Tag: honey

Thinking Like a Tree

JeremyLeave a comment

This the third in a series of four with the brain as the focus. 

Two sentences in David Haskell’s remarkable book, The Song of Trees, invite comparisons with honey bee colonies.  “Plant architecture is not a haphazard affair but is the result of constant assessment and adjustment as conditions change … Even though it lacks a nervous system, a tree’s cells are awash  in hormones, proteins and signaling molecules whose coordination allows the plant to sense and respond to its surroundings.” 

Twigs, for examples, sense the luminosity of their particular location on the tree and grow accordingly.  The cells in the breathing spore of a fir tree integrate information about the state of the needle’s internal environment, and open or close the pores to admit either gases or release water vapor. 

When such processes run through animal nerves we call them behavior and thought. So is a tree, or a plant, despite its lack of nerve cells, a behaving and thinking creature?  Indeed the proteins that vertebrate creatures, including ourselves, use to create the electrical gradients that excite our nerves are closely related to the proteins in plant cells that create similar electrical reactions.  

Plants of course have no brain to coordinate these signals, so their thinking is diffuse, located in the connections between cells, even as those connections happen at a rate 20 000 times slower than in a mammal.

Plants, like honey bees, also remember.  When kudu antelope in southern Africa browse on trees, it was noted not only that the trees subsequent growth was heavily defended by unpalatable resins, like a nervous bee that has encountered a spider on a flower, but also that the kudu avoided browsing on adjacent trees in favor of those a little more distant.  It was as if the tree under attack had been communicating with its immediate neighbors and giving them time to mount a defense, a response which the tree can ‘remember’ for future such attacks.  

Indeed, root tips interact with bacteria (roots provide bacteria with sugars and in turn the bacteria protect the root from attack, buffer it from changes in salt concentrations, and stimulate growth,) and very much in the news of late, with fungi. Nearly ninety percent of all plant species form below-ground units with fungi in which sugars and minerals are exchanged in the form of chemical signals that travel through the fungus, carrying messages about attacking insects and animals, among other things.  “A street market” is the analogy Haskell uses to describe the soil.  

It it not difficult to substitute bee colony for forest in Haskell’s summary : “It is not just the tree that thinks but the forest. The common life has a mind. To claim that forests ‘think’ is not an anthropomorphism.  A forest’s thoughts emerge from a living network of relationships, not from a human-like brain. … A forest’s intelligence therefore emerges from many kinds of interlinked clusters of thought.  Nerves and brains are one part, but only one part, of the forest’s mind.”

Individual honey bees have a brain and a nervous system.  We talk often of their cognitive abilities – we know they can communicate, remember and change their behavior in response to the environment.   A bee hive is a veritable ‘street market.’  Indeed we take it for granted that honey bees can think.  In the November issue of ABJ, Tina Sebestyen writes that “Even subclinical levels of DWV in bees can cause impaired cognitive function …,” and Tom Seeley, describing the steps in the evolution of the buzz-run signal,  states that  “… (the bees) receive  the information it provides to improve their decision making.” (My italics.)  My guess is that most subscribers of ABJ read these descriptions without giving them a second thought (pun intended.) Indeed honey bees do have a cognitive process, even as Randy Oliver stresses in the December issue of ABJ, “their  tiny brains have limited capacity for deep analysis and thinking, much less human concepts of morality.” 

According to the American Psychological Association, the term cognition includes all forms of knowing and awareness, such as perceiving, conceiving, remembering, reasoning, judging, imagining, and problem solving, all of which the individual honey bee can do.  It is interesting that this definition  does not include the word conscious, in that the cognitive behaviors of a bee are innate rather than conscious.   Rather than thinking, in the human sense, honey bees respond to information innately in two distinct ways, as explained by Tom Seeley in Piping Hot Bees.  The first is via signals which have been refined by natural selection over evolutionary time so that one bee provides another with clear and accurate information. An example would be a bee using the waggle dance to indicate the location of a food source. 

The second, and more subtle,  is via cues, which provide information incidentally rather than intentionally. An example of a cue is how long it might take a nectar forager to find a receiver bee willing to offload her nectar, which in turn helps her decide whether or not she should perform a waggle dance. 

According to Jurgen Tautz, there are essentially three ways to obtain knowledge : instinctual knowledge, embedded in the genome, is inherited;  some learning is gained by experience, which can then be communicated. For example, a forager has an innate sense of color (preferring blue and yellow;) can learn from experience as she makes different trips to a floral source, and can then communicate what she has learned via the waggle dance. 

Or, slightly more complex, a honey bee does not have an innate knowledge of all possible flower forms; instead she has the ability to learn the visual and olfactory clues that make up a flower’s character.  A single experience with a particular odor can be learned, and subsequently used to discriminate against other odors with 90 per cent efficiency.  After two or three interactions, the efficiency becomes 100 per cent.   Shape and color take a little longer to learn, but together they form the basis of flower fidelity. 

So yes, honey bees have cognitive functions and can make decisions, not consciously but by processes honed over millions of years in a social context of cooperation and altruism, qualities that are as vital today as they have ever been as we search for  an ethos of solidarity with all organic life, as described so wonderfully by Keith Delaplane in his recent and final publication, Honey Bee Social Evolution.

If individual honey bees have a brain,  a nervous system and cognitive functions,  the question then arises, what are the equivalents in the superorganism?  More next month.

Confine Not Your Children …

JeremyLeave a comment

All five of my grandchildren have social media devices of some kind, varying in capacity and complexity.  What is striking  is how the three eldest, ranging from ages 10 to 16, are quick to pull out their ‘phone’ to confirm a fact, look up an image, check a spelling, or find an answer to an issue being discussed.  The world is at their fingertips, literally, and they know how to access it.  All five are more competent on their devices than am I on my cell phone.   And yet at school they are required to relinquish their phones on arrival and listen to different people talking at them as the day progresses.

In his marvelous book,  Honeybees, A natural and a Less Natural History, recently translated from the Dutch, Jacques van Alphen describes how “There is a tradition of passing on knowledge through courses and conferences, and meetings between beekeepers often give rise to lively exchanges on all aspects of the profession.  The danger, however, is that age-old practices are not called into question, or re-evaluated and brought up to date…  As a biologist and an outsider, I was amazed at what beekeepers take for granted. …all the new knowledge about bee behavior, genetics and evolution has not led to fundamental changes in beekeeping.” 

The first beekeeping class I took, for example, was run by an elderly, competent beekeeper who was also the state inspector, and who talked at us for all but half an hour of the six classes. Looking back on the notes I took during those twelve hours, frankly I am not surprised that I lost both of my hives in the first year, nor that some were taking the class for the third, fourth or fifth time.

Challenging the status quo  is not comfortable.  I wrote two months ago about how  Cézanne’s art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during most of his life, challenged all the conventional values of C19th painting because of his insistence on personal expression and on the integrity of the painting itself, regardless of subject matter.  Personal expression and the integrity of the painting would seem to us to  be basic, yet his works were mostly rejected in his lifetime, even as, five years after his death, he was recognized by Manet and Picasso as ‘the father of modern art.’

If the first half of the C20th was the age of physics, starting with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and ending with the atom bomb, and the second half was the age of molecular biology, starting with the discovery of the DNA helix and ending with Dolly the sheep, then it was predicted that the first half of the C21 would be the age of the brain, and, with particular relevance to education, how we process information.  Scientific journals bear testimony to the fact that the work is being done,  yet it is seldom evidenced in classrooms.  Indeed, if my grandfather could come back to life he would be confused by  much of modern life, yet if he walked into a school he would know immediately where he was. 

I would think that beekeeping classes are ideal situations for a different approach. The ‘students’ are mature, self-motivated, set their own standards, take responsibility for their own learning and, if their needs are not met or the realities of beekeeping is contrary to their expectations, are free to leave. They bring their life experiences to each class at the end of which they have a new, practical, useful, life-long skill.

Most teachers would give an arm and a leg to have students like this.  And what do we do?  In most cases, talk at them in a way in which, as Jacques van Alphen says, “age-old practices are not called into question, or re-evaluated and brought up to date…”  It is more training than education, the difference between which was explained to me early in my career, when I was asked if I would want my daughter to have classes in sex education or in sex training.

We know that talking at people is, for most students, an ineffective way of learning.  In words attributed to Mother Theresa, “There should be less talking.  A preaching point is not a meeting point.”  So, in a technological age, how might it be different, particularly in adult education with motivated students such as described above?  There are four steps involved. 

First, even before the first class meets, the task of the facilitator is to guide the participants  to the literary and internet sources that are relevant and appropriate for the upcoming classes.  I use the term ‘facilitator’ deliberately, in that his or her task is to facilitate the learning process, to make each participant (a term I prefer to student) responsible for his or her own learning, rather than feeling the need to teach it to them.  Indeed, my favorite definition of education is by Parker Palmer – creating the community in which truth may occur. 

Hence participants arrive at the first class with the basic knowledge  that the facilitator would otherwise have to spell out for them, which would have consumed most of the time allocated to each class.   

Secondly, the classroom seats are in a circle, with the facilitator as part of that circle. In this way the questions raised by the based on their class preparation are what they really need to know, rather than what the instructor thinks they should know.  Rather than  a  one-way flow of information, it’s a mutual interchange of questions and responses.   Again, in my experience, the process of discussing previously processed material is not familiar to many students – we have been conditioned to sit and listen to the expert – and initially the facilitator has to take more of the lead than he or she might like.  But very quickly the circle takes on a life of its own, and the facilitator becomes as much a gatekeeper of the process.  After all, we’re dealing with mature people, and I mean ’mature’ not in terms of age but in terms of a willingness and an ability to get the task done.

To repeat the above, “Challenging the status quo  is not comfortable.”  Some twenty years ago I was invited to run some classes for experienced teachers working towards their masters degrees.  Thinking that I was dealing with mature, motivated students, I planned to facilitate a mutually interactive environment.  It did not work – the teachers came unprepared, waited to be told what they needed to know, and were anxious to know how they would be graded. Indeed I had misread the level of maturity of the majority of the class. One of the significant advantages of the beekeeping classes is that there is no grade, no necessary affirmation from an exterior ‘authority.’ Each participant is the determiner of their own level of success. 

As an aside, many teachers are notoriously resistant to change.  It is not surprising; after all they chose the profession in part because of the positive, comforting, supportive feelings they themselves experienced at school – certainly I did – and  want to recreate those, even though as adults they might be a generation advanced from experiencing them.  They see change as a threat rather than as a way of enhancing those feelings; hence it is even more important that we have data from the neuroscientific field to combat decisions based primarily on emotions.  More about that next month. 

Thirdly, the latter part of the class would be in the apiary for practical application of the material discussed.  My preference is to allocate three participants to a hive, to ask them to take notes using a prescribed format of what they observe as they work through it, and with each following class the triad returns to the same hive, thus following its development as the season progresses. 

I can imagine the counter-argument that, at least in the first classes, a basic core of knowledge has to be created.  I agree.  We’re not talking about the what so much as about the how.  This requires trust from the instructor-turned-facilitator; trust that self motivated students, given the tools and the responsibility, will learn more, and more efficiently, in a way that is appropriate to their own needs.  

Finally, the content has to be adapted from the conventional syllabus, not least because of the increased time made available by the work  done by students before classes. For example,  the reading done for the final classes needs to be oriented to some of the newer discoveries about honey bees, to include bee behavior, genetics, the influence of chemicals in our environment, and the challenges of a warming climate. 

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education,” argues Wendell Berry.  “Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible.” 

Or, in terms of the Hebrew proverb, “Confine not your children to your own learning, for they are of a different generation.” 

The Paradigm of Separation

JeremyLeave a comment

“Americans of all ages, all stages in life, and all types of disposition, are forever forming associations.”  Thus wrote Alexis de Tocqueville after he had traveled around the United States almost two hundred years ago, even as his main mission was to study the prisons and penitentiaries on the other side of the Atlantic.  “There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types  – religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.”

160 years after de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, Robert Putnam, Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government, released an essay which he later enlarged into book form – Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Many traditional civic, social and fraternal organizations, typified by bowling leagues , he argued, had undergone a massive decline in membership even as the number of people bowling had increased dramatically. It was the leagues that brought together different peoples from different backgrounds and cultures to share in a common purpose.  As Beau Breslin wrote recently in an article in The Fulcrum, “There is commonality in beer, frames and ugly shoes.” 

In 1967, 2% of Americans admitted to no religious affiliation; now that number is 30%.  It was places of worship that grounded Americans in a collective morality.  No longer. Union membership is down (10 per cent across the nation in 2024) as is involvement in professional associations like the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association. Increasingly, Americans no longer believe that ‘associations’ merit their time.  

Curiously, voter participation has remained steady, actually increasing in presidential elections in this century.  But there is a twist : polarized electors are galvanized by hatred. They are energized not so much by the appeal of a candidate so much as by a deep dislike of the other. Anger at your partisan enemy might get you to the ballot box, but it will not get you to the bowling alley, nor to a beekeepers’ meeting. 

The first county beekeepers meeting I attended in 2002 was poorly attended, and records show that was the norm. But with all the the public attention consigned to the plight of the honey bee by Colony Collapse Disorder, enrollment in beekeeping classes soared as did attendance at meetings.  That trend was, in my observation, already in decline five years ago, made worse by COVID and which has continued since the pandemic.  It is one of the ways in which we have not yet recovered from the forced isolation of 2020 and 2021.  It distresses me that, for the last two years if not longer, our local beekeeping association has organized some good meetings with prominent speakers, and the attendance has been minimal – perhaps 20 per cent of the total  membership.  That was not the case ten years ago, when we had to change venues because the turnout regularly exceeded the limit imposed by the fire code. 

Talking to PSBA President, Mark Gingrich, he suggested that during COVID many associations held their meetings via Zoom, and many who continued to offer that option after the pandemic are re-thinking the practice precisely because it encourages the isolation that denies the meaning of our collective lives.  

It has further implications.  As John Miller explains in the July issue of the American Bee Journal, the Bee Informed Project has ceased to operate because its research and the immense data trove that it accumulated was not supported by sufficient paying beekeepers who valued their services.  

In You Are The Happiness You Seek, published two years ago, the English philosopher and author, Robert Spira, argues that there are essentially two models for civilization.  “The first  is one in which the ideas and attitudes of individuals are informed by an understanding of the relationship to the whole, and their activities and relationships are the means by which this understanding is expressed in society.

“The second model is one in which individuals overlook their relationship to the whole and, as a result, believe and feel themselves to be discrete, independently existing entities. This is a paradigm of separation that inevitably leads to unhappiness on the inside, conflict on the outside between individuals, communities and nations, and the exploitation and degradation of the earth.”  

As is invariably the case, it is not difficult to determine which of the above is modeled by honey bees. 

History is replete with examples of collapsed civilizations in which individuals neglected their relationship with the whole. We too show signs of disintegration without embracing the remedies to rectify it.  It is like a sick parent who defies, even sabotages, the attempts of caring children who want to help, or the patient diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness who obstinately refuses to take the medicine. 

What is the solution?  Do we wait for an external event to force us back together, like CCD in the case of beekeepers, or do we become proactive?  It is not difficult and there are two things  that each of us can do.  First, there are many times when I have been tempted not to support an activity organized by an association I care about, to stay home rather than go out to an evening meeting.  And yet every time, almost without exception, I am glad afterwards that I went, often for reasons that I could not anticipate. 

Secondly, value those who are willing to give of their time and energy to organize those occasions when community comes together – meetings, picnics, cook outs, presentations, discussion groups – despite the disappointing turn outs. Those numbers too are declining and it is easy for volunteers to get disheartened, even as they are the heart beat of a successful organization. 

So, when offered the choice, not only welcome the opportunity to attend those forums which provide the opportunity to understand others and calibrate our collective moral compass, but make a point of recognizing and honoring those who made it possible.   Show up and give thanks – that is the solution.  We may not be teammates, but we are committed to our league.