eekeepers generally disagree. I don t like arguing, so I

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1 eekeepers generally disagree. I don t like arguing, so I Bdon t go to beekeeper meetings. You go ahead; I ll just slip out the back and walk my dog. Perhaps the main cause of the arguing is the point of view of the keeper. I am convinced that, for the moment, the most common point of view is: How little can we spend on the bees and still get them to make honey? If some beekeeper says, Feed them sugar water, their point of view must be: Because it s cheaper than honey. If not, then they are just repeating what they have been told without having their own point of view. No one who bases their thinking about bees on observation would ever think to feed them sugar, which comes from a root (beet sugar) or a stem (cane sugar). This sugar is simply not their diet, and digesting it must be difficult for them. What can we do to help the bee? This could become our point of view. Instead, the prevailing point of view is, If you feed them sugar instead of honey, they probably will be fine, and it will be cheaper. The same person who thinks this thought might also buy the cheapest dog food and the cheapest baby food, and be thoroughly consistent. However, the purpose of this book is to make you think of 129

2 130 Sensitive Beekeeping the bee as a being needing special treatment, as a species worthy of special treatment. You must have heard by now that bees are in trouble, especially since I wrote about it earlier. Actually, we are all in trouble, but the bees are more sensitive than we are, so they show the trouble before we do. Obviously, decades of pesticides and monoculture have been enough to wreck the bees, but beekeepers have also contributed quite a bit to the pain. It is now typical for bees to not be allowed to make their own wax honeycomb (wastes honey), not allowed to choose their own queen (older queens do not lay enough eggs), not allowed to live in one location (hives are wrapped in plastic and hauled thousands of miles for pollination of monocultures), not allowed to eat honey (sugar is cheaper), and sometimes not allowed to live at all in the winter (cheaper to take every bit of their autumn honey and then buy new bees in the spring). With all this abuse, it is almost humorous to look for the cause of their disappearance by examining cell-phone radiation. It is rather a question of why bees are still alive at all. We, as hobbyists, have a chance to save the world. If we feed the bees their own honey; let them make their own honeycomb with any size cells they want; let them figure out how to deal with their own pests and germs instead of giving them medicines and antibiotics; allow each colony to develop a familial bond by not mechanically dumping bees from one hive into another and not hauling them across the country in trucks; let them re-learn how to raise new queens when they have need, instead of routinely killing queens and replacing with our factory models; and do not force them to squeeze through queen excluders and pollen traps every day of their lives, then our bees might be all right.

3 131 Then, if the commercial bees totally collapse, there will be thousands of colonies all across the globe (because of you) that are naturally strong, naturally pest resistant, and able to step in as pollinators. We won t hand over our dear bees to be replacement slaves for a dying commercial system. Rather, the world will simply be more fruitful near and nearby the small and quirky hobbyist beekeepers. Thank you for doing your part. Once upon a time, a story about beekeeping was published in my local newspaper. It featured me, with misspelled name, which led to a local TV News reporter coming out to interview me.* The reporter was very nice, and seemed genuinely interested in the subject. There was something the reporter said in the story that was funny: Bresette-Mills says honey manufacturers do damage to the species when they harvest the honey quickly. (I actually didn t say this.) When she arrived, she wondered why I wasn t going to be wearing a bee suit and veil to go into the beehive. I answered that, since we were not making our living off the bees, we could take our time, move slowly, and back off if they did not want us around today. She must have interpolated this statement into her quote. Mainly I tried to convey to her that commercial beekeeping can be blamed for the decline of bee colonies, along with modern agricultural methods, but that it is not the sole problem. People will pay the least they can for a product, naturally, until you educate them about the differences in quality and approach. Remember when we became aware * This too can be seen on my YouTube channel (abjakm), since my friend Theo recorded it ( Beekeeping in the news ).

4 132 Sensitive Beekeeping that dolphins were routinely killed in the process of canning tuna? Remember when it was normal to raise calves in crates, and even to break their legs, to more economically produce veal? Remember before the phrase free-range chickens was ever used? Once the public learns of these practices, the market shifts, and people are willing to pay more for the more humanely produced food. We have yet to educate the public about the harm we routinely cause to bees. Maybe we could use the term Smart Honey to signify honey produced humanely. Without this education, the public will continue to simply buy the cheapest honey, which will continue to force commercial beekeepers to cut corners: taking all the honey from the bees and feeding them sugar and corn syrup because it s cheaper than honey; shipping the bees across country on large trucks, wrapped in cellophane, to make a profit on pollination; giving them diarrhea medicine (because of their inability to easily digest the sugar we feed them), and lacing their hives with insecticides to kill mites (that they would be able to kill on their own if they weren t weakened by the way we treat them) and antibiotics (because, well, it can t hurt, right?); not letting them make wax honeycomb, instead giving them plastic cells to conserve their use (their waste ) of honey to make the wax; killing and replacing their queens yearly with our specially engineered queens, with no consideration to the family or communal possibilities in the hive. The last straw may be cell phone towers, or certain pesticides, or who knows what. But blaming the last straw is silly. The entire practice needs changing, or as much should be changed as possible. Until this education effort gets off the ground, the best we can do is raise our own bees, and/

5 133 or support our local beekeeper who is not selling honey for $6 a pound. For $6 a pound, there is no money left for humane treatment, for strengthening of the bee colonies; but only enough for cutting corners. You can enjoy beekeeping so much more by just slowing down, showing respect, keeping your fear out of the picture. Can you imagine a teacher being successful who is afraid of her students? Impossible. And neither she nor her students would enjoy the interaction. I suggest you give it a try: Risk learning that bees are intelligent and respectful of you in equal measure to your own respect and intelligence.