head of an ass!

The point is that at first reading it is complex, even nonsensical : much as a new beekeeper trying to sift through the plethora of information presented at the first bee class, unable to recognize that everything is related, everything has a cause and an effect, that it all makes sense in the end.  One has to persist; just as with Bloom’s Taxonomy, there is a basic amount of detail that has to be understood before one can start to use that information – to analyze, synthesize, evaluate and eventually apply it.

On a second reading the roles of the various characters become more clear,  as do the various sub-plots, just as a beekeeper starts to understand the roles of the queen, drone and worker bees as well as the interactions between them, or the sub-plots of say assexual reproduction (swarming)  and the sexual mating of a queen with a number of drones.

A third reading might reveal the complexity of the characters, or the sheer beauty of the language, and we can spend an infinite amount of time parsing each sentence, teasing out different meanings, and making different applications of this fairy tale to our own lives. 

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind,” wrote Shakespeare.  And a little later, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” 

A Midsummer’s Night Dream, like all of Shakespeare’s plays,  portrays recognizable people in situations that all of us experience at one time or another in our lives—love, marriage, death, manipulation, power and powerlessness, fantasy, mourning, guilt, the need to make difficult choices, separation, reunion and reconciliation. It does so with great humanity, tolerance, and wisdom, helping us to understand what it is to be human and how to cope with the problems of being so.  

Similarly those who persevere are invariably captivated by the sheer wonder of a honey bee society and are drawn into the minutia of their lives, each detail of which increases ones understanding of the larger picture. Gradually a larger meaning comes through, stressing the lessons of the natural world and what is lost when we lose that connection, either through ignorance or arrogance.  That is where I am at as I read this ‘book’ for yet another time.

For Tautz and Steen, as expressed so beautifully in their epilog, “The winter cluster is a small example of the general principle that governs the bees community – an unconditional and mutual sharing.  Only while all care for one another in the ‘knowledge’ that they will be cared for themselves, can they be a superorganism.  Is this the message from the bees?  To hold up a world to us in which the Golden Rule – the principle of treating others other we would want to be treated – is a lived reality?”

Fortunately our play ends happily. Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius and Helena are joyfully reunited and agree to share the Duke’s wedding day. Bottom and Flute present their play before the wedding guests and,  as the three couples retire to bed, Puck and the fairies return to bless the palace and its people.

All’s Well That Ends Well.  May it be so with your bees this season. 

Jill Lepore’s most recent book, These Truths, is a tour-de-force. The American experiment, she argues, rests on three ideas that Jefferson called these truths – political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? As she reckons with both the beauty and tragedy of American history, Jill asks whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. 

Along the way (and there are 800 pages of ‘way’) she makes a remarkable observation. “Adams and Jefferson lived in an age of quantification.  It began with the measurement of time.  Time used to be a wheel that turned, and turned again; during the scientific revolution time became a line ….The new use and understanding of time contributed to the idea of progress – if time is a line instead of a circle, things can get better and even better, instead of forever rising and falling in endless cycles, like the seasons.” 

The concept of time as cyclical starts with the earth revolving around the sun, which creates the seasons, to which, over millions of years, all life has evolved and adapted – plants, birds and mammals. Mankind too.  For thousands of years, and especially outside the tropics,  we observed the cycle of spring, summer, autumn and winter, of planting the seeds,  watching the crop mature,  harvesting the bounty and surviving the dearth, waiting for life to re-appear.  In another sense, people were essentially non-transient and lived through a cycle of birth, growth, maturity and death, generation after generation, with no particular expectations of improvement or change. 

Honey bees go through the cycle  of egg, larva, pupa and a mature adult which fertilizes, provides or tends the eggs for the next cycle; or, in a larger sense,  they forage in the spring, reproduce in the early summer, store resources in the autumn, and cluster through the winter, waiting for the first signs of renewed plant life before sending out the foragers and feeding the next generation of brood.  Their purpose is the survival of the colony, and thus of the species, in as strong a form as possible.  This has not changed for some 80 million years, neither in purpose nor in practice. 

But, Ms Lapore suggests, this changed for mankind, and only for mankind, in the eighteenth century, with the predominance of science, reason, the enlightenment and a change in the concept of ‘progress.’  After the Reformation  the word ‘progress’ related to moral improvement, a journey from sin to salvation, from error to truth.  But following the emphasis on reason and science,  progress came to mean technological improvement, and by the twentieth century it had been surpassed by the term ‘innovation.’   The latter is no moral concept – innovation is concerned with novelty, speed and profit, rather than with goodness – and for many, in the age of the atom bomb, progress seemed to be obscene; salvation had not been found in machines despite the wealth of materialism available to many consumers. 

The point is that mankind, and only mankind, has moved from a cyclical concept of time to one that is linear.  We expect to do better than our parents, to learn more, to earn more, to have more. For example, in February, 1946, the New York Times introduced to the American public ENIAC – the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer – which, like the atomic bomb,  had been produced by the military to fight the Second World War, in particular to break codes  and to project weapons trajectories.  Grace Hopper, a professor at Vasar, explained, “It is the current aim to replace, as far as possible, the human brain.”  ENIAC could make calculations one hundred times faster than any earlier machine, and as from 1946 history cannot be fully understood without the concept of computerization.

Six years later, in November, CBS announced that it would predict the result of the presidential election using ‘a giant brain’, namely UNIVAC – the Universal Automatic Computer. Half the size of ENIAC, it was twice as fast. Built for the Census Bureau, the new concept of ‘data processing’ turned people into consumers whose habits could be tracked and whose spending could be predicted.  Just as advertisers could segment the market, so too could political consultants divide voters into different categories and send them separate messages. 

Fast forward thirty years  and the Silicon Valley Entrepreneur became the envy of the world. Many  of the wealthiest people in the world – Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckenburg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, for example – made their billions in computers and start-ups. As IBM marketed mainframe computers to the business world, Apple designed personal computers that most people could afford, culminating in the Internet (another military initiative)  by which the model of citizenship that involved debate and deliberation was replaced by one that involves consumption and persuasion, driven by the hyper-individualism of blogging, posting, tweeting, user-profiling and the eventual radicalization and polarization of the public forum.  It is a new narcissistic culture.

And now we anticipate 5G (meaning fifth generation) mobile technology that will process data one hundred times faster than currently.  How fast is enough?

Computer innovation is only one rather obvious example of many linear developments that happened during what for many is our life time, and at a pace that was inconceivable when it started.  Meanwhile the sun continues to rise at predicable times, the moon sets as it always has,  and it takes 21 days for an egg to develop into a worker bee, no matter what we do.  We use chemicals to make hens increase their egg production, cows to produce more milk, plants to produce more flowers,  orchards to produce more fruit, bee colonies to expand faster in the early spring … and we blithely ignore the subtle distinctions between quantity and quality.  

Is this the critical issue that underlies the global climatic crisis?  That in our over-confidence and arrogance we believe we can adjust everything to suit our linear needs?  If so, the natural world is showing, dramatically, just how futile and ill-advised this is.  And  this is one of the messages from the bees, expressed in the constant rhythmic cycle of their lives. 

It’s time to stop talking.  “Like the best of liberalism,” writes Kevin Baker in a superb essay in the May, 2019, edition of Harper’s, and  with particular reference to the USA, “ the proof is in the doing. All the efforts to dismiss (climate change) as some socialist plot will not stand, cannot stand.  These challenges will not vanish because we want to avoid them. They will not slow just because we choose to go slow.  The Green New Deal, as its name implies, is meant to be a restoration, a return to the sort of fairness, the human balance, the dignity of a working life, wantonly abandoned and derided by so many of our leading politicians and commentators. If we are to survive, it will be necessary to ignore them.  Obviously they have nothing more to offer.”

Amid the denial and ideological bankruptcy of much of the political leadership as we race to self-destruction, we can find direction and  inspiration from the natural world, which resolutely does what it has always done – live in conformity with the seasons which in turn reflect the power of the cosmos. 

“Don’t you think it would be sad if the human race suffered a catastrophe?” Charles Mann asked the late, great evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis,  No, she responded,  arguing that in a million years the planet will be fine—we just won’t be living on it. Then she added, “Besides, it’s the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out.”

One of Darwin’s laws is that biological processes like evolution apply to every species, from protozoa to people. If one puts some bacteria in a petri dish filled with nutrients, they will eat and multiply until they hit the edge of the dish, and then either starve to death or drown in their own wastes. Because biological laws apply to every creature, Margulis suggested, the same will happen to us—it’s inevitable. For it not to happen we would have to be special;  we would have to be unlike every other creature in that the rules of nature would not apply to us.

Let’s project forty years into the future,  when the earth’s population may exceed ten billion (which will include some of you reading this article) and ask what kind of world it will  be.  This is the essential question  Charles Mann asks in his most recent book, The Wizard and the Prophet, which is a portrait of two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views have shaped our ideas about the environment and the choices we face as to how to live in tomorrow’s world. 

The first view, what Mann labels the Prophets, follows William Vogt, who was in many ways the founder of the modern environmental movement, a crusade that Mann describes as ‘the only enduring ideology of the twentieth century.’ Vogt’s  fundamental contribution was to say that the planet has limits within which  we have to live. According to data aggregated by the Global Footprint Network, it takes the biosphere a year to produce what humanity habitually consumes in roughly eight months – a situation that is logically unsustainable. And yet we persevere with what the British psychologist Michael Eysenck calls the ‘hedonic treadmill’, holding out the hope that we can somehow purchase or will ourselves out of the crisis of diminishing returns. 

Rather, Vogt urges, put on your sweater. Turn down the thermostat, eat lower on the food chain, consume less rather than produce more, eliminate more toxins, reduce and recycle waste, protect biodiversity, live close to the land and protect local communities.  Small is beautiful, live lightly on the soil and work with nature rather than overwhelm it. Such a vision – a network of self-sufficient citizens guided by ecological precepts – conflicted with the prevailing perception of the good life and evoked epithets like ‘tree-huggers.’

The Wizards are the heirs of Norman Borlaug, an agronomist and humanitarian, who exemplified  the idea that science and technology, properly applied, will let us produce our way out of our problems.  In 1942 he took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties.  Combined with artificial fertilizers and intense irrigation, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, using a new variety of rice developed with Borlaug’s assistance, yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations. Thus Borlaug has been called ‘the father of the Green Revolution’ and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

The response of the Prophets to a technology that significantly increased the amount of calories produced per acre of agriculture, is unrelenting.  Since fertilizers are essential to the Green Revolution they forever changed agricultural practices, not only in terms of never-ending streams of nitrates, potash and potassium that run off into the water system, but also the large industrial complexes that were needed to produce chemicals on a sufficient scale.  

Irrigation is also essential in that rivers need to be damed and diverted, sending water to drier areas.  California is a prime example of the manipulation of water resources for the Central Valley and the crises this has caused state-wide in increasing times of drought. 

In addition, the development of high yield varieties meant that only a few species of  corn, wheat or rice were grown. In India for example there were about 30,000 rice varieties prior to the Green Revolution; today there are around ten, all the most productive types. By having this increased crop homogeneity there were not enough varieties to fight off diseases and pests, meaning that pesticide use increased significantly.

The use of Green Revolution technologies exponentially increased the amount of food production worldwide, which is advantageous for those living on the edge yet also increased the global population dramatically, thus adding to the problem that was the initial concern. Ironically such technology is denied to places like many African countries that do not have the infrastructure, governmental efficiency and security of other nations.

And let us not forget the small scale, traditional  farmers who struggle with debt and crop failures in the face of large scale industrialization and corporate control.  At least 300,000 farmers across India have committed suicide since 1995 – that’s almost 40 a day – often by drinking the very pesticides that, because of their cost, are the cause of their failure and sense of shame. 

Prophets look at the world as finite and people as constrained by their environment. Wizards see possibilities as inexhaustible and humans as wily managers of the world. One views growth and development as the lot and blessing of our species; others regard stability and preservation as our future and our goal. Vogt believed that ecological research has revealed our planet’s inescapable limits and how to live within them. Borlaug believed that science could show us how to surpass what would be barriers for other species.

Particularly important, the two sides have two different ideas of liberty. Wizards think that people are independent individuals who are most free when they have maximal choice—they can reinvent themselves endlessly, breaking through all barriers. Prophets think humans are by nature social and biological beings and true freedom lies in recognizing and celebrating our essential character, as creatures bound into a community, as a species in a web of other species.

What brought this to mind was the January issue of Bee Culture in which an article by Dr. Tom Seeley (a Prophet) on Darwinian Beekeeping, was sandwiched between three articles on new technologies for use in the hive (the Wizards.)  After summarizing the history of the honey bee, Seeley writes, “Wild and managed (colonies) live under different conditions because we beekeepers, like all farmers, modify the environments in which our livestock live to boost their productivity. Unfortunately, these changes in the living conditions of agricultural animals often make them more prone to pests and pathogens.”   I would add that most of those modifications have been made for the benefit of the beekeeper rather than the long term health and survival of the bees. 

Malcolm Sanford, in his article titled Record Keeping with Smart Phone Apps, writes, “In this technological age, the amount of data  that is possible to collect is mind boggling.  Thus more than ever beekeepers risk being swamped by almost infinite possibilities when it comes to making management decisions.”  In the same issue Engelsma et al assess the increasing number of electronic hive scales available, while Cazier et al describe the data sharing risks and rewards for commercial beekeepers.  

It is customary, in today’s world, to give equal consideration to both sides and to come up with a 

compromise, in this case more environmentally friendly hives for the bees with the use of technology for the benefit of the beekeeper.  Yet the current trend seems to be more of the latter and less of the former.  I am strongly attracted by Seeley’s argument and am experimenting with some major modifications to the Langstroth hive that are more akin to the environment feral bees will choose for themselves.  I do have scales under three of my hives as part of an experiment by Pennsylvania State University to assess the relationship between colony health and the surrounding environment; otherwise my technology consists of a hive tool and a smoker. I have to borrow Mary’s smart phone to record the data from the hive scales.    

In terms of the bigger question posed by Vogt and Borlaug, humankind is  capable of solving this dilemma. Simply feeding ten billion people—most of whom will be middle-class—will require prodigious social and economic changes. The issue is whether we will do it, and if so,  will we do it in time.  On that, the jury is out.

One of the highlights of my life was spending four days of 1989 in a canoe on the Zambezi River with my son.    The Zambezi Valley, one of the last unspoiled wild life areas in the world, is closed for all but four months of the year because of the heat and humidity.   Access in winter is strictly controlled and the guides go through a rigorous training. We got really close to buffalo and elephant in the water and on the land (one evening, a small herd of elephants walked silently through our camp site while we were sitting around the fire,) the crocodiles were some of the largest imaginable, the bird life was spectacular, and we had one alarmingly close encounter with a hippo.

It works the other way round as well.  In 1991 Mary and I were in the Mkuzi Game Reserve in Natal, South Africa, and signed up for an early morning game walk with the specific intention of seeing some of the park’s featured animal – the black rhino.  Shortly before sunrise we drove to pick up our guide – an elderly, traditional Zulu man, upstanding and proper, with an immaculately starched uniform and polished boots, armed with no more than an old 303 rifle, and who sat bolt upright on the passenger seat as he directed us to the starting point of our trek.  He led, I followed and Mary brought up the rear as we walked through the bush.  He didn’t speak English and I used my limited Zulu to ask questions.  Nothing escaped or seemed to perturb him.  I would ask about some spoor we had just crossed, and without looking back he would say, ndhdlulamithi (giraffe,) ingulule (warthog) or phuti (duiker.) 

After four hours we approached the car and, without thinking, I reached into my pocket and pushed the clicker to unlock the doors.  The dignified man in front of me, hitherto phlegmatic and unflappable, literally leapt several inches into the air. He was willing to face a charging rhino with a vintage weapon, but the prospect of a car that blinked its lights apparently of its own accord, terrified him.  

He was so inured in the traditional rural lifestyle of the Natal National Parks that a glimpse of the modern world was beyond his ken. 

Game reserves offer a romantic experience of wild creatures in unspoiled land, often leaving us with the feeling of being intruders in a landscape where the normal destructive rules of engagement between people and nature no longer seem to apply. Such places, however,  are much more than a romantic idea or a saccharine necessity.  As  humankind becomes the dominant ecological force across the planet, so does biodiversity continue to decline, with consequences that were dramatically spelled out in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,  published in October 2018 and titled Global Warming of 1.5oC

One of the unspoken messages of the report is that  parks and protected areas like the Zambezi Valley or Mkuzi Game Park cannot save the world’s biodiversity, in part because they are ecological islands. Small protected areas, covering 12 per cent of the earth’s surface in 2005,  surrounded by land without suitable habitat, cannot by themselves protect global biodiversity. And they don’t address the question of the larger mammals species, like elephants, whose enormous ranges cannot be contained even in the greatest of parks.  

Dr. Bill Adams, Moran Professor of Conservation and Development at Downing College, Cambridge, has described in detail the history of the conservation movement, starting with the colonial imperative of the 17th century which exerted a powerful attraction on naturalists. By the 19th century, museum and zoo collectors and big-game hunters were undertaking expeditions to bring back exotic plants and animals as specimens and trophies, which in turn led to the foundation of many of the world’s biggest environmental organisations, some as zoos, others as conservation or preservation societies.  A number of high-profile conservationists such as Theodore Roosevelt, provided publicity for the needs for preservation both home and abroad, even if large numbers of animal trophies were acquired in the process. 

After the Second World War, conservation became internationalised through the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the United Nations and an increasing number of non-governmental organisations, such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Nature Conservancy in the US.  At the same time, the number of protected areas grew. The land area officially protected as nature reserves of one sort or another doubled in successive decades, But, Bill Adams emphasizes, they had forgotten something.  The places we think of as intact wilderness were invariably someone else’s home., whether in Africa, Asia, or native America. 

The displaced people lost access to land for hunting or grazing; some lost homes and farms and they had no right of redress when it was taken away.

There is a certain false comfort in the idea that biodiversity is something in distant parts of the world for us to visit and enjoy, protected from an ever-expanding human population and an invasive global economy.  Much of it so far away that we experience it only virtually, through videos or webcams or gaming simulations.  But there is an alternative, which is quieter and more local. Once, nature conservation began at home. Indeed, that is the root of the word ecology, from the Greek for oikos, or home. As  the impact of industrialisation and urbanisation began to bite, conservation was seen as vital not just for the sake of non-human nature but also for the quality of human health and wellbeing in issues such as air and water pollution and urban design.

Nature was important for its beauty or rarity but also for its significance to human society at a time of rapid change.

Of course, local nature is still important. Many organisations focus on local wild places and their importance to ordinary people. Nature reserves are promoted as ‘green gyms’ for their health-giving potential as much as their ecology. Projects abound to get children out of the house to inoculate them against ‘nature deficit disorder’, inspired by books such as Richard Louv’s Lost Child in the Woods (2005). But despite the efforts put into camps and trails, mini-beast safaris, fungus forays, observation hives and bat walks, local nature has undoubtedly lost some of its public appeal.  It’s almost something to do with the kids on Saturday rather than an on-going commitment as a family. 

Once again we have to recognize  that our fate and that of the natural world are bound up with each other.   For the sake of both people and nature, we need to develop spaces where wild species can thrive, clean watercourses where children can play and that absorb floods, novel environments such as green roofs or linear parks, and a culture of celebration of untamed nature, from migrant birds overflying skyscrapers to butterflies on window boxes to feral bees that are not exposed to toxic substances.  The future of most species depends on what happens outside strictly protected areas, to the places where we live and work, and to link them to our consumption habits, to the honey and iPhones we buy, the water we drink and the fertilizers we put on our lawns. And we need to remember that one culture’s ‘wilderness’ is another’s ‘home’.

And it is the world’s very connectivity that makes this daunting task possible. It is now possible via a website and track an elephant across the African landscape as its radio collar sends locations through the mobile phone network. That gives a very different picture of the daily life of elephants from what the average tourist gets: one starts to see it from the point of view of the elephants and the farmers who live with them. In places such as the Laikipia Plateau in Kenya, elephants and people compete for space. Corn fields provide perfect jumbo feeding stations and the costs, in lost livelihoods and sometimes lost lives, is huge. Here, the conservation challenge faced by charities such as Space for Giants is not about creating areas that are protected like fortresses against people, but about building hybrid landscapes where people and elephants can co-exist, to the point of using bee hives connected by wires to protect crops – the beasts push against the wires, the bees are agitated and the elephants retreat. 

Nature is not a consumer good or a rare resource, to be chased down in some remote tourist destination. Rather it is home. How we live in nature, with nature, and as part of nature, matters, and one of the attractions of beekeeping is that we not only get to bring that intriguing part of the natural world into our homes,  but we get to interact with these fascinating insects rather than impose our will on them.  

We cannot fence off nature and expect it to survive.  Nature works, rather than simply exists, and we have to work with and within it.  This, for me, is Tom Seeley’s message of Darwinian Beekeeping, or what David Papke and I have called Regenerative Beekeeping, in which the needs of the bees are paramount over those of the beekeeper and we learn from how the bees have evolved over millions of years rather than what we have imposed on them in the last few millennia. A recent reminder of this balance came in a visit to a large city in Florida, during which I saw less insects (one honey bee and one butterfly to be exact) and less birds than we see in our backyard in five minutes. From one of these two places the wild had already gone.

With apologies to Alfred Lord Tennyson


Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward.
Into the DCA 
Flew the six hundred.
“Forward, the Drone Brigade, 
A flight for the future,” they said. 
Into the DCA
Flew the six hundred. 

Forward the Drone Brigade.
Was there a  drone delayed?
Even the young one’s sure
They were their sisters’ future. 
Theirs not to wail and cry,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to mate and die.
Into the DCA
Flew the six hundred. 

Drones to the left of them,
Drones to the right of them, 
Rivals in front of them
Shimmied and faltered.
No queen would be denied
Nowhere to shirk or hide,
Boldly they flew, and well,
Drawn by the  mating  smell
Upward with every breath
Into the jaws of death, 
Flew the six hundred.

Flashed all their lances fair,
Flashed as they laid them bare
Sabring the queen bees there
While all the hive wondered.
High in the afternoon smoke
‘Talians and Russians alike
Right through the line they broke 
Escaping the saber stroke …
… except a few drones who,
Shattered and sundered,
Were no longer  part of 
The dauntless six hundred.

Now that their work is done,
The colony’s future won
Ne’er shall their glory fade. 
Oh, the wild flight they made
As worker bees wondered.
Honor the flight they made,
Honor the Drone Brigade, 
Noble six hundred. 

In the late nineteenth century the proliferation of telegraph lines, steamships and railway systems  prompted for the first time the comment that ‘the world is shrinking.’  Today, with jet travel and cyber communication, the world has become ‘a global village.’   Time too has been compressed, and with it our attention spans. We skip from one disaster to another, one moment of fame to another, one election to another,  with nary a chance to collect our wits in between.  Immediate gratification is no longer fast enough.  

The challenge is to step back, to paint a big picture with a broad brush, and in this particular case,  to see where I personally fit in, with perhaps some implications for the bees. 

For more than a thousand years  the ruling authority in Europe was the Catholic church.   Its control, which was in part a combination of fear and superstition, was challenged first in Italy in the C15th by the Renaissance, a period symbolized by Leonardo’s Mona Lisa which, for the first time since the Greeks and Romans, featured the dignity and beauty of the human condition rather than a biblical event or a moral tale.  The  turmoil that followed, marked by a loss of faith in man, God and previous knowledge, was accompanied by a creative rebuilding on more reasoned foundations.  Known as the Age of Reason, its main feature was the Scientific Revolution.

Neither the Catholic church nor political systems based on the divine right of kings, abdicated gracefully.  The confrontation came first with the English Revolution of 1688 and triumphed in the American and French revolutions 100 years later.  While royalty and the nobility had been  preoccupied with an ornate, flamboyant life style, culminating in the Rococo style, a rapidly growing, frustrated  bourgeoisie  found their spokesmen in philosophers such as Locke, Burke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau and Paine who, presuming that rationality and truth were universal principles, developed an enlightened  philosophy based on  the rights of people and their relationship to government,  characterized by  issues of equality, freedom and individual rights.

It’s easy to forget that what is common place today could be very dangerous when first introduced.  The philosophers took great personal risks; some were imprisoned or spent much of their life in exile.  Jean-Francoise La Barre, a 21 year old nobleman, was publicly tortured, decapitated and burned because he owned a copy of one of Voltaire’s books, which the executioner contemptuously tossed onto the funeral pyre next to the victim’s head. 

The eventual success of the Enlightenment is explained in part by the proliferation of pamphlets, books, newspapers, coffee houses and salons – eighteenth century social media –  even as it was confronted by a smoking lava-flow of condemnation from the Christian churches.  The new optimism and confidence was expressed by a series of classical musicians  (Haydn, Bach, and Mozart, for example)  who composed elegant, carefully constructed, logical symphonies that produced breathtaking effects of harmony and grace.  Artists  were inspired by humanism, mathematical reason, and the patterns of nature, represented  in  heroic drawings of common people, the geometrical layout of Versailles gardens, and peaceful landscape painting.

The attack on the Bastille, July 1789, and the excesses of the Reign of Terror, 1793-94, led to the realization that there is a side to life beyond logic and intellect. Reason did not explain  longings or passions, dreams and nightmares. Rather one had to embrace the dignity and worth of the individual with all of his/her emotions, including love, hate, fear, sadness and  anger, together with the beauty of nature and a deep sense of the mystery of the universe beyond the mechanistic calculations of Newton and Galileo.

Artists such as Blake, Cole,  Delacroix, Goya, Friedrich, and Constable expressed the spiritual and intangible side of human nature.  At the same time as rich peasant traditions and folklore become favored subjects for those such as the brothers Grimm, Thoreau symbolized the longing for the simpler, rural life. Dramatic demonstrations of the clash between enlightenment and romanticism, between compositions that stress harmony and symmetry on one hand and  those that explode with feeling on the other,   can be seen in the classical paintings of Napoleon by David compared to either Goya’s The Third of May 1808, or Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, and heard  in the works of Mozart,  who died two years after the attack on the Bastille, compared to those of Beethoven, who lived through the turmoil of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars and witnessed both the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France and the entrenchment of the Habsburg Monarchy in central Europe. The pianist, Alfred Brendel, suggested that if Beethoven is considered a storm, then Mozart is a sunny day. 

Prominent features of the era were first, support for the  working classes who were the victims of industrialization, eventually finding a perspective in socialism, and secondly, the Romantic Heroes, lonely men who lived on intuition and imagination as they tried to express these new liberal ideals.  Thus the bold, brilliant, temperamental, egotistical Napoleon Bonaparte,  or the passionate, creative, sensitive, misunderstood, self conscious geniuses  of Chopin, Beethoven, Blake, Hugo and Byron.   Such heroes were prepared to risk all for their passion, and invariably led tragic, challenging lives. 

The horrors and stupidities of the Crimean War separated Romanticism from Realism, the latter with an emphasis on technology and industry which contrasted the significant wealth of a few with the degradation of slums and poverty experienced by the many.   Thus the railway barons and the Eiffel Tower were pitted against Charles Dickens and Karl Marx; on canvas Turner and the  impressionists were freed from prior restraints by both the camera, which no longer made precise copies necessary, and the toothpaste tube, which enabled artists to take their paints outside and into real light.  

And with this came a growing concept of nationhood that inspired Britain in particular to grab territory in India, Africa, and the Middle East, and gave ethnic groups in Europe the impetus to set aside their differences in favor of nationalist movements, not least in Italy and Germany.  Thus the seeds for worldwide competition in the C20th had been planted, even if behind the jingoism there were underlying feelings of stress and anxiety, characterized by Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

I confess to being a romantic, although without the need to risk all in the drive to achieve everything.  I can write readily how honey bees have attained the highest level of animal sociality recognized by sociobiologists, together with termites; I can chronicle how they achieve this eusociality without architects, engineers of blueprints; I can relate how a colony is a superorganism, a living thing  in and of itself, a self-regulating physiological and cognitive system with a memory and what Amia Srinavasan has called ‘a kind of collective intentionality.’  I can marvel that one honey bee cannot survive alone for long, but put enough of them together in the right conditions and they will build a wax cathedral.  

Yet there is a darker side too, a realistic picture that contains a warning for humanity.  In the early 1920’s the entomologist William Wheeler forewarned that social insects represent an evolutionary cul-de-sac which portends the eventual state of human society – “Very low intelligence combined with an intense and pugnacious solidarity of the whole.”

The harmony evident in bee and termite societies, Wheeler  argued, was made possibly by ‘the solution to the male problem.’  Males, he argued, are the ‘antisocial sex … responsible for the instability and mutual aggressiveness so conspicuous among the members of our own society.”   His reasoning is reflective of the culture of the times in which he was writing – the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and rising fascist movements in Europe – which I imagine was not that different to the confusion and instability many feel today. 

Honey bees limit the number of males in a colony and they die after mating, but the conundrum was that, in Wheeler’s eyes, it was the restless intellects of a small portion of the human male population that accounted for the great achievements in the ‘sciences, arts, technologies, philosophies, theologies and social utopias.’ He gave no credence to the female workers in the hive, or in our society, nor did he consider that the queen was not so much a ruler as a slave to her ovipositer.

We can dismiss his sexist reasoning but not perhaps his general warning – the blind alley that results from a combination of poor education and excessive tribalism or nationalism.  As we face the greatest threat our world has known – global warming – it is going take a concentrated, informed, universal commitment to find again the balance between reason and emotion,  between technology and nature, between the individual and the collective whole, between the lessons of the past and the visions of the future, if we are to find a successful equilibrium .

Perhaps  my grandchildren will get to witness the Second Enlightenment, when the dreams of Burke, Paine and Voltaire, combined with the serenity and harmony of Mozart and the passion of Beethoven, are rediscovered after more than two centuries of turmoil and violence.  If so, then the honey bees will have been our constant guides and inspiration, and I have no doubt they will be delighted to share their world with us.   That, of course, is the optimistic romantic speaking.   Or as Robert Browning wrote, ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?’

NASA’s photo of our Earth in the Milky Way

On February 14, 1990,  as the spacecraft Voyager 1 raced towards  the fringes of our  solar system,  the engineers turned the  cameras around for one last look at its home planet some 4 billion miles away.  Earth appeared as a tiny point of light, 0.12 pixels in size, inspiring these words from Carl Sagan : 

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Every year there seems to be one particular photograph or video that captures world-wide attention. Last winter, for example, video footage posted online showed a starving polar bear struggling in its Arctic hunting grounds because of the thin ice and food scarcity caused by global warming. The plaintive images generated a wellspring of sympathy and invigorated calls for stronger efforts to combat climate change.

This summer a killer whale carried her dead newborn calf over 1,000 miles in Haro Strait off of Canada’s Vancouver Island. “Her tour of grief is now over,” said an official of the Center for Whale Research, after seventeen long days, “and her behavior is remarkably frisky.” The world exhaled in relief. 

The majority of these images are of larger mammals – panda bears threatened by declining bamboo forests in China; orangutans put at risk by deforestation in Asia, the black rhino and elephants threatened by poaching in Africa …  and sometimes groups of insects get attention, such as the focus on CCD in 2006 which changed beekeeping from an unheralded, unappreciated  calling for a few to a rapidly growing hobby for many, with consequent exposure and publicity. 

Each has its strong group of advocates, raising public awareness as well as funds for its particular cause. 

There are two issues that arise.  The first is one of ethics : is it morally wrong to treat non-human beings in inhumane ways? As sentient beings capable of experiencing pleasure and pain (and yes, this includes many eusocial insects) animals have a plausible interest in being spared unnecessary pain and suffering. There might be reasons to give preference to a human life over an animal life,  but there can be no moral justification for regarding the pain that animals feel as less important than the same amount of pain felt by humans.

If we feel morally obliged to provide aid to human beings living in poverty or to the victims of natural and man-made disasters, regardless of their geographical distance from us, why can we not apply the same altruistic principle to alleviate the suffering of animals who are dying from lack of food, shelter and a sustainable environment, regardless of geographical proximity? 

The challenge is emotional overload, yet we can no longer deny that nature is taking its current course primarily because it has been altered, perhaps irrevocably, by irresponsible human activity, to the detriment of the members of other species.  An example close to our hearts is the honey bee and varroa mites.  The rapid transfer and spread westwards of Varroa destructor from Asia, where it had developed a symbiotic relationship with Apis dorsata, is the result of modern human transport systems. Can we then step aside and wait for our honey bees to somehow develop a resistance – the James Bond “Live and Let Die” approach – or do we have a moral responsibility to do everything possible mitigate the pain and suffering this invasion has caused the bees?

 After all, we typically come to the aid of waterfowl harmed by oil spills, sea mammals incapacitated by plastic floating in the oceans, and animals injured by vehicles. We do not stand by idle on the grounds that none of us is personally responsible;  we do not defended a lack of action by some alleged concern for the course of nature (‘We must not interfere!’) or the gene pool of the species (‘Let the weak die!’). We do not use those arguments to justify not intervening to help relieve human suffering during a famine or after a tsunami, or denying antibiotics to a child with pneumonia, or withholding treatment from someone with an early diagnosis of cancer. 

And this leads to the second issue. Our moral obligation in the minds of many is to giant pandas, ospreys, tigers and blue whales – large, charismatic, furry or feathery creatures glimpsed primarily in television documentaries. Yet the vast majority of life on earth, both in terms of species and numbers, is made up of insects – some 10 quintillion to be more precise, or 10 million trillion – and that excludes spiders because they are arachnids.   That works out to 1.4 billion insects for each human being world wide, and the global weight of the insect population is estimated to be 70 times greater than that of the human equivalent.  To paraphrase the British geneticist and evolutionary biologist, J.B.S.Haldane, “If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of creation, it would appear that God has an inordinate fondness for stars and insects.”  He actually said ‘beetles’ in that there are more types of beetles than any other form of insect, and more insects than any other kind of animal.

Sad as the extinction of the giant panda would be, the environmental impacts would be minimal. In contrast, the myriad of little creatures all around us are absolutely vital to our survival and well-being.  They have spent some 420 million years preparing this earth for our prosperity, and they are now desperately threatened.  “If all mankind were to disappear,” E.O.Wilson famously wrote, “the world would regenerate back to the right state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

Or as Grace Pundyk pointed out in The Honey Trail, beekeeping in the twenty first century has come a long way from the career described in 1774 by apiarist  Rev. John Thorley as a “means of discovering the hand of God in nature.”  Today it seems more about lamenting the hand of man in nature.