Queen of the Sun

Last night we went to the Naro and saw the documentary 'Queen of the Sun: What are the bees telling us?'. It is good to be suddenly inspired and moved again by a greater narrative than my own day to day life. Queen of the Sun deals with Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon where honeybees vanish from their hives in massive numbers. The problem with this is that bees essentially pollinate all of our food! A recent UN scientific study found that “Of the 100 crop species that provide 90 percent of the world’s food, over 70 are pollinated by bees.” As one beekeeper put it, without bees, we would have little to eat but wheat and oats.

The implications of the bees vanishing are alarming. If we want our future generations to have crops we need to help the bees. We need to renew a balanced relationship with nature where we work as stewards of the land and nourish that which sustains us. Our approach of manipulating nature to suit our ends is proving to be quite destructive.

In 1923 Rudolph Steiner, the great scientist, philospher, mystic and social innovator predicted that in 80 to 100 years the honeybees would collapse. He blamed this on the mechanization of natural processes that had previously happened organically in the beehive. The film spoke of the unique  relationship humans have had with bees for 10,000 years and how it has been all but lost in these large scale and highly unnatural practices. 

In the film, we saw how billions of honeybees are shipped from all over the country to pollinate the almond crop in California each year. This massive crop, which is hundreds of thousands of acres, only contains almond trees. This single food source severely limits the diets of the bees which normally include many different types of pollen. To make up for this, bees are fed high fructose corn syrup. Artificial breeding of queen bees is another problem. In the wild, a queen bee mates with up to a dozen different drones, thus receiving a good variety of genes. In commercial production, Queen bees are artificially inseminated, like breeding a single stock, and as as result have much shorter lifespans. The spraying of pesticides is another issue... overall, it makes sense that the bees are vanishing if this is how we are treating them.


I don't feel well informed enough to write an in depth article about this subject. But as with any important story well told, I am moved in such a way that it has become a little part of my dreams. I want to create a life where I am in close contact with nature. Along with owning a house on land someday, and having a big vegetable garden with fruit trees and chickens, I now want to keep bees. Inspired by the urban beekeepers interviewed in New York and England, who appeared to be mostly self taught, Skye and I started to fantasize about beekeeping NOW... but this isn't possible on our little balcony.

However, we learned in the discussion afterward that Norfolk is close to making beekeeping legal (it isn't yet for some reason), and that there are local beekeeping groups who are quite happy to help you get started. Everyone who talked about the beehives in their backyard was enthusiastic and spoke of the magic of working with these creatures. Finally -  one of the central figures of the film, Gunther Hauk, a biodynamic beekeeper and farmer, is now located in Floyd, VA. He has built a honeybee sanctuary where people can experience " the healing of the land, the honeybees, and, ultimately, the human being." I think we'll have to visit...