On bees - Sam Knight in The New Yorker:

‘In the early nineties, when Lars Chittka, a German zoologist, was a graduate student in Berlin, he was not sure that bees could feel pain. In 2008, he co-authored a paper suggesting that bumblebees could suffer from anxiety. Last year, Chittka published the book “The Mind of a Bee,” which argues that the most plausible explanation for bees’ ability to perform so many different tasks, and to learn so well, is that they possess a form of general intelligence, or bee consciousness. “Bees qualify as conscious agents with no less certainty than dogs or cats,” he wrote.
Chittka based his conclusion on work in his own lab and on hundreds of years of bee study, including that of Charles Turner, a Black American scientist, who was denied a university-based research career and instead worked as a high-school teacher in St. Louis. Starting in the eighteen-nineties, Turner observed variations in problem-solving among individual spiders, “outcome awareness” in ants, and the ability, in bees, to steer by visual landmarks—“memory pictures”—rather than by instinct. Turner posited ideas of general invertebrate intelligence which were almost entirely ignored. “He was really a century ahead,” Chittka said. Last year, the U.K. passed legislation that recognized animals as sentient beings, capable of feeling pain and joy. So far, the bill dignifies vertebrates, decapod crustaceans (crabs and lobsters), and cephalopods (squids and octopuses), but not a single conscious bee.
The more we know about bees, the more complicated beekeeping becomes. When I visited Chittka’s lab, he flipped open a laptop to show me a sequence from “More Than Honey,” a Swiss documentary from 2012, which included footage from the pollination of California’s five-billion-dollar almond crop—an annual agro-industrial pilgrimage that involves an estimated seventy per cent of America’s commercial beekeepers. On the screen, a mechanical arm scraped tumbling bees and honeycomb from the edge of a plastic hive, before loading it onto a truck. “It’s disgusting,” Chittka said. “But the absurd thing is that these people then complain that their bees are dying.” Like many entomologists, he does not see honeybee health as primarily an ecological problem. “Where they are under threat, it’s because of poor beekeeping practices,” Chittka said. In the scientific literature, the Western honeybee is sometimes referred to as a “massively introduced managed species” (mims), whose population is increasing on almost every continent, often to the detriment of other wild pollinators. In 2020, researchers concluded that the thirty-three hundred wild bee species of the Mediterranean basin were being “gradually replaced” by a single species of managed Apis mellifera. The same year, a report from the Royal Botanic Gardens, at Kew, warned that parts of London had too many honeybee colonies, whose foraging was displacing the city’s wild bee species. “Beekeeping to save bees could actually be having the opposite effect,” the report found.’

(…)

‘Patterson runs a teaching apiary for his local beekeeping association in a small wood in West Sussex. When I arrived, he was in a clearing, clipping queens. I waited on the path with his dogs. Patterson wore jeans that were held up with green suspenders. He pulled a pair of plastic chairs out of a shipping container and we sat down to talk by his car. He was despondent about the state of beekeeping generally, whether natural, conventional, or on commercial bee farms. “When I first started keeping bees, at least fifty per cent of our members worked on the land in some way. They were practical people. They were cowmen, or foresters or gardeners,” Patterson said. “If they had a problem, they knew enough that they could get out of it for having a bit of gumption.” Modern beekeepers preferred simple answers. “There’s a lot of narrow thinking going on,” he said.
Patterson was sympathetic to the ideas of natural beekeepers, although he suspected that many of them were misguided novices. “ ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely?’ You know,” he said. During the pandemic, Patterson experimented with not treating his bees for varroa and lost sixteen out of nineteen hives. He was fine with that. But he needed to have bees to teach with, so he had to start treating again.’

(…)

‘Throughout my beekeeping life, I have always tried to improve the bees,” he said. Patterson explained that when he said this most people thought he meant improving the bees to make more honey. “I think you can improve bees from the point of view of bees as well,” he said. Patterson was not ready to admit that this task might be beyond him, or any beekeeper. He had inspected nine colonies that morning. After I left, he was going to place new queens into the hives that he feared would not last the winter.’

Read the article here.

The bees and us.

Keeping bees might not save bees. Natural beekeeping is not always a solution.

And forget paternalism, you can improve bees from the perspective of the bee. Let’s say as if the bee was your own child.

We should strive te become that kind of improvers, probably.