Do you have bees?
Health FitnessDoesn’t it always seem like you don’t know what you have until you lose it? —-Joni Mitchell
Our relationship with honey bees is changing. We have realized that we need bees, not only for the miracle of honey, but as essential pollinators in our food system. While we may be aware that bees pollinate plants in our food system, do we consider that bees also generate food sources for birds and other wildlife?
After thousands of years of taking honey for our own pleasure, and after exploiting these insects for two hundred years relating them as disposable servants to satisfy our demand for industrial-scale pollination of almonds, apples, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, melons. , and pumpkin (this is the short list), we have no choice but to reevaluate our relationship with honey bees.
A slowly unfolding and mostly invisible (to Americans) cascade of global environmental challenges has created and is creating species extinctions every day. Most of these species are rarely, if ever, seen with our own eyes. Most of these extinct species had no “benefits” for the human species, so they have disappeared without much fanfare. Hopefully, we have some photos in our scientific archives. If the honey bee goes extinct, we will find out.
In terms of technology, we’ve progressed from stealing the occasional bee hive, to placing bees in pots, then straw hives that required killing bee brood at honey harvest time. Countless honey bee eggs and larvae were routinely gassed and killed in earthen pits..
Since those early days of developing European beekeeping, we have only changed the way we kill bees and their young. Now we kill them in open fields contaminated with pesticides. Before honey bees (and other pollinators) die using this new systemic approach, today’s traditional beekeeping promotes the introduction of pesticides and chemical toxins into the very cell walls of honey bee colonies, into the wax in which the eggs they are unsightly and pollen is stored, and of course small amounts of chemical toxins will be found in any honey that is not produced through natural and organic beekeeping.
I write about our changing relationship with honey bees, I find a purpose in protecting the welfare of honey bees as a beekeeper, but I call myself a hive manager. The goal of a hive manager is not the production of honey, or the production of beautiful soaps, candles, lip balms, or any other product; The goal of the hive manager is to develop a new cooperative relationship with these lovely creatures that humans depend on. Today, the most useful hive manager may be the urban beekeeper. Surprisingly, while cities are generally more toxic environments for people, cities are proving to be much less toxic environments for domesticated European bees.
Wearing the mantle of a hive manager using natural methods involves:
- listening to the bees in your care; they will communicate what they need from you
- view the bees in their care as intelligent, generous and complex social insects
- understand who is serving whom in the colony/butler relationship; You serve the bees!
- learn the trade necessary to manage a healthy bee colony
- appreciate the need for bees to expand without succumbing to product and the greed-oriented mentality of the past (more bees, more honey, more crops, more money); refrain from artificial or mechanized insemination of queens
- Honey is not a product that bees make for humans; honey is the food of the bees that the bees reluctantly share with us
- there are valuable and profound life lessons to be learned from building a relationship with a bee colony
- Developing an intuitive sense of what your bees need and bringing excellent craft and traditional knowledge to the relationship is your responsibility; in return you can receive some honey from your bees
- connect with the wind, sun, rain, flora, fauna, and seasonal rhythms that dictate the “do” aspects of caring for a bee colony
- refrain from the use of chemicals, corn syrup, and man-made medications; being willing to be a partner in supporting adaptive behaviors, which may mean letting weak, non-adaptive colonies die
- striving to be as hygienic (clean tools and equipment, reusing old combs) as honey bees
- allow bees to build combs and cell sizes in organic shapes instinctive to honey bees
- allowing yourself to be enchanted and experience a deep love for being melero – this latest shift in our interspecies relationship is inevitable once you begin to hear, see, understand and learn the simplicity, beauty and complexity that is a colony. of bees living in harmony, grace and incessant work.
Recently, teaching a class of six-year-olds, I asked them what they had learned. We had done bobbing dances, gone foraging pretending to be field bees, gathered flowers into a bouquet that embodied the life-giving touch a bee brings to any garden setting. I had shown them how bees take beauty and transform it into an edible product: with their ceaseless work and generosity, we can bring the essence of an infinite bouquet, alive and uncut, into our physical bodies.
The children responded in unison: “Cooperation.”