"Well Hello Honey"

Our bees are honey bees. Apis mellifera. Most British honey bees are descendants of the so called Buckfast Bees. As bees are quite prolific in their interbreeding (more of this no doubt in later posts) I wouldn't like to hesitate any guess as to the actual genealogy of our bees but the story of the Buckfast Bee is rather lovely.

The monks at Buckfast Monastery are famous for a couple of things. An astonishingly powerful and noxious tonic wine famous for keeping teens and winos from the southwest of England pretty much permanently stupefied and saving British bees from certain extinction in the 1920's. British bees were decimated by what was then called Acarine disease but what is now believed to have been a mite that lived in the trachea or windpipe of the bees. This feat of common sense and research was accomplished by Brother Adam, and i'm certain Brother Adam would wish to co author God in his achievement.

Brother Adam traveled the world meeting other beekeepers, researching bee populations and finding bees with traits desirable in a colony kept for honey production. (I'm grateful to Bee Source website for this information though it's available in lots of books) they are only moderately defensive and the colony builds up at a reasonable pace in the spring so the hive doesn't become over full too quickly.

A friend recently told me that there are more bees and bee keepers in China than in the rest of the world put together. Apparently bee keeping expertise there is millenia old and passed down through families. In the most recent Lush Cosmetics catalogue in the UK there is some amazing information about bee keeping in Zambia from where they source their fair trade honey. Here bee keepers share the honey with the bees and in feats of extreme bee keeping they climb trees that are tens of meters tall to collect the honey and husband their bees.

In England a chap called Phil Chandler wrote a best selling book called the Barefoot Beekeeper. He strives toward a more natural mode of bee keeping which gives more back to the bees than we take from them. His astonishing site Biobees.com has oodles of information for anyone who wishes to keep bees in a more generous and natural way. 

And of course Rudolph Steiner has inspired thousands if not millions to consider living life in a more generous way. To consider the way we live as sharing a journey with our fellow beings rather than plundering the planet and its resources merely for our own benefit. 

Consider This.

In the summer worker bees work themselves to death in around 6 weeks. They operate complex cultures and communicate with one another. They work together for the good of the hive and we benefit from their astonishing ability to turn nectar and pollen into something wonderfully medicinal and sustaining.

It is my feeling we owe it to the bees to put something back.

Thank you for reading

Catch you soon

xxx