I’ve dedicated my life to women’s rights and empowerment. I’m devoted to finding and remembering when women held roles of sacred office and the earth was revered as Mother. I research ancient cultures in my spare time, scribbling notes in the margins of every book, searching for what might be hidden in plain sight. So much of women’s history was never recorded—or worse, erased.

In fact, it was studying Ancient Greek priestesses that led me to beekeeping. However, as soon as one ventures down the path of beekeeping, one discovers that the bee world is rather fractured by vastly different schools of thought. It was the question of how to tend bees in a way that truly serves and supports them that deepened my feminism.

How we keep bees—and how we see them—stems from the same mindset that has subjugated and terrorized women for millennia. Tragically, we have not outgrown these misogynistic and imbalanced ways of thinking, as many people in positions of power in my country continually remind us.
And so, I turn to bees again, seeking mirrors in nature when I feel alienated from my own species. (I’ll save the post on building bridges between people for another day.)

In the fifteen years I’ve worked with bees, I’ve come to see that among their many teachings, they offer an avenue into a deeper understanding of the feminine principle. I have found countless parallels between how we treat women’s bodies and how we treat bees.

On this Women’s History Month (which will never be erased), here are a few of my natural beekeeping principles—lessons that translate all too well into how we might rethink our treatment of women:

1. DON’T CLIP THE WINGS OF THE MOTHER
Queens are the mothers of the hive. In conventional beekeeping, some still practice clipping the queen’s wings to prevent her from swarming. Swarming is how bees naturally reproduce on a colony-wide level. It’s their birth right.

2. DON’T REPLACE THE MOTHER EVERY YEAR WITH A VIRGIN WHO WILL BE MORE PROLIFIC IN HER PROCREATION
I mean, this should be obvious. I don’t really need to explain—but just in case: beekeepers mark their queens’ backs with color-coded paint to indicate the year she was born. That way, they can easily find her, kill her, and replace her with a younger queen, freshly bred to take over the hive. A younger queen lays more eggs, producing more bees, which means more honey, which means more profit

3. DON’T CONTROL HER ABILITY TO BIRTH HERSELF INTO A NEW COLONY. LET HER CHOOSE
See number one. Swarm suppression is Beekeeping 101 for most beekeepers. This is done primarily by destroying queen larvae before they hatch. No new queens mean the colony cannot split into two—because to do so, they need a mother for each new hive. The old queen departs with the swarm, while a new daughter-queen emerges in the original hive shortly after.

4. LET HER BUILD HER HOME THE WAY SHE WANTS
By her, I mean the hive—since it’s mostly female. Bees don’t want to build on pre-fabricated plastic foundation. Let them construct their own comb and arrange it as they see fit. Don’t meddle with their architecture just because you think you know better.

5. GO SLOW AND LISTEN TO HER—NOT YOUR AGENDA
The beekeeping industry, tied to commercial agriculture, doesn’t have the luxury of listening to the bees. Inspections must be quick: lots of smoke, fast movements, and often, crushed bees. But as backyard beekeepers, we can shift our approach. We can choose to move at the bees’ pace, not ours.

6. WHAT SHE HAS TO GIVE INCLUDES THE GIFT OF THE STING
Some of the most potent medicine in the world is bee venom—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

7. LISTEN TO HER BOUNDARIES
Self-explanatory.

8. BE GENTLE
For the love of the goddess, just go slow. Move from the heart.

9. SHE NEEDS THE INNER DARK TO THRIVE IN THE LIGHT
Honey bees are born in darkness, raised in darkness, and live in darkness. The hive’s shadowed void is their womb, their home, their sacred cave. They venture to the sun to find nourishment and engage in an interspecies love affair—but they need the dark. It is part of them.

10. NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY, SHE WILL ALWAYS BE WILD. THERE IS NO TAMING HER.
Don’t let anyone convince you that honey bees are domesticated. They are not.

If you want to learn more about natural methods for beekeeping take my online course:
INTRO TO NATURAL BEEKEEPING