Thoughts on Bees (Ben Falk's) Honeybee Democracy by Thomas Seeley
A well known permaculturist and homesteading expert Ben Falk, recently shared his insights into our relationship with bees reading Thomas Seeley's Honeybee Democracy.
To Quote Ben:
"Mind blown several times about honeybees by reading Honeybee Democracy by Cornell researcher Thomas Seeley. Yet this book is a striking example of how Science as an institution is often fundamentally perverse and near-sighted, how it grants itself superior authority and gives itself rights that the public has never given it to destroy living nature for partial knowledge at best.
For his studies he hunts down wild hives, kills the colonies by stuffing their entrance cavity with cyanide and then cuts down the whole tree to bring the hive back to his lab for study. He offers no justification for killing a couple dozen hives comprised of hundreds of thousands of living beings. The right to do so is apparently implicit simply because it's "research." At one point he says he was "saddened to kill so many bees but excited because I was the first human describing in detail the homes of wild bees." So apparently it's just about him - about doing something deemed by himself or his authorizing institution to be worthy. No member of the community who's commons was taken by his research was ever asked if killing off a couple dozen wild hives in Thompkins county was ok with them. Certainly the bees themselves never approved of the killing. In what world is killing a subject justified for some potential promise of benefit to the subject?
The most telling part of this situation is how emblematic it is of science as a whole - with its best foot forward. Far more perverse and sinister science projects abound but Seeley clearly seems to care for the honeybee. This is respected sound research in today's world. Yet no justification for killing off hundreds of thousands of living animals is even ever offered to the reader. No justification is needed apparently. The superiority of his project is so clear and so far above the needs of living beings that it doesn't even have to be justified. It's speciesism so thorough that no explanation is needed.
Some of his findings could have been easily attained without killing any bees purely through observation alone - as has been done by thousands of years by honey harvesters. For a supposed scientist Seeley makes vast assumptions throughout his work - such as that the bees don't know he's observing them, that observing a dead system is the same as a living one in real time, that others haven't observed what he has before, etc.
If killing thousands of living beings is justified why not explain how that is so? And if the supposed reason is for the benefit of the honeybees themselves why not do everything you can to learn from them without killing them? Why not have a summary of how what you learned can be applied in service of the bees? There's no application of his research in this book - no chapter on how to make the ideal wild swarm nest box to attract bees and give them a secure home. Seeley applies some of what he learned to conjectures about how humans can make better decisions as a collective group - interesting to be sure. His research also, like much research, illuminates how incredible and sophisticated other living beings are. The navigational and communication abilities of the bees are astounding no doubt and he brilliantly explains this. But why do we need to know yet another of the thousand ways other living beings are amazing? Is it not enough to simply know that they are? Do we not already know enough about nature as a whole to respect it? Are we really suffering for a lack of information upon which when we gain more we'll finally treat the rest of nature with respect and kinship? Of course not. This seeking of endless pieces of information for information sake alone without wisdom is a hallmark of a society disconnected from the subject we study. It's an objectification of nature and reduces the reality of the subject to the limitations of our means of inquiry. Like any other piece of solid research Seeley's work will be partly right and partly wrong. We'll see over time that some conclusions missed a larger more complex piece of the reality of the subject. Our knowledge is inherently partial. Yet today it's implicit in the institution of science that it's perfectly ok to destroy the lives of subjects to gain partial knowledge which is often of dubious value to begin with. Seeley got his name on a book and a bunch of peer-reviewed papers on his resume but the honeybees themselves have gained nothing in the process. Science in this way is simply another way that colonialism is administered in the service of ego."
You can purchase the book here:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9267.html
Or watch the authors personal thoughts here:
If you would like to read a related article I wrote about the bees and a study done on the effect of pesticides on our pollinating friends, check here:
What do you think? Are we on the right track or do we need to seriously reconsider our relationship with nature as it relates to bees and other lifeforms? Share your thoughts and bonus points for solutions based answers!
To the Bees!
This books sounds like a real bummer. What a shame. We need to start acting from a place of knowing that we are nature... not an independent thing outside of it, or that it is to be dominated and used. Especially looking at the forms of cooperation in nature, that it is not all "survival of the fittest" as we have come to understand it.
Just came across this article that feels relevant - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/23/paul-kingsnorth-imagine-how-land-feels
I read it and it is not a bummer. Seeley loves bees and developed tremendous insight into how bees communicate and make decisions collectively. He comes across as a very gentle person without a mean bone in his body.
In his more recent book about finding wild bee colonies he explains how he feels sorry for all of the bee colonies that he destroyed in his early work. Everyone looked at the natural world differently back then and his views about the right way to study bees have evolved.
Now he just finds wild bee trees and hives the swarms that issue from them.
Glad that he has changed his ways! Thanks for the update.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/03/insecticides-kill-bees-denials-absurd?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Facebook