Transcript: Ang Roell on the Relations of the Beehive /301
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Ang Roell.
Ang Roell When I think about what is happening, sort of the magic of possibility inside of a hive, the very first thing that I noticed as someone who has a basic biological understanding of the honeybee hive is that in the hive, ritual is work. Everything is ritualized, everything is seasonal, and everything is contingent on the expansion and contraction of light. Which if I look into the folk magic of my own people is also true
Ayana Young Ang Roell (they/them) is a beekeeper, facilitator, and writer who lives and works on the East Coast of the US/Turtle Island. They are the founder and lead beekeeper at They Keep Bees and a consultant with Mainspring Change Consultants.
Ang's work with bees includes cultivating queen bees who are adaptive to ever-changing climates. In their consulting work, they support organizations in making lasting change by shifting power structures & creating effective collaboration. In both of these roles, Ang seeks to build resilient collaborations designed to stand the test of these transitional and transformative times.
Oh, Ang, I am so delighted to have you here to share your wealth of wisdom with us today. So thanks so much for being on the show.
Ang Roell Thanks for having me.
Ayana Young I wanted to start off by grounding ourselves in your closeness to bees, I want to start by dispelling some common misconceptions about bees and beekeeping. I’m particularly interested in the ways we have misinterpreted bees as busy, productive creatures. What is the problem with imposing human-centric terms onto bees?
Ang Roell Great question. I think that we, as creatures drawn to hierarchy, tend to impose anthropomorphic ideas onto lots of creatures in the ecology in the environments that we're surrounded by. And I think that that's a dangerous exercise in and of itself because it doesn't actually allow us to be present for the lessons that different elements of our ecology and different creatures have to teach us. So by immediately imposing our ideas and our hierarchical functions in our current modern society, we shut off a line of communication, a line of receiving and reciprocity that is available if we're actually listening instead of imposing.
And I love this question because the misconception about productivity is such an excellent example. We live in a capitalist society, and in that society, we're taught that constant expansion is sustainable. We're taught it in our personal lives, we're taught it in our professional lives. And I think it's important to underline that these are their own systems, they don't function within the context of capitalism. And they don't function in a sense of constant expansion. They, like many things in the natural world, function in patterns of expansion and contraction. Like a lot of agricultural entities, they can be pushed into productivity, and they can be pushed into consistent productivity, but that actually does harm to the species. And this misconception lies in whether they thrive in this constant state of production, when actually, what I noticed is that they thrive in cycles that benefit from contraction, resets, or rests.
And if we're looking to bees to give us information about how bees can be successful and thrive in a modern world, what we see is that they impose these resets on themselves, and they do that in two ways. They impose that in their reproductive cycle: so they impose it by something called swarming, which is when a hive reproduces, the workers in that hive or the sister bees decide that they are going to produce a new queen. It's too crowded in this hive and we're ready to reproduce and split. Half the hive leaves with the old queen, they take just a little bit of nectar in each of their bellies. And they use the system of scout bees and vibrational communication to leave the hive and find a new home. And we can talk more about that later. The other half of the bees stay behind, a queen cell is raised, or a young queen is raised. They keep all of the resources that they need to thrive in place and raise a new queen, send her out to mate during that period where they have a split and that new queen is being raised and then going out to meet.
There's a period where brood production or young bee production ceases and it breaks the cycle of overproduction. And that cycle breaking also breaks the cycle of diseases and pests that may be in the hive and put pressure on the brood or the nest of the hive. So it's this natural opportunity to break the cycle of overproduction so that they can rest and recover while there is a new queen to hopefully continue to thrive.
The other way that they do it is that they cluster in the winter or in what's called dearth seasons, dearth being when there's not as much nectar and pollen available in the ecology around them. And for most bees that's winter. Here in the subtropics, it looks a little bit different but for the most part, we're talking about a winter cluster. In that period again we see this period of brood breaking or when there is no brood being produced in the hive, which usually happens during the darkest time of the year. The bees are clustered around their queen to keep her warm. And they are vibrating to maintain the temperature of both the queen and the inside of the hive at 94.5 degrees. And the bees on the outside of the cluster vibrate and send warmth in, and the bees on the inside of the cluster send warmth out. So it's sort of this elliptical sending of warm air around the whole cluster and moving around the space that they're occupying, whether it's a tree or a box, and eating just the little bits of food that they've had stored up.
So this idea of productivity with bees that we as humans have is based on this idea that they're constantly bringing in when in reality, they're bringing in resources from the outside - and not just nectar and pollen, but also mycelium and water. And they're storing those resources so that they can have these breaks in the productive cycle. And very often, both the swarming and the clustering happen with the other cycle of light that happens throughout the year. So during peak cycles of light, bees are more productive. And during low-light seasons, they actually rest and reset.
Ayana Young I was really getting lost in the bee world. I was imagining just watching them do what they do. I’m thinking too about how many terms around bees fall into colonial power structures, from the queen to the colony, just the language. How does this come to show the ways humans relate to bees, and is this structure as we understand it through the human eye realistic or true, or is this something to dispel?
Ang Roell Yeah, great question. It feels very imposed to me, as a beekeeper, and I'm constantly trying to shift language in beekeeping both subtly and overtly. For example, I pretty much cut the reference to colony out of my vernacular and use hive instead, which in the broader beekeeping world means the box, but to me is actually more representative of the cluster and nest of bees. What I find interesting about the language is, first of all, it's incredibly Eurocentric, which is inherently limited and biased, right? It means we have this 15th-century understanding of this very complex social creature. And if you look back in history, Aristotle was actually the first person to refer to bees, the primary queen, as first a king bee, imposing a sense of rulership over that individual bee rather than looking at the collective superorganism that is what we now know as actually a hive existence.
So first, Aristotle imposed this idea of “king bee.” And then in the late 300 BC era, someone named St. Ambrose imposed the idea of “mother bee,” which is probably a little more in alignment with what we think of as now a queen bee. But either way, we're talking about a human applied limited social understanding and lens of the honeybee throughout history, and this anthropocentric application doesn't allow us to fully understand the myriad of actions happening inside the hive.
For us, we refer to this one bee as the queen bee as if she is the ruler and the decision maker in the hive, but she actually makes no decisions. And she actually can't function or survive without a retinue like a collection of bees who take care of her. She can't defecate or go to the bathroom by herself, she can't feed herself consistently and successfully - and she can feed herself for short periods of time. She can't stay alive without the rest of the hive, not just her retinue but all of the worker or sister bees in the hive, working collaboratively to care for her. And that's true during both of the most productive times in the hive and those times of contraction.
I mentioned the cluster - if those bees don't help the queen thermoregulate her temperature, she will die. And the benefit to the super organism of helping her thermoregulate is that she stays alive and then is the reproductive organs of that hive. She's the only bee that can lay fertilized eggs, she can help expand the genetic material of the hive. She's the only bee that goes out to mate and thus cross-pollinate its genetic material with that hive and other hives in the general bioregion. So she is really important.
And I don't mean to discount the value, I mean as a business person I work a lot with queens and genetics and I think it's incredibly important. However, we miss the idea of the whole of workers, or sisters, or collaborators working together because we impose this hierarchy, we miss that it's not just roles or jobs that the bees are doing. But they're performing essential functions to keep each other alive and to collaborate on the thriving of the hive so that they can get to that point where they're able to swarm and reproduce, and thus expand.
Ayana Young Wow, I really love getting myself out of my daily mind and into the world of bees, it's really refreshing. And I think it's important for us to be reminded that there are so many worlds, upon worlds, upon worlds happening simultaneously that we humans can forget when we get trapped in our daily lives, that are important, but also are just one little, very little part of this world that we're sharing.
I want to think beyond this anthropocentric way of viewing bees to understand the autonomy of bees themselves, and perhaps even to understand the intertwined relationship we have with them. In your book Radicalize the Hive, you write “Right now the honey bee/human relationship is transactional. We want to ‘save the bees.’ If we want a reciprocal relationship with these creatures, we have to ask what we learn from the bees to begin to shape change so we can be more responsive to each other and our ecological allies.” How have modern movements to protect or “save” the bees missed the mark on the depth of the relationship between humans and bees?
Ang Roell Yeah, great question. And I think it's really important for me to acknowledge that I'm answering this question and all of these questions based on my role as an agriculturalist, as a farmer, and as someone who works in agriculture. So my lens for this question is rooted in how much I learned from bees by listening with all of my senses. And I feel like that's such an incredible first step, or call to action, as I see it. How do I listen with not just my ears and my eyes? But like, what is my olfactory system telling me? What is my nervous system telling me about what's happening inside of the hive?
And then balancing that role as a farmer/agriculturalist and my role as a listener leads me to more questions: how do I do this work and stay in alignment with my values? If I'm out of alignment, what are the consequences for me and for the bees, and for the larger ecologies in which I work? What are the consequences for the communities I care about? And then who am I calling in to hold me accountable to those consequences, who are my human and non-human mentors? Because I think it's incredibly valuable to have human mentorship and relationships. 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? And how might checking in and seeking new mentorship and perspective, 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. And I think that's where I feel we are just so out of alignment, we are this projected idea of superiority that, thanks to colonialism, leads us to this idea that everything exists in a vacuum and needs our input to continue to thrive 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 impose on everything this idea of existing in a vacuum when in reality, we're so interconnected and intertwined. And if we could slow down and ask ourselves some genuine questions, 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.
Ayana Young That was really beautiful. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on that. Considering this intertwined relationship, it’s also important to recognize how honeybees have been brought across the world for human use. Can you explain how honey bees came to North America and the ways they have since changed the American ecology alongside human interaction.
Ang Roell Yeah, thanks for asking this question. So I have a good friend who is a beekeeper in Canada and recently said something to me that just struck me. So profound in thinking about this, she said that we are a colonized people keeping a colonized insect on a colonized continent. And it was like being hit in the head with a realization. It's important to keep naming and challenging that for us to create a better system of both beekeeping and relationship with honeybees, but really, with anything in ecology that we're studying, that we as humans are benefiting from, that we're drawing our inspiration from or making our living with, right? I've literally thought about it every day since the season started. Every time I put my hands in a hive, I have thought about that quote, and it just keeps returning to me.
So honeybees are Apis mellifera by classification, and then there are sub-classifications of all these different lists, what's called races of Apis mellifera. Most types of Apis mellifera honey bees are from Europe or Africa. There's where the origins are. There are some Apis species that were native and endemic to both North America and South America. Those native bees were more responsive to the agroforestry that was stewarded here by Indigenous people. They tend to pollinate very specific flora in the ecology. When European colony colonizers came to the North American continent (that's what my knowledge base is, and so that's what I'll speak to), they saw this incredible agroforestry, which they just assumed was here naturally and not cultivated by Indigenous people. So that's another false assumption.
And then they started to impose on that the idea of how they could use the systems they had in place to impose monocrop agriculture on the North American continent. And they saw bees as a keystone in making that happen. And so the vision was to have these huge swaths of land where folks would be able to cultivate just one crop and bring pollinators in to pollinate that particular crop. According to historical documents that I've been able to trace, honey bees came over on boats, probably into the ports in Virginia. And it's not clear whether they initially came as a feral species, so a swarm hiding in the hull of a boat, for example, or they came over as a kept species in skeps, which are an old type of honeybee hive. But what we do know is that they started coming in through the Virginia colonies in the mid-1600s.
And initially, they were dominantly in the so-called States that made up the early so-called United States, and so they were in New England and New York and Southern Virginia as well as Georgia and Florida. And initially, a lot of “homesteaders” had honey bees and kept honey bees as a part of producing wax to make candles for light and making honey as a sweetener to avoid having to use sugar because of the costs of import. And then slowly as the concept of monocrop agriculture in the United States grew, they became a key component of fostering a monocrop system. And so they started getting transported from place to place.
Migratory beekeeping in and of itself, as I see it, isn't detrimental to the honey bee or human species. I think that migratory beekeeping actually happens in a lot of Indigenous cultures throughout the world, where farmers or agriculturalists will move bees, for example, up and down a mountain to catch different blooms at different times of the year so that they're able to cultivate honey bees from those different blooms or pollinate a native crop. So that in and of itself doesn't necessarily create a problem. There are beekeepers who will move these on in backpacks from one part of a forest to another to either expand their current agroforestry or to pollinate a specific crop.
But where it becomes a problem is that 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. So by creating these monocrops, it actually mandates that you have to bring pollinators in to pollinate whichever crop you're growing.
Almonds are a really good example here in the United States, and pollination is actually going on right now. It starts in early February, runs through the entire month of February and there are millions of honey bee hives that are trucked on 18-wheelers across the United States everywhere from Florida to New York. Folks bring pollinators into the almond crops for pollination. It's very difficult for native species of bees to survive and thrive in these areas because there's nothing else for the bees to feed on. And you couldn't leave honey bees in that area, because again, there's only this almond bloom that occurs in this monocrop system. And so it necessitates the moving of bees, which can very easily spread disease and pests that are detrimental to honey bee health but also very quickly wipes out other bee species who wouldn't be able to exist in that area because of the monocropping.
On top of that, monocrops are often treated with pesticides and chemicals because that's what happens when you don't have a diverse balance of species in agroforestry systems, you rely on chemicals to keep this monocrop alive. 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 of bands. And then those bees are trucked across the US to continue pollinating our food system.
So when we talk about bees pollinating one in four bites of food in the United States, that's not false information. But it's information that's missing a key component to me, and that's that it doesn't have to be this way. There are a lot of other ways that we could be in relationship with honeybees in relationship with the ecology around us. And learning from the people who are Indigenous to these different bioregions how to best support a balanced ecology that fosters both native and honeybee species, rather than this sort of imposed superior will of mass pollination events.
Ayana Young If we look into history, we can also see that this exploitative relationship with bees was not always the case. Bees have been companions, vital providers and so much more. Can you give us a glimpse into the rich history of beekeeping and the thousands-of-year-old relationship between bees and humans? How is beekeeping related to specific places and times?
Ang Roell Yeah, I'm happy to do that. I want to name that my knowledge comes from my desire to connect with my own ancestry and my own ancestry's connection to bees as an agricultural relationship and as a lifeline. So that just feels important for me to name that and to also name that there are still Indigenous cultures who have maintained the continuity of raising and stewarding bees across the world. So what I speak to doesn't encapsulate all of that, it only speaks from my own experience which is also Eurocentric because my ancestors are mostly from Ukraine and Germany. So just naming that as something to hold as you listen to this. But what I've learned about my ancestry, and from talking to other folks who have long histories of relationships with honey bees, is that there are a lot of interconnected nodes of practice that I find really fascinating.
So in what is now called Ukraine, but was sort of a Slavic Indigenous environment that encapsulated Ukraine, Slovenia, Poland, and Russia, some of the first beekeeping happened in trees is called tree beekeeping. So first started, people would do something called bee lining, which is a practice that's still used by researchers like Tom Seeley to find wild beehives. And beelining is where you find nectar-producing plants, or you put out a small drop of honey on a spoon, and you sit and you wait for a honey bee to come and feed on the plant or on the honey. And when they come you set a timer or you start counting. And what you're waiting for is how long it takes for that bee to go back to the nest and communicate where the food source is. Because bees will feed on an abundant food source over and over and over again. And so they'll go back to the nest and they'll do a directional dance called a waggle dance for the SR bees. And they'll say, “all right, forager bees, listen up. The food is half a mile that way, stay left of these trees and right of this road, and we're going to see a waterway, we're going to cross it and then the food is right there.” So they'll do this waggle dance and share that information.
And as someone who's been lining, you're waiting for the time it takes for that bee to leave the food source, go back to the hive, share the information and come back. And humans would then calculate how far the nest of a honeybee was based on basically dividing that distance. And then you can, because bees fly in as straight a line as they possibly can, you can literally track those beads back to the hive that they came from. In more modern practice, there's a practice of marking those bees with a tiny little bit of paint so that you can know they're all coming from the same hive. But historically, it was just a matter of beelining and following the bees back to that tree. And then from there, people would try to figure out an entryway into that hive so that they could harvest honey. So that's what we first understand as a human/honey bee relationship.
And then over time, people started to create reusable entrances into these trees. And so they were basically creating small doors in the tree where they can open and close that space so they could access the honey without doing too much damage to the hive. And there are different ways that you can understand based on where the entrance of the hive is, and where the honey is stored, it's typically stored furthest away from the entrance so the bees can protect it from predators because again, that's the primary food source, right? And so people would create these doors or windows into a tree so that they could open and close that and harvest honey from bees without damaging the nest. And they would do that on an annual basis.
And that would be a sort of ritual practice because they would let the hive swarm naturally and sometimes that meant that they would swarm away from the place where you had carved your space because different people lived in different localities. There are actually these carvings or markings that I found looking into the history of beekeeping in Ukraine, where different territories of different beekeepers would be marked by this carving right so you would know that certain trees were in my “territory” by the carving that was in the tree and I would know that certain trees were in your territory by the carvings that were on the trees, and we could then leave honey offerings to the different deities that we respected in honor of the honey harvest that we were able to get. And we could know whose hives we're potentially harvesting from so that we could have reciprocity of exchange.
Tree beekeeping was a huge part of the first “managed hives.” But then these started coming out of the trees and being stored in skeps, clay hives, boxes, and all of these different types of containers. And different cultures have different ways of utilizing these containers. Some would, in fact, destroy the entire hive to harvest honey. And some would be really intentional about only carving out certain elements of the hive, or just harvesting the honey and leaving the brood. But the idea of breeding hives into containers outside of the tree, there's a lot of conversation about the drawbacks - like if this is the place where we made our first mistake. Like the drawbacks of taking a hive out of a living environment, the deep decomposing center of a tree, taking them out of the mycelial network that exists in there, taking them out of the arboreal environment. Imagine a honey bee hive in a tree is going to be much much higher up in the sky in the air than the honey in a box on a pallet in a backyard, right?
So there's a lot of conversation and interesting inquiry currently happening with respect to whether arboreal beekeeping is actually the most natural form and the most generative way for us as humans to have a relationship with honey bees. But yeah, we moved them to boxes and we then kept them in boxes on different land. And that also created an opportunity for migratory beekeeping to be born, where people could move their hives with themselves and pollinate different herbs and different trees at different elevations. I have a friend, Melanie Kirby, who does this and pollinates at different elevations in New Mexico. She's an incredible beekeeper.
Yeah, so we know that that transition impacted our relationship with honeybees. And in a lot of ways, I think that that transition sort of gives us information about where the relationships have become more human-centric, rather than less. And I hold a lot of curiosity about what it would be like to rewild that relationship and cultivate tree hives. I mean, it is completely antithetical to anything capitalist because you're creating opportunities for hives to swarm and thrive in the arbors. And really, there isn't a “benefit” to you as a human agriculturalist. Instead, it's more of a like stewarding relationship with generosity.
Ayana Young I like that. Yeah. And I'm wishing that I could have a hive in a tree - I just looked at images of that and read a little bit about that a few years ago and was so enraptured by that way of beekeeping. And it almost felt a bit ritualistic too, and I think there are clearly more spiritual connections to bees that we can have, and I would love to hear what insight you have into the magic of beekeeping or the ritual and perhaps even the spiritual aspect.
Ang Roell Yeah, great question. This is something that I have sort of two (probably more)... I have my scientific approach to beekeeping and common sense natural beekeeping - I have that which is my work and my research. And then I have a deep interest in history and the ritual of beekeeping as a way of connecting with my own ancestors and doing ancestral work. Bees in a spiritual context are thought of as a portal, which if you’ve ever donned a suit and followed a knowledgeable beekeeper into a hive, this feels so resonant with my experience. They've always been thought of as this portal between the living and the dead.
So there's this practice called “telling the bees” that we believe originated in Northern Europe, but I very much welcome challenges to that because we believe a lot of things originated in Northern Europe. But the idea, the premise of telling the bees, is that they need to be kept abreast of changes. And particularly, they want to know about loss and death. And they want to know about transitions from the living world to the spirit world. And it's believed that that's because they are the steward, this portal between the living world and the spirit world. And this particular element is really powerful for me right now because I just lost a mentor and friend, they just transitioned to being an ancestor. And I am finding so much solace in going to my beehives every day, and being able to share the weight of that loss with a non-human creature. And to feel their understanding of that loss and to feel them moving, the vibrations of them moving up and down my hands or the hum of them inside of the hive. It is just such a profound reminder of the cycles of life, which my mentor, the grace with which he accepted his own transition was so powerful to me, and returning to bees who I know are seen as this portal of transition, and being reminded every day that there are cycles, and there are paths in life that we walk, and when they're done, they're done. And we're only here to bear witness and to hold space and to learn from those cycles for the period that we're here.
It's been an incredible balm from my own grief. And when I think about what is happening, sort of the magic of possibility inside of a hive, the very first thing that I noticed as someone who has a basic biological understanding of the honey bee hive is that in the hive, ritual is work. Everything is ritualized, everything is seasonal, and everything is contingent on the expansion and contraction of light. Which if I look into the folk magic of my own people is also true. There are these quotes about capitalism and how we're not meant to be working jobs but are meant to be eating fruit with our titties out. And, really, if we look back at the folk magic or the folk practices of each of our individual cultures, we are meant to be following the expansion and contraction of light and to be building with our community in response to the ecology that we're in.
We're meant to be working together on ritual, we're meant to be grieving together, connecting to each other, and communicating. We're meant to be building together, and when I look inside of a hive, I see a lot of that ritualized and seasonal work. And when I dig back into my own lineage for practice and ritual, I see the same thing to be true. So I just see this natural connection between the folk magic that I come from and the magic that I see inside of a hive and then just the connection that bees have to the ecology around that is so profound. The connection between nectar-producing trees and honeybee hives is just completely magical, and the fact that many trees, whether they're a fruit or not, or seed-producing, rely on honey bees to pollinate successfully so they can produce that fruit, that nut, that seed, that then goes into the ground and becomes the next tree. And so that cycle is so important.
And then they have the reality for me that that bee venom is this incredible medicine that I receive almost every day whenever I'm stung. So bee venom - I have a degenerative type of arthritis, and the only thing, the only balm that I've found for that is bee venom medicine. It's like being stung by bees. And I witnessed in my own life that I am stung basically from February until November. And then for the entire month of December, all of my joints hurt. But for every other month that I'm working with bees, I don't have that pain. And that to me is also like a type of medicine, a type of information or data about just my calling, and the importance of that relationship in my life that I get to be a part of.
Ayana Young It's really revitalizing to hear other ways of healing, and thank you for sharing that about yourself. I think that some folks listening will find some reprieve that they can find healing and other ways, and I hope that there's a way for you to get more year-long relief. There's just so much that you've shared with us, and there are so many more things I want to ask you. And as we’re coming to a close in our conversation, I'm trying to find what is pulling me the most. I guess there is something around the intricacy of our relationship to bees and beehives, the organization and communication of bees, and the art of beekeeping itself. I'd love for you to share what you have learned in your years of expertise about these intricacies that continue to amaze you, and what questions does this relationship you have with bees lead you to ask? And maybe what are your sparks of hope for the future?
Ang Roell I continue to be profoundly amazed by the ways that honey bees communicate, and then every single thing that I learned about their communication and their interspecies reciprocity with the ecology around them, just really blows me out of the water. We haven't talked too much about how they communicate through dance: they communicate through vibration, which is just like vibrating on top of or next to each other. They communicate about orientation through cycles of movement that again, is elliptical. And they have vision, they have both a compound and a complex eye. But they don't rely on that for communication, and instead rely on vibration, dancing, directional dancing, and iterative forms of physical contact to communicate. And I always find it so profound.
When queens are first hatching out of their cells, they do this thing called piping where they make this sort of bagpipe noise to try to find each other because only one queen would stay in that hive. So either the hive would throw multiple swarms, or the queens would have some kind of final showdown. And so everything I learned about communication just blows me away.
For example, in the swarm, there are scout bees which I mentioned earlier, and those bees, before the whole original hive is going to swarm, they make this decision to swarm. As they're making that decision, which is made through vibrational communication and consensus, they send out scout bees who are just going out to forage for food and water and mycelium and propolis. But on the trips, they're stopping at any location they think might make a good home and they're checking that space out. And they're literally measuring the cavities of trees or boxes with their bodies by walking around the entire inside of the stakes. They're orienting to the entrance so they understand whether it faces south or north because facing north would lead to a lot of late winter winds blowing into the hive versus facing south would lead to a lot of sunshine on the entrance which would get them started with their day a little bit earlier and less able to seize on those long periods of light more productively. So they're measuring all of that orientation and size and volume with their tiny little body, and then they're going back to the hive and they're sharing that information. Then when they decide to swarm, you’ll see a hive in a swarm, it's called bio backing. It's like when they're hanging from a tree or shrub or someone's car. They're all clustered together around the queen, they have a bunch of bees and one queen, and each bee just has a little bit of nectar in her belly. And that’s the potentiality for one whole hive.
But they need to find a place to live and start building new wax comb as quickly as possible because they have these very limited resources. So at this point, they're relying on the dances of those scout bees that went out to collect information about where to go. And each of those scout bees starts to do this dance that shares, “okay, one location is three miles west of here, one location is two miles south of here, here are all the details of that location.” And the bees in the swarm listen to this information by absorbing the vibrations. And through their epigenetic capacity to select the best possible location, they listen to the intake of that information, and they begin to take up the dance of whichever bee has chosen the best location. And it's not like the bee that does the best dance or tells the best story, it's literally the data that that bee has collected about which location is going to be best of the ones that they have to select. And then they reach a consensus when they are all dancing the same dance in the light from the tree, so they get out of the bio back, they’re now all in the air, but only the scout bees that selected the best location know where it is.
So they are relying on a handful of bees to direct 10s of 1000s of bees and their queen to this new location. And so they're just looking up in the sky and trusting that the bees flying above them, those scout bees, are taking them to where they need to go. And if that was not just the most profoundly mind-blowing example of collaborative communication and trust, and innate trust of your own instincts and your own intuition and your own epigenetic knowledge about the future, I don't know what is. Because you've just got this little bit of resource and you're just going to go for it and trust that this is going to work out. So that's the thing that amazes me.
My sparks right now are really - there are two for me: there's over the last year I've been recovering from a brain injury from an accident and I have had to slow down a lot of my beekeeping practice and rely on the people in my organization to hold the practice for a lot of different reasons. I've had issues with my eyes and my hearing and my vestibular system, which meant I couldn't do what I normally do. Like I've had to turn to more internal indoor activities related to the bees and one of them is processing wax. So the wax you process out, when we cull old comb from a honey bee of beeswax, is the place where detritus and chemicals and sort of things from the outside world that the bees don't want in the hive are stored in wax, and so it becomes suspended wax as a lipid. It's fat that's actually secreted from a honey bee’s abdomen, so they make it themselves from their own bodies. And that fat is secreted out and used to make the foundation of the hive.
As beekeepers, what we've learned over time is that if hives aren't going to be swarming and living in a natural arboreal context, it behooves us to remove old wax because it actually contains a lot of chemicals and external detritus. And so what we do is remove that old wax, we crush it down, we melt it to make these wax that we then share with other makers who make candles and wax painting and all kinds of beautiful and incredible things. But it's put me into a different lens of gratitude for what honeybees offer. And it's given me an opportunity to receive wax as a medicine, and then to share that with other people who are taking it and making something beautiful out of it and sort of recycling. What to the hive is toxic turns into something incredibly creative for the human world, that chain of giving has caused me to just appreciate the depth of what is provided to us.
And then my other big spark right now is that for the last last two years, I've been doing research about the capacity for small-scale beekeepers to raise their own queens, and I found some really fascinating things about the production ton of, what is called in the scientific world “high-quality queens”, and the potential for a success rate that small scale beekeepers could have. And so from that work I've been funded to start putting together educational cohorts of people to take those practices and implement them in their own apiaries. And what's being borne from that is a culture of beekeepers who want to do things differently, who want to receive information from beekeepers who are doing things differently, and who want to mimic the collaborative energy inside of the hive.
And that is driving so much of my work right now - this opportunity to connect with other folks who want to disrupt the beekeeping industry as we currently think of it, and think about ways that it dovetails with local and regional food systems and that it becomes more of a collaborative regional effort to sustain honeybees where we are and help us extract ourselves from the monocropping agricultural system and become less reliant on that and more reliance on these bioregional relationships. So those are my two, two big sparks.
Ayana Young Oh Ang, thank you so much for this really beautiful conversation.
Emily Guerra Thank you for listening to this episode of For the Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Anilah (Drea Drury), Alexa Wildish, and Violet Bell. For the Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Emily Guerra, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.