On Bees and Farming

Why don't we talk about bees? Quite a lot has been said about the recent, sudden death of honey bees, a Eurasian bee species brought to the United States that is most often used for commercial honey production and crop pollination. A few hypotheses have been thrown around as to why this is happening, but the consensus now seems to be that it is due to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD): the sudden die-off of bee colonies due to the disappearance of adult bees. This disorder is not yet explained by scientists, though there are still more hypotheses for this phenomenon.

Why is this important, you may ask? The monetary value of honey bees as commercial pollinators in the US is estimated at about $15 billion annually. They do almost 80% of all crop pollination here, and several crops need bees to even produce seed, such as blueberries, blackberries, watermelons, squashes, and pumpkins. Bees are fascinating creatures not just because of their usefulness in food production, however, but also because of their linguistic and spiritual significance.

Through the "waggle dance," a series of wiggles and figure-eights that bees make by walking, bees communicate to their hive mates the location and distance of sources of pollen. This method of communication does not meet all of the characteristics needed to reach the status of a language, which only human languages do, but they can still use it to communicate information about subjects that are removed in time and space from the bee performing the dance.

Bees are also used as symbols of the Christian in the world by the Fathers of the early Church. St. Basil the Great, in his Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature, he suggested that Christians who were worried about reading non-Christian literature approach these works like bees approach flowers. Just like bees only take the good nectar from flowers, Christians should only take the good from whatever thing we read or whatever situation we find ourselves in, and leave the rest behind. St. John Chrysostom said, "The bee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others." Bees aren't literally better than other animals, of course, they they are simply a good reminder of how Christians should act.

One of the things I was surprised about when I visited the farm was that it has an apiary, or a place where Italian honey bees are kept for use in pollinating or honey making. Knowing what I know now about crops that need bees to reproduce, this makes quite a lot of sense to me. I'm glad that we have made a habitat for them so that they can get nourishment from a variety of non-modified crops.

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