The Face of the Hive

⠀⠀You know how you learn to read your dog? Her expressions of love, worry, silliness and eagerness? Or how your cat does that one tail flick when he’s proud of himself?⠀⠀

⠀⠀What happens when you can’t see the face or hear the meow? Bees, as individuals, have faces, but what is the “face” of the colony? A colony, after all, is an organism. A whole that is the sum of many parts.⠀⠀

⠀⠀As beekeepers in protective suits, we can manipulate the hive without too much consequence. Guard bees will try to sting you, but you are safe behind the suit. If you squish a bee no one yelps or cries out. If you move too roughly, just to get it done, and bees get crushed under a langstroth box or between topbars, guard bees will react, but we don’t see the face of pain. We hurt individuals, but we don’t see the effect on the whole.⠀⠀

⠀⠀How can we try to befriend not just the cute individual bee but the faceless being that is a hive colony? All too often I witnessed rough handling because we can get away with it. Why? Because bees don’t exhibit the qualities of stress and grief we are used to recognising in mammals. Every time I’m in a hive I ask, how can I slow down more? How can I listen better? Who am I seeing here? It is a “they”, but also a whole (whom I call a “her”). Brining in a more feminine approach to beekeeping isn’t just about intuition and skirts, it’s about how we can work WITH a being rather than dominate over a being.⠀⠀

⠀⠀Bees are not domesticated. They never will be. We will never conquer them. We will never replace them with more efficient robots. We will never successfully tweak their genetics without harming them. The influence of the feminine is needed here. It is part of the rebalancing needed in both men and women as we attempt to knit ourselves back into the natural order.⠀⠀

⠀⠀So let us be in service to the mystery. Let us attempt to befriend the faceless being who sings the Song of Songs and builds cathedrals of gold.