AN INTERVIEW WITH THE BEES and Earl Flewellen
To celebrate spring, we’ve interviewed the bees! While you read this piece, we encourage you to do your own interview of the bees through listening them buzz.
What bees are telling us and how they communicate their needs:
Here, Big Bull Valley beekeeper Earl Flewellen shares what he learns on a visit with the bees. Earl is the founder of the Bull Valley Agricultural Center in Port Costa, a central partner with TFS. He describes what a beekeeper can experience and glean, with simple awareness, upon approaching a busy bee yard during the spring season. We are called to see, listen, feel, smell, touch, taste—deeply interact—if we want to understand the bees and what they need. And that approach starts way before one gets to the land where the bees are situated.
It goes something like this:
I arrive at the gate of the land in Port Costa, where the bees live and where our school will ultimately be situated. Stepping out of the car and strolling across the open meadow there, I take in the air, noticing the temperature, the strength of the breeze, and its aromas. In spring, I hope for a sunny warm day with a very gentle breeze, loaded with scents of pollen, green grasses, and the floral blooms out in the surrounding open fields. Sometimes I can smell the water of the pond a ways down the hill. All of these inform me, just stepping onto the land, what to expect under the first healthy hive’s lid, still out of my sight some 100 yards away. If I can smell all of these things and there is little wind, I know the bee yard will be obscenely busy; such days are a bonanza for the bees.
As I cross the meadow heading into the woods, stepping onto the footbridge, I take note of how much water is still running, or trickling, in the stream below. Is it prematurely dry? Or is it running heavier than is normal for this time of year? This tells me how much ground moisture endures in the landscape, informing me of how strong the field blooms will be this year, and how long they will endure. With every bridge-crossing for my periodic early season hive inspections, I take note. And, as the season progresses, so does my internal mapping of what is likely playing out in the grassy fields for miles around, without even stepping foot in them.
After crossing, still some 50 yards from the hives, I begin to train my ear on the hum of activity in and around the bee yard. If they are loudly buzzing above me, early in the season, I know they are devoting themselves to harvesting the pollen from the willows arching above the trail toward the hives. If it’s particularly loud, we’ve likely had a lot of winter rain and the willows are producing a bumper crop.
But, if I continue my approach and hear a louder whirring thrum nearby, I know to train my eye towards the air around the meadow that’s now opening before me to look for a swarm of bees, having departed a hive to gather in a nearby tree around their queen.
When I arrive into the open sunny meadow, I take a deep breath. Is it full of the smell of fresh nectar wafting from the hives as the worker bees inside fan it to condense it into honey? Then it’s truly a good spring burgeoning with field blooms. Is the air in the bee yard filled with thousands upon thousands of bees coming and going from all the hives in a wildly criss-crossed pattern? Then they are happily occupied with foraging on this near-perfect day and won’t mind my cracking open hives to inspect today as much as they certainly would were it windy and cold instead.
And, finally, before even cracking open the first hive standing before me, I know from the sound of the hive, the number and enthusiasm of the bees coming and going from its entrance, and how much pollen I see them carrying, what to expect when I open the lid. The number and enthusiasm tell me this is a very healthy hive and the population inside will be near capacity. They will probably need additional room for expanding. The fat little bags of bright yellow pollen I see on incoming foragers’ hind legs? This tells me they likely have a healthy queen and that the bees within the hive are working overtime transforming that pollen into food for the legion of her newly-laid eggs.
I take all of this in before I touch a hive. Before I reach for a tool. Certainly before I devise any notion of intervention, should any signs point toward less rosy assessments.
It is here where I remember that keeping bees has taught me something profound. It is something that has enriched my life, and shown me, in bright relief, some of the serious errors of my past. And, as it turns out, it is something that lies at the core of what we aim to teach young minds at The Field Semester.
To address, change, or heal what ails any given system, or intervene upon its behalf, we must begin when we rise from bed, opening our eyes to see, filling our lungs to breathe and then smell, stretching our digits to feel, opening our hearts to engage, and opening our minds to pull it all together into perceptive, responsive, and fully aware experience.
With this, especially if we take it to our lives, our learning, and our work, we are at our best possible capacity to help ourselves, those around us, and the systems we approach—in ways that match what they are telling us and showing us by being just exactly what they are, as they are… as found.
If we cannot start there—opening ourselves to seeing, listening, and feeling what lies within clear range of being seen, heard, and felt—then we are insuring we will make (and repeat) needless mistakes, overlooking sometimes profoundly simple ways of approaching what appears amiss.