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Lars Chittka’s Mind of a Bee,  and Stephen Buchmann’s What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories and Personalities of Bees”, examine the question of sentience in plants and animals, an issue made more complex by the challenge of understanding minds that process information in ways  profoundly different from our own, as described by Ed Yong in An Immense World.  Perhaps the critical  question was posed two hundred years ago by  Jeremy Bentham: “The question is not can they reason. Nor can they talk. But can they suffer?”

In place of a nervous system, plants have a chemical pathway  in the form of glutamate, a neurotransmitter at the point of leaf separation.   Furthermore, plants having their leaves nibbled on by a  herbivore can release volatile organic compounds through interconnected root systems to the point that nearby plants release antifeedant molecules, thus making their own leaves unappealing to the herbivore, thereby preventing over-feeding in any one area. In her remarkable book, Wildscape, Nancy Lawson describes on the one hand how, in Iran, marigolds and salvias growing next to a busy highway had elevated levels of stress hormones, and on the other hand, in Israel, a species of primrose as able to increase the sweetness of its nectar in the presence of bees’ wingbeats.

Clearly  plants physiologically can  distinguish between stimuli, but whether this sensation is pain or pleasure as we understand it remains an open question. 

Many animals, including us, are vertebrates with similar nervous systems and  the capacity to remember, the latter quality often termed instinct because we do not have the ability to probe the emotional state of these sentient beings.   Lars Chittka, a professor in sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London,  argues that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities which not only make them profoundly smart with distinct personalities, but allow them to recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness. 

What made the headlines was Chittka’s experiment to  determine if bees could learn to avoid predators purely as an adaptive response. The experiment employed a robotic crab spider that lurked in flowers, briefly grabbing a bee and then releasing it unharmed. After that negative experience, the bees learned to scan the laboratory’s flowers to make sure they were spider-free before landing. But much to Chittka’s surprise, some bees also seemed to exhibit what he describes as a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. “The bees not only showed predator avoidance but they also showed false alarm behavior,” he wrote. “After scanning a perfectly safe flower, they rejected it and flew away, seeing a threat where there was none.”

Buchmann and Chittka also argue for bees’ self-awareness and emotions, including their ability to suffer, meeting Jeremy Bentham’s minimum parameter for sentience.  This could have significant implications for agriculture. Previous research has focused on the role of bees in crop pollination, but the work being pioneered by Chittka’s colleague, Stephen Buchmann, currently an adjunct professor in the Entomology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology departments at the University of Arizona in Tucson, could force an ethical reckoning with how honey bees are treated.

In the US, commercially managed bees are considered livestock by the Department of Agriculture  and are treated as a workhorse for food production, just as cattle in feedlots serve the beef industry. Because a bee’s brain is so tiny the assumption was that there could not be much going on in something so small and with so few neurons. Insects  were considered to be semi-robotic, with no capacity to feel pain or to experience suffering. Instead, writes Buchmann, “Bees are self-aware, they’re sentient, and they possibly have a primitive form of consciousness.”  This raises practical and existential quandaries. Can large-scale agriculture practices continue without causing bees to suffer, and is the dominant western culture even capable of accepting that the tiniest of creatures have feelings, too?  “We are blasting bees with huge amounts of agri-chemicals and destroying their natural foraging habitats,” says Buchmann. “Once people accept that bees are sentient and can suffer, I think attitudes will change.”

it is only in the last decade that research technology has become sophisticated enough to analyze the  neurobiology of the bee brain.  Two examples.  A recent study (May, 2023) at the University of Sheffield in Yorkshire, England, was designed to discover how honey bees excel at quick decision-making. They are the only pollinators that must get enough food for themselves as well as harvest large amounts of pollen and nectar to support their colony, which means memorizing the landscape, evaluating flower options and making quick decisions in a constantly changing environment. Chittka likens it to shopping in a grocery store, where you are rushing up and down aisles comparing products for the best deals and keeping a mental account before you return to the product you ultimately decide to buy.

The task of the Sheffield group was to study how this might apply to improving artificial intelligence systems and devices  – the aim was to ‘develop skilled machines that can think like bees,’ according the the study leader, Dr MaBouDi. 20 bees were trained to recognize five different colored flowers –  blue flowers contained sugar syrup, green flowers contained bitter tonic water and the remaining colors sometimes had glucose. The bees were then released into a custom-built garden where flowers contained only distilled water to see how they performed.

The experiment found they made a bee-line for flowers they thought would have food – landing there in an average of 0.6 seconds, which is faster than another other animal – and were just as quick to avoid flowers they thought would not have food.  Next, MaBouDi et al. developed a computational model which could faithfully replicate the pattern of decisions exhibited by the bees, while also being plausible biologically. This approach offered insights into how a small brain could execute such complex choices ‘in the moment’, and the type of neural circuits that would be required.  “What we’ve done in this study is reveal the underlying mechanisms which drive these remarkable decision-making capabilities. We can now use these to design better, more robust and risk-averse robots and autonomous machines that can think like bees – some of the most efficient navigators in the natural world,” according to Dr MaBouDi.

Secondly,  Chittka and Buchmann studied bee behavior in response to fluctuations in the feel-good neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin. Mood-regulating chemicals increased when bees received a surprise reward of sucrose, similar to when humans enjoy a sweet treat. The improved mood led bees to have more enthusiasm for foraging compared with bees who received no reward. Alternatively, when bees were shaken in a tube or otherwise put in an anxiety-producing situation, dopamine and serotonin decreased. Buchmann reports in his book that studies have discovered bee brains “have their own internal opioid pleasure centers”.

Such findings have forced some to reconsider how bees are treated in a laboratory setting. Chittka says he would not run a traumatic experiment like the crab spider test today, but that he did not know such an outcome was possible back then. While Chittka now only conducts experiments he considers “ethically defensible,” this is not the case for others in his field, particularly when it comes to research on farming and pesticides. Part of the problem is that there are no animal welfare laws here in the United States protecting insects – or any invertebrates – in a lab setting, unlike mice and other mammals. Indeed, experiments are deliberately designed to stress and kill bees in order to figure out how much the insects can tolerate in the fields. “Many of my colleagues do invasive neuroscience experiments where bees have electrodes implanted into various body parts without any form of anesthesia,” Chittka says. “The current carefree situation that [invertebrate] researchers live in with no legal framework needs to be re-evaluated.”

In the US, the untold numbers of bees killed for scientific research pales in comparison with the number that die while pollinating mass-produced crops, particularly almonds. But finding a way to mass-produce crops while reducing pain and suffering for bees is a daunting undertaking. If vegetarians and vegans who avoid eating animals for ethical reasons were to apply the same standards to foods pollinated by bees, they would have very little on their plates.

Commercial pollination is also big business. The California almond industry rakes in more than $11bn a year and is the third-most-profitable commodity in the state.  While some agricultural operations have tried to improve the survival rate for bees by reducing pesticide use and planting more diverse forage beyond a single crop, a California startup called BeeHero is among the first commercial pollination services to directly address the issue of animal welfare.  The company uses electronic sensors that are placed in hives to monitor the sounds and tonal vibrations of the colony, which BeeHero says reflect the bees’ emotional state. “There is a throb or hum to a colony that is similar to a human heartbeat,” says Huw Evans, head of innovation for BeeHero. which  is pollinating approximately 100,000 acres of California almond groves. “Our sensors feel that hum the way a doctor hears a patient’s heartbeat with a stethoscope.”  The data from the sensors is collected and analyzed for any variations that could indicateharms being caused by the surrounding environment. 

Both Buchmann and Chittka say they have been profoundly changed by their discoveries of emotion-like states in bees. The mysterious, alien mind of a bee fills them with a sense of wonder as well as a conviction that creatures without a backbone have rights, too. “These unique minds, regardless of how much they may differ from our own, have as much justification to exist as we do,” says Chittka. “It is a wholly new aspect of how weird and wonderful the world is around us.”

So how likely is the unveiling of these ‘unique minds’, of our increasing awareness of sentience not only in honey bees but  probably in all animals, likely to change our attitudes and behavior towards them?  To come back to Stephen Buchmann’s statement,  “Once people accept that bees are sentient and can suffer, I think attitudes will change.” Based on our current behavior as well as our history, I’m not holding my breath.  Here are three examples from the thousands that I might have chosen; two are historical, one is current.  

In the first few hours of July 1, 1916, in the Battle of the Somme on the Western Front of the First World War, the British Army suffered more than 57 000 casualties,  with almost 20 000 dead, the bloodiest day in its history.  Their commander, Field Marshall Douglas Haig, whose statue today dominates Whitehall in London, had sent the flower of British youth to death and mutilation, yet neither in his public manner nor his private diaries did he show a trace of awareness of or regret for the human suffering he had caused.

Most Americans are familiar first,  with the ‘forty acres and a mule’ story, the promise General Sherman made to newly freed slaves at the end of the Civil War, only to have it reversed by Andrew Johnson after Lincoln’s assassination, and secondly with the 368 treaties signed with Native American tribes, often coerced, often broken.  And yet here is an account of which we are probably less familiar.  In 1918, when American soldiers returned from Europe, they were welcomed as heroes, and Congress voted to award them a bonus of $1.25 for day they had served overseas, to be paid in 1945.  But in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, some 15000 penniless veterans camped on the Mall to petition for their bonuses.  One month after the Senate refused to pass the appropriate bill President Hoover ordered the army to clear the encampment.  Using tanks, police, cavalry, fixed bayonets and tear gas, a force led by General Douglas MacArthur did so … and the veterans never received their payments. 

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of  The Body Keeps Score : Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, writes that “(R)esearch by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engage in physical violence.  A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or  hit …  For every American soldier who serves in a war zone abroad there are ten children who are molested in their own homes.”  

If we, as a ‘civilized’ people, are willing to molest and beat our children and spouses, often under the influence of alcohol, to dismiss mass annihilation in front of enemy artillery, and to deny veterans what they had been promised, what chances do honey bees have without a voice to express their suffering? If we are arrogant enough to call ourselves “wise” (as per the sapiens in Homo sapiens) then we should be wise enough to watch, listen to, learn from and empathize with these animals who have been there, done that, but don’t wear their feelings on little t-shirts. 

My background is in European and African history, and in education. In my years of high school and graduate work I was never required to take so much as one course in US history;  instead we came across the US obliquely.  The American Rebellion, for example, (as it was called) while studying the reign of George III; Woodrow Wilson’s role at the Treaty of Versailles; Truman and the two atomic bombs in the context of the Second World War; and Americans in Vietnam during the Cold War.  I guess many Americans have done the same with unwanted gaps in their education, perhaps as regards Africa, South America, the Middle East and the Far East. 

I am reasonably well traveled, by circumstance as much as by choice, and  am acutely aware not only that most readers are intelligent, highly distractible, able to stop reading at any time, do not necessarily care about this month’s topic, and  know more about a multitude of things in a wide range of fields than do I. 

The question is how to get such readers to care about something that they would otherwise not pay heed.  Spoiler alert : the answer is stories.

History, after all, is a story.  Often reduced to dates and events, it is the saga of humanity, of how we have related to each other, to ideas and to power, over time. In essence, it is the story of complex relationships with the elements of  failure and success, of joy and frustration, of quests and mysteries.

It has been suggested that when I come up with a bee topic for any particular month, I look for a ‘hook’ (often history-related) on which to hang it. In fact the reverse is mostly true.  While being exposed to a concept or event, I realize that there is a connection to the world  of the honey bee. Last month it was George Mitchell’s comment that “It was 700 days of failure and one day of success” that led first to the association with Socrates, and secondly to the concepts of the Socratic method,  induced confusion, and their application to the learning process as experienced by a beekeeper. 

The opening story has another function: as a local beekeeper shared with me, it aroused his curiosity along the lines of, “I wonder how Jeremy can possibly make this story relevant to honey bees?” 

Here is a current example. For the first week of July Mary and I were in County Donegal, Ireland. We had lunch and dinners in pubs, as well as mid-morning and mid-afternoon teas in small cafes, of which there were a proliferation.  I was struck not only by the absence of fast food outlets (granted, Donegal is one of the most rural of Ireland’s counties) but also by the leisurely time in which local people ate and the sociality of the meals (which perhaps is the difference between a pub and a bar.)  Frequently we struck up a conversation with those at a nearby table, or watched the inter-table visiting between customers who clearly knew each other. 

In the first week after our return to PA we went out for lunch.  The meal I ordered came with two sides, which I didn’t need   When I declined both, the gentleman behind the register said in some amazement, “But why don’t you want them?  They’re free!”. The insinuation was that I had to have them simply because they were free, whether I wanted them or not.

These events in combination prompted a recall of the Slow Food Movement, and to question if and how it relates to beekeeping. 

The former was founded by Carlo Petrini, a journalist and gourmet, 34 years ago.  Having studied at Berkeley and getting a taste of the university’s famed counterculture, he returned to his home town of Bra in Piedmont, Italy, which to his concern had been infiltrated by American culture.  He was incensed when, in 1986, McDonald’s announced it was building a Golden Arches in Rome, adjacent to the Spanish Steps in Piazza di Spagna.  Would it threaten the traditional food culture of Rome – local trattorias and osterias, the dining establishments of the working class?  As a means of protest he organized a festival of cooking and eating titled Slow Food, with an accompanying Manifesto proclaiming that food is the joy and heart of life, and that it is threatened by the trend to commodify, industrialize and destroy its essence, which is Taste, with a capital T.  In the twentieth century, modeled on industry, the  machine and profit,   speed became both our unit of  measurement and our shackles. We are willing victims of a  fast life that assails us in our homes,  fractures our customs and threatens our environment with a tempo that propels us down the road to stress, tension and anxiety. Food is a matter of necessary calories, absorbed as we rush out the door or drive to the next appointment, rather than a source of conscious pleasure and community. 

Petrini’s initiative piggy-backed on the organic food movement as well as the more generic trends towards individuality, sensuality and rebellion.  As the movement grew, Carlo added slow food conventions, feasts and seminars and an international conference in Paris.  Today, Slow Food has in excess of 150,000 members and is active in more than 150 countries.

In 2004, Slow Food co-founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy, which offers undergraduate and master degrees in food studies, and in 2008, the University of New Hampshire, inspired by a visit from Petrini, launched the first U.S.-based “Eco-Gastronomy” major in 2008.  Today there are more than 170 chapters and 2,000 food communities in the United States.

Is there merit in the concept of Slow Backyard Beekeeping,  with an emphasis on the rich varieties and aromas, rhythms and tempos, cadences and inflections, wisdom and experience, of the bee hive?  After all, the honey bee is the key to so much of our sustenance, both  body and soul. With Slow Beekeeping the emphasis moves from how to manipulate a hive as quickly as possible to the zen of beekeeping by which we consciously  exercise patience and observation, thought and reflection, wonderment and awe, through significant connection with the natural world. I have been one to stress the need to keep a hive open for as short a time as possible, in terms of minimum disturbance to the bees, and I wonder if the decorum with which it is opened is as important as the time.

Honey, rather than simply a resource for the bees and for us,  becomes the United Nations of the food world in its infinite global variety, the closest we can get to tasting the energy of the sun though the miracle of photosynthesis, a complex product of the evolution and adaptability of plants, the joy and heart of life  And we cherish the Taste (with a capital T.)  

Beekeeping and honey reveal our history –  ‘the story of complex relationships, with the elements of  failure and success, of joy and frustration, of quests and mysteries’ – if only we can take the time to slow down, reflect and rejoice in our privileged position as guardians of the honey bee.

Two scenarios share a common theme, despite being separated by distance and time. In the first, an elderly man walks to the public square where he questions young men on esoteric matters such as the nature of justice.   In the second, reflecting on what was possibly the major achievement of his life, a venerable diplomat says, “It was 700 days of failure and one day of success.”

The first is Socrates in the agora of Athens almost 2500 years ago, as described by his student, Plato.  In Plato’s early dialogues, confusion is considered to be the beginning of genuine enquiry, rather than a disagreeable feeling and a waste of precious time. With their assumptions challenged, the young Greeks were left in a state of confusion which, in Socrates’ eyes, was the first indispensable step of any true enquiry into the truth : ‘[Having] been reduced to the perplexity of realizing that he did not know … he will go on and discover something.’

The second is Senator George Mitchell in April of this year, describing the two year process that led up to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which brought an end two decades of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland.  Known as  ‘The Troubles,’ during which 3600 people  died and countless more were seriously injured, Protestants (or Unionists) fought to keep Northern Ireland part of the United Kingdom while Catholics (or Republicans) wanted to be part of the Republic of Ireland.  George Mitchell, a former senator from Maine and Clinton’s ambassador to Ireland, served as chairman of the Northern Ireland peace talks which brokered the historic agreement.

What did he do for those 700 days?  On the surface, very little.  He did not socialize with either side nor did not he speak much in public.  What he did do was listen, and by doing so he honored the state of national confusion without offering preconceived solutions, eventually establishing trust with both sides.  As he later said, “I tried very hard to be fair and nonpartisan. I’d had experience — six years as majority leader of the U.S. Senate gives you some practice in trying to bring people together – and so while there was considerable opposition to my serving as chairman at the outset, by the time we finished, we were all very friendly and we’ve remained personal friends really for the rest of [our] lives …”  

In a seminal paper published in APA PsycNet in 2003, the psychologists Paul Rozin and Adam Cohen asked college students to observe facial expressions and describe the emotion being expressed, as well as the facial movements involved. To their surprise, the most common descriptor was confusion, even though it is not a category in standard taxonomies of emotion, let alone part of the set of basic emotions recognised by psychologists. The question then became: what is the nature of confusion and what is its use?

Most of us encounter confusion on a daily basis, ranging from trying to make sense of an unexpected piece of national news to understanding the reasons for an inter-family quarrel. The world is an inherently and increasingly confusing place, not least in the post-truth era where fake news is ubiquitous : increasingly we encounter statements and problems that do not make immediate sense because they do not fit with previous patterns we have experienced.  Overcoming this results in real learning.

New beekeepers tend to believe the answers lie essentially in memorization or rote learning.  After all, that is how many of us got through school. Some, for example, in an early inspection, will encounter stimuli that are new and unexpectedly confusing, to the point that his or her ability to make sense of them using current knowledge is low. The consequent frustration can decrease motivation to the point of giving up altogether. Too big a piece of the puzzle is missing and  it feels that the game is not worth the strain. This is what researchers call ‘hopeless confusion’.

Complex learning tasks require both a solid knowledge base and the confidence and ability to apply that knowledge for diagnosis and possible solutions. In such instances confusion can act as a motivator.   As an aside, how often do we deliberately allow for confusion in our school classrooms (as compared to chaos) even though the learning from successfully solving a challenging problem can be deeply rewarding? Because of my background, I would add that the history of this country is confusing, and we simplify it at our peril. 

Consider, for example, a new beekeeper who, inspecting a hive, finds she cannot see eggs. Her knowledge base tells her why the presence of eggs is important; now she has to apply that knowledge to determine why they might be absent –  perhaps she just can’t see them, or the queen is not laying, in which case why, or there is a brood break because of recent swarming, or the bees are in the process of superseding the queen.  Amid this uncertainty she can adjust the inspection in a way that will help identify the likely cause which in turn will lead to appropriate solutions, ranging from doing nothing and coming back in a week’s time, to initiating enquiries for a new queen. And in the best case scenario, she will have access to a mentor who can help connect her observations with potential responses.

Nor is this confined to new beekeepers.  For example, I have a colony that did well last year, came through the winter strong, yet had a mite count of 12 in early April and 18 in late May.  My intent was to remove the queen, treat the mites once all the brood had emerged, and add a new queen with better genetics.  Yet, despite three searches, I cannot find her.  The bees are calm, which suggests they are queen-right, and there are neither eggs nor signs of a virgin, such as a queen cell from which she has emerged.  I know what to do –  add a frame with one-day-old larvae and, after three days, check to see if the workers are building queen cells around one or more of them; what I don’t know is why the colony is in this state. 

Similarly a colleague and neighbor had significant swarming from his hives last year, continuing this spring with 21 swarms from 12 hives.   It doesn’t seem to be an issue of the environment providing excess resources (his apiary and mine are less than a bee-mile apart,) nor is it likely all of his queens have a high tendency towards swarming.  Is it a management issue?  If so the answer in not immediately apparent, and he is approaching it rigorously, asking valid questions and making good notes, including graphical representations of the relationship between temperature, rainfall and swarms in his apiary. 

So he and I are confused, and happily so, the recognition of which is motivating a deeper kind of enquiry with more thorough information-processing, and without trying to hasten a conclusion.  An eventual solution will increase the chances of overcoming the next obstacle not by working harder so much as by working  differently.  The proviso is the 85 % rule – the optimal degree of difficulty to heighten focus without leading to a sense of helplessness, is a task in which learners succeed 85% of the time.

Research in neuroscience shows that encountering a problem while learning a new skill such as beekeeping enhances neuroplasticity in our brains, which make us more alert, focused and cognitively active. My guess is that most experienced beekeepers can relate to this process, in particular the feeling of being more focused, more aware, more alive, when working with honey bees.  Enhanced neuroplasticity is why retirees are frequently advised to take up a new hobby or interest, and might be why many beekeepers turn to this hobby later in their lives. 

But I don’t want to stop here.  I want to argue that there should be legitimate confusion on a much larger scale. Nicola Broadbear, the director of Bees for Development, writing in the Spring, 2023,  issue of the Natural Bee Husbandry magazine, suggests that “(P)eriods don’t become defined by the styles for which they are known until long after they have ended, and maybe the past fifty years will be regarded as the beekeeping crazy era, when it was thought that we could keep honey bee colonies in sub-standard housing, shift them from place to place, reduce the range and abundance of available flora, stop them reproducing normally, take away all their honey and feed them white sugar instead, treat them with chemicals, and we then complained that they became sick and died!” 

Reframing confusion as a positive and valuable feeling invites us to rethink some of our accepted practices. In our current world, information, data and pre-made solutions are so readily available at the tip of our fingers that we deprive ourselves of opportunities to enhance our brain plasticity by contemplating possible answers of our own. Instead of trying to come up with hypotheses for our questions, we put our brains on pause while we type in the question for Uncle Google and wait for the answer to be delivered on our phones. To cite Vidya Rajan (again) in a personal e-mail, “. So much information, but so little thinking/rumination because information just “is there”. No analysis, no inference, no hypotheses. Just answers. Boom.”

And yes, clearly there are times when confusion is inappropriate – I don’t want the pilot flying my plane, nor the surgeon about to operate, to be confused; my guess is that it was the hours of training with different unexpected scenarios  that allowed Sully Sullenberger to execute an emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River, in January of 2009, in which all 155 passengers and crew survived.  

How might Socrates and George Mitchell approach ‘the bee problem’? I imagine the former would ask persistent and demanding questions prompting us to examine what we have come to take for granted, until we were open to questioning the issues raised by Nicola above – the structure of a modern hive, the mass transportation of bees, the lack of natural resources, feeding sugar and exposure to chemicals.  George Mitchell, by comparison, might gain the trust of the various sides involved, from commercial beekeepers to hobbyists, agribusiness to small gardeners, until he judged that  exposure to opposing points had motivated sufficient empathy on all sides so as to prompt a higher level of focus and an increased probability of success.

My expectation is that when you read above the request to students by Rozin and Cohen to observe facial expressions, and that the most common description was confusion,  your immediate impression was that this was a negative.  In fact it was a positive. Productive confusion triggers us to think more deeply and to avoid premature closure, despite the frustration. Contrary as this is to current cultural trends which promise immediate gratification,  confusion is an indication that our brain is preparing to focus more deeply, to process more thoroughly, and thus offer us a better chance at learning something valuable.  I for one am grateful, first, that honey bees frequently invite me to learn something valuable (‘beekeeping is a gateway drug!’) and secondly, for friends who allow for that confusion by encouraging my ownership of  the thinking process rather than offering unsolicited advice and premature conclusions.  

On May 6 the former Prince of Wales was crowned, “Charles III, by the grace of God,  of  the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of his other Realms and Territories King, Head of the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith.”

I hope someone told the bees, reassuring them that this is not a return to a previous era when the colony too was headed by a ‘king.’

Despite its emphasis on facts and objectivity, the world of science is not free from personal and societal biases. One example is how the names scientists choose to christen their findings often reflect the society in which they live.  What we now call “worker bees” for example,  were once termed “slaves” because they were named at a time when slavery was common and acceptable.  A more recent example is the inherent bias which has prevented dietitians from seriously considering data that ice cream might be weight-reducing

Aristotle, student of Plato and a man of remarkable intellect – the Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein of his times – compiled the multi-volumed History of Animals in the middle of the 4th C BCE, and it remained the accepted word on animal biology in Europe until the early seventeenth century.  But Ancient Greek society had some strong opinions about women, viewing them primarily as property, so when Aristotle witnessed a society consisting almost entirely of women it is understandable why he assumed the ‘queen’ bees were male and called them kings.

These gender biases were so ingrained that  it took a change in western society 2000 years later for the possibility of a female ruler to compute.  The work which popularized the idea was The Feminine Monarchy, by Charles Butler, published in 1609 when the author was 49 years old.   The fact that he was interested in bees, that he lived under a female monarch (Queen Elizabeth I)  for the first 43 years of his life, that there were other powerful women in Europe (eg. Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary I, Marie and Catherine de Medici, Isabella of Castille, Mary Tudor of France, Mary Queen of Scots, Margaret and Elisabeth of Valois, Anne of Denmark, and the various consorts of Henry VIII) meant that society was primed to accept the role of a female leader – even as, twenty years before Butler, the Spanish beekeeper, Luis Mendez de Torres, had labelled her the maestro, or mistress, and as such, the source of all the bees in a colony.  Within a generation, Jan Swammerdam proved this anatomically when, after  dissection and under a microscope, he described eggs in the abdomens of queen bees.  

The first irony is that today, in the developed world, most of our human equivalents of worker bees live at a level that Elizabeth I or her father, Henry VIII, would have envied.   As Brian Watson explains in Headed into the Abyss, surrounded by comfort and wanting for little, we have more than enough to eat, have control over our physical comforts including temperature and humidity, might have more than one home, more than one car and more than one annual vacation, and we can buy almost anything we need at the touch of a button, all supported by an endless supply of light, power, fuel and energy.  

By comparison, millions of our fellow worker bees, and not only in the less developed countries, fight every day just to stay alive.  Food and water supplies are unreliable, the air is polluted, life-threatening infections and diseases are omnipresent with minimal access to health care … it sounds like a neglected colony of bees heavily infested with mites.

The second irony is that this queen does not rule.  Curiously,  five hundred  years before The Feminine Monarchy was published, the Anglo-Saxons were using the term ‘bee mother,’ recognizing her primarily as a superb ovipositor even as they did not realize the extent to which she is controlled by the workers. But because we anthropomorphize the natural world it was easy  to impose the hierarchy of the seventeenth century society on the honey bee colony, with a queen at the apex of the pyramid ruling  over her loyal subjects.  This societally imposed misconception obscured for more than two centuries the reality of a society in which there is no hierarchy, no strata, no absolute ruler; this is in contrast to our world with its vast disparity of lifestyles in which some act as if we live on a planet of infinite resources to which they are more than entitled while just as many are fighting abject poverty and denied the most basic of human rights. To steal a phrase from Vidya Rajan, writing about fecundity in India in particular,  “the poor are one fistful of rice away from starvation.”

Meanwhile the ‘perfect storm’ continues to build – an inability by many to accept that our planet exists in a delicate balance with finite resources, a capitalist model that rewards short term profits despite the long term costs, instant global communication that unendingly promotes a consumer mentality and measures growth accordingly,  a political model committed to short term, extravagant  promises and unable to plan long term, increased emphasis on the individual at the expense of community, a global population that is estimated to reach 10 billion in 25 years time, and a populace which feels disempowered and thus  unwilling to  accept personal responsibility for its actions.

Meanwhile the honey bee colony, unseen and unappreciated by most of us, continues to offer an alternative model in an increasingly challenging environment.  The queen may not be surrounded by the pomp and ceremony that accompanies Charles III, nor is her ‘coronation’  extravagant and costly, but she has one overarching attribute : she may not be the leader of the colony but she is in control of its destiny.

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On March 2nd, Michael Benfield, speaking on the fiftieth anniversary of the Green Party of England and Wales, of which he was one of the founders,  said he believed the battle for the world’s environmental survival was “at this moment, lost … I think we have succeeded in helping to educate but we have failed in dealing with the battle for environmental survival.” The scale of the solutions is simply too unpalatable for any political party to propose, he argued. The focus now has to be on mitigation. “It doesn’t mean to say that we can’t perhaps do other things to put things right, but it’s a very dire situation that we have.”

What follows is an imaginary scenario as to what might unfold if we continue to fail to support the talk with action.  I want to acknowledge at the outset my indebtedness to Dave Goulson’s chapter, A View From the Future, in Silent Earth, David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth,  which covers a huge amount of ground for such a short book, and Brian Watson, Headed Into the Abyss : The Story of Our Time and the Future We’’ll Face. 

I’ve lost.  Last night they came for the last little bits and I was unable to stop them. What surprises me, looking back, is how fast this has come to be.  I thought it was something my grandchildren would have to deal with; now I believe there is nothing left to which they can respond. 

I recall the abundance of my youth.  Supermarkets were filled daily with food, including exotic fruits flown in from all over the world and available throughout the year.  And it was so cheap that we bought more than we needed, throwing away at least one third, much of it only half-eaten.  Indeed the privileged societies of the world consumed so much that there was an epidemic of obesity and a wave of self-inflicted diabetes at the same time as, every day, hundreds of children were dying world-wide from hunger.    And this excess came wrapped in plastic that went into the landfills together with the dirty diapers and unused medicines, the household chemicals and  industrial waste, eventually leaching into the water systems and thus the oceans, to the point that micro-plastics were omnipresent, including the bottom of the Marian Trench more than 5 miles below the sea surface. 

Gasoline was plentiful and cheap.   Many families had two or more cars, each of which was six or eight cylinders when four was more than enough, heavy on fuel consumption, and there was little hesitation in driving or flying anywhere at short notice, despite the warnings of excess emissions.   And we lived in large houses with beautiful gardens, watered by sprinklers that turned themselves on and off without any thought from us. 

60 years ago in the midst of the excesses of the developed world,  Rachel Carson wrote, “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. We are challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”  

In 1992 1700 scientists from every corner of the globe issued  a Warning to Humanity explaining  that the lifestyle of developed nations was changing the global climate, polluting our soils, rivers and air, felling rainforests, overfishing the seas, creating acid rains and driving species extinct, in effect destroying the biodiversity which our planet had developed over literally millions, if not billions, of years, and which is both basic and essential to all life, whether it be animal, bird or insect. 

Governments paid little heed, even when a second warning was issued in 2017, this time signed by 20 000 scientists.  Indeed, in 2000, one of the leading voices on climate change, Al Gore, was narrowly defeated in a Presidential election by George Bush, a climate denier.  With the benefit of hindsight, that was a critical opportunity missed. Most politicians, despite their rhetoric, cannot see beyond the next election, and the general public has become so accustomed to short term gratification that it cannot think long term, never mind take actions that might be uncomfortable despite their being for the greater good.  Add to this a capitalist system that allows multi-national conglomerates to focus on profits rather than the human or environmental good, an unfounded belief in the benefit, if not the inevitability, of endless economic growth, and a belief that science, robotics, mechanization and Artificial Intelligence, despite being part of the problem, would come up with the necessary solutions. Indeed a UNO report in March 2023, eight years in the making, focused on technological innovation, thereby once again absolving John and Jane Doe from facing any personal change in behaviors. 

I have long been a beekeeper, always having (or after last night, perhaps I need to use the past tense) several hives of honey bees.   Thus a personal trigger point was some research out of Germany, published in 2022, which showed that the global biomass of insects has declined by 76% in less than 25 years.  Insects evoke strong emotional responses — usually fear and loathing – but they are the foundation upon which the natural world rests.  Many plants are eaten by them and, in turn, are eaten by other insects as well as by birds, reptiles and a variety of small mammals. But, as this report made clear,  insects, as a class, were dying, and we were the cause. 

Insects are also the foundation of our food pyramid, from earth worms who aerate the soil lessening our reliance on fertilizers, to those who act as biological control agents that can help reduce our reliance on pesticides, to the myriad of pollinators – bees, moths, butterflies, bats, wasps, ants, flies and birds among many others. 87% of all plant species require pollination in order to produce fruits or seeds — and this includes 75% of all agricultural food crops. 

Yet most people remained blithely oblivious to these dramatic changes, explainable by several factors. First, shifting baselines, where we mistakenly thought that the current state of the world at any one time was ‘normal.’ Secondly, the vast majority of people in more developed nations were so detached from the natural world that they saw pollinators only as bugs that needed to be squashed, unaware that the agri-businesses that mass-produced their food was also putting toxins in the water, soil and air to the point that even the nectar collected by honey  bees was impoverished.   Thirdly, our culture and education system for the most part did not encourage deep connections with the natural world, nor the ability to think and act selflessly in the long term.

Consequently, and like the reports before it, the appeal of 2017 had no visible impact on policy or behavior even as the percentages of wild vertebrates declined and carbon emissions increased, together with those of methane-emitting livestock, global climate temperatures and the human population.  It was named The Sixth Extinction and gave rise to numerous appeals on behalf of the polar bears, elephants and white rhinos while the real obsolescence was happening in our own back yards. 

By 2030  food crops such as coffee, chocolate,  raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, peaches and apples became more scare, replaced by the limited (and frankly unappealing) products of the grass family – wheat, rice, and barley – which are wind-pollinated.  It was a self-repeating positive feedback loop because everything in nature is interlinked with synergies that no one could predict. At local levels,  with the gradual loss of, and huge increase in the price of, milk, cheese and beef, the public learned how cattle are fed primarily alfalfa, that  alfalfa is insect-pollinated, and that insect pests had become resistant to the barrage of pesticides to which they had been subjected for decades, thus overwhelming the beneficial  insects like ladybirds, overflies, lacewings and carabid beetles,  severely weakened as they were by the same chemicals.  At a global level reduced ice cover at the Poles decreased reflection of the sun’s energy, leading to more warming and thus more melting (glacier melting in both the Arctic and Antarctica increased more than four times in the space of six years in the early 2020’s;) the thawing of the Arctic permafrost  released huge quantities of methane that were once trapped underground (methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide;) changing weather patterns reduced rainfall in the Amazon and forests of equatorial Africa, so the rainforests disappeared after acting as ‘the lungs’ of our planet for some 55 million years.

At the same time extreme weather conditions increased, especially hurricanes and wild fires.

Heavy rains, storm surges and increases in the ocean level flooded cities from New York to London to Mumbai, Shanghai, Osaka and Miami; the weakened economies could not afford to build the necessary protections, insurance companies were bankrupted and eventually large swaths of countryside disappeared under water, starting with the Maldives and Bangladesh and including much of Florida and the Fens of England. 

By 2035 it was obvious that the world no longer had the capacity to feed a global population that had stabilized at some ten billion people.  Summer droughts in the American wheat belt and the advance of the Sahara southwards in Africa meant many farmers had to leave their land with nowhere to go.  A century of intensive farming had critically reduced the narrow layer of top soil on which plants depend; what remained was critically polluted by chemicals (the world’s only sources of natural fertilizer, especially potassium found primarily in Morocco, were exhausted;) underground water used for irrigation had dried up, and all major rivers had stopped flowing in the summer causing storage dams to go dry. 

Increasingly ‘climate refugees’ were forced into crowded temporary accommodations which were ideal for outbreaks of deadly diseases, not least cholera.  The consequent fear, combined with rising unemployment,  food prices and shortages, led to protests, riots, and the election of increasingly extremist politicians who in turn inflamed this pubic anxiety for personal ends.  By 2040 countries had become isolationist, putting their own interests before those of humankind or the environment.  The mistrust, if not derision,  of scientists reached new peaks in an environment in which ‘truth’ was defined by those who shouted the loudest or had the money to buy time on the media. The title of Al Gore’s book, An Inconvenient Truth, seemed increasingly prescient. 

As agricultural production declined globally, money could no longer buy food from abroad, supermarket shelves began to empty and families began to stockpile provisions, resenting any suggestion that they should help feed the migrants camped on their borders. 

There is no doubt that those in developing countries suffered the worst.  The theme of the 2030’s was of the three f’s (floods, fires and famines,) leaving a billion people destitute and desperate.  Millions died in famines; those who survived created mass migrations north and south, trying to escape the civil wars that broke out along ethnic and religious lines as people looked for a scapegoat to blame for their suffering.  

Initially the rich were still able to live in a state of luxury out of all proportion to their numbers, even to their value.  But as the environment collapsed as measured by the increasing levels of  the oceans and of aridity, share prices fell, hedge funds folded and banks collapsed. Hyperinflation made money virtually worthless and everyone was poor.  It was a painful reminder that the foundation of the economy, even of civilization, is a healthy environment – if one cannot grow food the economy is obliterated. 

As early as 2022 life expectancy began to fall, living standards declined and the health services were overwhelmed. An aging population, the epidemic of obesity, related chronic illnesses such as diabetes, the resistance of bacteria to antibiotics, and plagues in the unsanitary migratory camps only made the situation worse.  By 2040 schools, hospitals and a nation’s infrastructure were in disrepair, pay-checks (when they came) could not cover the basic necessities of family life, law and order crumbled, people stole and looted what they could, and many abandoned the cities. Eventually the electric supply faltered and then failed – those who had stockpiled food lost much of it when their freezers failed.  And without power, water stopped running, shops had to close, gasoline was rationed (my ration was two gallons per month) but without electricity there was no way to pump nor to get power for electric vehicles. 

How have I survived, at least until now?   Fortunately I live in a rural area, have a well that can be accessed by hand, solar panels to provide electricity, a few chickens, some deer in the woods which I try to trap and, my pride and joy, a two acre vegetable garden, hidden from view and large enough to feed the three generations that live in the farmhouse.    Or so I thought.   

Last night some desperate, starving people, scavenging what they could to stay alive, invaded the farm. First they killed the few chickens, desperate for meat and ignoring the fact that otherwise there was a steady supply of eggs.  They tore apart the two bee hives, partly for honey, which they could have taken without killing the bees, and then for the larvae which are a rich source of protein, even as their removal will lead to the death of the colonies.   Then they found the garden and tore it up, irrespective of whether the root and leaf vegetables were ready to eat or not.  Everything is gone, including the seed which I collected so carefully in the fall  to create seedlings in the spring.  Yes, I have a gun, but it as empty threat, literally – there has not been any ammunition available for at least five years.  

So, for me and my extended family, as for most others, it is over.    Like those affected by the dreadful plagues in the Middle Ages, we have no alternative but to accept our fate. 

The irony is that in this last decade, with humanity in retreat, there are signs of environmental recovery.  The water in the streams is more clear; there are indigenous shrubs and wild flowers growing in the fields that were once intensively cultivated, without smog and micro-plastics the trees are more leafy, and it might have been my imagination, or even wishful thinking, but last week  I thought I caught a glimpse of a butterfly, which would have been the first in three years.   

It is all too little too late.  We had our chances to change our behaviors, and ignored them, hoping instead for miracles, or at the very least a colony on Mars.  Anything but the acceptance of personal responsibility and accountability.

So what of the future?  Human beings are newcomers to this world.  If we start with the first homo sapiens, which is 150 000  years before the first use of language, as best we can calculate, we have been present for .0004% of the planet’s history.  That is equivalent to 8 seconds in a 24 hour day. There has never been any guarantee that humans are not destined to disappear one day; we just never thought it would be this soon.  Not only is the end of our reign imminent but we should welcome it.  By desperately hanging on, repeatedly doing the same things, we are only postponing the inevitable.  Without us the earth will recover and perhaps, sometime in the next one or two million years, another intelligent species might emerge unencumbered with myths of divine creation and the right to domination, and a deeper understanding of the concept of love.    All evidence of our existence will have disappeared,  and hopefully these new beings, in whatever form they take, will do a better job than we have, not that any of us will be around to see it. 

At the University of Burlington, VT,  one of the science professors was renowned for his emphasis on the importance of observation.  Story has it that he would walk into the first class of the semester carrying a jar of yellow liquid, turn to the students banked in rows before him, and announce  that “The only way to find out if this is indeed urine is to smell and taste it,” upon which he put his nose close to the rim of the jar, dipped a finger into the liquid, and then licked his finger. 

“You all have to test and decide for yourself,” he would say, and when they protested he alleged that this was a pass/fail part of the course.  When they had all hesitantly smelled, dipped and licked, he would explain, “If you had been observant, you would have noticed that I dipped my second finger into the liquid, and licked my third finger.”

This past winter ten beekeepers from the local association decided to meet once a month for four months to discuss a previously-chosen book.  The only caveat was that this was not a ‘how to keep bees’ session so much as to reflect on some of the issues bees represent, the feelings they evoke and the challenges they face.

The first book we chose was Mark Winston’s Bee Time (which ended up taking two months to discuss;) the second was Dave Goulson’s The Insect Apocalypse, and the third was Richard Taylor’s The Joys of Beekeeping, most of which consists of the columns titled ‘Bee Talk’ that he wrote for Gleanings in Bee Culture in the 1970’s. 

One of the questions posed was, “What part of honey bees and beekeeping has most influenced you?” The answers included an increased awareness of the natural world, of the meaning of each season, of plant species and their presence, and of the variety of pollinators.   Taylor himself wrote, ”I shall never understand nature, this earth, the bees – all the myriad forms.  No one ever will.  I have no need to.  I gaze in unuttered reverence, and I am fulfilled.”

My responses were two-fold.  Having grown up in a competitive culture, I am constantly affirmed by witnessing a cooperative environment in which there is no designated leader and a commitment to the common good. The second response related to the subtle changes in my skills of observation.  I have written before about spending my youth on Murahwa’s Hill, an uninhabited outcrop close to the house in which I spent my teenage years.  On one occasion, walking over a granite exposure on the hillside, I saw, out of the corner of my eye,  something twitch.  When I stopped, and turned a troop of chacma baboons burst into life accompanied by a vociferous chorus.  On the one hand I had been unaware of their presence while they remained quiet in the trees, which was a lack of observation on my part; on the other hand I picked up the smallest movement in my peripheral vision, and knew enough not to ignore it. 

Some years later I was fortunate to spend time in the company of skilled African game guides as they searched for wild life in the veldt.  Initially I would look in the light, open, sunny places, expecting to see impala, warthogs, kudu, whatever, staring back at me.   The guides explained that most animals have predators, and those that survive have learned to stay within the boundaries of their natural camouflage, which means the periphery, the shade, the tree line.  Learning to look differently, namely to avoid the obvious areas and rather look with a broad, generalized gaze not for a specific animal so much as an unusual shape, the twitch of an ear, or something that for whatever reason felt out of place, dramatically changed my observation skills.  

I can recall, as a young teacher,  being asked to state the eye color of each student in the room, with the suggestion that if I could not do it  I had never really looked at them.  And on patrol as a platoon during the Rhodesian Civil War, we made a habit of not only looking ahead and to the side, but also above and behind. My guess is that GI’s in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Kuwait learned the same habits, out of necessity.  

After my first five years of beekeeping, during which time a frame of bees seemed to be mysterious and confusing, I gradually developed a protocol for a colonial inspection that involves both specific and broad observation.    The first step is to look, really look, at what is on the ground in front of at the hive as well as what was happening at the hive entrance. No expectations – just look. Incidentally, I place old carpet in front of each hive, underside up : not only does it suppress weed growth but it also provides a background on which dead bees are more visible.   Secondly, I look closely at the top of the frames after the inner cover is removed. In part, one develops a sense (sight, sound and smell) of what is normal, and without focusing on any one bee, one comes to recognize instinctively when something is out of the ordinary.  Thirdly, as each frame is removed,  I cast a broad eye over each side, trusting that I will absorb what is important.  With time, rather than an unholy mess of activity, patterns became evident to even the quickest of glances.   Many ask how to find the queen, even as that is seldom necessary – it is more important to see evidence of the quality of her activity.  If I do need to find her she will normally  make herself evident at the first, broad glance because of her distinct shape and the behavior of the bees around her.   Finally, I choose to look closely at one frame – after examining some individual bees for signs of say, DWV, I shake off the bees into the box (putting aside some for a mite check) and, without the impediment of little furry bodies, look specifically into a number of cells. 

This practice, which continues to improve every year,  has converted into the wider world.  Driving, I am instinctively looking to the sides and behind, and am quicker to see a red tailed hawk on a telephone line, or white tailed deer beside the road, or a couple of hives in a backyard that had previously been vacant.  I am more aware of what has been planted in the fields adjoining the road, or what is in bloom.  Consequently I enjoy driving on smaller side roads rather than main highways even though the former may take longer; sometimes time is not the most important criteria.    Walking, I look up and behind as much as forward, and my vision is generic and yet quick to see unusual details.  I am mindful of the comment from Tom Seeley that with the current spotlight on genetics we are in danger of losing an appreciation of observational research, which, time consuming as it is, has been the basis of honey bee discoveries for thousands of years. 

So this is how beekeeping has influenced me, with one caveat – should I be on the phone, my observational skills literally disappear!

As for the Burlington professor, was it really urine?  I don’t know, but one of those students, more than thirty years later, says it is a lesson he has never forgotten. 

“The same life that pulsates in us, the same yearning and striving, the same love of existence, fills everything around us, “wrote Richard Taylor in a chapter entitled Friends. “These things are not foreign; they belong to us and we to them. It is not our role as human beings to conquer, exploit and destroy, but to build up, protect and love in the spirit of acceptance the natural order into which we have been placed.”

With acknowledgments to Peter Sieling

Do you ever have one of those mornings when you come downstairs and you know that, in the midst of the normal marital bliss, someone is clearly not happy?   My first response was one of avoidance, usually involving the bee yard where I could hide behind clouds of smoke.  

Then I  realized it was better to hang around, doing little jobs around the house, hoping that ‘she who must be obeyed’ noticed how helpful I was.  I would do the dishes without being asked, clean away all the papers on the dining room table, plug up the entrance to the yellow jacket nest on the porch, hoping that a few stings might show the levels I would go to as a means of contrition. 

My third approach as a one man truth and reconciliation commission, was to read out loud interesting excerpts from books that I thought might lead to some  self-improvement – improvement not for me, you understand, but gentle advice for she who might need it. 

Old bee books hide nuggets of wisdom between the ‘how to keep’ bees information. Lorenzo Langstroth, for example, in the Hive and the Honey  Bee, offered what he called “a friendly word to wives.”

I would say to every wife, do all that you can to make your husband’s home a place of attraction. When absent from it, let his heart glow at the thought of returning to his dear enjoyments; as he approaches it, let his countenance involuntarily assume a more cheerful expression, while his joy-quickened steps proclaim that he feels there is no place like the cheerful home where his chosen wife and companion presides as its happy and honored queen. If your home is not full of dear delights, try all the virtue of winning words and smiles, and the cheerful discharge of household duties, and exhaust the utmost possible efficacy of love, faith and prayer.

For those  of you who want to use this delightful passage in the event of marital discord, it is in the 1878 edition on p. 125.

After I had finished reading, the Chairlady of the Family Fund Raising Committee did not say anything.  Clearly the passage had moved her more than I had anticipated.  I was expecting something like, “Don’t you love how those nineteenth century writers expressed such noble and lofty thoughts?”

“I have my own friendly advice for husbands who are beekeepers,” she said eventually. 

“First, don’t ask me to scrub and wash the shirts you wear in the beeyard.  Either wear a beesuit, like any sane beekeeper does, or use old shirts which can be thrown away afterwards.”

The term ‘sane beekeeper’ struck a note with me.  “The bees can’t tell the difference in my shirts,” I suggested.

She didn’t answer.  “Secondly, the cup holder in the Prius is full of dead bees.  When are you going to vacuum them out?”

“It’s been on my to do list since last fall, and is rapidly working its way to the top.”

“Thirdly, why are there still two hives on the porch?”   I was about to explain that actually they were nucs and they were in the process of being moved away from the apiary, one foot every week, but she continued, “AND there’s a hive in the driveway, another outside the barn, a fifth on the garage roof.”

The last one started out as a bait hive until a swarm moved in, but I didn’t get a chance to explain. 

“Fourth. I’m missing a pair of panty hose.”

“Don’t look at me, I’m not that kind of guy,” I protested.   

“You were using them to strain honey in the kitchen,” she countered. 

“Oh, THAT pantyhose.  I didn’t realize you were the type who counted every article of clothing …”

Then came the coup de grace. “Remember that Lorenzo Langstroth suffered from severe depression, spent much of his life separated from his wife, and moved in with his brother-in-law.  MY brother, YOUR brother-in-law, is looking for a nanny.”

Whoa.  I didn’t know my betrothed was so familiar with the life and times of Lorenzo Langstroth.  I realized it was time to check the bees and I  retreated out of the door. 

It was the bees who inspired my fourth approach. 

Now when I come across a piece of useful information, I write it on a post-it note, highlight it in yellow, write ‘good advice’ in the margin, stick it on her chair, and then go back to the bees.

In the next installment of this exciting serial, I will tell you what I come up with for my fifth approach. 

Mention parasites to a beekeeper and the conversation invariably will turn to varroa mites, both species of nosema, tracheal mites, and even possibly bee parasitic mite syndrome (BPMS,) a complex of symptoms associated with varroa mites, viruses, or a combination of both. By comparison, American Foul Brood and European Foul Brood are bacterial infections, chalk brood is a spore-forming fungus and  sac brood is a virus.

Parasites are ubiquitous to the global ecosystem.  Scott Gardner,  Judy Diamond and Gabor Racz, writing in Parasites (Nov. 2022,) state that “It has been said that every species of animal is either a parasite or a host.” We can add plants to that list, and the single exception is the phylum containing starfish and sea urchins.   

Many parasites are obligate, meaning they are unable to complete their life cycle without a host.  Consider nematodes, for example, a phylum of worms.  They account for 80 per cent of all animal species and are so plentiful that, according to the authors, “one could line them up end to end and have nematodes in every meter across our entire galaxy.” Fossil evidence from South America shows that early species of nematodes infested iguanodons 120 million years ago, which is the middle of the age of dinosaurs. One of the sub-species Ascaris lumbricoides, transmitted by contaminated feces, is present in more than one billion people where it is the source of the tropical disease, ascariasis.  An adult  female produces some 200 000 eggs a day, each of which can survive for a decade. Though the eggs are microscopic, multiple by the number of affected people worldwide and the result is a biomass  equivalent to 8000 adult elephants. 

A parasite with which I had more than a passing acquaintance is Trypanosoma brucei which is transmitted via the bite of the tsetse fly; the consequent ‘sleeping sickness’ overwhelms the central nervous system with fatal consequences. Some people of African descent have developed a genetic resistance to trypanosomiasis although with an increased risk for high blood pressure and kidney disease.  In sub-Saharan Africa this might be worthwhile trade-off, but members of the African diaspora may pay dearly for an immunity they no longer need. 

In terms of plants, in the 1840’s in Ireland, the potato blight caused by a parasitic pathogen resulted in a famine that killed more than a million people and led two million more to emigrate.  The authors caution that “Modern agriculture, in which each individual food plant is genetically identical to the next one in the row, is highly vulnerable to the worst effects of parasitic fungi.”  By comparison, Lars Chittka writes  in The Mind of a Bee (July, 2022)  “(W)e have learned in recent years that, in bees, differences occur in any psychological trait examined, and occur between individual bees as well as between colonies of bees …   Variation in individual intelligence is important for how well bees fare in the economy of nature, and variation among individuals in a colony determines the efficiency of their division of labor.” 

Mosquitoes, cockroaches, nematodes, ticks, varroa mites – that is the ‘icky’ factor. 

But there are also parasites that provide a symbiosis with their hosts called mutualism, in which each of the two species benefits from their interaction.  A prime example is honey bees and flowers, where the latter depend on the former for pollination and in turn provide nectar as a carbohydrate for the bees and pollen as a protein essential for the growth of the larvae.  In the words of Victor Hugo, “Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”

An alternative relationship is commensalism, where one partner benefits and the other is unaffected. Trees, for example, provide shelter, protection and, in some cases, nutrition, to birds, which in turn don’t benefit their hosts (with the possible exception of aiding seed distribution) but nor do they harm them. 

What prompted me to investigate this topic a little further was the realization that we, too, are parasites on earth.  Interestingly, the modern definition of parasites originated in the eighteenth century and the scientific revolution.  The original definition is Greek and refers to a person dining at at someone else’s table at someone else’s expense.  First, that is an apt description of our current behavior as a global species.  Ironically we evolved through the good auspices of nature, and now, having evolved, are rapidly destroying that which nurtured us.  In a nutshell, we have ravaged evolution by evolving.  This is unusual behavior; typically parasites preserve their hosts, if not individually at least as a community,  for their own long term survival.

Secondly, just as a bee colony is an ideal environment in which parasites and viruses can exist and multiply – warm and humid with newcomers being introduced through the foraging bees – so we, with our urban lifestyles, are the equivalent of an apiary – one vast, interconnected web that includes covid, avian flu, ebola  and mad cow disease among many others, all mutating at a rate many times faster than are we, and faster than we can come up with safe, effective chemical treatments.  

An alternative is the paradigm of mutualism, neatly summed up by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil (despite the God reference) when he met with President Joe Biden at the White House on February 10th, and called for protecting the natural world to combat climate change together with creating a world governance to enable us to work together against existential threats.  “This is not a government program,” Lula said. “This is a faith commitment of someone that believes in humanism, someone that believes in solidarity. I don’t want to live in a world where humans become algorithms. I want to live in a world where human beings are human beings. And for that, we have to take care very carefully what God gave us: that is the planet Earth.”

In 1835, the New York Sun printed a report attributed to the Edinburgh Journal of Science which reputedly had been submitted from a remote part of South Africa by the famous astronomer, Sir John Herschel.  In it he described how, after focusing a remarkable new telescope on the moon, he had seen unicorns, beavers walking on their hind legs, and four foot, naked  ‘man bats’ that copulated in public and were given the genus vespertilio homo. (The use of the term vespertilio was clever in that it is the oldest accepted genus name for bats, which Carl Linnaeus grouped with the primates  due to certain characteristics that bats seemed to share with actual primates.)  

The Sun, published by Benjamin Day with Richard Locke as editor, was one of the new ‘penny papers’ that were commonly available, compared to the more established papers which required a subscription that made it accessible primarily to the elite.  The six consequent articles enlarging on this remarkable discovery produced a public sensation to the point that The Sun was, for a time, the most widely read newspaper in the world.

The articles were not intended as a hoax so much as satire, and the reasons it was not  read as such were twofold.  First, New York was deeply divided on the issue of slavery, and those opposing abolition believed that the remedy was to re-settle on the moon.  Secondly, what has been labelled as ‘astro-religion’  was increasingly popular in the early nineteenth century, namely the belief that all of the heavenly bodies were populated because God would not have created them without also creating intelligence beings to appreciate them.  Indeed Thomas Dick, the most popular astronomer of the time, calculated that the population of the moon was in excess of four million beings, and religious groups outdid themselves raising funds to purchase bibles which would be sent up to them.  

Richard Locke, the editor of the Sun, thought this was preposterous, not least the idea of superimposing religion on  science.  “I will give you man bats on the moon,” he wrote, “written in high falutin’ rhetoric, just to expose your ideas.”  What he did not anticipate was that even though the Edinburgh Journal of Science had never published any such article, and even though Sir John Herschel had never sent such a report, so many people were so deeply schooled in the ideas of astro-religion that they simply believed it to be true.   

Locke was deeply concerned as his intended lampoon was taken literally, but the publisher, Benjamin Day, wanted to milk it as much as he could because of the revenue from increased sales, to the extent that he hired an artist to produce a lithograph based on Herschel’s description, versions of which were re-published world wide, invariably with highly imaginative additions. Readers seemingly felt no need to investigate their authenticity for themselves, to check the sources or to question their assumptions.                               

The point is that an idea, an organization, even a person, no matter what its validity, can be misinterpreted through public fervor or ignorance.  And the point of this Corner is that I see something similar in the relationship between commercial and small scale  beekeepers.  

This is not in any way meant to criticize commercial beekeepers who are a particularly North American phenomenon in size and number, and are outnumbered by smaller beekeepers at a  ratio of 99:1, even though they operate more than 95% of colonies in the US  As Al Avitabile wrote in a letter to Bee Culture, December 2022, commercial beekeepers “care and tend to their bees more so than many small size beekeepers, for after all, bees are their livelihood. We … are all members of the beekeeping family.  Commercial beekeepers make any honest living transporting their bees to assist in pollinating monoculture crops (without which) our crops would be far less productive  and their cost to the consumer would be prohibitive. The commercial beekeepers did not create monoculture farming.  However by providing pollinators for these crops they assist in sustaining this form of agriculture.” 

What is important is that the objectives of commercial beekeepers are different to those of small scale beekeepers, as Charles Lindner makes abundantly clear in his on-going series in ABJ, A Year as a Commercial Beekeeper.  In the second installment, November 2022, he wrote, “One of the keys to successful commercial beekeeping is understanding the business.  It is not so much about the bees as it is the logistics.” 

It is easy for smaller beekeepers, especially those newer to the craft, to believe that their big brothers have all of the answers simply based on the magnitude of their operations, even though their objectives are so different.  For example, after the Second World War when honey was expensive and sugar was cheap, some commercial beekeepers (I believe initially in Canada)  realized it was more profitable to remove all of the honey from their colonies and substitute it with sugar syrup for purposes of winter survival.  It was purely profit driven and  had nothing to do with the health of the bees.  

Today we regard it almost as a necessity to feed the bees with sugar syrup, sugar cakes, pollen patties and a whole lot of other  supplements promoted in the journals, all of which would be provided by honey and pollen if there were sufficient quantities available to the bees.  Nor  do we question the effect of such feeding on the health of the bees – replacing the complexity of honey and pollen with simple sugars and yeasts – even as research increasingly shows the questionable value of supplements and additives. More bees may overwinter this way but it is increasingly apparent they are smaller in size, lighter in weight, and have their immune systems compromised, thus (ironically) making them more vulnerable to the 4 P’s, including varroa. 

It is easy to equate size with expertise. Commercial practices, made necessary by the need for profits, are now accepted as a vital part of small scale practices, not least because some journal articles are written by commercial beekeepers and much of the advertising is directed at them.  Charles Lindner, for example, orders 20 000 new frames at a time, and how many side-liners need a 32 frame extractor at a cost of several thousands of dollars, or are interested in buying 8 frame hives once the almond season is over with a minimum purchase of 50?

It does strike me every month that the voice of the hobbyist beekeeper is missing on the Ask Three Beekeepers panel in this publication, even as the majority of the readers are presumably hobbyists.  The responses of Mark, Steve and Charlie are considered and experienced, avoid hoax and  satire as well as the inane kind of fabled reports attributed to Sir John Herschel.  There is much that the smaller beekeeper (and I count myself as one) can learn from them provided we realize that the objectives of large scale beekeeping are different to those of the hobbyist, that objectives drive management decisions, and that hobbyist beekeepers have  aspirations, practices and end goals of their own, equally valid as those of our commercial bretheren. The lesson therefore, as a beekeeper, is to be clear on one’s objectives and manage the bees accordingly.  The moon – man bats and all – is an intriguing distraction (pie in the sky?) but we all have compelling alternatives here on mother earth. 

 

In his book Bee Time : Lessons From the Hive, in a chapter entitled ‘A Thousand Little Cuts,’ Mark Winston  describes in exquisite language and detail, “(T)he slow but relentless transformation of beekeeping from a relatively small scale, pastoral occupation directed by a close feeling for nature’s rhythms, with little chemical input and mostly stationery apiaries, to a highly industrialized business where mobility is essential and management is driven by artificial feed, pesticides and antibiotics.”

Colony Collapse Disorder was one of the outcomes of the latter form of management,  and significant energy was devoted to studying the causes.  The initial suspect was a  new disease or pesticide until attention refocused on the synergy between multiple factors, of which pesticides were central, both those applied by farmers in nearby fields and those applied by beekeepers in the hives.

The first significant study came from the Department of Entomology at Pennsylvania State University in 2010 which found 121 different pesticides in wax comb, many with known toxic effects on bees, and an average of 214 ppm of pesticides in stored pollen. Although the latter had been delivered very efficiently to both nectar and pollen by a new class of systemic insecticides called neonicotinoids, Chris Mullin, one of the authors, asserted that “It’s not any one of the pesticides correlating with with decline or health problems; it’s the suite of chemistry and the chemical load that causing the problem.”

In France, Yves LeConte showed higher bee mortality and reduced resistance to diseases when bees were exposed to nosema spores together with a pesticide (imidacloprid, a neonicotinoid) rather than when exposed separately.  At the University of Maryland a study reported that the impact of miticides applied by beekeepers was more severe in the presence of antibiotics, in that the ability of the bees to detoxify and eliminate pesticides was reduced.  

Wanyi Zhu, at PSU, developed a model using invariables such as the reduced nectar and pollen collection from disoriented foragers, the shortened life spans of workers who  begin to forage several days earlier than they normally would, and small increases in larval mortality which caused eventual reductions in the worker bee population, all of which destabilize the age structure of a healthy colony, disrupting the vital balance between eggs, larvae, pupae, workers and foragers.  Remarkably the model mimicked CCD almost perfectly – all seemed well until the colonies suddenly collapsed and died. 

The overall picture of these and many further studies is that small effects on individual bees are amplified as they accumulate in the thousands of workers that make up a colony. Each worker’s functions are only minimally reduced by one exposure but reactions between diseases, miticides and  agricultural pesticides lead to considerably worse outcomes. 

The overarching lesson is one of synergy – disorders act together and escalate exponentially to induce considerably more damage than simple addition would predict. In agriculture, for example, the application of herbicides, fungicides, pesticides and fertilizers have increased at the same time as water becomes an increasingly sensitive resource.  Like the bees, it is not one issue in isolation but the synergy between them that Winston calls ‘the toxic chemical treadmill’ – increased resistance in pests, decreasing biodiversity, habitat reduction, the build up of chemical residues in soil, water and air, and the increasing costs for farmers together with increased rates for petroleum, natural gas and food caused by the war in Ukraine. 

Nor is this limited to bees and agriculture.   Our homes, schools and  workplaces are riddled with a profusion of synthetic compounds in a potentially toxic package.  Winston describes some of the  interactions as described by biologist Sandra Steingrabber in Raising Elijah –  preterm births linked to exposure to combustion products from coal, the connection between asthma and plastics, between learning disabilities, organophosphates and heavy metals, and between autism and chemical exposures in early pregnancy.  With one exception, risk assessment is  based on one material at a time even though we are exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, of low level toxicants in our food and environment, each of which alone is supposedly safe for us, according to the EPA, but perhaps not in combination.  Why?  Because almost none has been evaluated in groups of two, three, ten or hundreds even though the fate of the bees confirms the regulatory limits to the exposure of single compounds offer little safety. 

Anyone who has picked up a prescription at the local chemist knows what that exception is –  the pharmaceutical industry.  In the US, where people over 55 take anything from 6 to 9 drugs on average, regulatory authorities require exhaustive tests of drug interactions, and even when a drug is approved the side effects are extensively monitored.  (The same monitoring does not apply to products labeled ‘natural’, even though they cram the shelves of the same pharmacy.) 

I feel like I am living in the midst of a CCD epidemic, although I prefer Chris Mullin’s phrase,  toxic house syndrome.  In the 24 hours leading up to this article, over and above the regular acrimonious political news, stories related to climate change (as of mid-October, 2022, there is nowhere on earth where it is safe to drink rainwater)  and fears of a recession, there have been vivid images of child starvation in Sudan and the Yemen, barbaric deaths of civilians in the Ukraine, missiles launched over Japan by North Korea, fears of rising winter fuel costs in Europe, threats of nuclear war by Putin, the bombing of a school in Afghanistan were 50 girls killed as they studied for university entrance exams, and 30 young children killed in a day-care in Thailand. 

When is one cut one too many?  Like CCD, it’s unpredictable, even unforseeable.

I can handle and respond to each issue alone, but it is the synergy between them which is overwhelming to the point that I want to abscond, if not physically then emotionally and mentally.  Yet I also want to stay informed, not to bury my head in the sand.  So what to do, not least as our exposure through modern media is only going to increase?  Incidentally, the evening news programs often end with a ‘feel-good story’ of individual kindness or generosity, but somehow it doesn’t cut it in the face of the preceding stories of overwhelming tragedy and sadness. It’s the old tale of the frog in water on the stove; he doesn’t react as the heat gradually escalates until it is too late and he boils to death.  We may not literally be in the process of incineration but the increasing rates of mental illness may be a symptom of that distress. 

Historically, this is when a populace is tempted to trade its liberty for security, realizing too late that the ‘strong man’ cares little for those who gave him or her that power. 

 In terms of solutions, beekeeping is probably the easy part in that we need to become more bee-centric, meaning managing honey bees in terms of their health and well-being as they have established it over the millennia, rather than for the convenience of the beekeeper.  The environment in which pollinators exist is more challenging, and it is depressing to note that in the coming elections only one percent of the voting population regards climate and environmental issues as their main priority, or that here in York County, according to the latest county profile, of the 253 000 acres of farmland, only one percent is farmed organically. Unfortunately, the environment is controlled by the politicians who in turn are influenced by the deep pockets of industries with their own profit-oriented agendas.  Bee colonies, by contrast, remain in the hands of the beekeepers. As with our toxic houses, schools and workplaces (consider children bussed to school in vehicles belching diesel fumes)  education is a vital part of the solution, and meanwhile I vote with my wallet by making purchases in line with my values, as happened with the anti-smoking movement a generation ago.  And lets not forget how one amazing person – a Rachel Carson, John Muir, David Thoreau, Ralph Nader, Greta Thunberg – can make a difference as long as we don’t abdicate our personal responsibilities. 

Ultimately the solution involves reducing pesticide use and diversifying farms in a way that enhance both our food security and the natural world on which we depend.  There is much research to show that this is economically realistic; the challenge is to change the current mindset which is beset with inertia.  I’m reminded of the many predictions in the 1900’s that the automobile had no long term future and that it was physically impossible for a man-carrying machine to fly!

That leaves our exposure to incessant stories and images of brutality, criminality, denial, irresponsibility and cruelty to the innocent.  I guess we each have our own solutions, which for me include recognizing my meaningful sphere of influence and acting within it.    Honey bees are an essential part of this.  How often am I asked, “How are the bees doing?” which provides an opening to discuss wider issues. I can be creative in ways to help them, and I get to appreciate a creature and an environment that has, like us, survived and prospered through collaboration.  

‘How are the bees are doing’ offers other specific reactions as well.   Common lore has it that a honey bee starts working immediately she leaves her birth cell and doesn’t stop until she dies of fatigue some five weeks later.   In fact in 1983 an English research, Walter Kaiser, showed that bees sleep anywhere between 5 and 8 hours a day, According to Jurgen Tautz, young bees sleep for shorter periods than foragers and are fond of “cat naps.” Conversely, adult foragers have a sleep pattern that mimics a human adult –  a night of long deep sleep –  reflecting  the arduous demands of foraging.  They are what Mark Winston calls ‘restaholics rather than workaholics.’ 

This pattern can change.  If stressed, perhaps by a drop in population, the workers begin foraging at an earlier age and return with heavier loads.  But they die younger, a trade-off that is good for the colony but tough on  individuals.  

When sleep deprived, their waggle dance is impacted negatively,  affecting both those performing the dance as well as the observers, which in turn results in less efficient foraging. And according to a report in Nature in June, 2020, sleep disturbances show impairments in both metabolism and memory consolidation.  It doesn’t matter that I am a sloppy dancer, but it does to a bee!`

Although honey bees don’t mirror the exact sleep patterns of humans, there are many similarities. Like honey bees, humans tend to sleep at night so we can have the energy to do demanding jobs during the day. Both human’s and bee’s body temperatures decrease during sleep, they move less, and it is more difficult to wake them when they are in a deep sleep stage.  The lesson for humans is that rest builds a potential for work that can be utilized when our personal professional and personalized lives are challenged, not to mention the implications for our lifespan. 

The term multi-tasking initially defined the ability of microprocessors to do more than one job at a time.  It works well for computers but not so well for people – switching contexts leads to inadequate focus and thus human error.  One example will suffice : auto accidents are four times more likely when driving while talking on a cell phone, which is the same rate as driving while drunk.  

Honey bees also perform many functions during a lifetime, but they do them one at a time, from cleaning out the birth cell to foraging for resources.   They may not be intelligent in the conventional sense, but they are single minded.  The obvious lesson for us in our stressful world is to be present in the moment, much as many beekeepers are when they are in the apiary – calm, focused and without distraction. 

In a chapter titled Bees in the City, Mark Winston describes his appreciation for that ‘sweet spot where nature on one hand and human ingenuity and commerce on the other are in equilibrium.  Bees literally connect one generation of plants to the next … but also pass on values and a sense of belonging to each other and to the generations to come.”