I was going to write about Buffalo but then Uvalde happened which I was going to write about and then the NRA with Senator Cancun and the Former Guy happened. I just don’t have any words for the cultural/political dumpster fire. I’m in no mood to pile on to the 19 officers who had no idea what to do. I am curious about how in such a tiny town and such a blazingly screwed up kid, no pastor or youth minister had any idea either. I appreciated President Biden not giving a formal speech. Time to shut up and make something happen as there are a lot of towns like Uvalde. I’m shutting up about it, too.
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Honeybees have a perspective on life we could learn a lot from. They have a fossil record, not a Facebook timeline. They are focused on doing the next right thing and doing it right (paraphrasing Seth Greer’s great song). That makes them lock in on the next generation, which causes them to bring the center of the hive up to 95 degrees in late winter when it is freezing out so the Mother can start laying the eggs that will become the workers and foragers the hive will need when the Maple begins blossoming in early March.
This season I got a nucleus hive in place just before the bloom from John Lineberger, who is also a high end race car machinist. Racing bees! And, indeed, they took off and haven’t stopped even for a pit stop, piling in the honey.
We’ll have 5 gallons bottled available at the Threshold Retreat and Farms booth at Cobblestone Market Saturday just down the street from where the bees call home. This honey is a single hive vintage, sort of like the single vineyard vintages offered at the high end Round Pond Winery where Kathryn and Fernando work. Their Bovet Cab runs just under $150 a bottle. Our honey, which is technically healthier, will be $12.
This vintage will be bottled as Warthog From Hell Honey, honoring the fierce southern women bees who produced it. TC—untamable herself—suggested the name, thinking of Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona—“give me that baby you warthog from hell!” Mothers of every species are fearless on behalf of their kids. The Uvalde cops had to handcuff a mom; the bees would have approved of the mom and wondered about the drones.
Next month we’ll bottle another 15-20 gallons in a mélange from hives in Old Salem, Hispanic Waughtown, Buena Vista, Clemmons and Yadkin. The friends who work with those hives have sharply different perspectives on nearly everything except bees, but we help each other find our way. Despite politics and theology, if I needed something at 3 am at the very end of my rope and hope, I’d call one of them—probably the one I disagree with the most. That honey will be bottled under the name Honeybee Spirit, honoring exactly that.
Honeybee Spirit is also the name of the workshop I’m doing through Threshold Retreat and Farms next month. We’ll explore what we can learn about human spirit in the presence of bees. We can’t learn from the bees, since they would not deign to teach anyone without wings, antennae and only two feet. They know our species is still primitive, barely emerged from larvae stage. They trace to the wasps, before breaking off 30 million years ago to gather nectar in highly social hives that would give up their lives for each other. We’re more like the wasps, I regret to say—meat eating with limited social skills.
To learn from the bees, one has to slow down and attend. Pay close attention to what they are actually doing. I have a Warre’ hive in the back of our house. It uses a different design than the one my racing bees are growing to ridiculous scale. The Warre’, designed by a French priest to be more like the tree cavities bees prefer, has a Plexiglas window that allows me to watch the sisters build comb, tend to the larvae and even see some chewing their way out of their cell to start working. After three weeks inside the dark house, the bees become foragers, navigating by the light and position of the sun to scour in about a two or three mile radius. They invite us to look as carefully at our neighborhood, noticing what is bloom and where the best pollen is, also the rotted wood piles with the medicinal mycelium.
The bodies of the bees are perfectly evolved to read the reality of their environment and then thrive with what is offered. Every little body part is perfectly adapted. Fred Smith once asked me for what are we humans perfectly adapted? We can’t fly or even run fast; not very acute eyesight—none at all in the ultraviolet ranges bees favor. We can smell ok, but nothing like the acuity that allows bees to find subtle blossoms at distance. We can reason when we choose to, but often choose not to. We can invent entirely new things and then make them be; but often choose the most ancient and crude ways—handguns.
And then we have Spirit. I would not go so far as to say humans are the only sentient creature with Spirit. I’d be surprised if dolphin do not. Golden Retrievers, in my experience, do. And surely in some way we can’t grasp, the hive. But for what do humans’ Spirit perfectly adapt us? Africans understand that every human has spirit energy. Kant believed every human has that and creative freedom, that makes it possible for us to invent entirely new social forms, not just the iPhone and AK-15. We are obviously not going to make it another few generations if we don’t pick up the pace on growing up.
It seems likely that we humans will be known only by one of the thinnest layers in the archeological record, facing away before we barely got going. But maybe not. Maybe our capacity for Spirit might allow us to change into something more wise, generative and resilient.
I’m working on a book about all this by the same name, Honeybee Spirit. Should be ready to take wing later in the year. If you sign up for the workshop, I’ll share a working draft of the book with you. And a bottle of Honeybee Spirit honey, too. The workshop is whatever we make of it; the honey is what the honeybees have made and I can assure you, it is for the ages.
