Let Yourself Be Honey-Tongued

There is poetry in all things if you look for it. Language, and how we speak about a thing, carries incredible power. Language shapes our world view. It shapes our understanding and our relating.

Bees have been beloved to the poets since time immemorial. Sappho, Sylvia Plath, Kahlil Gibran, Pablo Neruda, Emily Dickinson, Maya Angelou, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Oliver, and Antonio Machado to name a few. Indeed to speak well, beautifully, or convincingly is to be “honey-tongued”.

One of the things I hold most dear about the bee shamanism pathway is the craft of poetic speech. Very rarely is anything laid out for you in linear fashion. Every teaching drips in metaphor, poetry, and carefully selected words. Rather than “the infinity symbol”, it is the lemniscate. Rather than “working with energy” we sup of the flower. When we explore language with our honey-seeking tongues, we drape ourselves across the bed of our imagination. Worlds open. New pathways of seeing and understanding occur.

When I say beekeeping, what do you imagine? When I say bee guardian, what do you imagine?

When I say, “a practitioner of bee shamanism can learn to energetically work with their endocrine system”, that’s interesting right? What about when I say, a melissae can become a mistress of her own alchemical garden? Something else happen. I’m roughly talking about the same thing. The first makes a certain kind of sense. You can nod along, say “sure, sure”. The second evokes. It beckons. It hints at much more than energetic work. Something nearly mythic is at play, and you are invited to be part of the myths stalking you. A mythic life doesn’t have any interest in easy explanations.

Bringing the liquid amber of poetry into our language addresses the hole that black and white thinking leaves in us. It is rather anti-establishment. Patriarchy doesn’t love it. Your head of marketing is wringing their hands.

The dominant narrative likes things to be laid out: steps 1,2, and 3. No crooked path through the gloaming. No dalliance in the meadow on your way to market. It’s all “how to’s”, quick fixes, and “7 easy steps to siphon the creative soul right out”.

I’m fairly certain the bees don’t approach life from a users manual. They are infinitely more complex than branded, market-approved language will allow. So are you.

We owe the magnificent creativity of this Earth a little attention to the craft of language. After all, she spins in the black void of the universe, who’s very name hints at the honey-dark stuff that binds it all together: poetry, song, verse.

When I name a course Apis Sophia Exstasis, Entwine, or Betwixt and Between, I’m not trying to be mysterious. I’m calling to the particular poetry of your soul with words from my own. I believe that we are magnetically drawn to that which will call us home to ourselves. Have you ever stopped in a town while traveling just because you liked the name of it? Yeah, that.

Perhaps we could step away from the confines of words that sell, or words that make it obvious, and step into the sensation you feel on your tongue when you speak the name of a beloved softly to the night air.

Maybe then we can start to sniff out the pollen-scented language of the bees.

Harvest Season

I see harvest feast season as the time between the Celtic New Year and the Gregorian New Year.  This means, form Halloween through Christmas, food suddenly becomes much more interesting for me because I’m thinking about fall bounty: fruits, nuts, squash and all the other seasonal flavors that bring thoughts of warm nourishment and cozy times.  

Thanksgiving is a very problematic holiday for all the reasons that are popularly known and many that are less so.  However, despite its origins, the idea of a late autumn harvest feast is not new.  This whole season is a time to celebrate harvest, and there are harvest foods, ceremonies and festivals in every culture.  Sometimes, harvest celebration is also about making up your own new traditions.

Normally, tonight my sisters and I would be helping our mother bake pies for Pie Night.  That’s right, the day before Thanksgiving we have a meal just made of pies.  Pumpkin, Fruit, Tarts, Pot pies, hand pies…you name it.  All the pies.  

There’s something about rolling out pie dough for a French galette or an apple pie that makes me feel connected to the older ways of getting food.  The kind of food that was gathered seasonally because we didn’t have refrigerators.  We couldn’t just pop down to the store to buy imported mangos or greenhouse strawberries.  For many of our ancestors, the relationship to food was more direct and immediate.  A good harvest was something to celebrate, to pray for, to honor.  In our consumer culture, it’s easy to forget the preciousness of food.  Even while so many in our own country are going hungry.

Beekeeping gives me a sense of that preciousness.  Caring for the bees in a bee-centric model usually means I get less honey.  Some years I don’t get any at all.  Therefore, when I do harvest a small amount from the bees it is always an utter delight.  Something worth savoring.  Something precious.  Something to celebrate.  It makes me think of those special moments when you get to enjoy something that was grown with care over time.  Something that is only available certain times of the year.  It’s not so very different than gardening.  Each potato you dig up from your garden is a jewel.  You feel an elation and giddiness and the excavation.   You immediately want to make something delicious to share with someone you love.  It’s the same with honey.  Why savor it yourself, when you could share that first fresh bite of harvest with your sister?  This is the spirit of feasting I try to cultivate when gathering with family and friends each November.  There is a delight in sharing good food.  To offer someone a taste of something delicious is aways a way to celebrate life.  It reminds us that no matter how hard it is, in this moment, there is honey. 

That being said, we can’t savor the honey, nor share the bounty, without coming to terms with the legacy of devastation and displacement colonialism brought to this nation.  We can not feast with out also acknowledging the lie that this holiday represents.  Yes, it may be a step to see is more as an opportunity to celebrate harvest, but not at the cost of turning away from the reality of what this day means.  We can, I think, do both.  We can honor ancestral traditions and make new ones.  We can celebrate the bounty of the earth and honor the first people’s of this bit of earth that we inhabit.  We have to make something new out of something old and broken.  A different way of honoring life and the earth stewardship that is required of us going forward.  Part of stewardship of place is honoring the people of that place.  All of this is in my heart as I pass by Pie Night without any pies, and wonder just exactly when I’m going to roast that pumpkin on the altar.

P.S. just for good measure here’s a ridiculous video of my mother and I dorking out in the kitchen a decade ago:

Food for Bees

Do you feed your bees?

Bees get their nutrients from flowers. Pollen provides protein, fatty acids and minerals, while nectar provides energy through carbohydrates (sugars) and minerals/vitamins.

The honey bees’ diet is nuanced and complex, gathered from the diverse floral offering of the bioregion and stored for consumption in the hive.

As bee stewards, we often need to be mindful of nectar sources and potentially feed our bees. Reasons to feed might include: a prolonged drought leading to a nectar dearth, a long winter, a baby colony, and inadequate forage in their habitat.

In conventional beekeeping, another reason to feed you bees is because you took too much of their food and have to feed them so they survive. 🙁

Here’s the catch: in most beekeeping practices people are taught to feed bees sugar. Even if you don’t take too much of their food, you are still expected to feed them sugar syrup for all the above mentioned reasons and also as stimulative feeding. When beekeepers feed bees too early in the spring, it stimulates the colony to start producing more bees. This is because the sugar coming in signals to the queen that there is a nectar flow and she needs to lay eggs for new foragers to be born. Beekeepers do this to get a jump start on spring and build up a bigger workforce toward human aims of production and capital.

The thing is, sugar is not honey. Sugar is not bee food. They can survive of it, but not forever. It’s hollow food. Ultimately, sugar syrup damages their digestion and weakens their immune system. Beekeepers say you can’t feed bees honey because it could contain the spores of a disease called foulbrood. This is true, however, it can be avoided if you know your honey source (talk to the beekeeper your sourcing from) and also know if foulbrood is reported in the area you live in.

If you are going to feed your bees to help keep them alive and support immune health, consider feeding them their own food: honey. If you have to feed them sugar, mix it with some honey or alternate between honey and sugar. Remember, honey is bee food, before it is human food.

Sometimes There’s Honey⠀

I spend a lot of time talking about the importance of letting bees be bees. I teach about more natural or bee-centric approaches to beekeeping. I talk about planting for pollinators. I educate on the damages of the monocrop pollination industry and conventional beekeeping. I leave the bees alone most of the time. But sometimes...there’s honey.⠀
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Sometimes getting to the honey is messy. It’s sticky and unruly. If you harvest it from natural comb, it means no fancy centrifuge extractor. It’s a knife, a board, and an invitation to the ants. It’s crushing comb with bare hands. It involves destroying something beautiful that took honey and love to make. As in, comb is wax, and wax takes a lot of energy/food (honey) to produce from the body of a bee. Getting to the honey can result in sting, even with your best intentions and gentlest hands. Sometimes you fuck up and the bees tell you in their perfect, piercing language. Sometimes collecting honey is magic. And sometimes it’s a questionable endeavor full of misfortune and mistakes.⠀
All of this for a moment of gold on the tongue. A sun-warmed treasure from the beings that bring us the resplendence of flowers. ⠀
We can’t take too much. It’s part of the rules. Our society tells us take more, but the bees are quite clear: it is their gift to give, not our right to have.⠀
However, when you do find yourself in a moment of honey, between the mess, the blade and the sting, give over to it. Pleasure is sometimes seeking you.