“The only reason for being a bee is to make honey.  And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.”

Winnie the Pooh

Honey Bees & Resilience

When we consider beekeeping, thoughts tend to revolve around honey, hives, pollination – and stings. How honey bees live, and the wonder of the Hive Mind can show us how to use our time efficiently and effectively, and in harmony with our environment.

A honey bee colony constructs its home from wax made by the workers, sustains itself with the nutrients gathered from its surroundings, and being sedentary, has to adapt to the vagaries of its habitat. It flexes and fluctuates in accordance with the available resources, and there are important outcomes to learn from the bees, both in how they utilise their reserves to best effect, and what they can show us about the area in which they live.

Observing how the bees delegate and allocate their energies can give insight in to husbanding our own reserves constructively. 

Understanding the bee colony’s annual rhythms of growth, reproduction, and senescence across the year is a fascinating way to gain insight in to the imbalance within the world we are inexorably creating, and they are a useful proxy for the wider issues of biodiversity, the climate crisis, and our own disconnection with nature. 

The resilience of the bee colony, coupled with the long-standing bond humans have with honey bees is a positive and affirming relationship that guides us in a reversal of the trends we currently see happening across the planet.

In this workshop we will discuss:

how honey bees sense the world how a bee colony finds a home and establishes itself the caste system of worker, drone, and queen defence and protection across the year efficiency and allocation of resources growth and rest periods interrelatedness and interactions with other species the colony mindset and altruism.

There will be the opportunity to ask questions as well as discuss more general bee issues including how to best provide forage and habitat for all pollinators.