The living threads of bees
Dear friends,
‘There is a special quality of bees — how they bring beauty and love to whatever they are touching. They are alchemists, and this alchemy is something that intrigues me and that I love to bring to the worlds in which I am participating’.
When I heard these words spoken recently by BeeWisdom network ‘weaver’ Annelieke van der Sluijs in a podcast interview, my storyteller’s ears pricked up. Her words touched on themes I have been exploring for some time in this newsletter through stories like the Brave Little Parrot, the Spider Weaver and the Blossom Tree.1
In each of these stories, a small, humble creature (or creatures, counting the chameleons in the case of the Blossom Tree) confronts a difficult or disastrous situation, and transforms the situation with their own unique energy, bringing about something miraculous. In each story, you could say that the creature’s love for their world is the catalyst for transformation. Yet in addition to love, each creature brings their particular energetic impulse — their unique way of touching the situation as no other creature could. The Brave Little Parrot is moved by her courageous heart to fearlessly confront a cataclysmic forest fire. With wisdom and patience, the Spider Weaver teaches two human brothers her artistry. And the loyalty and true friendship of the kusha grass (with her chameleon allies) is what saves the life of the Blossom Tree.
So hearing bees described as alchemists, I naturally grew curious to see if I could recognise the unique alchemy of bees in stories; some unique energetic signature through which bees transform the world as no other creature could. Rudolf Steiner, after all, saw in bees an energetic quality so peculiar that he described them in his lectures as a “Weltenrätsel,” meaning “world enigma.2” Alchemy is similarly understood as an enigmatic process — that ancient, mystical quest to transform dull material substances into gold. Alchemy is transformation, with a dash of magic and mystery thrown in. And metaphor aside, bees produce something perhaps even more miraculous than gold — gathering pollen and nectar from flowers, they transform it into sweet, delicate, golden honey. To our ancient forebears, I can only imagine what a precious and miraculous gift this source of sweetness, energy, abundance and healing must have been.
Poring over myths, and images of carvings and rock paintings around the world dating back thousands of years, I perceive the reverence people held for bees. In stories, I find bees are appreciated for their altruistic spirit. Bees are mysterious; they know things beyond human understanding, and they carry messages between worlds. In a human origin story from the San people of the Kalahari, there was a bee who carried a mantis across a turbulent river. When the bee grew exhausted and could carry the mantis no further, it placed the mantis on a floating flower and planted a seed inside of its body. From that seed grew the first human.
In Irish mythology, bees were intermediaries and messengers. One had always to inform the bees about important household events, such as births, deaths and marriages.
In ancient Egyptian mythology, the tears of the sun god Ra fell to Earth and were transformed into honeybees. Ancient Egyptian beekeeping practices were depicted in hieroglyphics dating back as far as 3100 BCE, as temple beekeepers tended the sacred hives to supply a thriving trade in a variety of honey and wax products.
In our modern world, of course, many things once held sacred, like honey and even the bees themselves, have been manipulated and turned into commodities. As if by some perverse process of reverse-alchemy, that which sparkles with aliveness in the world is reduced to dull grey matter in our minds, stripped bare of its magic and mystery. As Goethe wrote: ‘When a way of looking disappears from the world, the objects perceived often go missing too.’ How do we recover our perceptions of bees? Our reverence for bees? How do we learn to appreciate the particular qualities of alchemy that bees offer for our times?
In the conversation between Anneleike van der Sluijs, fellow BeeWisdom weaver Sandira Belia and Lifeworlds podcast host Alexa Firmenich, I hear bees described as the creatures who maintain the living threads of the Earth. Drawing on their exquisite capacities for sensing and healing, their vibrational language and their transformative touch, bees do the invisible work of weaving enlivenment through the world.
van der Sluijs says:
‘There is the intricacy of giving and receiving, in relation with plants and soil and sunlight. There are all those micro relationships that bring the life force in the landscape. For me, this is also an inspiration for acknowledging more of the small, subtle energies that shape our lives, and also valuing the relationship of all those different energies that together bring this whole that we know… It doesn’t matter if a bee is in a degenerated landscape or in a very lush landscape. There is always this touch that brings magic, and that brings beauty and healing.’
Inspired by this conversation, I wonder about the life-worlds3 of bees:
What would it be like to live in a sensuous world of touch and smell, of sound and vibrations reverberating through the warmth of the hive? What might it be like to mediate life and death and worlds beyond, as a somatic cell within a larger organism? To be part of a cross-pollinating collective of beings, at times co-regulating with one another through songs and dances and pheromones and touch? At other times foraging in intimate dances with flowers, imperceptibly healing and transforming the landscape? And also at times swarming together in joyous murmurations of flight, immersed in deep collective processes of rebirthing and finding new homes?
I once saw a swarm of wild bees, in a brief moment dipped in magic. They suddenly appeared over the ridgeline and swept right past me, a small and intensely undulating, softly humming, cloud of unified purpose and movement that was gone again almost as suddenly as it appeared.
Like the birds in Attar of Nishipur’s Sufi poem Conference of the Birds that I wrote of last time, bees are both the one and the many, the individual and the hive. ‘Bien’ is the word used by beekeeper Michael Theale to describe the ‘oneness of the honeybee nest”:
‘Depending on our perspective, the single bee can either be understood as an individual (bee) or a somatic cell, and it oscillates incessantly between both poles of being. Similar to light which can be described as a wave and a particle, the bien can be observed on multiple levels with sometimes contradicting paradigms. One very important aspect of the phenomenon of the bien is to be in between worlds and paradigms. Ancient cultures recognized the honeybees as messengers, linking heaven and earth. This oscillation between opposite poles of being makes the bien into a very unique, sacred, and sometimes enigmatic being.’
We humans, too, can oscillate between different and opposite paradigms and poles of being. We can be the individual and the hive, the one and the many. As South African drama therapist Marlize Swanepoel observes, the bees show us how to do this. Describing her practice delivering arts-based psychosocial programmes in community health, she draws beautiful insights about the social teachings of bees. As she observes, like the bees who dance to communicate, we too can presence with one another, co-regulating our nervous systems and tapping our innate gifts for knowledge, wisdom and healing. When we dance together like the bees, we help one another feel safe and calm, and create the space to cohere as a group. When we connect with our instinctual knowledge as the bees do, we discover strengths and resources we didn’t know we had. And when we slow down and experience the sweetness of life, we are able to experience love, joy, peace, wellbeing and connection with ourselves and one another.
In March, I experienced a taste of these healing, artful, joyful and connected qualities of bees. I attended a fascinating multidisciplinary conversation on ‘The Art of Bees and Gardens’ hosted by Swiss artist Dunja Herzog and Johannesburg beekeeper Thembalezwe Mntambo at the POOL gallery space in Cape Town. The energy of the bees was palpable in the room, as artists, urban township farmers, renegade beekeepers and even a researcher of archaeoacoustics, the archeological study of human culture and sound, all shared their experiences. In a flowing conversation that wove together many living threads of all our rich and diverse connections with bees, people shared their stories of urban displacement, trauma and intergenerational healing, radical resourcefulness and their aspirations for food sovereignty and creative freedom.
As Dunja Herzog related, she discovered bees, or rather the bees discovered her, while she worked with Nigerian bronze casting artist Phil Omodamwen at his studio in Benin City, exploring themes of resource extraction and metal waste with a project of casting bronze salvaged from e-waste in beeswax, using an ancient ‘lost wax’ technique to produce a series of sculptures and musical instruments. These works were displayed in the studio garden, where the pheromones in the wax attracted bees, to Herzog’s delight.
Moving to Johannesburg with her collection of instruments in 2022, Herzog set up in a new studio at Victoria Yards, where her affinity for bees and the ‘light and life and hope’ they bring soon connected her with beekeeper Mntambo.
As an urban beekeeper without land, Mntambo tended the hives he kept in public and private gardens within the ‘man-made’ forests of affluent suburban Johannesburg near his home. As Mntambo explained to Herzog, he was disillusioned with modern, extractive bee-keeping practices exemplified by the wooden langstroth box, with its removable frames designed to force bees into assembly line-style honey production. As he observed, few black beekeepers could afford to follow such industrialised, capital-intensive systems, reliant on land, suits and other expensive equipment, machines to extract the honey and constant maintenance of the frames.
Mntambo and Herzog then collaborated to explore traditional beehive making, producing beautiful ceramic hives from earthen clay, and weaving basket hives from straw, replicating artisanal techniques from Switzerland.
Their collaboration provides an intimate glimpse of the breadth and connectivity a ‘bee-centric’ view can inspire. How many of us humans, after all, might also call ourselves cross-pollinators, making connections and weaving the fine golden threads of ideas, imagination and stories across our landscapes?
Musician and ‘farmer by day, artist by night’ Vuyo Myoli, who found healing in beekeeping and now runs the Beez Move social enterprise in Gugulethu; Xolisa Bangani, poet and founder of the Ikhaya Culture Garden in Khayelitsha, a movement to restore inner and outer soil and ‘make gardening cool’ among youth; and Simangaliso Ngalwana, a marathon runner, engineering student and indigenous and medicinal plant expert, came together in one conversation that wove the powerful threads of land, migration, ancestors, intergenerational connection and healing.
The three men explored their roots in the Xhosa-speaking Eastern Cape of South Africa, where land is abundant yet a scarcity of economic opportunity drives migration to the city. Growing up as part of a ‘lost generation’ in a community of elders scarred by violence and struggle, Bangani reflected on how he had always loved and found healing in plants. He began growing flowers around his house, but later met with a permaculturist who challenged him, asking: why are you growing flowers when people are going hungry? Bangani went to the urban farming initiative Abalimi Bezekhaya to learn food gardening, but the older women farmers who worked there told him he should be in school. Finally, one of the women recognised his passion and saw an opportunity to pass on farming knowledge through him to help the next generation.
As Bangani reflects, young people want change but often don’t know how to create it. At Ikhaya Culture garden, they changed the composition of the soil. Once bare and sandy, the soil was nurtured to support a vibrant food forest, demonstrating the possibilities of both inner and outer transformation. What further golden threads of alchemy and healing could the bees could bring to Ikhaya Culture Garden?
The day before the conversation at POOL, Bangani hosted semi-retired engineer and renegade beekeeper Klaas van der Waal in a beehive-making workshop at Ikhaya Culture Garden. van der Wal spoke next, sharing his experiences of experimentation and learning to make beehives from palm stumps and other materials discarded or donated by others. He said:
‘I’m not a beekeeper, I’m a bee-watcher. It’s relaxing and therapeutic just to watch the bees, to go to the hive and appreciate the work the bees do for you and for the hive. You can use anything to make your hives. Swarming season is coming up in June (in South Africa) and they will take whatever form is available, depending on if they are a big swarm or a small swarm. It’s a nice free-thinking, free-flowing business — you just use your imagination and get creative. That’s what the bees like.’
Earth artist Izabeau Pretorious picked up the threads of abundance, resourcefulness and creativity, describing her inspiration from playing with natural materials, weaving complex, sinuous archways with wattle sticks and sensing how the elements of nature want to flow. This ancient form of play may be reflected in the reciprocity and co-evolutionary sculpting between flowers and bees dating back some 150 million years ago, she observed.
We journeyed next from the weaving of natural materials to the weaving of sound, with an extraordinary presentation from archaeoacoustician Neil Rusch. His work featured in a chapter of Karen Bakker’s book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is bringing us closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, entitled “How to Speak Honeybee.” Bakker had observed that “For quiet listening you need a body held in stillness to hear some of these sounds.” Modern science has of course been moving us away from our own direct sensory knowing, employing powerful artificial computing technologies to analyse the complex behaviours of bees, revealing secrets that our human forebears intimated long ago through deep listening.
Of the honeybee, Bakker writes:
‘Human verbal language is largely based on the noises we make with our vocal cords and mouths, the expressions we make with our faces, and the way we hold and move our bodies. In contrast, bee language is mostly spatial and vibrational. Its syntax is based on something very different from human language: the type, frequency, angle and amplitude of vibrations made by the bees’ bodies, including their abdomens and wings, as they move through space.’
She is referring to the bees’ famous waggle dance. In a version of the book chapter published in Noema Magazine, she describes how an Austrian researcher named Karl von Frisch painstakingly proved a hunch he developed that the dances of the bees could in fact be understood as highly complex language. As Frisch had once remarked, ‘Miraculous worlds may reveal themselves to a patient observer where the casual passerby sees nothing at all.’
As Bakker writes:
‘Frisch referred to honeybee dances as a “magic well”: The more he studied them, the more complex they turned out to be. Every species, Frisch argued, has its own magic well. Humans have verbal language. Whales have echolocation, which endows them with the ability to visualize their entire environment via sound. Honeybees have spatial, embodied language: We now recognize some of the subtle differences in their body movements and vibrations, which include waggling, knocking, stridulating, stroking, jerking, grasping, piping, trembling and antennation, to name just a few.’
Bakker’s chapter makes for fascinating reading (though it is pretty disturbing to see where some of these technological advances are going — think robotic bees, military applications). As she describes, further scientific experimentation, assisted by increasingly sophisticated instruments and technologies, suggests that bees’ magic well of communication enables a keen level of social learning and cultural transmission, as if through the coherence of their visual and vibrational communication with one another, the bees build collective intelligence to make the colony function as a unified ‘cognitive entity’.4
To the conversations around bees at the gallery, Rusch brought his deep understanding of the vibrational qualities of bee language, and of the sensibilities which would have enabled our human forebears to commune with bees. Like many indigenous peoples around the world, the /Xam San people of southern Africa understood how to communicate with bees through vibration. Showing a photograph of a 2,000 year old San rock art painting depicting bees and honeycomb, Rusch pointed out the instruments wielded by the human figures in the painting. Studying the images, he and his colleagues from the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand believed them to be a type of bullroarer known as a “!goin !goin,” once used by the /Xam to move the bees.
A bullroarer is an ancient vibroacoustic device, or aerophone — one of the earliest known musical instruments. It is composed of a piece of wood or stone, rounded at the ends and attached to a string or a cord. When it is swung around the head in a circle, it produces an intense, vibrating hum that sounds like a giant swarm of bees. As Rusch related, the /Xam people would very likely once have used their !goin !goin instruments to direct swarming bees to new hive locations that would be easy for them to access — a striking example of interspecies communication and empathy.
Rusch had brought along about eight or so !goin !goin aerophones which he made himself, and we were all encouraged to try them out. As overpowering vibrational whirring noises filled the room, it felt as though we were summoning the bees. I could feel their living, golden threads of connection all around me.
Which brings me back to the alchemy of bees. In writing this piece, I have come to appreciate their particular ways of creating warmth, cohesion and belonging; of travelling between worlds, and weaving the living threads of connection between disparate things. In the conversations at the gallery, the bees invisibly wove coherence through the different life experiences, perceptions and insights, creative approaches and practices shared by people. We are humans, of course, not bees — but we can still choose to be inspired and emulate the qualities of bees that we value. This is also what the stories teach us. So I return to the question posed by Anneleike van der Suijs in the opening of this piece: How do I want to bring the alchemy of the bees into the worlds in which I am participating?
How can I learn from the bees what it means to live more towards the pole of being a somatic cell within the larger body of the living world, seeking and acting in ways to support the thriving of the whole?
How would you bring the alchemical touch of the bees into your world?
With love,
Megan
Although my essay doesn’t go into the actual story itself, it is concerned with the qualities of what enables peace. The Blossom Tree is a story within a story: it is a fable of a wealthy trader from the city of Varanasi who enters a dispute with his neighbours. They seek the advice of the Buddha to help them resolve their dispute, which prompts the Buddha to tell them a story about a magnificent and beloved tree, which highlights the humble values of friendship and loyalty. For when the Blossom Tree is about to be cut down, it is her faithful friend the kusha grass, aided by her chameleon friends, that comes to the rescue. The story can be read here.
The beekeeper Michael Theale writes in this essay.
In addition to being the title of Alexa Firmenich’s podcast, this term comes from phenomenology, the study of direct, embodied, lived experience. I use it as I understand it from this passage in David Abram’s book Spell of the Sensuous:
‘If the worlds experienced by humans are so diverse, how much more diverse, still, must be the life-worlds of other animals - of wolves, or owls, or a community of bees! And yet, despite this multiplicity, it would seem that there are basic structures of the life-world that are shared, elements that are common to different cultures and even, we may suspect, to different species. Husserl’s1 writings seem to suggest that the life-world has various layers, that underneath the layer of the diverse cultural life-worlds there reposes a deeper, more unitary life-world, always already there beneath all our cultural acquisitions, a vast and continually overlooked dimension of experience that nevertheless supports and sustains all our diverse and discontinuous worldviews.’
That was the term used by Cornell University bee scientist named Thomas Seeley, who created an algorithm to analyse the swarming behaviours of bees, revealing levels of cohesion and coordination surpassing what many human social groups would be capable of (I’m kind of joking here, though I don’t know that it is really such a joke!). As Bakker writes:
‘Perhaps Seeley’s most startling finding was that, in choosing a new home, honeybees exhibit sophisticated forms of democratic decision-making, including collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, consensus building, quorum and a complex stop signal enabling cross-inhibition, which prevents an impasse being reached. A bee swarm, in other words, is a remarkably effective democratic decision-making body in motion, which bears resemblance to some processes in the human brain and human society. Seeley went so far as to claim that the collective interactions of individual bees were strikingly similar to the interactions between our individual neurons when collectively arriving at a decision.