Bees can put sunshine in your brain; yes, you can eat it as honey.
Is beekeeping a cybernetic system?
Insect pollination is essential for one in every third spoonful of food we consume, including pollination by honeybees (Wallberg et al., 2014). Container-based beekeeping by humans has a long history, with beehives found and dated back as far as the 9/10th century BC (Lefkovitz, 2007; Mazar et al., 2008).
Bees, wasps, termites and ants are some of the most socially complex non-human organisms we know about. Honey bees are a highly social insect that forms colonies and operate as a superorganism, including their complex microbiome (Hölldobler & Wilson, 2009). For example, foraging bees collect pollen, fungi and other microbes and combine them to form ‘bee-bread’ that nurse bees feed to the hive’s baby bees.
My grandparents on both sides kept bees, my parents kept bees, and now I continue this family tradition of beekeeping.
Humans may keep bees and select their genetics for calm demeanour, robust health and honey production, as well as striving to create environments and technologies that influence their behaviours, but make no mistake: bees are not domesticated, and we cannot control them.
Honeybees are an excellent example of a complex self-adapting autopoietic system (Maturana & Varela, 1980; Varela et al., 1974).
Bees make their worlds by deciding where to live, what to pollinate and when, and including underlying internal randomness.
When working with a honey bee colony, the beekeeper may only influence and disrupt the colony. Examples of disruption include:
- Killing and replacing the queen.
- Moving the hive.
- Checker-boarding the brood nest.
- Stealing resources from the colony.
Influencing can include using pheromones to create signalling bias in swarm navigation, feeding sugar syrup when flowers are scarce, and insulating the hive. If things go well, in their lifetime twelve bees may create one teaspoon of honey.
The umwelt (world perception capacity) of bees outdoors is similar to and entangled with humans; they see colours and shapes similarly to us (Jack 2021). Within the hive, however, all their communication is done in the dark, with smells (pheromones) and by listening and feeling vibrations from other bees as they dance and shimmy to signal and share information about the world inside and outside the hive.
The only thing we know of that can create glucose from minerals is photosynthesis in the leaves of plants (Jahren 2017). The honey you are invited to consume from this jar has been selected and refined by bees from nectar from plants. Sunshine becomes glucose, honey becomes the synapses firing in your brain reading this sentence and answering the question, is keeping bees a cybernetic system that links ecology, people and technology?
Please enjoy this sunshine.
Ben Fox
References:
Hölldobler, B & Wilson, EO, 2009, The superorganism: the beauty, elegance, and strangeness of insect societies, 1st ed, W.W. Norton, New York.
Jack, J, 2021, ‘How Bizarre, How Bizarre, How Bees Are: Domus and Umwelt in the Multispecies Entanglements of Humans and Honeybees’, Pathways, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 47–61, doi: 10.29173/pathways22.
Jahren, H, 2017, Lab girl: a story of trees, science and love, This paperback edition published in 2017 by Fleet, Fleet, London.
Lefkovitz, E, 2007, September 4, ‘“Land of Milk and Honey” lives up to its name. Earliest beehive colony in Mideast found in Beit She’an Valley: [Daily Edition]’, Jerusalem Post, , p. 05, Jerusalem.
Mazar, A, Namdar, D, Panitz-Cohen, N, Neumann, R, & Weiner, S, 2008, ‘Iron Age beehives at Tel Reḥov in the Jordan valley’, Antiquity, vol. 82, no. 317, pp. 629–639, doi: 10.1017/S0003598X00097271.
Wallberg, A, Han, F, Wellhagen, G, Dahle, B, Kawata, M, Haddad, N, Simões, ZLP, Allsopp, MH, Kandemir, I, De la Rúa, P, Pirk, CW, & Webster, MT, 2014, ‘A worldwide survey of genome sequence variation provides insight into the evolutionary history of the honeybee Apis mellifera’, Nature Genetics, vol. 46, no. 10, pp. 1081–1088, doi: 10.1038/ng.3077.