Honeybee Spirit – garygunderson Blog

Humans get so many things wrong about honeybees. I’m sure they are a bit confused about us, too. But they must be especially mystified by the way we call the one who sows all the eggs in the hive a queen, which implies the off-putting and inefficient pomp of human royalty. Mother is closer, given her role in laying many thousands of eggs; but also wrong given her lack of maternal qualities. She lays eggs but has no role in raising them. And the first thing she does when she emerges with her impressive stinger is to kill her competitors. Not like my mother.

The one we call queen is more like a sower of seeds. She is not even a gardener that carefully plants a seedling, making sure the roots are nestled just right in the soil. Let’s call her Sower.

Honeybees have successfully flourished for 30 million years precisely because they have no royal qualities at all. We have no idea how 60,000 bees in the hive think collectively, but we know it’s not the queen. Every single worker bee—all girls—have the identical genetics of the Sower. The hive every egg “royal jelly” for three days before switching to the more mundane “bee bread.” But the hive feeds the Sower special food her whole life turning on the genes that make her much bigger and living 10 times as long and, of course, able to lay a thousand eggs a day. But she isn’t any smarter than the other bees. Her most consequential decision is which egg to lay in which cell and doesn’t really decide even that. She sticks her tentacles into the cell to see which one the architect bees intended (the 10% drone cells are slightly bigger).

Why is this important for humans? We have long fallen for the idea of the Elevated Decider who receives ridiculously disproportionate privileges in exchange for making big decisions. The honeybees make those decisions collectively without the process skewed by privilege. Flat democracy so perfect humans can’t even recognize it.

Now and then humans approach smart by accident, such as recently seen in Texas of all places.

Honeybees typically produce way more honey than they can possibly consume, leaving plenty for us. They can also produce more hives, which is why they are so adaptive, able to explode into almost any niche given the chance. The Texas department of agriculture triggered an explosion of bee hives by granting agricultural tax abatements to any “farm” over 5 acres with 5 or more hives. Texans are not known for environmentalism, but they known a lucrative write-off when they see it.

Honeybees are insects, as TC reminds me, with little emotional bandwidth. They don’t care about dubious Texan morality. Suddenly, there were bees everywhere! And the people dumping poisons suddenly were surrounded by tax-incented Texans. (Here’s the story.)

We are so used to complaining about environmental decline that we overlook the natural superpowers like the honeybees’. They can make a new Sower and thus entire new hive when they need or want to do so. Normally, this is when the old Sower starts to show signs of wearing out and getting erratic. The hive puts some promising eggs in larger cells and feeds those eggs nothing but special food. In about 16 days a Sower will emerge. (She isn’t nice: as I mentioned, her first act is to kill the other potential queens.) She’ll fly off to mate with six or ten drones and returns to lay eggs in the dark for a couple years.

Often in the Springtime the the hive will find itself thinking of reproduces itself. Honeybee sex involves the whole hive. The existing Sower is chased around the hive to lose weight so she can fly one last time. About half the bees in the hive pour into the air in a swirling ecstatic cloud bringing the old Sower with them. They pause in a tree branch to give the scouts a chance to find a new permanent location in the neighborhood. While they are pausing an opportunistic human can persuade them into a box they may find it acceptable.

Kelly Carpenter’s bait hive for Methodist bees. So far it has captured four swarms that have come from his church rafters.

Kelly Carpenter and I have captured three Methodist hives this way in the past couple weeks. Combined with some Texas-style splits, 5 hives are now 16. The process is risky and wild. They bet everything on expansive possibility which has worked for thousands of millennia.

Last year about half of all hives in the United States did not make it through the gauntlet of toxins, sprays, overcrowding and stupid human behavior that magnify the threats of mites and such. But it is important to note that most of the hives that failed were the ones kept by humans.

Many natural species are also capable of exuberant expansion once humans quit pumping poison into their neighborhood. Nature out-generates death every chance it finds. Humans can help the most by removing the financial incentives to poison. Just imagine if we gave tax rebates for planting butterfly and pollinator flowers. Do we really need Texans to show us?

Why five acres? Our townhouse community has one acre of sanitized fescue vacuumed in the fall. The city council could change the game for bees and bugs and songbirds with a 5% property tax rebate. Of course, we could just do it. We not legally bound to spray neurotoxins on ourselves.

Too small to matter? One of my favorite organizations is Homegrown National Parks. “Homegrown National Park® addresses the urgent biodiversity crisis with a simple, science-based solution to a global challenge. We are a grassroots call-to-action to regenerate biodiversity by planting and preserving native plants that support critical ecosystem services and removing invasive plants that do not. We are catalyzing action that will have meaningful, tangible, measurable, and immediate results. We can do this NOW, without waiting for legislation.”

We are not inherently smart as honeybees. We have to think hard and do things on purpose. Somebody had to notice that there is more private land currently planted in lawns than in all the national parks put together. And think about what that means.

We can just stop behind stupid. Start choosing abundance.

Nature just won’t quit trying. Here’s an eager dandelion emerging from our parking lot. Never quit trying….

I walk through morning light among the apple trees to the circle of seven hives as a half-million bees begin a new day. I sit by the small hive over on the left looking for pollen saddlebags on the arriving foragers which will tell me there are babies being fed. This hive is a refugee remnant from one that fell prey to an infestation of wax moths. Many bugs beside bees are attracted to honey and wax—small beetles, ants, “destructor mites” too small to see. And, the most disgusting, wax moths that tunnel sideways through the comb leaving stringy goo the bees can’t remove and can quickly overrun the whole hive.

Bees are NOT supposed to do this, but they were refugees without options, so they build UNDER an empty hive.

The Mother and 6 or 8 thousand sisters abandoned the lost hive, flew 100 feet across the circle and attached underneath an empty box and built comb as if they were waiting for me to do something. This situation is not covered in my dozens of beekeeping books, which the bees don’t read. I was anxious about hurting the already traumatized refugee Mother so I gently picked up the bottom board under which they had attached themselves and put it on top of a small box with their new comb dangling down into a box. I added a bottle feeder to help them settle in.

Mother might have time for two three cycles of babies before frost. The sisters don’t hibernate, but they’ll quite raising babies and push the drones out to save food and bother. The girls form a tight ball to keep Mother warm until February when she’ll rev up again if—a big if—the hive can recover its strength. I’ll always pull for the underbee.

Meanwhile, the other half million sisters around the circle need treatment for those damn mites. This involves a 14 day regime of stinky chemical pads inside their hive which makes them grumpy as I check carefully for other bugs. The only nectar around is goldenrod so I’ll feed them after this treatment with a last shot of formic acid till we tuck them in for the Winter.

We say “beekeeper” but I am the one being kept. Why do all this? Not the honey, although I did harvest 18 gallons from four of the hives this summer; should be twice that If I can nurse these hives along. But the longer I am kept by the bees, the less I think about the honey. These sisters have watched mountains, oceans and glaciers come and go—taking lightly the latest annoyance, we silly humans. I savor being inside their generous circle on a season of their 30-million-year journey.

Moon rising through the Nunnery on Iona.

On every one of those 11 trillion days, they read their environment and adapted to the unexpected. They focuses on the babies who thought only of the babies after them. Bees will let you have honey, but sting for brood. On the other hand (bees have six) their survival depends on radical diversity. Honeybees are impossible to tame; certainly not be me. The mother mates with 10 boys a few seconds each 50 feet in the air. She flies right past the neighborhood boys to those a couple miles away. Her daughters have random fathers so every bee and every hive is a slightly different mix of inherited traits. Don’t worry about their survival; some hive somewhere will have the traits to survive the worst we dumb humans can do. We humans on the hand (we only have two) are far less likely to survive. We don’t think about the babies, resist diversity and have tamed ourselves.

But now and then an improbably wild human hive emerges with traits fit for the future. Last month TC and I took rail, ferry, bus and footpath to the rocky island of Iona on the western coast of Scotland. People have come here for millenia to experience its “thin veil” between human and the Ultimate. The abbey was built 1,460 years ago and Druids worshipped here a thousand before them. Its Christian phase attracted pilgrims and, unfortunately, my ill-behaved Viking kin for centuries until succumbing to the protestants who let the rubble crumble. In the 1930’s until a muscular Presbyterian, George McLead, founded the Iona community restoring the abbey, and more importantly, built a movement for enspirited mercy and justice. My Norwegians gave them the lumber for the ceiling they had burned earlier. Now Iona is a hive of radical spirit. If honeybees invented humans, we would look like the Iona community—women leading with maybe 15% men allowed, as long as seemed relevant to the babies.

Late summer fields surrounding the Abbey of Iona.

About a mile across the strait from Iona is the pink granite “island of the strong women.” The founding priest Columba shipped the women and cows over there, which didn’t last long as boy energy is too brittle for the harsh climate. Today the spirit and practice of the Iona community is distinctly feminine, unafraid of the bitter winds or the venal proud boys now having their day in so many places around the world. Spirit with sting ,if the babies are threatened. And they are.

Aaryaman Singhal, one of the brilliant young leaders of the Sunrise Movement. Count me in.

Iona tunes my ear for the songs of freedom rising up where you don’t expect it. An unlikely young hive, the Sunrise Movement, rose up in Texas demanding the government to reinvent the depression era Civilian Conservation Corp to fight climate extinction. It is led partly by Aaryaman Singhal, who reads his environment like the a honeybee. After slogging through steaming heat in east Texas and Louisiana, this week he stood by President Biden and AOC announcing the American Climate Corps infuriating the republicans (who rather remind me of the wax moths the way they go sideways). It will set another 20,000 people free to give themselves a chance to give the world a chance.

This is how life works. Hope comes from the edges, from the experiments you’d least expect to work. Look to where the veil is thin between human and ultimate; where you can see the inbreaking of the future.

Tag: Honeybee Spirit

Bee sex in Texas

Underbee