August 28, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Sam Knight’s absorbing “Hive Mind,” a report on the clash between natural and conventional beekeeping. Knight writes, 

Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture. They believe that mainstream beekeeping—like most human-centered interactions with the natural world—has lost its way. There is another path, but it requires the unlearning and dismantling of almost two centuries of bee husbandry and its related institutions.

He notes the “dire interventions” of conventional beekeeping:

Managed bees are typically kept in a drafty box low to the ground, as opposed to a snug nest high in a hollow tree. Most beekeepers’ colonies are much larger than those which occur in the wild, and rival colonies might be separated by only a few yards, rather than by half a mile. Much of the bees’ honey, which is supposed to get them through the winter, is taken before they have a chance to eat it. A queen bee goes on a spree of mating flights early in her life, and then lays the fertilized eggs until her death. In apiaries, queens often have their wings clipped, to interrupt swarming (a colony’s natural form of reproduction), and are routinely inspected, and replaced by newcomers, sometimes imported from the other side of the world. Propolis—a wonderful, sticky substance that bees make from tree resin and that has antibacterial qualities—is typically scraped out of hives by beekeepers because it is annoying and hard to get off their hands.

He visits the apiary of natural beekeeper Gareth John and describes the activity inside one of the hives:

Inside, the colony looked like a train station at rush hour. John pointed out bees fanning their wings, to keep the temperature and carbon-dioxide levels under control, and guards stationed at the entrance, apparently checking the bright-yellow beads of pollen that arrived on their fellow-bees’ knees, like bag searchers at a museum. In the forties, a German beekeeper named Johann Thür used the term Nestduftwärmebindung—literally, nest-scent-heat-binding—to convey the heady fug of warmth, humidity, pheromones, and other mysterious signals that is essential to a healthy bees’ nest. Natural beekeepers often speak of the hive in somewhat spiritual tones, as a single, sentient organism that has evolved in parallel to mammals like us. “This creature is not like any other creature we ever interact with,” John said. I touched the glass. The hive thrummed. The smell of honey rolled across the pasture.

Those last three sentences are very fine. 

Knight doesn’t take sides. He talks with conventional beekeepers, too. He quotes Margaret Murdin, a former president of the British Beekeepers Association:

“You can let the bees get on with it, if you hadn’t interfered so much in the first place,” she said. It was humans who brought in varroa and pesticides and agricultural monocultures. “You can’t say, ‘We’ve got a pandemic and we’re not going to intervene. We’re going to let everybody die of COVID,’ ” she added. If we have broken the bees, then it is our job to fix them.

To intervene or not to intervene – that is the question. As Knight’s illuminating piece shows, there’s no easy answer.