Wonder spawned in: 100 million years ago, give or take
Wondered into being by: Wasps, flowers, maybe God, hard to say
Wonderspan: 10 min approx.
To experience this wonder at its best: Click 'full screen' and make sure you can hear the sound.
As far as most people are concerned, the fame of Stratford-upon-Avon as the birthplace of Shakespeare overshadows all else, but this is not so for everyone. Among a certain crowd of folk, Stratford was for some years not merely a famous place but the centre of a world. Those folk are the nation's beekeepers, for whom Stratford's main institution was not a theatre but the National Bee Unit. Until about 1992, in a half-derelict office building on old MoD land, this tiny government agency took overall responsibility for the nation's bees. Most people in Stratford didn't even know it was there but to the beekeepers of Britain it was the
axis mundi -- Bee Central.
In 1991 I worked at the Bee Unit for a summer as a laboratory assistant and beekeeper. My job was front-line defence (sort of) against a nasty sort of bee mite called
Varroa Jacobsoni, which for the first time had somehow made it across the channel from France to the south coast of England. To beekeepers, the news was like you or me hearing that rabies had erupted in the next village. The mite was killing off hives in the south and beekeepers in the north were worried they would be next. Sure enough, they were. An imaginary line was drawn across the midlands and all bees were forbidden to fly over it but no-one told the bees and so varroa is now endemic in Britain.
Those early days of invasion were heady times for the National Bee Unit. Its four or five full-time staff were sorry about what was happening to bees, but they were also quite thrilled because they had something new to do, the BBC kept putting them on air, they were mentioned in Parliament and the government gave them a few extra pennies to recruit some lab staff / assistant beekeepers to help look for these pesky parasites in the nation's bee hives. Thanks to all that 'something must be done' nonsense I was one of the new recruits. Although armed with a GCSE in Biology, I never found a mite, although after weeks and weeks of looking I started to want one quite badly, like you do. Never mind; instead I learnt about bees.
Apart from being a wonder in their own right, bees matter ecologically, economically and ultimately (for humans, anyway) existentially, as they are the largest insect group specially adapted to pollination. The colours, scents and delicate bodies of flowers have evolved over millions of years to work sympathetically with the eyes, antennae and anatomy of bees - indeed,
flowers look even better to bees than to us. So it is that a huge diversity of plant species, including those our food chain depends on, depend in turn on bees in order to reproduce efficiently on a large scale. Plants are so dependent on bees that, without them, there would be ecological devastation, little food for us, and economic
collapse in human society. If the dependency of our money economy
upon our ecological one ever needs an example, think of bees. What they do for our plants is worth £130bn worldwide each year; one in three mouthfuls of our food entirely depends on bees.
Today we imagine life as a bee. There is so much to say - I would like us all just to listen to the soft, swoony buzz that a garden bee makes on a summer's afternoon - but you demand more, I understanding that. So this week's wonder-for-a-Monday
is divided into a hexagonal honeycomb of exactly six bee wonders. Just pick one.
SIX BEE WONDERS to choose from:
- Do the beessanova
- Bee sick, anyone?
- Mite bee nasty
- Great balls of bees
- Bee alive or dead
- Bee bop shbam - all the buzz on the bee-bang
Can we learn much from the bees?
Bees are sometimes idealised as a perfect society on which to model our own, but that’s a strange claim to make – there are no true individuals in a bee colony, for example, and we humans are more than the sum of the genetic functions we perform. But does that mean there's nothing we might learn from bees?
There are some things they do rather well. Bees can learn to help each other to deal with their common problems, such as the varroa mite (as long as humans don't rush in too readily with quick-fix chemical treatments). Bees are also a sign of fertile, flourishing ecology, so they act for us like a canary in a coalmine - if bees struggle, it means our ecology is struggling, and probably that our economic system is becoming removed from the ecological realities on which it is based. Bees collect their food together and share it – they don’t disappear
into their own cells, hoard all they can and moan about a dog-eat-dog
world. When bees swarm, they decide together the best new home and every 'debating' scout is equal – bees have learnt that moving towards consensus, when done efficiently, gives them the best chance of a good outcome for the whole group - much better than relying on a single leader to know best in spite of what everyone else is telling them (I'm thinking here of how the UK ended up in a war with Iraq).
Happily, many more people are taking to looking after bees - you don't have to have a bearded septuagenarian (although that is a good look for a beekeeper). Perhaps this newfound affection for bees is a fad, or maybe it belongs to a long-term backlash against the stultifying nothingness of consumerism that encourages to seek an ‘ever-fugitive
wholeness’, as Wendell Berry puts it. At least with bees there is an opportunity to care for and respect another creature. Beekeepers typically love bees - their relationship with them is a kind of constant, low-level wonder. And I love the idea of people looking after bees on city roofs looking out at sunset, while below the commuters make their way home:
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock
(T S Eliot, from Preludes)
Extra...
Wonderful, fascinated overview of how bees live, from 1950:
Much more about bees:
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www.waysofloving.com
