Read an Excerpt
1 FROM BEUYS TO BEES
When written in Chinese the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters – one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.
J. F. Kennedy
We are becoming used to environmental disasters. The bee crisis, however, strikes a singular chord. Everyone is alarmed because everyone is affected. One third of the world’s food production depends on bees. The potential loss of pollinating hives is a clarion call even to environmental sceptics; the loss of biodiversity a frightful prospect to those with ecological concerns. a growing world population and a declining number of bees is a dangerous mismatch.
First signs of colony collapse surfaced in Texas and Louisiana in 1960. From 1972 feral bee populations began to fall in the United States and are now almost extinct. Trachea and Varroa mites started to wreak havoc in colonies in the 1980s. France reported major unexplained losses of bee populations in 1992. By 2005 fifty percent of domesticated bees had perished in the US. The United Kingdom became affected in 2006. In the same year the term Colony Collapse Disorder was coined to describe what was rapidly becoming an agricultural catastrophe. Two years later many US beekeepers reported losses of up to ninety percent. Belgium, Netherlands, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain suffered substantial declines, and other European countries soon followed. In the meantime severe colony collapse has struck China and Japan. Egypt is also affected.
Beekeepers are at a loss as to how to stem the tide of destruction. Scientists have begun a frantic search for causes. Many accuse the Varroa mite. but this mite coexisted with Asian bees long before colonies began to collapse. Other researchers blame monoculture, genetically modified crops, herbicides, pesticides and electro-smog. No doubt these all play their ignominious part. But bees are dying in areas unaffected by herbicides. Colonies collapse where there is little electro-smog.
In this book I explore the reasons behind the bee crisis and suggest a new way of thinking about it. My aim is not to discredit current trends of thought, but to establish communication between different ways of seeing the world. I believe that the gap that separates these ways of seeing is the same into which species after species disappear.
I am not a professional beekeeper. I have been marginally involved in amateur apiculture in Western Australia. My own relation to bees was initially an artistic one. Inspired by the artist Joseph Beuys I worked with honey as an artistic medium in search of new icons for the environmental age. Beuys used honey, wax, fat, felt and copper as metaphors for social transformation. My own work led me to creations like Honeyclock (Fig. 17), and Buddha in Honey (Fig. 12), a series of visual meditations on compassionate ecology. These, together with The Bee Master, a contemporary festival drama written by Jennifer Kornberger, were part of the initial momentum for this book.
During this work I came across a lecture series on bees from 1923 that influenced much of Beuys’ work, particularly his social vision. The same pages that sparked Beuys’ social sculpture opened a door to me to a new compassionate ecology. What I read fuelled my passion for bees. This passion fused with my interest in understanding paradigms: the way they come into being, establish themselves and claim more and more minds until they rule with singular power over decades, centuries and sometimes millennia. The transcript of the lecture series shed light on bees and paradigms simultaneously. It spoke of interconnectedness, wholeness and of ways to learn from the future before it becomes a mistaken past.
The lectures that inspired Beuys predated the bee colony collapse by some eighty years. The speaker was neither a beekeeper nor an expert in the way we understand it, yet the future demise of the honeybee was predicted in his first lecture and its causes clearly outlined.
But now we come to this whole new chapter concerning the artificial breeding of bees... much can be said for the artificial breeding of queen bees, because it does simplify things. But the strong bonding of bee generations, a bee family,
will be detrimentally affected over a longer period... In certain respects you will be able only to praise artificial breeding, if all necessary precautions are taken, as Mr Mueller described to us. But we will have to wait and see how things will look after fifty to eighty years. Certain forces that have operated organically in the beehive until now will become mechanised … It won’t be possible to establish the intimate relationship between the queen bee you have purchased and the worker bees the way it would arise all by itself in nature. But at the beginning the effects of this are not apparent...
This is the way things stand … with the artificial breeding of bees. You can increase their production of honey, all the work they do, and even the worker bees’ capability of accomplishing this work … we’ll see that what proves to be an extraordinarily favourable measure upon which something is based today may appear to be good, but that a century from now all breeding of bees would cease if only artificially produced bees were used. We want to be able to see how that which is so wonderfully favourable can change in such a way that it can, in time, gradually destroy whatever was positive in this procedure.
In the audience sat a conventional beekeeper called Mr Mueller. He represented the state of the art of beekeeping: the practical, professional expert. Of course, this practical, knowledgeable man was very much taken aback by the speaker’s assertions, an understandable reaction given that the speaker was indicting the very practices that made beekeeping profitable for a catastrophe nobody in the room would live long enough to see. Nor could Mueller see any evidence for such a catastrophe. Later in the series the speaker, referring to heated contributions from Mr Mueller, reiterates his position.
Nevertheless, it is important to gain this insight — that it is one matter if you let nature take its course and only help to steer it in the right direction when necessary, but it is entirely another matter to apply artificial methods to speed things along.
I really don’t want to take a strong position against what Mr Mueller has stated. It is quite correct that we can’t determine these matters today; it will have to be delayed until a later time. Let’s talk to each other again in one hundred years Mr
Mueller; then we’ll see what kind of opinion you will have...
Reading this passage I can almost hear the laughter in the room — but today we would not join in. Hives are dying worldwide and the plight of the honeybee has become dire reality. If it continues, honey is the least we will lose. Bees are the agronomists of nature, ecologists in action. They pollinate our major crops and maintain biodiversity. An estimated one third of the food staples on this planet is dependent on their ceaseless toil. Bees are major collaborators we cannot afford to lose.
The lecturer on bees was one of the few great universalists of the last century, Rudolf Steiner, perhaps best known as the founder of Waldorf education and biodynamic farming. While I am fascinated that Steiner was able to foresee the bee collapse, explain its causes and accurately estimate the timescale, I am even more fascinated by the fact that his contribution is ignored by current researchers. I see this as the one-sided orientation of a mindset that has had its time. There is something in the present paradigm that would rather suffer a crisis, no matter how devastating, than entertain the validity of a different way of seeing the world. This is as important a problem as the bee crisis, deforestation, pollution and global warming together, for it points to the cause behind all these: the current scientific paradigm with its default position that solutions are found in details and that parts make the whole. This mindset applies the microscope of the mind where the ‘macroscope’ of applied imagination should prevail.
Steiner’s lectures are confronting in this respect. They oppose prevailing trends with a radical re-imagining of our concept of ecology. Much of Steiner’s lecture cycle will appear arcane to those unfamiliar with his work, however his basic insights about bees and why they will disappear are perfectly intelligible to common sense as well as to compassionate sensitivities we all already have, but little apply. While it requires an expert to manage an apiary and trained scientists to fathom the chemical composition of queen substance, the most important insights about bees are well within our reach — as are the reasons they disappear.
My first aim in this book is to facilitate this understanding of Apis mellifera, my second to mediate between differing paradigms. Without cross-pollination of mindsets, ecology remains infertile. A new beehive of paradigms is needed to solve the plight of bees and the current problems of nature.
