The Idle Beekeeper by Bill Anderson

Author:Bill Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams Books
Published: 2019-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

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4https://www.swallowtailgardenseeds.com/tips_lists/bee-friendly-plants.html

5http://jeb.biologists.org/content/218/17/2799

6 Zachary Huang, “ Varroa Mite Reproductive Biology,” Bee Culture 140, no. 10 (October 2012): 22.

7 M.A.Y. Oddie, B. Dahle, and P. Neumann, “Reduced Postcapping Period in Honey Bees Surviving Varroa destructor by Means of Natural Selection,” Insects 9, vol. 149 (2018).

“Over here!”

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Bee Gentle

There is an old superstition that the bees must be told. From the ancient Egyptians to the Celts, many cultures have revered bees as messengers of the gods and bearers of wisdom from the spirit realm: a living connection with our ancestors. “Telling the bees” requires the bees to be verbally informed by the beekeeper of births, marriages, arrivals, departures, and deaths in the family. Before digital record-keeping, people traditionally used to write much of the same information in their family Bibles—that is, people who could afford a Bible and knew how to write in it.

But long before printed Bibles, paper, or even handwriting, humans have felt the need to somehow record their lives in a living culture that will survive them. From Celtic warriors who believed a good death in battle would immortalize them through unforgettable songs of their extraordinary skill and courage sung forever, to our forensic analysis of the tiniest fragments of DNA to identify the remains of particular individuals in disasters that have killed many, we need it to be known by the future that we came and went, and left a mark.

When a beekeeper died, it was the superstition that their bees not only had to be told, but they had to be involved in the mourning; otherwise they, too, might depart. Sometimes this became quite involved: when the beekeeper’s coffin was lifted at their home to be carried to the church for burial, at the same moment their hives would be symbolically lifted up a few inches from their stands, which were draped in funereal black. The church bell, tolling as the coffin approached the empty grave, would stop as the coffin was lowered into the ground, providing a useful, long-distance sound cue for the beehive to simultaneously be lowered back to its original position as the bees’ keeper returned to the earth from which they came.

Long before wedding planners spurred on a multi-billion-dollar global industry, hives would have been lavishly garlanded in the beekeeper’s wedding decorations and a slice of wedding cake left out for the bees, presumably to encourage reciprocal fertility in the happy couple. Though I suspect that in a role-reversal of adults eating the mince pies left out for Santa Claus to provide children with evidence of his existence, here the bees would witness the little darlings stealing the cake.

You are of course very welcome to observe these ancient rituals in your beekeeping practice. I haven’t yet, but describe them for two reasons: first, because they suggest that for a very long time we have trusted the bees as some kind of a repository of the things most important to us, and in doing so we have intimately connected the survival of bees with our

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