As the bees hover suspended in their sleep, tucked away from the snow and cold, dreaming of the Spring cherry blossoms, we too are invited to slow our ever increasing speed and rest. We are called to inhabit the darkness and let it midwife our souls into a deeper peace, a larger reflection of our lives…

Come, all you who have wandered far from the path, who have separated yourselves from Love; A banquet is prepared for you in the heart’s Secret Room.

There you will find the way home; a welcome ever awaits you! Even as you acknowledge the times you have erred, the forgiveness of the Beloved will envelop you.

Call upon the Beloved when fear arises, when you feel overwhelmed; The Eternal Listener will heed your cry; you will find strength to face the shadows.

Befriend all that is within you, discover the Secret Room in your heart. Then will abundant blessings enter your home; and, you will welcome the Divine Guest who is ever with you.

(Psalms for Praying: An Invitation to Wholeness, Nan C. Merrill (NY:NY, Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc)

May we all find that Secret Room for silence and restoration in this season of darkness and cold in the Northern Hemisphere—like the inner chambers of the beehive. Huddling close for warmth.  May the beauty of our collective souls radiate and glow this Solstice, like a candle in the night, seeping into all the corners and cracks of a hungry world. Let us all imagine this place we call Earth, healed and whole. A place of beauty, peace. Enough for all.

These are mean times we live in. It reminds me of Charles Dickens’s opening lines in A Tale of Two Cities, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

Despite meanness, life affirming work continues to squish up through our commonwealth toes. Global grassroots organizers like Ruth Nyambura, a Kenyan political ecologist; and Kandi Mossett, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network in North Dakota balance out begrudging world leaders on Climate Change action.  Fresh faces like U.S. Bernie Sanders and Canadian Justin Trudeau’s “sunny ways” politics balance out the cold war, fear mongering political attitudes of a tired, old WWII bunker paradigm.

What do bees have to do with this?

A peek inside the hive at my hibernating girls on a 60 degree day last week..

Bees speak to us of the kind of collective activity and flurry of coming together for survival sake which must happen in these mean times. Such times, by the way, are also rich with opportunity. As big and angry and ugly as the the death dealing, fossil fuel and global banking industry remains, much bigger is the voice and heartbeat for life— in all it’s many manifestations of health, whether creaturely, plant or human.

As Mark Winston, biologist, beekeeper, and Academic Director of the Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University, wrote in BeeTime: Lessons from the Hive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 2014)p. 17:

If there is one notable message from honeybees, it lies in the power of their collective response to stress, in the way they allocate work, communicate, make decisions, and balance individual activities with their communal imperatives. Our decision either to emulate honeybees by opting for the collective good or to pursue personal interests and individual gain may be the decisive factor in the success or failure of our response to contemporary environmental challenges.

feeding my bees honey, since nectar was scarce in the late summer and fall 2015

These days my bees huddle together for warmth, in a football sized ball. Collectively they slowly rotate from the inside of the ball to the outside, taking turns in the center of the warmth. The babies and queen stay at the center all the time and the goal is to keep the future generation from freezing to death. Bees emit heat by vibrating their flight muscles together, keeping the ambient temperature at around 98 degrees F. During the winter they will slowly eat through their honey and pollen stores.

They are tens of thousands of ordinary bees. Most will not live out the winter or see the next Spring come.

In the end, it is going to be millions of ordinary human beings that bring about the change needed for this generation.  The social transformation that is needed now to contain the odious threats of Climate Change will ultimately be driven by ordinary citizens like us. We are the ones who must move us from Mean Times to Kind Times, from Ignorance to Wisdom, from Industrial Fossil fueled steroid injected lifestyles to Earth balanced, respectful, Eco-centric ones —for the commonwealth of the whole biotic community.

I will end with a brilliant quote by Rabbi Marc Gellman, spoken at the Yankee stadium on September 23, 2001, in the wake 9-11. Entitled “We are Unbreakable”. My bees know this inherently.

The Talmud and the African tribe, the Masai tribe, both teach a wisdom for our wounded world. They both taught:

Sticks alone can be broken by a child, but sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.

The fears and sorrows of this moment are so heavy, they can break us if we try to bear them alone. But if we are bundled together – if we stick together – we are unbreakable.

And we shall do far more than merely survive. We shall overcome. We shall overcome the forces of hatred, without allowing hatred to unbundle us. We shall overcome the forces of terror, without using fear to unbundle us.

So in all our comings and our goings, from this time forth, let us remember: That the person next to you, in front of you, behind you, is not merely an obstacle to your free and unfettered life. They are a part of this bundle, that keeps you and each of us from breaking.

Let us never again view our fellow New Yorkers, our fellow Americans, our fellow citizens of the world, (I would add, our fellow creatures and biosphere)as limitations on our life or freedom. But rather as the moral twine that binds us, and saves us, and delivers us from evil.

My bees are confused. This winter, in a year of the warmest global weather trends on record, they go to hibernate as the temps drop nightly to 20 degrees F. But then the next day is 50-60 degrees and sunny. My girls are eager to come out and begin the search for food. Unfortunately the trees are barren, the pollen is gone. Spring is months away. They burn up precious honey stores as they fly around in mid-winter, doing their usual foraging. I continue to feed them.

Global Climate Change is real.

I’m not sure flying hundreds of thousands of people to Paris, burning millions more gallons of fossil fuel en route, was the best way to address the heating of the planet through carbon emissions.

Perhaps if everyone had stayed home and had a giant skype party to plan the next step, we’d be a bit further ahead. Maybe it could have bought the Marshall Islanders an extra year reprieve as their home slowly sinks into the rising ocean.

Honeybees are only one indicator that our atmosphere is changing and warming. Some creatures have already begun to migrate to northern most habitats. Plants and trees that have been Keystones in southwest climates for a millenium are dying from drought and disease. They are being replaced by desert terrain, other flora that is non-native or not co-evolved with the local pollinators.

In these times of unpredictable weather patterns, massive extinction and human carbon activity, as we wonder what another year will bring—never mind a decade—soul resilience is needed.

Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee, Sufi Teacher, For Love of the Real (Fall 2015), sees strengthening our spiritual resilience in these times as critical. It is as important as adapting our physical lifestyles to a less impactful, destructive, consumeristic way of being. As he wrote from COP21, the Global Climate Summit in Paris: “Paris, A Spiritual Response to Climate Change” (Huffpost, Dec. 2, 2015)

“[we must do] small things with great love, learning to live and act with love and care, with the true attention of our minds and hearts—these are the signs of the sacred and the truest way to generate life, to help life recreate itself.

The forces of greed and exploitation are more entrenched than we realize, the environmental collapse accelerating, but this is the challenge for those whose hearts are strong, who care for the planet and for the souls of future generations.”

The bees teach me to think small, act local, go native. Their little lives of 30-45 days are all spent in the neighborhood, foraging, feeding their large families, staying healthy, building their economies of honey, pollen and wax comb. Working collaboratively, they scour the weediest, most humble habitat, spinning dandelions, chamisa and goatheads into pure golden honey.

As our communities will be shaken with new challenges from climate change in the coming decade, we will need the same community minded intelligence and resilience of bee colonies. Caring for one another and seeking the highest good for the whole commonwealth—human and non-human—will be our biggest learning curve. Transcending tribalism and opening our hearts to include the bee, the Syrian, the soil, the “other” will make us spiritually resilient.

Recently I shared this post on my facebook page, swiping it from another friend’s page (thank you Lynn!). It was a little clip from the Danville Bee, June 4, 1956—a story posted about a swarm of bees attending their keeper’s funeral in Adams, Massachusetts.

“Throughout his life, John Zepka had raised, worked with, and loved bees. He became widely known in the Berkshire Hills as ‘a man who had a way with them’. “

According to the article, as the funeral procession approached the tent they found it swarming with bees. Clinging to the ceiling and floral sprays, the bees weren’t there to harm anyone. They were there to bear witness to their beloved keeper’s life and death. They were merely showing up along with the other mourners to give their solemn regards.

It brought to mind the old tradition of “telling the bees”….that when a member of the family dies, the bees must have their hive draped in black cloth, lest they leave for good. As one northern European song goes:
Honey bees, honey bees, hear what I say!
Your Master, poor soul, has passed away.
His sorrowful wife begs of you to stay,
Gathering honey for many a day.
Bees in the garden, hear what I say!

(Ethnobeeology, Nov. 13, 2013)

I share this story, along with last week’s post, because I am fascinated by the intimate connection that we are able to have with the natural world.  We’ve noticed it with bees, because they are among the few creatures with which we’ve cultivated a relationship—for over 5,000 years. Since I’ve begun to have a relationship with bees, I’ve paid close attention to their habits, changes in their behavior and housekeeping patterns. When I lost both of my hives last winter, I cried. Spring blooms were not the same without the busy, buzzy beehives in my backyard. For me they signal life and the passing of seasons. I certainly mourned their passing. I’m not sure they would mourn mine.

As a bee colleague of mine once said, “I don’t think a few years of having bees qualifies one as keeping bees”. I would concur. One must spend a lifetime of care and dedication to nurture such a bond of trust, as John Zepka’s funeral bees illustrated.

We have many miles to go in our relationship with the world of wild creatures.

I like to collect bee stories.

This past week I went to see my friend Diane for Acupuncture (https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=Mother%20of%20Mercy). Diane is not only an amazing curandera, but also a devout Catholic dedicated to intercessory prayer on behalf of those who suffer —not only for humans but all living beings. She understands the one-ness of all creation and the vast web of life that we live within, sacred and blessed by the Creator.

As often happens, we got to talking all things bees. Diane told me this story which she said I could share…

This past summer, she noticed that the vegetables she planted in her back yard were devoid of bees. She worried. She waited. Not a bee in sight.

So she began to pray for the humble busy bee. She asked for the bees to come and visit her garden. And knowing Diane, with a heart filled up to overflowing with gratitude, she gave thanks to God for the bees.

Later that day, her husband Buzzy called her, saying, “Diane, did you see your tomatoes? There are bees everywhere. Lots of them”. (I am liberally paraphrasing her husband’s words.).

Sure enough, when Diane returned home that day, she said there were not just a few bees, but swarms of bees!

This week many of us will give thanks around our tables with family and friends in our traditional holiday style.

I bow to the First Peoples of this county who, out of their great and generous hearts, prepared food for the European settlers those many centuries ago—struggling with disease and hunger on the shores of this land. How could they know that the white men would flow into this country like hordes of grasshoppers over the next centuries, decimating their land, their people, their way of being?

I bow to the refugees today, on the move from their lands because of the violence of war, the seizing of their land, the inequitable global economics.

I pray that we might awaken to the same Spirit of connection that Diane reminded me of this past week— we are part of a vast web of life, human and nonhuman. May we live and pray to be in sacred relationship together, honoring all life. Honoring every being’s right to live kindly, peacefully and fruitfully upon God’s good green earth.

To end this post,  I am shamelessly copying W.S. Merwin’s powerful poem, “Thanks“, even as we stand in the face of so much that has been taken. So much that is lost. So much that is beautiful. So much that is possible…

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

— From the Rain in the Trees, copyright© 1998 by W.S. Merwin.

(I hope I will be forgiven for transgressing any copyright rules, despite the fact that this poem is linked everywhere on the internet…)

I am done with great things and big plans. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillaries oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest of monuments of pride.  —William James

Social transformation, I learned at my retreat this past weekend, means working in the “little way” sometimes. Small, incremental changes. Not big and grand.

That is what happened last Thursday as we sat down around a long board table of City officials to talk about creating a Bee City USA.

There was clearly resistance and worry of being “forced to change” how we do business with the application of chemicals on our public spaces.

I personally hoped for a point of collaboration.

I did my pollinator friendly presentation, stated my concern about loss of habitat due to the herbicide RoundUP, and the insecticides that are harming bees— neonicitinoids in particular. A nerve poison, if you will, for insects.

One by one, each department stated their integrated pest management plan. To the surprise of my colleagues and I, those officials continued to work towards the best possible IPM, with regulations imposed by state and federal laws.

We all noted that one of the biggest unregulated culprits were backyard sprayers, with over the counter poisons. Your average homeowner who grabs a gallon of RoundUP or any other given pesticide or herbicide at Lowe’s or Home Depot on the weekend and sprays indiscriminately. We all agreed upon increased collaboration to educate the public about this danger.

It was a start. Though we did not come away with a resolution, we did get up from the table with an agreement to work together towards the best practices and health of the city’s open spaces. We did agree to sit again in January and talk about the specifics of a resolution.

Little by little, reaching out across the things that divide us..

This past weekend I also learned about a book which talks about “tickling” that part of your brain where memory and emotional responses are lodged (Tickle Your Amygdala by Neil G. Slade). The amygdala is that primal brain where autononomic responses associated with fear and fear conditioning are located.  But it is also the place where the emotion of pleasure is experienced. “Tickling the amygdala”  can turn on the best parts of the brain towards a good end, rather than keep us stuck in fight or flight.

My teacher reminded me that social transformation doesn’t happen, usually can’t happen, if people are constantly in that frozen or aggressive stage of panic, terror and fear. If instead, you begin in that comfort zone where civilities and values are exchanged and shared, bit by bit we can move towards change— like those rootlets in William James’ image…streeeetching towards a new world by millions of small acts of courage and collaboration across our differences.

The attacks in Paris, France reminded me again that terror will destroy the web of trust quicker than anything. It will erode the relationships that lubricate civil society which allow us to live together and work towards the healthiest world possible.

Bees teach us about social cooperation. They illustrate selfless acts to bind up and further the commonwealth of the collective. Though they also engage in heartless and cruel acts at times, the ongoing thrust of the colony is towards survival and thriving of the whole. May it bee so.

This week, Thursday, November 12, I go before the City of Albuquerque to begin the work of collaboration towards a pollinator friendly city. The heads of all departments that apply chemicals will be present. Parks and Rec, Open Space, Environmental Health, and Solid Waste.

It is daunting and hopeful. I, along with the President of the NM Beekeepers Association, a Bernalillo County Extension horticulturist, and a consultant from About Listening will begin the journey of a thousand miles, by taking this single step together.

I ask you, the reader, to light a candle and shine some goodwill on us this Thursday, 10am-noon.

Wendell Berry, the great writer poet and farmer gave a lecture at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It was entitled: “It All Turns on Affection” , based upon E.M. Forster’s novel and movie, Howard’s End.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/24/wendell-berry-delivers-annual-jefferson-lecture-humanities

In his speech, Berry told about his grandfather’s great love of that Kentucky land he nurtured back to health and hung onto during the Great Depression. He would’ve lost it if Berry’s father, a lawyer, hadn’t fronted the money to save it.

Berry talks about “boomers” and “stickers”.  He got those words from Wallace Stegner, an important mentor.  Boomers “are those who pillage and run…make a killing and end up on easy street“. This might have originally been a certain kind of person with ambition and the willingness to step on as many heads possible to get to the top. But, in today’s world, it seems that those persons have now been swallowed up or subsumed into a huge machinery of multi-national conglomerates intent on the bottom line of profit.

Stickers on the other hand, are those who “settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made in it.” Stickers, according to Berry, are motivated by affection and the life they love, hoping to preserve the land and remain upon it. This is in stark contrast to a motivation of greed, desire for money, property and power.  (It All Turns On Affection, NEH 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, April 23, 2012, p.6) We often think of stickers as conservative “country bumpkins” stuck in rural quagmires. Yet, we owe them a debt of gratitude for our food. And for preserving land.

Berry’s lecture reminds me that if I go before a committee with my guns blazing, filled with political rhetoric and threats, I will only sow discord. I hope to speak instead from my heart—one full of affection and gratitude not only for the bees, but for all of life. Including humans.

Meanwhile.  May I grow only more sticker-like in my affinity for my community of insects and soils, trees and plants, water and air here in my little postage sized backyard. May they become more like kin whom I would protect at any cost.

I have lived here for a mere 12 years. My husband has lived on this piece of earth for 30 years continuously. After 10 years of blood, sweat and tears, we mechanically pulled out the bermuda grass, hauled away the landscape of rocks, contoured the land and created swales, finally planting food for our pollinators. It’s a start towards humbly taking our place in this land community that was formed billions of years before we got here.

Aldo Leopold (1887-1948),land conservationist, scientist, forester, writer, wrote, ‘In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it”. (Berry, Wendell, “It All Turns on Affection“. NEH 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, April 23, 2012, p. 15)

May it be so.

Topbar beehive at Lorenzo’s organic farm

This week I am at a writing workshop in Louisville Kentucky. Since my writing project is about beekeeping, it often brings up bee jokes and bee references.  I was surprised to find a fellow beekeeper amongst our ranks during one of our morning writing exercises. It was a fiction piece, killer bees on the loose, and the triumph of the honeybees, saving the main character’s life. I had to wonder.

I had the chance to talk with Tim at happy hour that night. He talked fondly of his bees and his great affection for them. But he was no longer actively keeping bees. He had realized he was too busy to devote the time needed when they absconded at the end of one season. He was disturbed at the hive left behind in disarray. Likely the colony fell victim to varroa mites.

For every beekeeper, mites are a reality these days. It’s hard to know why or how this scourge exploded on the scene in the early 1990’s. Clearly bees were vulnerable, weakened by harsh practices of the industry, chemicals used in big ag and moving bees around the country for pollination. Varroa brought down even the hardiest stock of honeybees and grown men to their knees as they lost whole bee yards.

Varroa mites are microscopic parasites that infest the brood nest, attaching to the growing larvae and maturing honeybee. If the bee isn’t deformed, dying soon after it  emerges, the mite will eventually suck the living juice out of the bee, making life miserable.

These days bee keepers count “mite loads” with various tests, determining if a colony is heavily infested or if the mite load is something that a healthy hive can keep in check through hygienic practices and a healthy varied diet. Either way, if you bother to google the little beast, it is grotesque in all ways.

As a beekeeper, I am more aware of how important resilient, hardy mite-resistant queens and bee colonies are.  I have already treated my hives with essential oils of wintergreen and tea tree a few times this Autumn—in anticipation of winter.  We’ll see if they survive. This is the real litmus test. If the infestation has diseased the colony and weakened it beyond the point of resilience, you will have a hive of dead bees in the Spring.

At the end of happy hour, Tim shared a heartbreaking story with me. It was the early 90’s. He and his family lived in Southern Ohio. The Ohio State Agricultural Department had identified an AIDS-like disease that infected and killed bees. It came from the varroa mite which now was raging it’s way across the nation. It was decimating the livelihood of thousands of beekeepers who trucked their hives around the country to pollinate crops. The Ag Department mandated that all hives with varroa mites be burned.

Tim remembers that night vividly. His 10 year old son asked to go along. Tim tried to dissuade him, but his son was resolute. And so, they set off to the hives on the side of a rolling hill. Tim with his gasoline in hand and his son by his side. When they arrived, it was dark.  His son looked at him and said, “Dad, they are all in there aren’t they?”  Tim slowly nodded his head, “Yes”.  “So they will all be killed?” he persisted. “Yes son”.  “Dad, the bees didn’t do anything wrong, did they?”.

At this last question, Tim choked up. He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. “It still gets me, even today”, he said.

These days, we know better.  Along with the bees, bee keepers have learned to live with varroa mites, seeking ways to strengthen their colonies genetically, just as they continue to evolve ways to rid themselves of mites. We are also waking up to the ways we have changed their habitat and climate in such unhealthy ways that they are suffering huge effects.

Now that we know better, I pray we do better by bees. Their struggle to live is our struggle.

close up of the top bar hive entrance