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Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on ‘what the papers don’t say’ – without fear or favour.
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The first time I opened a beehive, something changed inside me.
I’m not sure if it was the rich wax-and-pollen laced smell or the gentle buzzing of the bees themselves, but I felt suffused with a sense of peace and rightness as I gently eased my first frame up and into the light. The weight of the bees on a frame still surprises me. However grim the news from the human world, for me, the hive is always a place of wonder and solace.
There is nothing hyperbolic about using wonder to describe the world of honey bees.
They can talk to one another, passing on the quality, distance, and precise location of a food source through a complex sequence of movements and vibrations called the ‘waggle dance’. And, unlike most of the dolphin or primate ‘languages’, we actually understand what the bees are saying to each other (each waggle, for example, represents 50 metres from the hive).
Honey bees are more sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field than any other creatures. They use it for navigation and for making the honeycomb panels of their hives. But they also use the sun as a reference point and have an in-built ‘map’ of its movements across the sky over 24 hours, with the ability to modify this map to fit local conditions.
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Amazingly, they can also do this on overcast days and at night, by sensing the position of the sun on the other side of the world. This means they can learn and store information, despite having a brain 1.5 million times smaller than our own.
Then there is honey.
It takes the entire lifetimes of 12 bees to make enough honey to fill a teaspoon. A single bee would have to travel 46,500 miles to make a pound of it – almost twice around the world.
Bees produce honey to keep the colony alive through winter and through periods when they can’t fly. They make it by eating and regurgitating the nectar they collect, mixing it with preservative enzymes from their honey stomach.
Once it’s ready, they pack it into the hexagonal wax cells and fan the comb with their wings until all but 20% of the water evaporates. This stops the sugar from fermenting. The cells are then sealed with wax to produce a uniquely stable form of stored sugar, which can keep without spoiling for decades.
But the hive contains mysteries as well as wonders.
For almost two decades, honey bee colonies across Europe and the US have been afflicted by a catastrophic phenomenon known as ‘colony collapse disorder’ (CCD) in which worker bees desert hives en masse, leaving behind the queen and stores of perfectly edible food. No single cause has yet been identified, although pesticides (particularly those using neonicotinoids), diseases carried by mites, habitat loss, and climate change have all been implicated.
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It has echoes of a previous catastrophe – the so-called ‘Isle of Wight disease’ – which was blamed for wiping out the native black British Bee in the years before the First World War. It didn’t quite do that – tests have shown there is still plenty of British bees’ DNA in the national gene pool – but thousands of colonies died, and again the data reveals that there was no single cause.
Perhaps there is a lesson here. After all, bees have thrived as a result of their relationship with humans. We have cultivated them for their honey, but also for the rich metaphors they have offered us.
To the ancient Greeks, Babylonians, and Egyptians, bees provided a model for a well-ordered and productive society with a benign monarch at its head. Now, apiculture is big business – the total value of global crops pollinated by honey bees is estimated at almost $200 billion: in fact, every third mouthful of food we eat, we owe to bees.
Honey production has increased by 50% in the past 25 years – there are now more honey bees alive worldwide than at any other point in human history.
There is no obvious causal connection between CCD and the industrialisation of apiculture. But it’s hard to resist it as a warning about our obsession with unfettered growth.
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Open a hive and you find not a factory full of exploited workers, but a rich and complex culture where each element is governed by a sense of reciprocity with the rest of nature. The queen and her pheromones, the workers and their industry, the near-magical translation of substances gathered from plants and turned into food and medicine – we over-exploit this at our peril.
There’s an old European tradition that any important news in the family – marriages, births, but especially deaths – is marked by going to the hive and ‘telling the bees’.
Perhaps now it is the bees that are trying to tell us something.