The Honey Bee makes the world go round – without them flora would die and all other life would quickly follow. And bees have done their job for a very long time.
For perspective Homo sapiens (probably you) reached anatomical modernity about 200,000 years ago and began to exhibit full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago (according to Wiki). And that is just an average since many Homo sapiens remain noticeably un-evolved even to this day.
Bees on the other had are over 100 million years old. That is 2,000 times older than humans. If the bee life on this planet was shown as sixty minutes on a clock (3,600 seconds) then human existence would be shown as less than TWO SECONDS.
That is why for me Bees are exalted. I have a bee hive on my roof and I just let them bee, uh, I mean be. I haven’t removed any honey for years. They are my rooftop sentinels helping to keep the neighborhood more in harmony.
As a New York green builder I feel keeping bees is part of the matrix. Ecological native gardens, green roofs, living walls, ponds, natural swimming pools, gray water, composting, building with salvaged materials and bees – these are the things that make the world go ’round. They are all connected.
This brings me to the reason for this post. I think we can’t have too many bees in the world and the more people who keet them the better. It is not about the honey. We have too much sugar in our died and despite the amazing benefits of honey it is still sugar. It is about helping the keepers of life do their job. God knows we work against them in every other way, arrogant overcomsumers that Homo sapiens are.
So check it out. There are lots of beekeeping networks, some formal some not. For example you could take this cool course:
