Keeping Bees
Sept 18 2023
The honey bee
with its sesame seed brain
dances in the dark.
The intricate language of dance
conveyed by touch,
giving directions
to life-giving nectar
steered by the sun.
Is this a kind of sentience?
Do they learn,
do they remember?
And is the hive
some kind of collective mind,
as alien to us
as an extra-terrestrial
stumbling on earth?
We “keep” bees
as if they need to be kept.
I think of this conceit
— our presumption of mastery
over an unknowable creature
so unlike ourselves —
and wonder at our hubris.
Who made us
masters of the universe?
And what danger is there
in such misplaced certainty,
when there is so much more to know
so little we have learned?
A fascinating article. Like the industrialization of agriculture in general, does apiculture contain the seeds of its own destruction?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/is-beekeeping-wrong
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