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“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. 

You’d rather assemble frames than go shopping

Your favorite flower is the dandelion

You call a friend in the middle of winter, bursting with excitement because your bees are making cleansing flights

You tell your troubles to the bees

You read the latest bee journal from cover to cover before you get from the mail box to the house

You have propolis under your fingernails

You’d rather read a Bee Catalog than a good book

You turn the hose on the clover after a rain storm to make sure it has enough water

You grow a plant you don’t really like because someone told you the bees like it

You’ve been kissed by the bees and gone to town with pollen on your nose 

Last December Mary had to have some laser surgery after having had cataracts removed earlier in the year.  She liked the ophthalmologist she had consulted with- apparently he is a man big not so much in size as in character and personality, hyperactive and warm,  interactive and genuinely caring.  Waiting for the surgery she mentioned that her right eye watered more than the left.  “Let me look at you” he offered, and very quickly said, “You right eye does not close as tightly as the left one, and there is a slight droop in the eyelid.” 

Mary, herself a retired family physician, had not noticed this, nor had I, and even knowing it I find it difficult to see.     On recollection, Mary recalled that twelve years ago she had Lyme’s Disease with the consequent Bell’s Palsey-like drooping of the right side of her face, before it was rectified with medication. The current condition of her right eye was clearly a long term consequence of that disease.

Fast forward a few weeks as, on Christmas Eve, we prepared a treasure trail for three of the grandchildren.  You know the kind of thing.  Each starts with a card on which is a drawing or a phrase, which leads them to where the second card is hidden, and so on until the final card reveals the treasure – in this case, their Christmas gifts.  The youngest had five such cards, all with pictures; the older two had semi-cryptic clues.  Thus Owen’s first card read, “Cluck,cluck, this is egg-citing “ and steered him to the chicken coop. 

In all three cases the path to say, the third clue,  led them very close to where the fifth and eight clues were placed: all of the clues were visible if one chose to look.  Despite my anxiety, the cards were found in order. The children were so focused on the clue-in-hand that  none of them saw the other signs and tip-offs as they ran passed them.

Finally, as the first snow storm of the year approached in January, two good friends and I were discussing jigsaw puzzles as a source of stimulation when one is confined indoors.  We agreed how, the more one works on a puzzle, the more one chooses pieces by shape rather than by color. In other words, one sees the parts of the puzzle from a different vantage point.  

Clearly there are different kinds of looking.  The ophthalmologist was hyper-busy when viewed from the outside, yet had the ability to focus intently when required with the experience to make significant deductions from a minute discrepancy.  A phrase I heard recently was ‘the ability to see the world through a small window.’ Puzzlers, quiet and centered,  find themselves acutely aware of another dimension to small details, whereas the grandchildren, excited and flowing with adrenalin, were so focused on a preconceived, distant goal that they were unaware of the details around them.

These experiences prompted some reflections on how we as beekeepers look at frames of honey bees, and how we see differently.  For a new beekeeper a busy frame of bees is  confusing, even intimidating.  In many cases, the instructor has described what they need to look for, and the students bravely look for the presence of eggs, pollen and honey, and of course they want actually to see the queen rather than be satisfied by signs of her presence and activity.  They are exhilarated when someone points out say a queen cell hanging off of the bottom of the frame, or if the instructor uses a finger gently to move a few bees so that larvae are revealed in the bottoms of a few adjacent cells. 

The more experienced beekeeper takes this in with a glance, to the point that he or she will often spot the queen without actually looking for her : it is not the queen herself that stands out but the behavior of the surrounding bees, or the difference in her movement compared to the workers in the retinue.   A personal benchmark was spotting a queen who was in the act of laying, her abdomen buried in the cells, even though I was not looking for her. 

What that experienced beekeeper notices is something out of the ordinary, something that is unexpected, that breaks the anticipated pattern, that has a distinctive if unexpected shape. It may be  a few cells of exposed pupae in otherwise capped worker brood, or a bee with deformed wings, or the movement of a small hive beetle scuttling to safety, or more than one egg in the bottom of a cell, or a degree of alarm in the movement of the bees suggesting the loss of their queen, or …    You know the scenario. 

So the first question is, how do we move from the first scenario, akin to the grandchildren and their predetermined goal set by an outside authority, to the more sentient scenarios akin to the ophthalmologist and his ability to detect the unexpected in what was otherwise normal, or puzzlers making choices based on minute differences in configuration?   My guess is that time,  perseverance  and experience are the only teachers.  Like swimming, if one is to stay afloat one has first to jump into the water, get wet, splash around a lot, practice, get some well-timed direction, and practice some more.  One cannot learn to swim only by reading a book or looking at pictures, no matter how good they might be. 

The second question is, when you look, how much do you see?  `

Although she denied it, my mother lived a fascinating life.  In 1940, at the age of 16, she experienced the London Blitz and nine years later, with her husband and two young children, moved to a remote corner of southern Africa.  Initially she hated it, not least the loneliness, but came to love it and ultimately became private secretary to the Prime Minister, accompanying him to international conferences in Geneva and London.  Despite my pleas she never wrote anything down.  I have so many questions to ask and now it is too late.

Recently I was communing with my good friend and fellow beekeeper, David Papke, at our regular haunt (I would like to say ‘alehouse’ a la Benjamin Franklin, but it is nothing so romantic) about the heritage we leave our children.  We each resolved to record some personal memories in the event they might one day be of some interest to future generations at a time when we are no longer here to answer questions directly.  I decided not to follow a timeline so much as to record  memories as they occurred; one memory led to another and before along I had covered 20 pages.  At our next coffee conversation David and I wondered why some memories remain over intervening decades while others are lost, and I realized that for me those recollections are tied to feelings.  It may be that the combination of event and feelings stores those incidents more effectively in the memory bank, or perhaps an emotion today triggers a memory of an event that originally had similar sentiments attached, but speaking personally  there are three general areas of feelings that are involved – painful  feelings, like shame, embarrassment and guilt; romantic feelings tied to those one has loved; and feelings of serenity   

The memories evoked by painful feelings significantly outnumber the other two categories combined, and I wonder if my commitment to beekeeping is a subconscious effort to balance the pain by committing to something that involves love and serenity as well as symbolizing a perennial life style that was more simple, more genuine, perhaps even more authentic.

From Socrates to Thoreau, from the Buddha to Wendell Berry, a simple life has been equated with a good life. Magazines encourage us to feng shui our homes and our lives; we receive unsolicited articles in our in-boxes offering simple solutions to what are assumed to be our problems;  guests on talk show programs promote the Slow Food Movement which, beginning in Italy, advocates for a return to pre-industrial basics and has adherents  across continents; and the shelves of book shops are filled with commentaries on issues such as Buddhist mindfulness and recipes for rediscovering joy and happiness. 

In his book,  The Wisdom of Frugality , Emrys Westacott argues that through much of civilization frugal simplicity was not a choice but a necessity, and precisely because it was necessary it was deemed a moral virtue. In the last two hundred years, which is 2% of our civilized existence, the advent of industrial capitalism and a consumer society has instilled the idea of relentless growth and, with it, a population that is encouraged to buy stuff that previously was judged to be surplus to requirements or confined to the trappings of a privileged few.  And even for the elite, wealth was flimsy protection against misfortunes such as war, famine and disease.  As for the vast majority – slaves, serfs, peasants and laborers – there was virtually no prospect of accumulating even modest wealth.  Just making it through a long life without excessive suffering counted as doing pretty well.

Since the advent of machine-based agriculture, representative democracy, civil rights, antibiotics and cyber-space, people expect (and can usually have) a good deal more. Living simply now strikes many people as simply boring.  The result is a disconnect between our inherited traditional values and the consumerist imperatives preached by contemporary culture.

There does appear to be a growing interest in rediscovering the benefits of simple living, especially among millennials.  Some of this might reflect a nostalgia for the pre-consumerist world, a relief from the stresses of a constant cyber society, or a sympathy for the moral argument that living in a simple manner with traits such as frugality, resilience, peace of mind and independence, makes one both a better and  a happier person.  It might also reflect a feeling of separation from the natural world and a yearning to live closer to mother earth. 

And at the same time there are millions who continue to live on the fast track, working long hours, racking up debt and striving to ascend the  bureaucratic ladder.  Hypocritically, we applaud the frugality and moral integrity of say Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama  and Pope Francis, while at the same time working extra hours so we can afford a bigger house, a newer car and pay down our debts. Similarly we condemn extravagance that is wasteful and yet witness the tour coaches lining up every day outside the gates of the Forbidden City in Beijing and the palace at Versailles, or the 5000 passengers disembarking from a cruise ship at a port in the Caribbean. The truth is that much of what we call ‘culture’ is fueled by forms of extravagance.

The arguments for living simply were most persuasive when most people had little choice; they are less persuasive when a frugal life style is a choice.

That might be about to change. Economically, in times of recession we find ourselves in circumstances where frugality once again becomes a necessity and the value of its associated virtues is rediscovered. Currently in the United States the distance between the ‘have lots’ and the ‘have nots’ is greater than at any previous time, provoking an increased critique of extravagance and waste. With so many people living below the poverty line there is something unseemly about indelicate displays of opulence and luxury. And according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one can live perfectly well provided certain basic needs are satisfied which, at least in one estimate, requires an annual family income of $70 000.  Anything in excess of that, some argue,  is best used to ensure that everyone has the basics – food, housing, healthcare, education, utilities and public transport – rather than funneling into the pockets of a few, where noblesse oblige is pitted against self-interest.  

Prior to 1800 one is unlikely to have heard an argument for the simple life in terms of environmentalism. Two centuries of industrialisation, population growth, pollution,  deforestation, climate change and the extinction of plant and animal species, suggest that the values and lifestyle of conscious simplicity might be our best hope for reversing these trends and preserving our planet’s fragile ecosystems.

The scuttlebutt in Pennsylvania is that the honey bees have had a very difficult winter, with significant numbers of dead-outs which were the result of neither cold nor starvation so much as something else as yet unknown. My sense is that it reflects a change in the environmental, probably chemically induced,  and the spartan wintering habits of the bees, honed over millions of years, were not enough to enable them to survive. As the environment changes they  are victims of a situation not of their causing.  Unlike the bees, we do have a choice,  and if we opt not to be more ecologically wise, frugality might be forced upon us. An honored tradition that bespoke a  moral virtue would become a respected life choice out of the necessity of survival. 

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

  and I wake in the night at the least sound

  in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

  I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

  I come into the peace of wild things

  who do not tax their lives with forethought

  of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

  And I feel above me the day-blind stars

  waiting with their light. For a time

  I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

A fable written by George Reavis, then Assistant Superintendent of the Cincinnati Public Schools, almost 80 years ago, was  up-dated in Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, first published in 1989.  It describes how the animals in the Great Forest, rather than give parents the responsibility of teaching their children the skills they needed to know, decided the young ‘uns should  learn from professional teachers. So they organized a school and hired staff. 

They opted for  a standardized educational curriculum with an activity-based syllabus consisting of swimming, running, flying, and climbing. All the animals took all the subjects – it was very important that no child be left behind. Standardized achievement tests were administered to all students to ensure they were progressing satisfactorily,

The ducks were excellent in swimming; in fact, the ducks were better than their teacher. But some of the ducks made only passing grades in flying and all of them were very poor in running, and thus  were required to stay after school for remedial running practice, to the point that they had to drop swimming in order to practice running. This was kept up until their webbed feet were very sore and they were so tired that soon they were only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in school, so nobody worried about that – except the ducks. 

The  rabbits started at the top of the class in running but did very poorly in swimming. Also, the rabbits insisted on hopping, and the teachers, concerned about their hyperactivity,  made them walk everywhere instead of allowing them to run or hop. The rabbits had to come in early every day for special swimming class to the point that some of the younger rabbits developed severe fur problems from spending so much time in the pool. 

The squirrels were excellent in climbing and running; in  fact, the squirrels were the best students at climbing the standardized tree. But they wanted to fly by first climbing the tree, then spreading their paws and gliding to the ground. But in flying class their teacher made them take off from the ground with the other students, and clearly the squirrels were not mastering the course material. So every day the squirrels had therapy – a flying therapist took the squirrels into the gym and made them do front-paw exercises to strengthen their muscles so they could learn to fly the right way. The squirrels’ paws hurt so much from this overexertion that some of them only got a C in climbing; two even failed climbing altogether. 

The eagles were problem children. In climbing class they beat all the others to the top of the tree but they insisted on using their own way to get there and were quite stubborn about it. They said that clearly it was the goal that mattered and that it was quite right for them to get to the treetop by flying. The school psychologist diagnosed them as having oppositional-defiant disorder and developed a strict behavior modification plan for the wayward birds.

At the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim exceedingly well and also could run, climb and fly a little, had the highest average and was the valedictorian. The prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought against the tax levy because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum,.  They apprenticed to the badger and later joined the groundhogs to start a private school. 

In some schools today, outside of the forest, we still make squirrel children try to learn to fly by flapping their paws and we punish eagles for being defiant about their right to be themselves. In other schools, fortunately,  we enjoy all children for themselves. Each squirrel is a perfectly wonderful squirrel. Each rabbit a lovely rabbit whether or not it chooses to hop, skip, roll or walk. Each eagle is allowed to be an eagle and we encourage each duck to swim rather than worrying about learning to run. 

Honey bees balance their behaviors between the needs of the community and their state of maturity, beginning with new-borns cleaning out the cells from which they have just emerged and ending with the collection of resources needed for the continuation of the species.  Whereas there are certain broad principles within which they operate,  the bees are more adaptable  than we initially realized, and will change their behaviors (the equivalent of swimming, running, climbing and flying) depending on the signals they receive from their nest mates. 

Beekeepers, and beekeeping classes, are not always as flexible, and may be dogmatic in what they determine is the ‘right’ way to keep honey bees.  Certainly nu-bees need assurance and direction, yet never to the point that they are submitted to standardized achievement tests, or accept average as OK,  or are subject to behavior modification plans, whether self or externally imposed,  to the point that they lose that vital enthusiasm and sense of awe that keeps many of us involved.   

Covey argues that driving forces (eg. the ability and desire to fly, swim, run or fly) are positive, motivate growth and change, and keep us engaged, while restraining forces are negative. Valuing differences, especially our  mental, emotional and psychological differences, is the essence of synergy, and it is synergy which best describes the activities of a bee hive.  To develop the empathy that allows us to welcome and respect differences, we first have to realize that people tend to see the world not as it is but as they are – we each visualize it through the prism of our own experiences – and the good instructor or mentor evokes and utilizes those perceptions.  The word ‘education’ is derived from the Latin educare, meaning to draw out, not to pour forth.  

An effective beekeeping instructor or mentor has the humility and reverence to recognize his or her own perceptual limitations and to harness the rich resources made available through interaction with the hearts and minds of nu-bees, not least their curiosity, enthusiasm and burgeoning passion.   He or she cannot see honey bees as they do, nor can he or she bring to the class the life experiences that each of the class members has; rather, opening up to their perspicuity adds to the knowledge, the  understanding of reality, of everyone in the apiary.  To return to the jigsaw analogy, perhaps it is the instructor’s job to put the corner pieces in place, to help the new beekeeper complete the connections between them which  outlines the puzzle, and then to step back as he or she fills in the individual pieces.  Because the final picture is not uniform – the colors, the shapes and the images are unique to each one of us. 

The alternative, as George Reeves articulated  in the 1940’s, is that we try to make everybody the same, and no-one is happy. People get hurt and their best gifts go to waste.