Do you have bees?

Doesn’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 just for the miracle of honey, but as essential pollinators of our food system. While we may be aware that bees pollinate the plants in our food system, do we consider that bees also provide 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 by relating them as disposable servants to meet our demand for industrial-scale pollination of almonds, apples, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, melons, and squash (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 files. If the honey bee goes extinct, we’ll find out.

In terms of technology, we have progressed from robbing the hive of occasional bees, to placing bees in pots, then into straw hives that required killing the young bees at honey harvest time. Countless honey bee eggs and larvae were routinely gassed and killed in dirt pits..

Since those early days of developing European beekeeping technique, 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) are killed 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 are laid. they are ugly 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, find purpose in protecting the welfare of honey bees as a beekeeper, but 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 on which humans depend. 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 your care as intelligent, generous and complex social insects
• understand who is serving whom in the colony/steward 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 the product and 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 bees that bees reluctantly share with us
• there are valuable and profound life lessons to be learned by 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 exchange 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; be willing to be a partner in supporting adaptive behaviors, which may mean letting weak, maladaptive 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 into organic shapes instinctive to honey bees
• allowing yourself to be enchanted and experience a deep love for honey; This latest change 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, while teaching a class of six-year-olds, I asked them what they had learned. We’d done bobbing dances, we’d foraged for food pretending to be field bees, we’d put flowers together in a bouquet that represented the enlivening 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 incessant labor and generosity, we can bring the essence of an endless, living, uncut bouquet into our physical bodies.

The children responded in unison: “Cooperation.”