It has been many decades ago since I tasted the honey created by my father-in-law”™s bees. It was as dark as petroleum with an intense flavor. I never did discover where those bees got their pollen or what eventually happened to the three hives on the property. Now it seems that bees, an essential link to the production of our food system, are in an incomprehensible collapse.
Well, maybe not so incomprehensible when you see how bees have been treated in the process of being “industrialized.” A documentary ”“ “Queen of the Sun” ”“ is essentially a barometer of the health of the world. As Michael van Baker pointed out in the film, Rudolf Steiner (1923) predicted that our imposing an ill-fitting industrial culture on bee cultivation would end up destroying the bees”™ own successful, adaptive culture. Modernizing bees for productivity in the face of their exquisite models for density, sustainability and allocation of resources, is stunningly insensitive to a natural phenomenon on which we depend.
What exactly does industrializing the bee culture mean? Consider the system of trucking bees all over creation, piling hives on flatbeds, shrink-wrapping them. They are then treated like migrant workers, beginning their assigned task of pollinating crops in Florida, then proceeding up the Atlantic coast, stopping in North Carolina, and eventually winding up in Maine. One can only imagine the stress on these delicate beings ”“ toxic truck emissions, constant movement and exposure to disease in unfamiliar terrains.
Traveling bees get to so stressed out they need to be injected with corn syrup. Corn syrup? Why on Earth would honey bees need high fructose corn syrup?
It appears to act like a vitamin, designed to pep up the travel weary bees.
A huge negative to all bees, not only the ones that are being trucked around, is the exposure to pesticide sprayed over the crops on which they are expected to perform. A case in point is the $2 billion almond crop in California, a classic monoculture that requires a million honeybee hives for cross-pollination. That”™s a million hives just to keep this one crop able to turn out cheap almonds. On top of that this one crop is keeping 40 percent of all the bees in the country busy. One of the solutions is for agribusiness to create space and a harmonious environment for the bees that their business depends on so they can survive locally, avoiding most of the negatives of travel. Pesticides will still be the problem if growers in the country do not make the connection between the need for the toxic material and dependence on honey bees.
It is an ongoing tragedy ”“ to witness the endless chipping away at nature as if it doesn”™t matter if we chop off that particular branch of the system. One is reminded again of the analogy of the airplane, as we systematically remove one bolt at a time figuring that is not really essential to keeping the plane in the air. Well, let”™s check what we would lose without the assistance of the tiny honey bee ”“ almonds, apples, avocadoes, blueberries, cantaloupes, cherries, cranberries, cucumbers, sunflowers, watermelon ”¦ the list goes on.
The artificial insemination of the queen bee is another enormously damaging process for the long-term survival of the honey bee. Here is the natural process for the reproduction of bees ”“ the queen bee, after being fed prodigious amounts of food by the drones, is ready for insemination. She flies straight up 500 feet in the air, followed by only the most vigorous of the drones. When she lays her eggs they will weigh twice her body weight. In the industrial procedure she is fed artificially, a process that apparently creates the queen bee, an incomprehensible part of the bee saga. She is then inseminated by a random selection of drones thus bypassing the basic principle of the survival of the fittest.
There is some good news to share. The film “Queen of the Sun” attracted a full house in the Jacob Burns Film Center”™s largest theater, and, when asked who actually had bee hives in the audience an astonishing 25 or 30 people raised their hands. The film movingly exhibited the close relationship owners had with their bees, even to the point of a yogi using his gray handlebar mustache to tickle his bees, he says to their delight. I guess all is not lost yet.
Surviving the Future explores a wide range of subjects to assist businesses in adapting to a new energy age. Maureen Morgan, a transit advocate, is on the board of Federated Conservationists of Westchester. Reach her at maureenmorgan10@verizon.net.
