For The Wild - ANG ROELL on the Relations of the Beehive ⧸301

00:00:01.000 Hello, and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking with

00:00:08.140 Andrew.

00:00:10.060 When I think about what is happening, sort of the magic of possibility inside of a hive,

00:00:16.920 the very first thing that I noticed as someone who has a basic biological understanding of

00:00:21.880 a honeybee hive is that in the hive, ritual is work. Everything is ritualized. Everything

00:00:29.620 is seasonal and everything is contingent on the expansion and contraction of light,

00:00:34.680 which, if I look into the folk magic of my own people, is also true.

00:00:42.420 And Role They Them is a beekeeper, facilitator, and writer who lives and works on the east coast

00:00:49.060 of the U.S. or Turtle Island. They are the founder and lead beekeeper at They Keep Bees

00:00:55.500 and a consultant with MainSpring Change Consultants.

00:00:59.640 Ange's work with bees includes cultivating queen bees who are adaptive to ever-changing climates.

00:01:04.960 In their consulting work, they support organizations in making lasting change

00:01:08.980 by shifting power structures and creating effective collaboration.

00:01:13.620 In both of these roles, Ange seeks to build resilient collaborations

00:01:16.940 designed to stand the test of these traditional and transformative times.

00:01:21.120 oh and i am so delighted to have you here to share your wealth of wisdom with us today so

00:01:31.620 thanks so much for being on the show thanks for having me awesome well i wanted to start off by

00:01:38.980 grounding ourselves in your closeness to bees and i would love if you could start by dispelling

00:01:48.380 some common misconceptions about bees and beekeeping, I'm particularly interested in

00:01:54.000 the ways we have misinterpreted bees as busy, productive creatures. What is the problem with

00:02:01.200 imposing human-centric terms onto bees? Great question. I think that we, as creatures

00:02:12.100 drawn to hierarchy tend to impose anthropomorphic ideas onto lots of creatures in the ecology and

00:02:21.340 the environments that we're surrounded by. And I think that that's like a, it's a dangerous

00:02:25.420 exercise in and of itself because it doesn't actually allow us to be present for the lessons

00:02:29.980 that different elements of our ecology and different creatures have to teach us. So by

00:02:36.140 immediately imposing our ideas and our, our hierarchical functions in our current modern

00:02:42.480 society, we shut off a line of communication, a line of receiving and reciprocity that is

00:02:49.860 available if we're actually listening instead of imposing, right? And I love this question because

00:02:55.980 this, the misconception about productivity is such an excellent example, right? We've lived

00:03:00.440 in a capitalist society and in that society we're taught that constant expansion is sustainable

00:03:07.440 uh we're taught it in our personal lives we're taught it in our professional lives um and i

00:03:14.680 think it's important to underline that these are their own system they don't function within the

00:03:18.640 context of capitalism and they don't function in a sense of constant expansion they like many

00:03:25.800 things in the natural world around us function in patterns of expansion and contraction.

00:03:34.280 Like a lot of agricultural entities, they can be pushed into productivity and they can be pushed

00:03:39.640 into consistent productivity, but that actually does harm to the species. And this misconception

00:03:47.160 lies in whether they thrive in this constant state of production.

00:03:50.600 when actually what I notice is that they thrive in cycles that benefit from contraction or resets

00:03:58.360 or rests and if we're looking to bees to give us information about how bees can be successful and

00:04:04.780 thrive in a modern world what we see is that they impose these resets on themselves and they do that

00:04:12.580 in two ways they impose that in their reproductive cycle so they impose it by something called

00:04:17.980 swarming, which is when hive reproduces it, that hive, the workers in that hive or the sister bees

00:04:25.420 decide that they are going to produce a new queen. It's too crowded in this hive and we're ready to

00:04:30.820 reproduce and split. Half the hive leaves with the old queen. They take just a little bit of 0.98

00:04:36.940 nectar in each of their bellies and they use the system of scout bees and vibrational communication

00:04:43.320 to leave the hive and find a new home and we can talk more about that later the other half of the

00:04:49.520 bees stay behind a queen cell is raised or a young queen is raised they keep all of the resources 0.66

00:04:56.420 that they need to thrive in place and raise a new queen send her out to mate during that period

00:05:03.100 where the hive is split and that new queen is being raised and then going out to mate

00:05:09.620 there's a period where brood production or young bee production ceases and it breaks the cycle

00:05:15.580 of overproduction and that cycle breaking also breaks the cycle of diseases and pests that may

00:05:22.800 be in the hive and putting pressure on the brood or the nest of the hive so it's this natural

00:05:27.760 opportunity to break the cycle of overproduction so that they can rest and recover while there is

00:05:34.020 a new queen to hopefully continue to thrive. The other way that they do it is that they cluster 0.69

00:05:39.680 in the winter or in what's called dearth seasons, dearths being when there's not as much nectar and

00:05:46.360 pollen available in the ecology around them. And for most bees, that's winter.

00:05:55.120 Here in the subtropics, it looks a little bit different, but for the most part, we're talking

00:05:59.840 about winter cluster and in that period again we see this period of brood brood breaking or when

00:06:06.960 there is no brood being produced in the hive usually happens during the darkest time of the

00:06:11.460 year the bees are clustered around their queen to keep her warm and they are vibrating to maintain

00:06:20.660 the temperature of both the queen and the inside of the hive at 94 and a half degrees and the bees

00:06:27.260 on the outside of the cluster they vibrate and send warmth in and the bees on the inside of the

00:06:32.680 cluster send warmth out so it's sort of this elliptical sending of warm air around the whole

00:06:39.700 cluster and moving around the space that they're occupying whether it's a tree or a box and eating

00:06:46.320 just the little bits of food that they've had stored up so this idea of productivity with bees

00:06:51.540 that we as humans have is based on this idea that they're constantly bringing in constantly

00:06:56.560 bringing in when in reality they're bringing in resources from the outside and not just nectar

00:07:02.380 and pollen but also mycelium and water and they're storing those resources so that they can have

00:07:09.660 these breaks in the productive cycle and very often both the swarming and the clustering happen

00:07:16.700 with the other cycle of light that happens throughout the year so during peak cycles of

00:07:23.160 light bees are more productive and during low light seasons they actually rest and reset

00:07:28.720 wow i was really getting lost in bee world i was like imagining just watching them do

00:07:40.220 do what they do and i'm thinking too about how many terms around bees fall into colonial power

00:07:50.820 structures from the queen to the colony like just the language and I'm wondering how does this come

00:07:57.300 to show the ways humans relate to bees and is this structure as we understand it through the human eye

00:08:03.780 realistic or true or is this also something to dispel yeah great question it is it feels very

00:08:14.060 imposed to me as a beekeeper. And I'm constantly trying to shift language in beekeeping, both

00:08:21.420 subtly and overtly. For example, I've pretty much cut the reference to colony out of my vernacular

00:08:28.260 and use hive instead, which in the more broad beekeeping world means the box, but to me is

00:08:34.700 actually more representative of the cluster and nest of bees. What I find interesting about

00:08:40.500 the language is that, first of all, it's incredibly Eurocentric, which is inherently

00:08:45.820 limited and biased, right? It means we have this 15th century understanding of this very complex

00:08:52.040 social creature. And if you look back in the history, Aristotle was actually the first person

00:08:58.480 to refer to the primary queen as first a king bee, imposing a sense of rulership over that

00:09:10.000 individual bee rather than looking at the collective superorganism that is what we now

00:09:15.100 know is actually what a hive exists as. So first Aristotle imposes this idea of king bee. And then

00:09:21.240 in the late 300 BC era, someone named St. Ambrose imposed the idea of mother bee, which is probably

00:09:28.960 a little more in alignment with what we think of as now a queen bee. But either way, we're talking

00:09:35.160 about a human applied limited social understanding and lens of the honeybee throughout history right

00:09:42.680 and this anthropocentric application doesn't allow us to fully understand the myriad of

00:09:50.120 actions happening inside a hive you know for for us we refer to this one bee as the queen bee as 0.82

00:09:56.580 if she is the ruler and the decision maker in the hive but she actually makes no decisions and she

00:10:03.000 actually can't function or survive without a retinue like a collection of bees who to take 0.97

00:10:08.800 care of her she can't defecate go to the bathroom by herself she can't feed herself um consistently 0.75

00:10:16.940 and successfully she can feed herself for short periods of time uh she can't she can't stay alive

00:10:25.460 without the rest of the hive not just her retinue but all of the worker or sister bees in the hive

00:10:31.020 working collaboratively to care for her. And that's true during both the most productive times

00:10:36.260 in the hive and those times of contraction, right? I mentioned the cluster. If those bees

00:10:41.920 don't help the queen thermoregulate her temperature, she will die. And the benefit to

00:10:48.060 the superorganism of helping her thermoregulate is that she stays alive and then is the reproductive 0.99

00:10:56.040 organs of that hive. She's the only bee that can lay fertilized eggs. She can help expand 1.00

00:11:03.720 the genetic material of the hive. She's the only bee that goes out to mate and thus cross-pollinates 1.00

00:11:09.620 genetic material with that hive and other hives in the general bioregion. And so she is really

00:11:16.280 important. And I don't mean to discount the value. I mean, I, as a business person, work a lot with

00:11:22.820 queens and genetics and i think it's incredibly important however we miss we miss the idea of a

00:11:29.940 whole of workers or sisters or collaborators working together because we impose this hierarchy

00:11:35.940 we miss that it's not just roles or jobs that the bees are doing but they're they're performing

00:11:42.840 essential functions to keep each other alive and to collaborate on the thriving of the hive so that

00:11:49.000 they can get to that point where they're able to swarm and reproduce and thus expand

00:11:54.520 wow i really love getting myself out of my daily mind and into the world of the bees it's really

00:12:07.700 refreshing and i think it's important for us to

00:12:14.220 be reminded that there are so many worlds upon worlds upon worlds happening simultaneously that

00:12:22.540 us humans can forget when we get trapped into our daily lives that are important but also

00:12:32.260 are just one little very little little part of this world that we're sharing and

00:12:38.700 i want to think beyond this anthropocentric way of viewing bees to understand the autonomy of

00:12:48.040 bees themselves and perhaps even to understand the intertwined relationship you have with them

00:12:56.480 in your book radicalize the hive you write quote right now the honeybee human relationship is

00:13:03.080 transactional. We want to save the bees. If we want to learn reciprocal relationship with these

00:13:09.700 creatures, we have to ask what we learned from bees to begin to shape change so we can be more

00:13:17.380 responsive to each other and our ecological allies, end quote. So I'm wondering how have

00:13:24.100 modern movements to protect or quote save the bees missed the mark on the depth of the relationship

00:13:31.320 between humans and bees? Yeah, great question. And I think it's really important for me to

00:13:38.300 acknowledge that I'm answering this question and all of these questions based on my role as an

00:13:46.120 apiculturalist, as a farmer, as someone who works in agriculture, right? So my lens for this question

00:13:51.600 is rooted in how much I learn from bees by listening with all of my senses. And I feel like

00:13:57.800 that's such an incredible first step or call to action as i see it how do i listen with not just

00:14:07.080 my ears and my eyes but like what is what is my olfactory system telling me what is my nervous

00:14:14.020 system telling me about what's happening inside of the hive um and then balancing that role as a

00:14:22.340 as a farmer epiculturalist and my role as a listener is leads me to just sort of more

00:14:28.800 questions of how do I do this work and stay in alignment with my values if I'm out of alignment

00:14:34.720 what are the consequences for me and for the bees and for the larger ecologies in which I work what

00:14:40.320 are the consequences for the communities I care about and that I'm a part of who who am I calling

00:14:46.780 in to hold me accountable to those consequences right who are my human and non-human mentors

00:14:51.640 Because I think it's incredibly valuable to have human mentorship and relationship.

00:14:56.840 But what are the other ways that you're learning from the ecology around you about the other worlds that are out there all around us that we're ignoring 90% of the time, maybe even more?

00:15:09.100 And how am I checking in and seeking new mentorship and perspective?

00:15:14.240 Right. Like that, that to me is more about saving ourselves, saving our own psychology and our own sense of beings on this planet than it is about saving any one system or creature.

00:15:29.560 And I think that's where I feel we are just so out of alignment. We are this projected idea of superiority that leads us to, thanks to colonialism, that leads us to this idea that everything exists in a vacuum and needs our input to continue to thrive.

00:15:49.440 When in reality, we are one of very few things on this planet that think we can exist in a vacuum. And that's sort of our biggest failure is that we assume that we can exist in this vacuum and thus make everything or impose on everything this idea of existing in a vacuum.

00:16:09.520 When in reality, we're so interconnected and intertwined. And if we could slow down and ask ourselves some genuine questions and give ourselves the space to be reflective and actually listen, we could be taking in so much more information about how to course correct this very chaotic, high conflict environment that we've cultivated for ourselves in modern society.

00:16:33.320 that was really beautiful thank you for sharing your thoughts on that and

00:16:40.980 considering this intertwined relationship i think it's also important to recognize how honeybees

00:16:49.760 have been brought across the world for human use and i'd love if you could explain how honeybees

00:16:55.680 came to North America, and the ways they have since changed the American, quote, ecology alongside

00:17:03.720 human interaction? Yeah, thanks for asking this question. So I have a good friend who is a

00:17:13.880 beekeeper in Canada, and recently said something to me that just struck me so profound in thinking

00:17:21.840 about this. She said that we are a colonized people keeping a colonized insect on a colonized

00:17:28.300 continent. And it was like being just hit in the head with a realization. It's important to keep

00:17:35.640 naming and challenging that for us to create a better system of both beekeeping and relationship

00:17:42.480 with honeybees, but really with anything in ecology that we're studying, that we as humans

00:17:47.960 are benefiting from um that we're we're drawing our inspiration from or making our living with

00:17:54.860 right i think that it just i've literally thought about it every day since the season started every

00:18:00.620 time i put my hands in a hive i have thought about that quote and it just keeps returning to me

00:18:05.060 so honeybees are at this mellifera by um by classification and then there's sub sub

00:18:14.920 classifications of all these different what's called races of Apis mellifera. Most types of

00:18:23.520 Apis mellifera honeybee are from Europe or Africa. There's where the origins are. There are some

00:18:31.180 Apis species that were native and endemic to both North America and South America.

00:18:39.280 um those native bees were more responsive to the agroforestry that was stewarded here by

00:18:46.460 indigenous people um they tend to pollinate very specific uh flora in the ecology when

00:18:57.920 european colony colonizers came to the american continent the north american continent because

00:19:04.480 That's what my knowledge base is, and so that's what I'll speak to.

00:19:08.440 When European colonizers came to the North American continent, they saw this incredible agroforestry, which they just assumed was here naturally and not cultivated by indigenous people.

00:19:22.220 So that's another false assumption.

00:19:24.380 um and then they they started to impose on that the idea of how they could use the systems they

00:19:33.560 had in place to um impose monocrop agriculture on the north american continent and they saw bees as

00:19:41.980 a keystone in making that happen right and so the vision was to have these huge swaths of land

00:19:48.520 where folks would be able to cultivate just one crop and bring pollinators in to

00:19:56.800 pollinate that particular crop. Honeybees came, according to historical documents that I've been

00:20:03.420 able to trace, honeybees came over on boats, probably into the ports in Virginia. And it's

00:20:11.540 not clear whether they initially came as a as a feral species, so a swarm hiding in the hull of

00:20:18.600 a boat, for example, or they came over as a kept species in skeps, which are an old type of honey

00:20:26.060 beehive. But what we do know is that they started coming in through the Virginia colonies in the

00:20:32.380 mid-1600s. And initially, they were dominantly in the so-called states that made up the early

00:20:41.800 so-called United States. And so they were in New England and New York and the southern Virginia,

00:20:48.840 as well as Georgia and Florida. And initially, a lot of quote-unquote homesteaders had honeybees

00:20:58.640 and kept honeybees as a part of producing wax to make candles for light and making honey as a

00:21:05.560 sweetener to avoid having to use sugar because of the costs of import. And then slowly as the

00:21:13.540 concept of monocrop agriculture in the United States grew, they became a key component of

00:21:19.560 fostering a monocrop system. And so they started getting transported from place to place. And

00:21:27.080 migratory beekeeping in and of itself is, as I see it, isn't detrimental to the honeybee or human

00:21:33.480 species. I think that migratory beekeeping actually happens in a lot of indigenous culture

00:21:38.320 throughout the world where farmers or apiculturists will move bees, for example, up and down a mountain

00:21:45.920 to catch different blooms at different times of the year so that they're able to cultivate

00:21:51.040 honeys from those different blooms or pollinate a native crop. So that in and of itself doesn't

00:21:58.080 necessarily create a problem. There are beekeepers who will move bees in backpacks from one part of

00:22:05.360 a forest to another to either expand their current agroforestry or to pollinate a specific crop.

00:22:12.160 But where it becomes a problem is the monocropping doesn't allow for a diversity of species to exist. And I'm talking about both plant species, flora and fauna or native bees, right?

00:22:29.340 So by creating these monocrops, it actually mandates that you have to bring pollinators in to pollinate whichever crop you're growing.

00:22:40.120 Almonds is a really good example here in the United States.

00:22:44.020 All-in pollination is actually going on right now.

00:22:46.680 It starts in early February, runs through the entire month of February.

00:22:50.000 And there are millions of honeybee hives that are trucked on 18 wheelers across the United States, everywhere from Florida to New York and West.

00:23:03.880 Folks bring pollinators into the almond crops for pollination.

00:23:08.740 It's very difficult for native species of bees to survive and thrive in these areas because there is nothing else for the bees to feed on.

00:23:16.820 And you couldn't leave honeybees in that area because, again, there's only this almond bloom that occurs in this monocrop system.

00:23:24.260 And so it necessitates the moving of bees, which can very easily spread disease and pests that that are detrimental to honeybee health,

00:23:34.920 but also very quickly wipes out other bee species who would be able to exist in that area because of the monocropping.

00:23:42.040 On top of that, the monocrops are often treated with pesticides and chemicals, because that's what happens when you don't have a diverse balance of species in the agroforestry system, is that you rely on chemicals to keep this monocrop alive.

00:23:56.480 And so not only are we imposing our will on the ecology in the flora sense, but we're imposing our will on the honeybee by sort of forcing this migration and this forced pollination event.

00:24:10.300 and then those bees are trucked across the U.S. to continue pollinating our food system

00:24:16.600 so when we talk about bees pollinating one in four bites of food in the United States

00:24:22.080 that's not false information but it's information that's missing a key component to me

00:24:27.140 and that's that it doesn't have to be this way right there are a lot of other ways that we could

00:24:33.900 be in relationship with honeybees in relationship with the ecology around us and learning from

00:24:39.880 the people who are indigenous to these different bioregions how to best support a balanced ecology

00:24:46.900 that fosters both native and honeybee species rather than this sort of imposed superior will

00:24:54.240 of mass pollination events.

00:25:09.880 Held in your smile, you've left my stars with colors and robes on a busy canvas.

00:25:25.820 You painted over all the places I would not look and revealed your work.

00:25:37.080 Oh, you must love me so long

00:25:44.900 In these magic hours

00:25:51.460 You drew me out from under my own blanket of doubt

00:25:59.040 You saw me hiding there

00:26:02.800 If we look into history, though, we can also see that this exploitative relationship with bees

00:26:27.700 was not always the case bees have been companions and vital providers and so much more so i just

00:26:35.760 i really would love if you could give us a glimpse into the rich history of beekeeping

00:26:40.360 and the thousands of year-old relationships between bees and humans and how beekeeping

00:26:47.960 related to specific places and times great yeah i'm happy to do that um

00:26:56.480 i want to name that my knowledge comes from my desire to connect with my own ancestry and my

00:27:08.160 own ancestry's connection to bees as an agricultural relationship and as a life way

00:27:14.820 so that just feels important for me to name that and to also name that there are still

00:27:19.840 indigenous cultures who have maintained the continuity of raising and stewarding these

00:27:26.700 across the world. So what I speak to doesn't encapsulate all of that. It only speaks from

00:27:33.160 my own experience, which is also Eurocentric because my ancestors are mostly from Ukraine

00:27:38.920 and Germany. So just naming that as something to hold as you listen to this. But

00:27:45.260 what I've learned about my ancestry and from talking to other folks who have

00:27:53.780 long histories of relationships with honeybees is there's there's a lot of there's a lot of

00:28:00.140 interconnected nodes of practice that I find really fascinating so in what is now called

00:28:08.320 ukraine but was sort of a slavic indigenous environment that encapsulated ukraine uh

00:28:17.520 slovenia poland and russia some of the first beekeeping happened in trees and it was called

00:28:23.800 tree beekeeping um so first started uh people would do something called bee lining which is

00:28:30.880 a practice that's still used by researchers like tom seeley to find wild beehives and bee lining

00:28:37.180 is where you find a nectar producing plant or you put out a small drop of honey on the spoon

00:28:45.440 and you sit and you wait for a honeybee to come and feed on the plant or on the honey

00:28:53.460 and when they come you you set a timer or you start counting and what you're waiting for

00:29:02.020 is you're you're counting how long it takes for that bee to go back to the nest and communicate

00:29:10.040 where the food source is because bees will feed on a an abundant food source over and over and

00:29:16.640 over again and so they'll go back to the nest and they'll do a directional dance called a waggle

00:29:21.340 dance for the sister bees and they'll say all right forage your bees listen up the food is

00:29:27.220 you know half a mile that way stay left of these trees and right of this road and we're going to

00:29:33.780 see a waterway we're going to cross it and then the food is right there right so they'll do this

00:29:38.220 waggle dance share that information and as someone who's beelining you're waiting for the time it

00:29:44.560 takes for that bee to leave the food source go back to the hive share the information and come

00:29:48.980 back. And humans would then calculate how far the nest of a honeybee was based on basically

00:30:00.520 dividing that distance. And then you can, because bees fly in as straight a line as they possibly

00:30:06.580 can, you can literally track those bees back to the hive that they came from. In more modern

00:30:13.420 practice, there's a practice of like marking those bees with a tiny little bit of paint so that you

00:30:18.340 can know they're all coming from the same hive. But historically, it was just a matter of beelining

00:30:24.360 and following the bees back to that tree hive. And then from there, people would try to figure

00:30:31.120 out an entryway into that hive so that they could harvest honey. So that's like what we first

00:30:36.900 understand as human honeybee relationship. And then over time, people started to create

00:30:44.560 reusable entrances into these trees right and so they were they were basically creating small

00:30:51.400 doors in the tree where they could open and close that space so they could access the honey without

00:30:56.660 doing too much damage to the hive and there's there's different ways that you can understand

00:31:02.780 based on where the entrance of the hive is where the honey is stored it's typically stored um

00:31:08.200 furthest away from the entrance uh so that these can protect it from predators

00:31:12.540 because again that's the primary food source right and so people would create these doors 0.56

00:31:19.920 or windows into the tree so that they could open and close that and harvest honey from bees without

00:31:26.380 damaging the nest and they would do that on an annual basis and that would be a sort of ritual

00:31:33.420 practice because and they would not you know let hives swarm naturally and sometimes that meant

00:31:40.220 that they would swarm away from the place where you had had carved your space um because different

00:31:46.420 people lived in different localities there are actually these carvings or markings that i found

00:31:51.260 looking into the history of beekeeping in ukraine where different territories of different beekeepers

00:31:57.420 would be marked by this carving right so you would know that certain trees were in my quote-unquote

00:32:04.040 territory by the carving that was in the tree and i would know that certain trees were in your

00:32:08.880 territory by the carving that were on the trees and we could then leave honey offerings to the

00:32:16.820 different deities that we respected in honor of the honey harvest that we were able to get

00:32:21.680 and we could know about whose hives we were potentially harvesting from so that we could

00:32:26.940 have a reciprocity of exchange. Tree beekeeping was a huge part of the first quote-unquote

00:32:34.640 managed hives, but then bees started coming out of the trees and being stored in skeps and clay

00:32:41.380 hives and boxes and all of these different types of containers. And different cultures have different

00:32:48.100 ways of utilizing these containers. Some would in fact destroy the entire hive to harvest honey,

00:32:55.200 and some would be really intentional about only carving out certain elements of the hive or just

00:33:01.280 harvesting the honey and leaving the brood but the idea of bringing hives into containers outside

00:33:09.560 of the tree there's there's a lot of conversation about the drawbacks like if this is the place

00:33:16.480 where we made our first mistake right like the drawbacks of taking a hive out of a living

00:33:24.540 environment, the deep decomposing center of a tree, taking them out of the mycelial network

00:33:31.120 that exists in there, taking them out of the arboreal environment. Imagine, you know, a honey

00:33:36.940 beehive in a tree is going to be much, much higher up in the sky, in the air, than a honey

00:33:43.200 beehive that I have in a box on a pallet in my backyard, right? So there's a lot of conversation

00:33:49.020 and an interesting inquiry currently happening with respect to whether arboreal beekeeping is

00:33:57.520 actually the most natural form and the the most generative way for us as humans to have a

00:34:05.320 relationship with honeybees but yeah we moved them we moved them to boxes and we then use those you

00:34:14.860 know kept those boxes in different on different land and that also created an opportunity for

00:34:19.280 migratory beekeeping to be born where people could move their hives with themselves and

00:34:25.340 pollinate different herbs and different uh trees in different elevations um which i have a friend

00:34:34.200 melanie kirby who does this like pollinates at different elevations in new mexico she's an

00:34:39.780 incredible beekeeper yeah so so we know that that transition impacted our relationship with

00:34:46.880 honeybees and in a lot of ways I think that that transition sort of gives us information about

00:34:54.340 where the relationship sort of became more human-centric rather than rather than less

00:34:59.720 and I hold a lot of curiosity about what it would be like to

00:35:05.080 rewild that relationship and cultivate tree hives and it is completely antithetical to

00:35:13.920 anything capitalist right because you are you're creating opportunities for hives to

00:35:19.620 swarm and thrive in the arbors and you're really there isn't a quote-unquote benefit to you as the

00:35:29.960 human agriculturalist instead it's more of a like stewarding relationship of generosity

00:35:35.720 I like that yeah and I'm wishing that I could have a hive in a tree that just I've looked at

00:35:48.760 images of that and read a little bit about that a few years ago and was so

00:35:52.520 enraptured by that way of beekeeping and it almost felt a bit ritualistic too and I think

00:36:03.440 there are clearly more spiritual connections to bees that we can have and I would love to hear

00:36:10.640 what insight you have into the magic of beekeeping or the ritual and perhaps even the spiritual aspect

00:36:18.160 hmm yeah great question this is something that i you know i have sort of two

00:36:26.380 uh probably have more but i have sort of like my scientific approach to beekeeping and and

00:36:34.820 common sense natural beekeeping right i have that which is my work and my research and then i have

00:36:41.520 the a deep interest in history and the ritual of beekeeping um as a way of connecting with

00:36:49.860 my own ancestors um and uh doing ancestral work uh bees in in a spiritual context are

00:36:57.900 thought of as a portal which if you ever donned a suit and followed a knowledgeable beekeeper

00:37:07.080 into a hive this feels so resonant with my experience right they're this portal between

00:37:12.220 um they've always been thought of as this portal between the living and the dead

00:37:16.080 and so there's this practice called telling the bees that we believe originated in northern Europe

00:37:25.180 but I very much welcome challenges to that because we believe a lot of things originated

00:37:30.200 in northern europe um but the idea the premise of telling the bees is that they need to be kept

00:37:38.660 abreast of changes and particularly they want to know about loss and death and they want to know

00:37:48.240 about transitions from the living world to the spirit world um and it's believed that that's

00:37:54.000 because they are this steward this portal between the living world and the spirit world and this

00:38:00.740 this particular element is really powerful for me right now because I just lost a mentor and friend

00:38:13.380 and they just transitioned to being an ancestor and I am finding so much solace in 0.84

00:38:21.680 going to my beehives every day and being able to share the weight of that loss with a non-human

00:38:32.900 creature um and to feel their understanding of that loss and to feel them uh moving you know 0.63

00:38:43.780 the vibrations of them moving up and down my hands or the hum of them inside of the hive

00:38:48.600 it's just such a profound reminder of the cycles of life which my mentor you know the the grace

00:38:57.140 of which he accepted his own transition was so powerful to me and returning to bees who I know

00:39:05.760 are seen as this portal of transition and being reminded every day that there are cycles um and

00:39:12.080 there are paths in life that we walk and when they're done they're done and we're only here

00:39:17.900 to to bear witness and to hold space and to learn from those cycles for the period that we're here

00:39:24.940 it's been an incredible balm for my own grief um and when i when i think about what is happening

00:39:34.620 sort of the magic of possibility inside of a hive the very first thing that i notice as someone who

00:39:41.460 as a basic biological understanding of a honeybee hive is that in the hive like ritual is work

00:39:49.380 everything is ritualized everything is seasonal and everything is contingent on the expansion

00:39:54.700 and contraction of light which if I look into the folk magic of my own people is also true right like

00:40:01.700 there's these quotes about capitalism and how we're you know we're not meant to be working

00:40:07.960 jobs. We're meant to be like eating fruit with our titties out. And really, if we look back at

00:40:14.040 the folk magic or the folk practices of each of our individual cultures, we're meant to be following

00:40:21.140 the expansion and contraction of light and to be building with our community in response to the

00:40:27.400 ecology that we're in. We're meant to be working together on ritual. We're meant to be grieving

00:40:33.820 together and connecting to each other and communicating and we're meant to be building

00:40:39.240 together and when I look inside of a hive I see a lot of that ritualized and seasonal work

00:40:45.560 and when I dig back into my own lineage for practice and ritual I I see the same thing to

00:40:52.880 be true so I just see this natural connection between the folk magic that I come from and the

00:40:58.820 the magic that i see inside of a hive and and then just the the connection that bees have to

00:41:05.020 the ecology around that is so profound the connection between nectar producing trees and

00:41:11.120 honeybee hives is just it's it's completely magical and the fact that many trees whether

00:41:19.460 they're fruit or nut or seed producing rely on honeybees to to pollinate successfully so they

00:41:27.580 can produce that fruit that not that seed that then goes into the ground and becomes the next

00:41:32.020 tree and so that cycle is so important and then they have the reality for me that that bee venom

00:41:39.160 is this incredible medicine that i receive almost every day whenever i'm stung right so bee venom

00:41:47.400 i have i have a degenerative type of arthritis and the only thing the only balm that i've found

00:41:54.620 um for that is bee venom medicine it's like being stung by bees and I I witness in my own life that

00:42:03.520 I am stung basically from February until uh November and then for the entire month of

00:42:13.980 December all of my joints hurt but for every other month that I'm working in bees and working

00:42:21.640 with beads, I don't have that pain. And that to me is also like a type of medicine, a type of

00:42:29.460 information or data about just my calling and that the importance of that relationship in my life

00:42:37.280 that I get to be a part of.

00:42:51.640 Dirty thank you's

00:42:56.840 I need my heart 0.96

00:42:58.260 In my heart

00:42:59.740 I need my heart

00:43:02.460 You took me in

00:43:05.140 Gave me medicine

00:43:07.940 You said

00:43:14.880 Come now sit down

00:43:16.900 Here beside the fire

00:43:18.440 Tell me why you're wondering

00:43:21.160 When I came in the door

00:43:33.780 You saw me looking for a knee in your heart

00:43:37.360 You brought it to my lips

00:43:40.560 Gave me a little sip

00:43:42.140 Gave me a little sip of a knee in your heart

00:43:51.160 hmm it's really revitalizing to hear other ways of healing and thank you for sharing

00:44:01.320 that about yourself i think that some folks listening will find some reprieve that they can

00:44:09.120 find healing in other ways and i hope that there's a way for you to get more year-long relief

00:44:15.480 mm-hmm well this is yeah there's just so much that you've shared with us and there's so many

00:44:22.720 more things I want to ask you and I'm as we're coming to a close in our conversation I'm trying

00:44:28.380 to find what is pulling me the most I guess there is something around the intricacy

00:44:39.700 of our relationship to bees and beehives and the organization and communication of bees and

00:44:47.480 the art of beekeeping itself. And I'd love for you to share what you have learned in your years

00:44:55.520 of expertise about these intricacies that continue to amaze you. And what questions

00:45:01.960 does this relationship you have with bees lead you to ask and maybe what are your sparks of hope

00:45:10.700 for the future yeah I I continue to be like profoundly amazed by the ways that honeybees

00:45:20.360 communicate I mean every single thing that I learn about their communication and their

00:45:26.620 interspecies reciprocity with the ecology around them it just really blows me out of the water

00:45:32.740 we haven't talked much about you know they they communicate through dance which i talked about

00:45:37.340 they communicate through vibration which is just like vibrating on top of or next to each other

00:45:43.080 they communicate about like orientation through cycles of movement that again are elliptical

00:45:50.980 and they they have vision like they have they have both a compound and a complex eye but they

00:45:59.440 don't rely on that for communication and instead rely on vibration dancing directional dancing

00:46:10.020 and like iterative forms of physical contact to communicate and I just I always find it so

00:46:20.300 so profound and when queens are first hatching out of their cells they do this thing called

00:46:26.840 piping where they make this sort of bagpipe noise to to try to find each other because only one

00:46:34.340 queen would stay in that hive so either the hive would throw multiple swarms or the queens would

00:46:39.700 have some kind of final showdown and so every everything i learn about communication just

00:46:47.440 blows me away for example in a swarm there are scout bees which I mentioned earlier and those

00:46:55.860 bees before the hive the whole original hive is going to swarm they make this decision to swarm

00:47:02.580 and as they're making that decision which is made through vibrational communication and consensus

00:47:07.720 they send out scout bees who are just bees going out to forage for food and water and mycelium and

00:47:14.980 propolis but on the trips they're stopping at any location they think might make a good home

00:47:21.160 and they're checking that space out and they're literally measuring the cavities of trees or boxes

00:47:26.900 with their bodies by walking around the entire inside of the space they're orienting to the

00:47:34.880 entrance so they understand whether it faces south or north because facing north would be

00:47:40.680 would lead to a lot of late winter winds blowing into the hive versus facing south would lead to

00:47:46.780 a lot of sunshine on the entrance, which would get them started with their day a little bit earlier

00:47:52.340 and thus able to seize on those long periods of light more productively. So they're measuring all

00:48:02.240 of that orientation and size and volume with their tiny little body. And then they're going back to

00:48:10.420 the hive and they're sharing that information and then when they decide to swarm when a hive

00:48:17.140 you'll see a hive in a swarm it's often called it's called bio backing it's like when they're

00:48:21.600 hanging from a tree or a shrub or someone's car they're all clustered together around a queen

00:48:26.880 they just have they have a bunch of bees and one queen and each bee just has a little bit of nectar

00:48:33.140 in her belly and that's that's one the potentiality for one whole hive right but they need to find a 0.80

00:48:40.920 place to live and start building new wax comb as quickly as possible because they have these very

00:48:47.300 limited resources so at this point they're relying on the dances of those scout bees that went out

00:48:54.780 and to collect information about where to go and each of those scout bees starts to do this dance

00:49:01.100 that shares okay one location is three miles west of here one location is two miles south of here

00:49:08.380 here are all the details of that location and the bees in the swarm listen to this information

00:49:13.980 by absorbing the vibrations and they through their epigenetic capacity to select for the best

00:49:23.420 possible location they listen to the intake that information and they begin to take up the dance

00:49:29.820 of whichever bee has chosen the best location and it's not like the bee that does the best dance or

00:49:35.100 tells the best story it's literally the data that that bee has collected about which location is

00:49:40.720 going to be best of the ones that they have to select and then they reach a consensus when they

00:49:47.720 are all dancing the same dance they alight from the tree so they get out of the bio vac they're

00:49:54.480 now all in the air but only the scout bees that selected the best location know where it is so

00:50:02.740 they are relying on a handful of bees to direct tens of thousands of bees and their queen to

00:50:12.440 this new location and so they're just looking up in the sky and trusting that the bees flying above

00:50:18.120 them those scout bees are taking them to where they need to go and if that is not just the most

00:50:23.780 profoundly mind-blowing example of collaborative communication and trust and innate like

00:50:31.700 trust of your own instincts and your own intuition and your own epigenetic knowledge about

00:50:38.260 the future I don't know what is right because you've just got this little bit of resource and

00:50:43.720 you're just going to go for it and trust that this is going to work out so that that's my

00:50:49.480 the thing that amazes me my sparks right now are really there's two for me there's

00:50:57.040 uh over the last year I've been recovering from the brain injury from an accident and I've had to

00:51:05.280 slow down a lot of my beekeeping practice and rely on the people in my organization to hold

00:51:12.380 the practice for a lot of different reasons I've had issues with my eyes and my hearing

00:51:17.180 and my vestibular system, which meant I couldn't do what I normally do. Like I've had to turn to

00:51:23.280 more internal indoor activities related to the bees. And one of them is processing wax. So the

00:51:29.540 wax you process out when we call old comb from a honeybee hive, beeswax is the place where

00:51:36.060 detritus and chemicals and sort of things from the outside world that the bees don't want in

00:51:43.600 the hive are stored in wax and so it becomes suspended wax is a lipid it's a fat that's

00:51:49.220 actually secreted from a honeybee's abdomen so they make it themselves from their own bodies

00:51:55.140 and that fat is secreted out and used to make the foundation of a hive as beekeepers what we've

00:52:02.660 learned over time is that if you if hives aren't going to be swarming and living in a natural

00:52:07.700 arboreal context it behooves us to remove old wax because it actually contains a lot of

00:52:13.280 chemicals and external detritus. And so what we do is remove that old wax, we crush it down,

00:52:19.560 and we melt it to make beeswax that we then share with other makers who make candles and

00:52:25.420 lost wax painting and all kinds of beautiful and incredible things. But it's put me into a

00:52:30.900 different lens of gratitude for what honeybees offer. And it's given me an opportunity to like

00:52:36.620 receive wax as a medicine, and then to share that with other people who are taking it and making

00:52:42.020 something beautiful out of it and sort of recycling what to the hive is toxic into something

00:52:48.160 incredibly creative for the human world. That chain of giving has caused me to just

00:52:57.500 appreciate the depths of what bees provide to us. And then my other big spark right now is that for

00:53:07.020 the last two years, I've been doing research about the capacity for small-scale beekeepers

00:53:12.380 to raise their own queens. And I found some really fascinating things about the production

00:53:17.980 of high quality, what is called in the scientific world, high quality queens and the potential for

00:53:23.900 success rate that small-scale beekeepers could have. And so from that work, I've been funded

00:53:29.700 to start putting together educational cohorts of people to take those practices and implement them

00:53:35.880 in their own apiaries and what's being born from that is a culture of beekeepers who want to do

00:53:43.020 things differently um who want to receive information from beekeepers who are doing

00:53:48.060 things differently and who want to mimic the collaborative energy inside of the hive and that

00:53:55.960 is driving so much of my work right now this opportunity to connect with other folks who

00:54:04.540 want to disrupt the beekeeping industry as we currently think of it and think about ways that

00:54:10.980 it dovetails with local and regional food systems and that it becomes more of a collaborative

00:54:18.580 regional effort to sustain honeybees where we are and help us extract ourselves from the

00:54:25.560 monocropping agricultural system and become less reliant on that and more reliant on these

00:54:31.460 bioregional relationships so those are my two two big sparks oh ang thank you so much for this

00:54:39.780 really beautiful conversation

00:54:42.320 thank you for listening to this episode of for the wild podcast the music you heard today

00:54:52.900 is by Alexa Wildish, Violet Bell, and Drea Drury.

00:54:59.160 For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young,

00:55:03.920 Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem,

00:55:08.320 Emily Guerra, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.

For The Wild - August 24, 2022

ANG ROELL on the Relations of the Beehive ⧸301

Episode Stats

Transcript