This week my inbox has been full of panicked emails from beekeepers loosing their hives.  October and November is the time many hives die.  This can be for a number of reasons and happens whether you treat your hives for varroa mites not.  Honey bees are a threatened species.  All of our pollinators are, which means all of life is threatened.  It’s a lot to contend with emotionally. 

When we give ourselves permission to cultivate a personal relationship with our bees, we need to give ourselves equal permission to grieve them when they die.  If we are to knit ourselves back into the fabric of life, we must feel it. 

Our culture famously doesn’t do a great job with healthy expression of emotions.  When we do have strong emotions, we call it feminine, as if it’s a bad word, i.e. “don’t be hysterical”. Men aren’t given permission to show emotions and women still carry the burden of their emotions being associated with actual mental conditions, re: hysteria.  Ya’ll, hysteria used to be a nervous condition in women thought to be caused by uterine dysfunction. ‘Hystera’ meaning “womb” in Greek.

We are taught that feelings are dangerous and a sign of weakness.  We have no cultural container for grief and dying.  If we don’t allow ourselves to feel the grief at the loss of our fellow non-human kin, then we sever ourselves from the life of our planet.  When we don’t feel grief, we numb ourselves, and by numbing ourselves, we allow (and perpetuate) the continuation of the grave violations to life our species inflicts upon itself and all other life. 

To all you beekeepers out there who cry for your hives, while “professional” beekeepers roll their eyes at you, keep going.  Cry, rage and grieve.  We are not an industry.  We are a species trying to remember itself.  We are a species trying to heed the clarion call.  We will not save our planet and it’s preciously unique life forms without first feeling the severity of what’s happening all around us.  Then we turn, once more to the beauty.  We turn our cheek to the sun and bend our ear to the soil.  We fall in love again. 

#bees #righttodie #beekeeping