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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the following eleven years there were a series of stimuli, one of which, in 2018, was what Tom Seeley calls Darwinian Beekeeping, and which I prefer to think of as regenerative beekeeping.  In essence, Dr. Seeley suggests that beekeeping has become increasingly designed for the benefit of the beekeeper rather than the health of the bees, and he has examined feral colonies to survey  the conditions that bees choose for themselves, given their druthers.  David Papke had been similarly inspired, was a step ahead of me in coming up with a hive design that was more bee friendly, and we spent a year re-designing our hive bodies and presenting, with differing levels of success, our reasoning to some local bee organizations. The reactions ranged from outright dismissal to skepticism to enthusiasm to excitement.  

Initial results are encouraging, but it is a small sample and early days.  The question is, what kind of changes in management might supplement the re-design of the hive?   It is important to note that at each of the three occasions on which I have been fortunate to hear Tom Seeley present his findings, he stresses that this is a concept for hobbyists, possibly for sideliners, but not for commercial beekeepers, whose objectives and financial commitments are less likely to allow for experimentation. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2011 the South African government, in response to pressure from China, refused to grant the Dalai Lama a visa so that he could celebrate Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s 80th birthday in Capetown. Four years later the Dalai Lama invited his spiritual brother to spend a week at his residence in Dharmasala in India to discuss the concept and achievement of joy.   The resulting book describing that discussion, compiled by Douglas Abrams, is called The Book of Joy : Lasting Happiness in a Changing World. 

Americans focus on happiness (the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is listed as one of three ‘inalienable rights’ in the 1776 Declaration of Independence)  whereas the Danes relish contentment, but joy is bigger than both, Desmond Tutu argues.  “While happiness is often seen as being dependent of external circumstances, joy is not.”  “The ultimate source of joy is within us,” the Dalai Lama agrees.   “Not money, not power, not status… which fail to bring inner peace.  Outward attainment will not bring real inner joyfulness.  We must look inside.” 

The title of the book is insightful : the conscious cultivation of joy within us can lead to long lasting happiness despite the external challenges and traumas of a world that is changing beyond our control.  The reverse does not apply : happiness from an external event, say the purchase of a new car, does not lead to long lasting joy.  An example would be how quickly the elation of a child opening gifts under a Christmas tree can dissipate. 

Both the Archbishop and the Dalai Lama have suffered deeply, and in the midst of pain and turmoil each has managed to discover a level of peace, of courage , even exuberance.  “Discovering joy does not save us from the inevitability of hardship and heartbreak,” said the Archbishop, whose prostate cancer has returned. “In fact we may cry more easily but we will laugh more easily too.  Perhaps we are just more alive.  Yet as we discover more joy we can face suffering in a way that ennobles rather than embitters.  We have hardship without becoming hard.  We have heartbreak without being broken.”

Working with honey bees can bring happiness (and sadness!) but does it reinforce our discovery of and adventure toward, joy?  Paul Ekman, a psychologist and pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions, and a friend of the Dalai Lama,  has written that joy is associated with a variety of feelings.  The question is if those feelings relate to beekeeping.  For example …

• Pleasure of the five senses : initially looking at bees becomes observing them,  gradually we learn to hear and smell them, and it is not unknown for beekeepers to dip drone pupae in honey and eat them.  They taste like chicken!
• An original feeling of relief at overcoming anxiety and fear can lead to a sense of excitement : there is an understandable apprehension and nervousness as one first approaches the art, science and craft of beekeeping, and as the challenges of keeping bees healthy and alive increase, so does the sense of achievement, which in turn leads to joyful feelings like contentment, pride and delight at having accomplished a challenging task. 
• Wonder, ecstasy and bliss : the bees never fail to astonish, and the more we learn the greater the amazement until eventually we are transported outside of ourselves and imagine more closely the life of a colony.  This in turn can provoke feelings of gratitude for what the bees offer and a sense of pride at being a small part of this vital process. 

The feelings of joy thus evoked were valued particularly by the romanticists of the nineteenth century, who, as materialism and empiricism became manifest, asked if the sensual can be entwined with the scientific, and of what value is a technology that enriches the understanding but robs the imagination. In the 1820’s Alexander von Humbolt, the Prussian geographer, naturalist, explorer, and influential proponent of Romantic philosophy and science, wrote to his friend, Johann von Goethe, “Nature must be experienced through feelings.” 

A modification is provided by Douglas Halladay, a professor of business at Georgetown University, who adds ‘meaning’ to the equation. Is there a vital difference between happiness and meaning? “Is child rearing a happy task?” he asks.  “Well, yes and no.  Is it the most meaningful role one could do?  Yes.”   Beekeepers find meaning not only in the lessons of the superorganism but also in making a difference at an individual level to local and global  environmental challenges. 

And joy has a value!  In 1922, Albert Einstein was in Japan having been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, and not having cash with which to tip the hotel porter he wrote two notes on a piece of hotel stationery, one of which read, “A calm and modest life brings more joy than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.” That note was sold at auction in October, 2017 for $1.56 million. 

Ultimately the daunting graphs, tables and technical language with which researchers churn out data-filled reports assessing the perils we face are too often devoid of poetry and imagination. When we obscure the intuitive, sensual feelings that we experience with, say, a colony of honey bees or an exuberant family, we also obfuscate the feelings of wonder, pleasure, excitement and gratitude that can drive the perseverance needed to find solutions.   As Henry Thoreau asked rhetorically in 1851, “With all your science can you tell me how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?”

		
If you can keep your bees when those about you
   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can find the queen when others doubt you
   But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can feed and not get tired of feeding,
   Of being stung and not give way to flinching;
Be quick to help and slow to give advice,
   And tempted not to look too good nor talk to wise;

If you can dream that next year will be better;
   If you can think when looking at a frame;
If you can meet with beetles and varroa
   And treat these two vexations just the same;
If you can bear to see a strong hive swarming,
   Flying by the trap you carefully set,
And watch the girls you gave your all to, leaving
   For nests uncharted and unknown  … and yet

If you can watch a weak hive dwindling
   And know it’s going to be a loss,
And grieve and feel your heart strings shrinking,
   Yet know the girls are still the final boss;
If you can force your will and nerve and sinew
   To serve you, long after all the bees have gone
And hold on when there is nothing in you,
   Except the love which says to them, ‘Hold on;’

If you can talk with groups and keep your virtue
   Or raise new queens but keep the common touch;
If neither drones nor workers  find rare favor
   If all bee species count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving bee house
   With sixty thousands bodies having fun, 
Yours is the earth and everyone applauds you -
  a beekeeper - when all is said and done.   

In August, 2017,  there was a common thread running through four events that happened  in the space of a week. 

I enjoyed the eclipse, even if it was not as dark as I had anticipated it would be where we were vacationing near Cambridge, Maryland,  but the hype that preceded it was over-the-top.   Front page coverage in the newspapers every day for two weeks prior and traffic jams in South Carolina three days before the event seemed incongruous in terms of priorities and practicalities. 

Secondly, when our extended family went on a two mile walk to a waterfall, the focus of the children was on the destination with little awareness of the myriad of alluring attractions alongside the path, nor did the adults draw attention to them.  

Thirdly, the thirty and forty year olds chose to rent a power boat large enough to hold ten passengers which could  race up the bay.   My choice was a two seater kayak so that a grandchild could sit in front as we paddled along the shore line looking for birdlife and various water creatures.

The final event was a breakfast discussion with a good friend in which she described how she receives between forty and seventy e-mails at work every day, while others get in excess of one hundred. 

The theme is that we are so focused on the big things that it is easy to ignore the smaller but equally compelling things along the way.  The eclipse was dramatic yet how often do we appreciate the stars on a clear night?   Waterfalls whet more than the appetite yet they are surrounded by amazing rock formations covered with insects and surrounded by beautiful wild flowers, some no bigger than a dime but ever so elegant on close inspection.  Power boats drive the wind through one’s hair but the speed frightens the birds, makes it difficult to observe anything in the water, and the shoreline is too far off to see any detail.  And one hundred e-mails a day means there is little time for earnest thought or a profound response; it is too superficial, too quick.  To spend five minutes on each of a hundred e-mails would take more than an eight hour work day, so clearly we cannot and do not do it.  And this does not include all the other materials available via cyberspace; according to one TV analyst, four hundred hours of content are added to Facebook every sixty seconds, and the total content of that site is greater than all of the published knowledge from the dawn history until 2012. Sometimes less is more.   

The pressures imposed on younger generations by advertising are unfathomable;  everything has to be bigger, quicker, faster,  sleeker, newer.  Advertising  by its very nature makes us feel inadequate and incomplete based on our material possessions; 2.0 is good until the 2.1 version comes out, Playstation 4 until Playstation 5 is produced,  an annual up-grade  to the new version of the I-Phone is seen as an essential … we might label this the Age of Perpetual Discontent.  Meanwhile the news media focuses on the big, the dramatic,    Hurricane Harvey fills our screens until Irma hits Florida and the people of Texas are left behind; Maria hits Puerto Rico and Florida disappears from the news.  

The sports pages are filled with the latest signings invariably involving multi-million dollars deals (Lionel Messi, for example, signing a €500, four year deal with Barcelona in 2017)  and the entertainment pages are studded with ‘stars’ on red carpets in gowns valued in the thousands of dollars. Yet if we look closely we find that their lives are no more joyful than our own; indeed the reverse may be true if only we can identify what truly brings us contentment. 

Imagine the pressures faced by a teen standing on a street corner in a major city while his family is struggling honestly to provide the  basics of life, and he sees an entertainer or sports figure or drug pusher go past in a flashy car dressed up to the nines.  It is tempting to judge others solely in terms of ostentatious displays of wealth and to feel inadequate by comparison, to the point of being willing to do almost anything to scale  those appealing but false heights.  

I have been fortunate in always having a job when I needed one, having sufficient funds to pay for the basics, and having an advantageous skin color and ethnicity.  Nor have I felt envious of those who have more, which was easier to do in the 1960’s in a country without television and a society where the lower classes were kept at arms’ length (ie. the indigenous African population – an unfortunate and typical colonial scenario.)   And I discovered other ways of being in this world that did not require money.   Yet I wonder how affluence impacts my grandchildren.  In the 1970’s, at a conference on  teens and drugs, a presenter observed that that generation could no longer be scared into good choices, referring to photos of blackened lungs scarred by smoking tobacco, or drug takers withered and anemic and literally dead to the world. The only insurance policy of any value that parents and teachers (and perhaps grandparents) could provide was the confidence and capability  to say no and to walk away because, she argued, when those children first came into contact with drugs or alcohol or promiscuous sex (yes, that’s what we called it)  with all the accompanying peer pressure, we, the parents, grandparents and teachers, would not be there to guide or rescue them. 

While there is certainly a big picture, beekeeping is essentially about the small stuff. I suspect that one of the difficulties facing new beekeepers is the ability to really see at the micro level, to look at a frame of bees and absorb the phenomenal detail that it provides with hierarchies of levels of information.  And then being able to assimilate, categorize, analyze and evaluate that data (ie. exercising Benjamin Bloom’s Higher Order Thinking Skills) and make the appropriate decisions. 

In Feathers : The Evolution of a Natural Miracle, Thor Hanson distinguishes between bird watching and bird identification. Too often we do the latter whereas the true wonder of birding, he suggests, “lies in the watching, soaking up the fine details of plumage, behavior and habitat.  Even common birds do uncommon things, and every sighting is worth more that a glance and a tick on a checklist.”                                   

So yes, eclipses and waterfalls and power boats and e-mails are important, but never at the expense of the smaller stuff – small in size perhaps, and too easily not seen, but a never-ending source of joy and wonder if one chooses to look.  That is what the ‘girls’ offer me – not only an insight into a beautiful world that is omnipresent, vital to our continued existence, but a touchstone to combat the mass exposure to the dramatic, the grand and, all too often, the superficial.  Even common bees do uncommon things, and they put into context much of what we otherwise take for granted. 

Thirty years ago,  in Philadelphia and with time to spare, I joined a group touring the Independence National Historic Park which, I believe, is the only national park within a city.  It is famous for the Liberty Bell but what happened that morning involved a different type of liberty. 

A large group had assembled in a hall dominated by a painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. After the guide and ranger, Lisa Randolph (the fact that I remember her name is itself telling) had finished her explanation of the events depicted in the painting, a young African American boy, perhaps eight years old, raised his hand and asked how old Benjamin Franklin was when he signed the declaration.  

The majority of teachers would have provided the answer immediately, but not Lisa.  Instead she told the young man the year in which Franklin was born, explained that he could find the date of the signing at the bottom of the painting, and then said, “When you have worked out the answer, raise your hand and you can tell me how old he was.”

The tour continued.  We were standing in front of the ropes that section off the original Supreme Court when a hand when up.   Without saying a word Lisa stepped forward, picked up the young man, took him behind the ropes (probably highly illegal,) sat him on one of the historic benches and invited him to tell the answer to the whole group.  He did, he got it right and the group applauded loudly.  

That young man will probably remember that event and the positive feelings associated with it for the rest of his life. 

Notice that Lisa did not check to confirm that the answer was correct before he gave it.  She trusted him and had he got it wrong she would undoubtedly have helped him work through to the correct response.

Lisa was a mentor for me and after the tour had ended I was able to convey to her the significance of her actions. I have not seen her since but the memory is as fresh as if it happened yesterday.  The gift she gave the 8 year old boy was the privilege to think for himself, the freedom to come to his own decision based on the data, and the joy of immediate feedback and recognition. 

Being a mentor for a nu-bee presents similar challenges.  How much does one demonstrate oneself and how much does one stand back and observe?   How often does one speak and how often does one wait for the lessons to be learned, the connections to be made?  How does one persuade others to read and attend those vital meetings rather than sharing what one has read or what the guest speaker at the latest meeting revealed?  There are no definitive rules and ironically I am one who probably is too quick to interfere, too quick to pull out my hive tool and demonstrate. 

Best  of course is a mutual, trusting to-and-fro.  

This is mindful  of a conversation with a nephew who spent a semester at Trinity College in Dublin.   When asked to describe the  critical difference between the school in Ireland and the schools he attended in the United States, he thought for a minute before responding, “At Trinity we were expected to teach ourselves.” 

There are many gifts that we have to share with those who are new to this ancient craft, including our knowledge and our passion.  In Parker Palmer’s wonderful definition of education, we too “can create the space in which the community of truth might occur.”

Many of the world’s greatest teachers – the Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed, Gandhi – did not have so much as a piece of chalk for a teaching aid, yet the lessons they taught with the help of a finger in the sand and a spinning wheel, have lasted, in some cases, for thousands of years.  Today it would appear that teaching equivalents are powerpoint slide programs which have become an obligatory part of  presentations to the point that a conference cannot be considered effective without  them. 

Three inventions in the last century were predicted to ‘revolutionize teaching.’  The first was the wireless, invented during the First World War so that front line soldiers could communicate without the wires (hence the name) which were too often blown up on the battlefield.  The second was the overhead projector which enabled teachers to face the students while simultaneously projecting an image on a screen behind them, and the third was the internet with it’s immediate access to a wealth of knowledge. 

If this trend suggests anything at all it is that powerpoint projections will  be as quaint in the classrooms of our grandchildren as radios and overhead projectors are in classrooms today.   And if so, what will have replaced them?

Powerpoint is not a panacea; it is not an easy tool to use nor are the slides simple to design and produce.  Too often, for example, the slides are so busy that they are either difficult for the viewer to absorb (for me graphs are particularly difficult to understand at a glance) or they distract from, rather than reinforce, the points the speaker is making, or the speaker feels obliged to read everything on the slide and since an audience tends to read faster than a presenter can talk, the former is well ahead of the latter and loses focus.  Personally I would argue that reading a slide aloud is an insult to the intelligence of the audience. 

Some honey bee researchers prepare and present slides very effectively. Randy Oliver comes too mind, as do Keith Delaplane and Denis Vanengelsdorp.  For them a slide is a stimulus for a bigger issue rather than the whole issue spelled out;  graphs and diagrams are explained thoroughly and often become the basis for future slides, thus making it easier for the audience to comprehend  the significance of the various lines on the graph as they develop without having to reinterpret the axes every time. 

The reliance on powerpoint presentations implies that our audience cannot stay focused unless we provide them with something to look at, a reflection perhaps of the influence of television and it’s associated media on our attention spans as well as the confusion between education with entertainment. In the old black-and-white movies the camera stayed on a scene for more that 20 seconds.  Observation of almost any current  television program will show that that time is now less than 2 seconds, and for commercials it can be even less. 

No wonder more than 90% of ADD medication is prescribed in the US – we suffer from visual stimulation overload. 

 As an aside, three other observations about recent honey bee conferences I have attended.   There are very few people of color among the attendees;  casual observation suggests that 70% were male with an average age in excess of 50, although it was probably difficult for younger folk to get away for mid-week events; and a significant number of men had a beard, mustache or both.  Explain that one!

Charlie Rose, before he was discredited by charges of sexual harassment, was asked the secret of good interviewing.   There are  three essentials, he suggested  – prepare, listen and engage.  Technology can help us with the first but not necessarily the second and third requirements.   I recall a colleague describing a student in her classroom who was listless and disinterested yet when she saw him on the sports field he was a ball of energy and clearly the team leader.  Her question was, “What was the coach doing that I was not doing in the classroom?”  How was he getting that student engaged?   The answer included shared responsibility as a team, the coach as motivator rather than judge, and  a shared, agreed objective, in this case winning.  

In the absence of natural materials we  have to provide honey bees with the necessary technology for their survival – hive bodies, frames and foundation, for instance –  after which they seem to function without the need for chalk, wirelesses, overhead projectors and power points.   Certainly they ‘listen’ to each other, thanks to the marvel of those floral bouquets we call pheromones, and they are actively engaged from the day they are born to the day they die.  Bees live in community.  It is a common existence with shared responsibility and a clear objective – the long term survival of the colony. And as beekeepers we are coaches rather than presenters : we are invested in the same objectives as are the bees and do all we can to facilitate their success; we are, with them, a team, and prosperity comes from cooperation rather than from competition. 

Many of us fantasize about far away places, about different and strange cultures, musing as to how other people live.  And as beekeepers we are the recipients of such conjecture. In today’s profound disconnect from our ecological dependency in general, and from food production in particular, we quietly do what many consider to be madness – work with insects which (so others think) want to sting us. 

Those who have survived the initial physical and emotional turmoil of working with honey bees know both the brilliance and the brutality that comes with our commitment, the wonder and the dismay, the rewards and the anxiety.  Subject to the weather, pests, pathogens and diseases, and the apparent whimsicality of the bees – “Why did they abscond in the autumn, with no chance of survival in the bigger world, and after all that I did for them…?” –  we are also treated to the visual joys of foragers at the entrance of the hive loaded with pollen or of a newly mated queen, the sensory delights of honey made by our own bees or of newly made glistening wax, the audible hum of a contended colony or the sense of rapt immersion that comes when one loses oneself in observing the inner workings of a hive. 

And once one has experienced that ‘zen of beekeeping’, heard the hum, witnessed the dances and smelled the brood, one can develop a very protective instinct towards the bees, to the extent that the loss of a colony is heart-wrenching.  In Slovenia the term for colony is ‘family’, and yes, it can feel like one has lost part of one’s family. 

The tension between doing what is necessary to keep the bees alive and healthy, and enjoying that process, is what makes the life of a beekeeper difficult to understand for many. What words describe adequately the hours spent worrying through the winter or working in the summer, or the romanticized idyllic pastoral reverie of communing with nature?   There is joy to be found as one is pulled between theory and practice, between growth and survival, between acceptance and intervention,  which is difficult for those who are detached from the agronomic ethic to comprehend.

And not everyone can manage honey bees.  How useful it would be to develop a profile of a successful beekeeper which could be used to assess the potential of every wannabee.  My guess is that the prime characteristic would be a yearning for reconnection, a realization that he or she will never move back to the land full-time but needs to experience again, even if only temporarily, what was a vital element of the human existence for thousands of years, was central to the agricultural revolution and which diminished when mankind began to industrialize.  Today, in a post-industrial age, the world is witness to 400 cities with populations in excess of one million inhabitants, most of whom feel that the natural world is not important so long as there is a park of some kind in the neighborhood. 

Nor does everyone want to keep  honey bees, but in and age of ‘nature deficit disorder,’ to use Richard Louv’s phrase, those of us who do need to bring others on the journey with us. Not least, it determines the caliber of the world our grandchildren will inherit. We cannot escape our responsibilities to the quality of the soil, water and air, and every time we sit down to a meal we are the beneficiaries of this interdependence.  Becoming familiar with the ecstasy and the heartache of beekeeping, even by proxy,  offers an insight into the larger and vital world of food decisions, land-use policies and environmental health. 

Perhaps that is why, when a meeting of beekeepers is asked if they love what they do, almost all hands go up.  It can be hard to find the right words to describe the feelings that lead to that sense of satisfaction, of fulfillment, but perhaps keeping bees allows us to connect briefly with that never-ending cycle, and to experience first hand what Forrest Pritchard calls ‘an ancient biorhythm’ that the bees intuitively understand and we are in danger of forgetting. 

Honey bees, to steal a phrase from Joel Salatin, can be ‘nature’s balm for the soul,’ provided we can step back long enough from the sugar roll tests, the sticky jars of sugar syrup, the mantle of smoke, the odor of the guard bees and the gummy propolis on a hive tool, to see them in a larger context, not least as a sophisticated yet sensitive super organism that is the culmination of some 40 million years of evolution.  

The chances of it raining at the height of the nectar flow when the bees are most geared up to gather nectar and pollen are 100%.

When the soil’s soggy and you can’t get near your hives to remove ripening queen cells, it will rain again.

When you’re looking for the queen she will be on the last frame you pull from the hive; when you’re not looking for her, she will pop her head over the top bars and wave at you.

The season’s biggest snowfall will occur five minutes before you were going to wrap your hives for the winter.

The chance of your smoker going out is directly proportional to the 

 ‘pissiness’ (ye olde beekeeping worde) of the hive. 

Heavy winds will blow the top covers off of your hives while you are looking for bricks to hold them down.

The catalogs will have every bee related item known to man – except the one you’re looking for. 

Your lawn mower will run out of gas just as you mow in front of your most pernickety hive.

And don’t bother getting the gas can – it’s empty. 

Everybody in the neighborhood has floral feasts, but the bees seem to like best the garden of she who believes she is allergic to bees.

That old, rusted hive tool never gets misplaced. It’s the new shiny one that always gets lost in the grass.

In 1924, when Stéphane Hessel was seven years old, his father  moved his family west across the Rhine river from Berlin to Paris.  The family’s literary milieu was shattered by the German invasion of 1940 and Stéphane, by then a member of the French army, became a POW.  He escaped and, outraged by Marshall Petain’s decision to collaborate with the German occupation in the form of Vichy France,  joined General de Gaulle’s Resistance movement in London where he found the inspiration that was to excite the rest of his life.  It came in the form of the program of the National Council of the Resistance which looked beyond the defeat of the Axis powers to ‘a true economic and social democracy.’

In 1944 he parachuted into France ahead of the Allied invasion to organize resistance networks.  Captured by the Gestapo he was subject to the equivalent of water boarding and was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, surviving only by switching identities with an inmate who had already died.  While being transferred to Bergen-Belsen he escaped. 

With the war over Stéphane, aged 28, was sent to the United Nations in New York  where he joined Eleanor Roosevelt in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and found his life work in the promotion of what he called ‘a culture of human rights,’ whether it be between Israelis and Palestinians, illegal immigrants anywhere in the world, or the withdrawal of social rights in many countries in Europe which he described as ‘a rejection of the gift of the wartime generation’s legacy.’

In 2010, aged 93, Stéphane published a 30 page pamphlet which became an over night sensation.  Titled Indignez-Vous, or Get Outraged, he exhorts his readers to “find a reason to be indignant.  This is a priceless act, because when something makes us indignant we become activists, we feel committed and our force becomes irresistible … I would like everyone of us to find his or her own reason to cry out. That is a precious gift. When something makes you want to cry out, as I cried out against Nazism, you become a militant, tough and committed. You become part of the great stream of history.”

His words describe the feelings many experience as they stagger from one crisis to another, battered by financial catastrophes and inundated with recurring messages of disaster from across the globe.  It’s easy to feel helpless, to collude with the perceived enemy, as some Frenchmen did under Petain, or to get involved on the basis that, as Gandhi described, one has to become the change one wishes to see in the world.  

So, what are you outraged about (there are more than enough choices) and how does it translate into action? What is your equivalent of the Second World War – that period of loss, confusion and turmoil in which lay the germ of an idea that was to become a focus of your life?  For me it was the credibility gap between what we say and what we do, between principles and practice, either individually or as a nation.

And in the midst of this I found the bees, or perhaps they found me, and a passion and a sense of outrage came together.  The bees invited me to walk the walk  and gradually I became the activist that Stéphane Hessel describes, striving for “… ethics, justice and a sustainable balance” in the belief that commitment is irresistible, peaceful insurrection is inevitable, and the bees, our environment,  and  the next generation will be the beneficiaries.  

Stéphane died in February, 2013, aged 95, and even in the tenth decade of life his conscience was outraged whenever the post-war world betrayed the program he had fought for. He often found himself in a minority, yet speaking in London in 2010 he said that of the long and arduous journey that had been his life, “something clearly emerged :  the need to give a sense to my life by defending the values that the Nazis had scorned.”

“The worst of all attitudes,” wrote Stéphane, “is indifference.” Or as Charles de Gaulle said in 1940 after having been driven from France by the invading German armies, perhaps his darkest hour, “Must hope disappear?  Is defeat final?  No!”

Conventional wisdom in Pennsylvania has it that one year in five is a good one for the honey bees. 2014 was that year for me, and there was a possible explanation.

The agricultural practice in this neck of the woods  is mainly no-till on the basis that it preserves earthworm activity just below the surface and reduces water run-off with the associated contaminants and top soil that make their way eventually to the Chesapeake Bay.  The down-side, and it’s a big one for beekeepers, is the use of herbicides to kill the spring growth that in previous years would have been plowed under. 

My home apiary is surrounded by farm land with a dual rotation of corn and soya beans.   The soil seems to be regarded by the farmer is an inert substance to hold commercial fertilizers rather than a healthy, self-sufficient, complex organism; the prime concern appears to be financial viability rather than the long term health of the soil, the quality of water or the variety of life that the land supports. It says much that it is seen as an either/or situation.  Thus in the fall, after the crop is harvested, the land lies fallow for four months which means that in early spring it is an 80 acre bed of ‘weeds’ (ie. a carpet of wild flowers with mainly blue and purple florets close to the ground.)     In early April, just as those flowers are coming into bloom,  the farmer  spreads lime and then herbicides which kill literally every living plant, after which  he sows either corn or bean seed.

In 2014 the weather did not cooperate.  The wet, cool spring meant the farmer delayed his applications of weed killer which in turn meant that the bees had an extra few weeks to work the verdant wild pasture.  And it was those couple of weeks that, I believe, made the difference.  The colonies built up fast and when the regular nectar flow started they were well positioned to take full advantage. It is what Randy Oliver has called a “brief nutritional boom-or-bust period” during which this  short and unexpected period of floral diversity provided a copious quantity of both nectar and pollen, followed by the regular nectar flow and thereafter a ‘green desert.’  

Mary and I had occasion that same year to meet with several Alsatian beekeepers. Alsace, a contentious piece of land that has been much fought over by the French and Germans, is 106 miles long and 60 miles wide.  The eastern border is the Rhine river, 10 miles either side of which is a flat alluvial plain.  Water run off is not an issue (there is a network of canals to catch water from the Vosges mountains to the west and the Black Forest to the east, and to use it for irrigation before feeding it into the Rhine) and perhaps that is why we saw evidence of plowing rather than no-till practices. The main crops on the alluvial plain are corn and wheat, whereas vines dominate the foothills of the mountains.  The Vosges is richly forested with four tree species –  acacia (locust,) tilleul (linden or basswood,)  chatagnier (chestnut) and sapin (fir;) which, together with fleur sauvage (wild flower) make up the main honey varietals from May to August. It is noteworthy that the overwhelming source of nectar is from trees; beekeepers move their hives to different areas of the forests as the differing species of trees come into bloom from April through August.  To take advantage of an agricultural crop requires the beekeeper to pay rent to the farmer and the accepted fee is 12 jars of honey!

Two professional beekeepers we met both said that it had been a bad year for the bees (in France to qualify as professional one must have a minimum of 200 operational hives;) in fact according to Erik Delfortrie, “Last year was the worst and this is worse.”  In a good year he expects to get 20 tons of honey from 400 colonies, which averages out at 100 lbs per colony;  last year he harvested 4 tons, or 20 lbs per colony.

I raised the question of pesticides as a possible reason and, to my surprise, both denied it.  They pointed out that corn, grapes and wheat are not honey bee pollinated and that chemicals are not used in the forests. Erik described how a good quality microscope revealed that bees in weak colonies had high levels of nosema cerenae compared to their sisters in strong colonies.  

I asked Jean-Pierre Maisset, who had been President of the Valle de Ville beekeepers’ association for 20 years (he retired when he turned 70 so that younger people with different ideas could step forward) about the two year ban in France of two of the neonicotinoid products.  He supported the action but was skeptical of it’s effectiveness because of the complexity of the chemical interactions and the difficulties of enforcement.

The other impression of Alsace is of road sides and borders of fields that are rich in preserved floral vegetation, whereas we label the native plants growing in the brush, between rows, in ditches, hedgerows and woods as weeds which need to be mowed or sprayed, even though they provide a steady and diverse nutritional supply to a myriad of insects, 99% of which are beneficial.  We have come to believe, erroneously in my opinion, that  honey bees are unlikely to survive the winter unless we feed fondant or sugar syrup in the fall, on the basis that our environment is increasingly unable to support honey bees without our intervention.  First, syrup from white sugar does not have any of the minerals, proteins, amino-acids, phenols, pigments and vitamins that are in honey and which, although small in quantity are vital to the health of the bees; and secondly bees fed on sugar syrup emerge from the winter stronger in numbers but smaller in size with their immune system compromised; and thirdly, feeding a sugar substitute allows us to ignore the bigger issue – the depletion of our environment – much like the curbside recycling programs were devised by the garbage collection industry to distract the public for the real issue – the massive accumulation trash in the first place.

There seems to be a disconnect between the commercial agricultural sector and beekeepers. Mary and I were approached by a local farmer who enquired about the possibility of renting some of our acreage to plant his corn/soya bean rotation.  But, he insisted, he would need to remove the trees we have planted so that his heavy machinery could access all of the land more efficiently. The majority of those trees, which he saw merely as obstacles, are black locusts (acacia) which we have planted over the years specifically for the honey bees.  He seemed unaffected by the idea that the girls pollinate some 27 000 acres, much of which includes his farmland, and the discussion did not go any further.  

Farmers and beekeepers complement and benefit each other.  There is the potential and the need for a win:win situation,  yet the necessary conversations do not seem to be happening at a local level.  Is it possible that, in the days of smaller, family farmsteads, the farmer and the beekeeper were one and the same person, and there was a natural understanding of the interactions between insects and plants, to the benefit of both? Is it a coincidence that the farmer and researcher leading the restorative agricultural movement – Gabe Brown and Jonathan Lundgren respectively –  are also beekeepers?   Whatever the reason, we are all the poorer for the lack of dialog.