"Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt - marvelous error!" " that I had a beehive here inside my heart." "And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures." "Queen of the Sun:" "What are the bees telling us?" "Colony Collapse Disorder is the bill we're getting, for all we have done to the bees." "It's just a name that was given to a phenomenon that a hive is found empty." "Food is there, honey is there, but the bees are gone." "The first thing we look for is: who is the cause for that?" "Who is responsible?" "We are not going to solve the problem by us killing a virus or bacteria or fungi, because the problem is an inner one." "Personally, I am grateful for a crisis, the crisis will give us the possibility to learn something if we are willing." "If the heart opens up enough to tell the mind something." "Bees Vanish;" "Scientists Race for Reasons" "Apocalypse Of The Honeybees" "Vanishing bees threaten US crops" "If we didn't have bees to pollinate our crops, you know, we'd have to eat just bread and oatmeal all the time, and a couple of nuts!" "Vanishing bees leave mystery and anxiety in their wake" "If we kill the bees there will be no agriculture." "I repeat: no agriculture." "Bees are the pollinator that guarantees the growth and survival of fruits." "The honeybee is important because we depend on it to pollinate 40% of our food, a tremendous amount of what we eat." "So that's to say 4 of every 10 bites of food you consume, you would not consume if not for the work of the honeybee." "We have lost in this country alone, in America, about five million colonies each one of them having 20 to 50, 60 thousand individual honeybees." "The bees are always telling us all kinds of things that we have to learn, they are giving us messages and their crisis is our crisis definitely." "We could call it Colony Collapse Disorder of the human being too." "Look:" "Full Honey." "Full, full, full honey." "With a little chance, maybe we can see the queen." "But you see, I feel yet that we have a chance." "This queen is so marvelous." "Is so marvelous." "I am full in love for this queen." "In all the story of the bees, as bees are in the world since 150 million years old, the beginning of the meeting human being and bees it is about 10,000 years." "And a cooperation slowly begin." "This cooperation develop and from hunter of honey human being slowly" "begin beekeeper!" "Beekeepers they are choosed by bees." "And you see my mustache?" "You can brush." "You can brush by mustache." "They like." "They like." "The honeybee was considered a sacred animal." "And the sacredness came out of that knowledge that the honeybee is one of the great nurturers of life and fertility." "The honeybee came out of the Mystery centers." "Places where there were initiates and leaders of mankind who guided and impulsed and inspired the various civilizations that we have." "The ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Greco-Roman civilization, the Egyptian, Babylonian civilization." "If you think that they opened up the tombs of Tutankhamen and honey that was 2000 years old is still edible..." "There is a reverence to bees." "There is also a reverence to the gods." "Now, don't you think in some way that we should actually be revering them because they're actually keeping us alive, as opposed to the other way around?" "They're absolutely beautiful creatures." "They're God's creatures and if we don't protect them then we're not protecting ourselves." "Look." "There they go." "Honey was considered so sacred as a gift from the bees." "The honey was not sold until the end of the 19th or into the 20th century." "Most of the honey was given away as a gift." "It is one of the most beneficial and healing substances that we can imagine." "It has enzymes, it has nutrients, it has trace minerals and it has forces of the hexagonal, the silica forces in it." "And silica is a substance in the Earth's mantle." "About half of the Earth's mantle is silica." "The silica in us is mainly in the sense organs." "It is the sensing for what goes on in the surrounding." "So the silica and the honey have a beneficial influence on our evolution." "Mainly from the 19th century on we have gone into controlling nature more and more." "And we have lost that feeling for sacredness." "Steiner gave lectures to the workers at the Goetheanum in 1923 and Steiner said, Yes, this mechanization of beekeeping, this realm of life is becoming mechanized and industrialized and that will eventually destroy beekeeping and the honeybee might not survive the end of the century." "That is the 20th century." "So, now with the Colony Collapse Disorder it's clear that Steiner's prediction has come true." "And as Steiner said that" "Our very lives depend on beekeeping." "Everybody should be interested in beekeeping." "Our lives depend on it!" "Look at the beautiful honey." "So I feel that we are seeing changes in climate but I think the Colony Collapse Disorder and the disappearance of the honeybee is a much more pressing, urgent problem to solve." "A lot of rationalization, a lot of mechanization has gone into beekeeping to make it profitable." "And that has brought down the honeybee in it's vitality, in it's health." "It's financial." "It's financial!" "We're accepting things that aren't ideal for the bees because we have to for the business that we're in and we're in the business to stay in business, so we have to do it!" "You're going to take ten!" "He's going to take fourteen when youre done here!" "We are a mobile industry." "We run hundreds of thousands of miles every year." "Without the almond growers and the high price we would never have survived." "The almond crop is our fastest growing, most profitable export crop here in California." "Every February, just around Valentine's Day, has become the single greatest pollination event in the world." "Bees from the entire country, as far away as New England and Wisconsin and Minnesota and Florida get on trucks in the middle of the winter and three quarters of all bees in America come to California to perform this absolutely critical act," "where they have to be woken up, strengthened with high fructose corn syrup." "I mean if there's anything more viscerally offensive, it's the idea of feeding the creators of honey high fructose corn syrup." "When we feed the corn syrup we hope that there's enough natural" "nectar and honey on the hive to supplement whatever feed they get out of the syrup." "In Europe and America they are using a thing called oxytetracycline or tetramycine in the sugar." "The bees consume the sugar and then transfer it up in the honey." "Now, you eat that honey." "You eat that honey." "It's got oxytetracycline or tetramycine in it." "You then become resistant to that antibiotic." "There is a 600,000-acre monoculture of almonds in the Central Valley." "The problem is that every one of those trees, every one of the blossoms needs a bee to visit it." "Yet if there is nothing but almonds in the Central Valley, there is nothing to eat for the bees for the 50 weeks of the year that the almonds aren't in bloom." "So there essentially are no bees around." "It's not sustainable." "Two or three years ago there were not enough bees in America to pollinate the whole crop so the USDA gave permission to import bees from Australia." "Now, as it happened, Australian bees harbor certain viruses that are unfamiliar to American bees." "Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus is one of those." "We brought that in to pollinate the almonds." "That's where all the bees of America mixed." "We've created this great Bee Bordello as one beekeeper put it." "We constantly intermix from all over the country, so if they've got something in one part of the country like tracheal mite and we don't have it in our part of the country, we certainly will have it" "because the migratory nature of beekeeping spreads all these pests at a very rapid rate!" "We don't have a single event that causes the bees to go way downhill." "It's a little bit here and a little bit there." "These semi-load trips I believe cause huge stress on them." "Once the hive starts getting stressed to a certain point then it can no longer cope with many of these other things and that extra stress is just enough to put it over the edge." "Millions of bees die every year while waiting in holding yards before pollination begins." "Monoculture 1." "The cultivation of a single crop in one region." "2." "A single, homogenous culture without diversity." "So many of the problems we face come down to one thing and that is monoculture." "There are many attractions to monoculture, it's efficient, but from the point of view of nature it's..." "it's insane." "And monocultures are the reason that the bees are struggling." "And monoculture is the original sin of agriculture." "Now, the trouble with monoculture is it's an absolute distortion of the way an ecosystem works." "Because what you do with a monoculture is you take your vibrant eco-system, you destroy it... then you put all... put in place all the things you just took out." "So instead of having natural fertilizers in the soil you add inorganic fertilizers, instead of allowing a natural ecosystem around pests to develop you have to use pesticide." "So what's the connection with bees?" "As far as the industrial agricultural corporations are concerned, the solution that's being offered is to destroy the insects that make food possible and this is the disaster that they are ready to force on us." "It used to be a continuous paradise for honeybees from Pennsylvania all the way through South Dakota, the whole northern part of the country, but now there's just huge... huge expanses of it are just monocrops of corn and soybeans." "The fencerows are all gone." "The bees can't even live there because there's not enough for the bees to survive on in a continuous cornfield." "They'll starve to death." "The German beekeepers and our bees live in a very serious situation." "Every 2 years we have a disaster." "2002, 40% of the German bee colonies died." "2006, 50% of the bee colonies in America died." "Perhaps in the next years in these areas where the agriculture is so intensive could bring us in a situation that the bees do not find enough pollen and nectar in the area for sustaining themselves." "We are in such a habit of exploiting, of using nature for our own ends and the honeybees right now, I think, are saying," "If you continue your ways, I'm withdrawing." "I've been a beekeeper for over 30 years." "I knew something had to be done to help the honeybees." "And here I was in my retirement." "It was in this moment of utter hopelessness" "I had that feeling of urgency to start this biodynamic farm with a bee sanctuary at it's heart." "Land had to be found, people had to be found to come and help me and it was not easy." "You go on a great leap of faith and trust." "I came to a moment where I really doubted that I could do this alone with my wife and then at one point things more or less fell apart." "And it seemed like everything I had worked for was gone." "Then the bees sort of let me know," "Go ahead." "We'll help you," "and a month later a wonderful donor came for this purpose of creating a honeybee sanctuary on a biodynamic farm." "It's 610 acres that were maltreated like the rest of our land." "We are surrounded here in the heartland by Monsanto." "Farms that are a lot of them already corporate owned and with genetically manipulated seed." "These are, for the insect life, deserts and there is no forage for the bees." "They can't exist there." "So right now we are in this deep crisis where we have to look at the honeybee as a patient in the emergency room and you don't demand of a patient in the emergency room that they perform and give you a lot of something." "We are building up here on Spikenard Farm a biodynamic farm for the bees." "We are enlivening the soil and we are enlivening all that is growing here" "and it rays out into the surrounding area." "From early humans on we were quite touched and impressed by the way bees can make honeycomb." "And by how exact each cell is shaped." "They are all hexagonal." "The honeycomb is actually part of their metabolic system." "They sweat out the wax between their abdominal rings." "Honeycomb like this would take approximately one million of those tiny platelets." "They build chains of building bees and they follow gravity." "So this is exactly what happens if you have a have a steel chain and you pin it in two sides." "You have such a form." "And there are two groups of bees, one working here building this part of the comb, another one working here building this part and so, this is where they come close together." "The comb is the biggest inner organ of the beehive." "It's their skeleton, it's the place they live on." "It is the womb for all of the baby bees." "It's the place where nectar is processed into honey." "90% of their lifespan is happening on the comb in darkness." "What is amazing, wax is made by bees that have never seen the light." "But they have been nourished by light." "Pollen is so to speak materialized light." "And they have the ability to free the light they have ingested making snow white wax." "It is really a big wonder." "And then man can collect this wax, make candles and in the dark period of the year," "towards Christmas, he can free the light again from the wax in the bee." "For me, it's kind of a big imagination." "In the beehive all the individual members dedicate their lives for the bigger entity and sometimes I believe that monasteries are actually imitating a beehive." "There is this formalized striving for selflessness, for letting go of ego, for the totality of life." "The workers are all females." "As a colony these 30, 40, 50 thousand female workers all give up their sexuality, they do not produce offspring, and this renunciation of their sexuality, where they can then take care of their queen in a wonderful way," "they clean her and they feed her and they feed each other and they do that service of work for the entire colony." "And all of it is for the future, for the health and the wealth of the colony." "We are entering the innards of this being right now, at this moment." "This is one whole being." "The biological term is super organism, something which goes beyond a single individual organism." "So those 20, 40, the 60 thousand bees are one undividable entity." "If you go a little bit deeper into the biology of the bee you realize bees are a picture of a harmony and coherence according to exactly and precise environmental and contextual situations." "You see this bee is dancing and the direction it makes, tells the bees in what direction they have to fly out with respect to the sun and speed and intensity of the dance is an indication of how good" "the food source is." "I start to see the flight of the bee like a golden thread in the landscape." "From flower to flower." "The relationship of bees and flowers is one of the most beautiful co-evolutionary relationships we have." "Bees are the legs of plants." "The great existential fact of plant life is the inability to move." "Being rooted in place." "And the flowers have studied the preferences of the bees and learned precisely what patterns, what smells, what shapes are most attractive." "So how do you deal with the need to move your genes and expand your range?" "Well, the genius of flowers was to recruit bees to do that for them and bees were their willing collaborators in their desire to move their genes around." "One of the great mysteries of the world I think is the fact that our taste and bees' coincide to the extent that they do." "These are very different species but what a bee thinks smells good, we think smells good and that's not always true." "There are a lot of plants that are pollinated by flies and those plants smell nasty." "Smell like decomposing meat." "Our canons of taste and the bees' are very, very close." "Beauty to a bee is usually beauty to a human as well." "Insects are not warm." "You cannot pet them or develop the same relationship that you might have with a dog, a cow or a pigeon." "However, when you let your mind explore the world of bees right at that moment, you and every beekeeper fall under the bees' spell." "We become beekeepers because we fall in love with these insects." "Unfortunately, today the beekeeper has to face daily a thousand obstacles." "We registered in the past years a bee plague." "In the region of Piedmont alone more than 30,000 behives have been poisoned by a systemic pesticide." "My association started a harsh confrontation with the biggest producer of such pesticides." "However, fighting against multinational enterprises is a bit like fighting against windmills." "They are so powerful and we are always marginalized." "But we have faith faith in the willingness to fight." "Industrial farming is based on chemicals." "It's based on chemicals that came from warfare." "They were designed to kill human beings but of course they instantly kill the pollinators." "The tremendous death of bees that we are seeing is the pesticides that have been used very intensely." "It's a much bigger problem than just agriculture." "The lawns that are sprayed is so damaging to so many creatures that are part of the food chain." "Pesticide has the same effect that nerve gas has on humans." "The poisoned bees cannot find their way back to the beehive and they die." "In Europe, accept more and more pesticide." "More and more and more hives disappear." "The terrible thing is the center of memory of the hive is destroyed by pesticide." "They can't discover again colony." "Bees, they can disappear." "And this is the worst thing that can arrive to humanity." "I was with my bees and I hear a noise of an airplane and all of a sudden I see that it is spraying something." "So when I realize that insecticides or fungicides were being sprayed if the drift comes over here my bees are damaged or gone." "When you see an airplane like that coming and spraying there is this tremendous feeling of not being able to do anything." "You're just so vulnerable and all the bees that are hit by it are so vulnerable." "These are bees that are a treasure for me and they are a part of me and I don't want to lose them." "I really don't want to lose them." "There are many people, including a lot of beekeepers, who suspect a relatively new class of pesticides might have a role in Colony Collapse Disorder." "Collectively they are called the neonicotinoids and it's true that they are among the best selling insecticides worldwide." "These neonicotinoids, which are neurotoxic, they target the nervous system, affect the ability of bees to learn and to remember and to navigate, all of which would contribute to an inability to return to the hive after foraging." "Bees are gleaners." "Bees are particularly vulnerable because they're really designed to pick up small particles." "They're built to electro-statically attract pollen." "We recently discovered with the sequencing of the entire honeybee genome, honeybees are distinctly lacking enzymes that break down poisons or toxins." "Today, stopping these pesticides is the most important and urgent action." "Bayer is responsible for the use and production of pesticides that kill bees." "This is the first issue." "In Europe bees are completely dependent on human care and on human help." "Without this care many, many bee colonies will die and only very few will survive without the help of the beekeepers and all human beings." "In former times the coal miners had special birds in the coalmines and when the canary birds stopped singing and stayed silent it was time for the coal miners to leave the mountain." "What most people think of when they think of a pollinator is they think of the honeybee and the honey bee is by far the most important agricultural pollinator we have." "But what a lot of people don't realize is no. 1 - we have about 4,000 species of other bees." "Everything from large bumblebees, thousands of species of bees that are everything from little bees, they look like flies, to bright green-- florescent almost green to striped in different colors." "Bees of all varieties across the world." "Beyond bees, flies and beetles are very, very important pollinators." "The beauty of the seed is out of one you can get millions." "The beauty of the pollinator is it turns that one into the million and that's an economics of sharing." "That's to me the real economics of growth because life is growing." "Without the pollinators we'd lose the plants." "They're just completely codependent." "The pollinators wouldn't be there without the plants and the plants wouldn't be there without the pollinators." "We've seen a decline in many of our bees." "With our native bees we are seeing declines probably from the same things:" "disease to nutrition to potentially pesticides as well as habitat loss." "So, if bees are dying we can be sure that butterflies wil be dying, solitary bees will be dying, bumblebees will be dying, and we know from the point of view of conventional academic ecology that if insects are dying," "birds will be dying, plants will be dying." "I think we're doing some pretty scary things and the situation is pretty dire and I think we're just beginning to realize how dire it is." "But at the same time nature comes up with all sorts of surprises and hopefully there will be some cheering surprises rather than all gloomy ones." "These little guys run the world." "These guys really are the bosses." "They're doing all of our work for us and without them we'd be in big trouble." "This honey that I'm collecting here at the moment here from the West coast of the South Island in New Zealand is some of the cleanest honey in the world." "I am a honey robber." "I steal their honey." "Because what they bring in is what they use for the winter." "So, we actually steal their honey" "We actually rob their honey, but leave enough so the bees survive the winter." "I'm an organic beekeeper." "And the reason is mainly because of what I believe in." "It's from the heart." "It's not from the dollars point of view." "It's from the heart." "The bees are dying." "And I personally think it's genetic modification." "I personally think that." "We're changing the structure of the plant." "The structure of the plant is being changed completely." "And the bees are telling us that." "The bees are dying because of it." "You take genes from an unrelated species and shoot it into the cells of a plant." "And the only two ways you can introduce unrelated genes the first is the use of a gene gun where you shoot gold particles laden with genes and put them into the organism." "But it's a very unreliable process so you also have to add antibiotic resistance markers." "You also have to add viral promoters and every genetically engineered seed is a bundle of bacteria, toxins, viral promoters." "Genetically modified organisms are planted in millions of acres around the United States." "Genetically engineered crops can compromise the immune system of bees." "One German scientist found that when bees collect pollen from corn, the genes that have been inserted into the corn end up transferring into the gut microorganisms of the bees and continue to function." "Unfortunately, human beings also get genes transferred to their gut bacteria, meaning it produces this genetically engineered bacteria inside of us." "When we start to manipulate genetic material we are going to the very deepest sources, to the very deepest layers of the human being." "It allows us to be almost god like." "But the question is:" "do we have the wisdom, the morality, the depth to do these interventions?" "Are we really knowing what we are doing?" "Are we sure that what we do will not have long-term effects?" "And we are not experimenting here with animals or plants." "We are experimenting with the human being, with the soul of human beings, with the body of human beings." "Nature is very patient for a long time but there is a moment when things do collapse and we have to wake up but hopefully wake up early enough to make a change." "I became a beekeeper in 2003 under rather unusual circumstances." "I had been invited by the local beekeeping association to give them a talk on genetic engineering in relation to bees." "And one of them said," "Why don't you come and look at our bees?" "And then we opened some beehives and that's what did it." "I was absolutely smitten." "One of the biggest challenges to beekeepers was the varroa mite, which is now spread all over the United Kingdom." "It's a little beast that lives on the bee and drinks it's blood and beekeepers have found, that unless they treat their bees with chemicals every year, they will be killed by the varroa mite." "I was taught the conventional way of beekeeping and did all the things that my mentors taught me which includes putting chemicals in the hive." "The chemical I started with was a synthetic pyrethroid called Apistan." "Clearly one doesn't want that sort of thing in the honey." "I was going down a road which didn't really fit with my outlook." "In fact, if you get the dosage wrong you get bee mortality from the anti-varroa chemicals that you use." "You are on a kind of treadmill of putting chemicals in the hives." "You are postponing the day when the bee adapts to the mite." "In the process of trying to kill the mites for so long and using so many chemicals we're breeding mites that adapt faster and faster to every new chemical we throw at them." "This deadly chemical Coumaphos has no effect whatsoever on the varroa mite." "In fact, the varroa mites treated with Coumaphos did better by some measures than mites that were not treated." "So in other words, a chemical that was formerly a deadly poison to them is now somehow being used as a resource." "They're becoming stronger and stronger." "We've bred a race of super mites." "I'm keeping the Warré hive to see if the bees can survive with varroa without any intervention with chemicals." "This method of keeping bees without any chemicals runs the risk of going for broke, definitely." "You could lose all your colonies." "But if you are inteefering, you are going against natural selection." "Okay, this is a Darwinian approach." "But the only other alternative is to stay on the treadmill of giving chemicals year in, year out, forever." "And in this new type of hive the bee might be in a better home to defend itself against the ravages of the varroa mite." "I'm leaving the bee and the mite, more or less, to fight it out together." "And that is, I think, the goal in long-term sustainable beekeeping is to let bee and mite co-evolve together." "Phil?" "Phillip." "Can you get me a jar?" "There's some beautiful honeycomb up here." "Thanks Phil." "I'm going to put some honeycomb in this." "Yeah?" "We'll put it in the bucket and send it down later." "I was nine when I started beekeeping and I learned it from my stepfather Ian." "When Phillip first started he actually pestered me into keeping the bees." "He, at that point in time, was the youngest beekeeper in the UK." "Bees have a sort of weird intelligence and they can do things that humans can't like walk upside down." "It's kind of the allure of Spiderman but sort of like the bad bit of Scorpion." "You can, however, feel a little bit of emotion for the queens who I have named after the various queens of England." "Some of the names of the queens are:" "Queen Elizabeth the First," "Mary, who was named after Bloody Mary because shes one of the most vicious hives." "There's Queen Victoria who spawns almost all the time but is fairly stable." "This is what is stress free." "Day at work... sit down up here, look at my girls." "You see the little antennae?" "It's lovely." "She's such a good girl." "Come on." "Back you go!" "Oh!" "Look at this!" "And this is Hackney in London." "This is what people can do." "People say that they can't keep bees." "They're lying." "And look at that side, dripping with honey." "All these girlies... yeah, these girlies here?" "...are putting everything back into the environment." "Not me." "I'm just helping them and I just think it is so rewarding." "The Sun let's life be created on Earth." "Without the warmth, without the light, no life would be here." "The bees themselves are Sun creatures and the bees being such great Sun beings," "they are the nurturers of life on Earth." "The queen, the most sublime being in such a hive, is deeply, deeply connected with the Sun forces." "When the young queen emerges, when she goes on her marriage flight, she flies up around 600 feet into the air." "She flies through this swarm of drones and is mated by up to a dozen drones so that when she returns, she has over a million sperm in her and she can lay millions of eggs over her lifespan." "And she can lay approximately 1500 to 2000 eggs a day which is more weight-wise than her own body weight." "A tremendous feat if you consider that, that she can lay more than her own weight in eggs on one day." "I am a queen breeder." "I breed queen bees." "I'm doing this so that I can be a commercial beekeeper, so I can make a living from bees." "Each one of those will have a queen bee hatch out from it." "The problem with bee breeding has always been this compromise between inbreeding which is the way of fixing certain traits so that an entire line of queens will all be similar." "But if you push that process too far it ultimately weakens the bee and you've lost the vigor and once you've lost vigor, you've lost everything." "Modern queen breeding has brought the quality of the queen down to a level where the queens nowadays don't live 4 to 5 years." "They sometimes don't live even one year." "So they are susceptible to all kind of illnesses so now we have to requeen practically every year because the queens don't last long." "It's the same with the cow." "The cow, instead of living 20 years, has a life expectancy of 3 to 4 years." "Not even one guaranteed calf." "There are parallels with bee breeding and animal breeding." "Chickens' and pigs' genetic stocks have been just weakened terribly." "They have to be propped up, almost literally propped up, even to stand up so they can eat." "That's the direction we're going in." "The biology of honeybees is set up to avoid inbreeding at all costs and if bees are inbred for very long they start to become weaker." "The artificial insemination of queens is where a young queen, a virgin queen, is knocked out." "Sperm is squeezed out of some drones and the queen is artificially inseminated." "The problem I see there is that in nature the young queen goes on a marriage flight and that's actually the health of it." "That the queen will breed with up to a dozen drones of different varieties and here we are creating another, like a monoculture, one stock and that stock is good for a little while and then it doesn't have the life forces that is necessary." "In the beehive we can actually see what happens if we start to manipulate nature." "For awhile nothing much." "For ten, twenty years it is possible to do that." "But after 50, 60, 100 years you can see the effects of such manipulation very, very clearly." "It's very interesting that in one of Rudolf Steiner's lectures he recognized very early on, if we manipulate the bee civilization on that level there will be a long-term effect." "And we are reaping the harvest we have sown." "This image of a queen in a cage became a prominent image for me in the play and the queen represents for me the soul of the world." "I was looking into this metaphor of the queen in the cage and how bees were being handled in the world today." "There's a queen bee just there." "So, we put her in a cage." "I'll cage up all this one then I can send her away and sell her to somebody." "All the queen bees in cages are being exported to the United States to build up the colonies in the States." "This has degenerated the whole strength of the bee colony." "We have to raise queens again the natural way and this we have to respect: that nature is much wiser than we are." "We live with our bees in the bush, in the forest." "We've moved with them and you do become very in tune with nature when you live with them all the time." "And they have got some magical, magical properties and magical things they do." "I think some of it rubs off on us." "Did you hear that?" "Well, my father was a beekeeper and his grandfather had a bit of a fiddle before him, so I started getting stung at a pretty early age." "Belting on the lids of the hives down in the back yard and my mum... remember my mum telling me running up to the house screaming with a head full of angry bees stinging all out at you." "You just snap a handful off like that." "This gets the smoker going pretty quick." "Just push it down in there a bit until it gets a little bit going... and a bit of a puff." "You can smell... smell the honey." "It's a bit odd today." "We don't have the trouble in Australia yet with the Colony Collapse Disorder that they seem to be having in America." "So I think you're just creating such a big toxic load that the bees have had enough so out the door they go and go and look for greener pastures." "In West Australia the use of chemicals is banned for the treatment of hive diseases and parasites." "As a consequence our honey is quite pristine compared to other parts of the world who have to treat with miticides etc." "which must in turn leach into the honey and give you a contaminated product." "This is a bit of fresh West Australian nectar right off the wandoo." "It's... mmm... beautiful, beautiful, sweet, light flavored honey." "Excellent for toast and crumpets and yeah, could just eat that all day." "Baaaaa!" "In New Zealand we have this fantastic history of beekeeping because it's very much part of farming community that involves beekeepers and farmers working together to have a whole agricultural system that works." "The feeling for nature and for the bees and that has become very much connected to my Maori connection." "In old societies the beekeeper was a very respected person." "He became someone that was revered and someone that was looked up to who would bring in this sweetness." "The Maori were very much a people that would watch nature and watch insects and if they would see changes in them, these changes would mean a lot to them and they would mean that there would be changes coming for them as well." "We're hearing stories from America of bees not coming back to their colony and for me to think that my children won't have pollination happening with their berries and with their vegetable patches and food supply," "I find..." "I find that really something that's really affecting my heart." "And I'm really finding out why I'm beekeeping is to keep that going for my children's children." "If bees leave this world I wouldn't like it because there would be no honey and no fruit, because you wouldn't find many peaches or apples these days then." "My three daughters and my wife are now coming out into the field with me and that's an incredibly warming feeling around the bees is to have a family business." "It's wonderful that the kids can be part of the financial business making and roll candles for the girls to be able to sell at the market." "And all the wax we make... and it helps us get some money to look after our ponies, which are very special to us, and we really like doing that." "So this is Lace." "She's 30 years old and she loves honey." "She's great!" "She goes out and wins competitions and she's healthy." "She's a good pony." "Well, we had a pony that had an electric fence that pulled all his skin down." "So we had to pull it up like a sock, bandage it with Manuka honey every day;" "fresh Manuka honey on everyday and the whole thing has healed completely and vets can't believe it." "I'm stung!" "I'm stung!" "And it's pumping the toxin into my..." "flesh." "You can see it moving?" "I'm going to just give you a demonstration on how to get them out!" "So you just bare your fingernail back like that and go." "The venom from the bee sting is the same as rattlesnake poison." "The only thing is, it's only a little minute amount." "Rattlesnake bite can kill you, but..." "Well, if you got enough bee stings it would kill you too." "Beekeeper, he can receive 500 stings!" "But more than 500, he can die!" "So we have to be in very deep respect about bee." "To be a beekeeper is a kind of art." "If you are a yogi, if you practice yoga naturally, you can be a beekeper." "Because you have to be quiet." "You have to explore your soul." "Bees:" "life and death." "What's particularly unfortunate is that honeybees are often blamed for stings that are inflicted by other hymenopterans." "To an entomologist a yellow-jacket is a wasp." "It looks nothing like a bee." "Bees are sort of brownish and fuzzy, yellow-jackets are yellow and black and shiny." "Different behavior, different gestalt." "But the vast majority of non-entomologists, people are either unwilling to or unable to differentiate." "Ah!" "A Bee!" "So bees get a lot of bad press that is undeserved." "Can you clip this little branch there first?" "This one right here?" "Yeah." "It's about to go." "Okay." "Oops." "A swarm, as much as people don't like it, is a natural way of procreation;" "of guaranteeing that more colonies of bees are there." "And at the right time when the new queens are ready to emerge the old queen with almost half of the entire workers will leave the hive." "They swirl around in the circumference of maybe 50 feet and then the queen lands and alights on maybe a branch and the of the rest of those swarm bees gather in a cluster and they hang there until they are either taken by the beekeeper" "or they find a new home." "So the commercial or the average hobby beekeeper prevents swarming and we have taken that joy, that "joie de vivre", that wonderful invigorating activity away from them." "For the honeybee to regain her health" "I think we also have to see that the swarming is allowed again as much as possible." "When somebody calls, and I'm on lists all over the place for swarms," "I actually go to the hives where people are freaked out and they're afraid." "That to me is like," "Uh oh!" "Hive in danger." "A lot of people will call an exterminator." "They really think that the bees are going to attack or something like that." "They are at their most docile at that time." "Exterminators come and they poison them!" "I tell people that," "You are seeing a miracle of nature." "This is a force of nature come and landed on your tree." "The beehive is just simply moving to a new home." "The woman I was helping she had just taken my class." "She didn't have any bees before." "Often I say," "Get a swarm." "Don't buy bees." "That's commercial, that's cattle ranching bees." "And I invite them to come with me on a swarm call." "And I help people get set up with their first hive." "It's so wonderful, then they get to handle the bees and they get to be with them." "It isn't just sticking them into a box and letting them grow." "So they get to interact with them right from the very beginning." "Isn't that beautiful?" "You could see how happy she was and she started singing with the bees and she was feeling into them and... she'll be a good bee momma." "I can't express it!" "I'm like a little kid." "It's like I got my first bicycle or something, I don't know." "I'm just so excited to work with them and learn with them and... yeah." "A movement of Rooftop  Backyard Beekeeping is rising in popularity around the world." "I wonder if bees paint." "And if they do, how?" "My name is Wisteria and I'm a backyard beekeeper in Portland, Oregon and we are building beehives and painting bee boxes." "I've got my friends and family and members of the bee project here." "We're tasting mead..." "Which is delicious." "It has a little bit of sparkle to it." "...and just sharing with families from Portland what beekeeping is all about." "I'm a rooftop beekeeper in New York City." "And I'm a third generation beekeeper." "It's illegal here to keep bees." "It kind of scares me, it worries me a little bit." "I really would like to keep my bees." "We're really just trying to do something simple for nature." "This is really a crazy moment here." "As we're doing this there is a swarm of bees!" "They look like they're going into that tree right there which, is not... is just completely bizarre." "I'm not sure where they came from and they're coming closer." "It does look like they are sort of aiming right in there though." "That's crazy." "Yeah, I've never quite seen this happening." "I think you guys brought that mojo, honestly." "Only in the Bronx, baby, are you going to find a swarm." "Legalize beekeeping!" "Give the bees a chance." "Long live the honeybee!" "Wooo!" "All we are saying is, give bees a chance." "Legalize beekeeping!" "Woo!" "Give the bees a chance!" "Beekeeping, the vital practice of managing and maintaining honeybee colonies for pollination and honey production, is a banned practice in New York City." "This ban is outdated and detrimental to the health and wellbeing of our urban environment and our community." "This bill needs our support and I encourage you to call your city council representative today and encourage them to support councilman Yasskys bill." "One of my neighbors, probably because they were uninformed and scared maybe, reported the hive to the health department and as a result I was served with a notice of violation and I have to appear at a hearing in fifteen minutes." "If she has a child and sees, as she pointed out, this swarm of bees..." "If beekeeping is done properly it's a safe activity." "This solves both problems." "Let's people who want to do it, do it, and make sure that those who are going to engage in this beekeeping do it safely." "So, here we have a wonderful opportunity to do what other great cities have done:" "legalize bees, allow for honey production, whether it's on a tiny rooftop or small garden and build the sustainability movement bee by bee." "At our Honey Festival there'll be tastings and jugglers and demonstrations so you should definitely come and pick up your local honey there." "And all this week restaurants across New York City are participating in New York Nectar." "So, I'm a beekeeper here at the Center for Discovery." "I just had this sense that I had this calling to do service." "And so, I'm at home, I'm in heaven here." "One of the most amazing things about the farm is that we're... we're working with people with disabilities." "But by working with them in a... and integrating them into a farm based program they really become individuals with abilities." "Nice work!" "People with autism have this innate affinity for nature and so by working outside they're at home." "So when I think about Colony Collapse Disorder" "I really hope that we can, as a society, have a connection with nature instead of a disconnect with nature." "And one of the things that I really enjoy about the bees is that they all have this really strong sense of mission." "It's not about individual advantage." "It's not about getting ahead." "They take on different tasks, like they might start off as a housekeeper and then a nurse bee and much like we have different roles here." "We have integration specialists and skills trainers, all sorts of people coming together as a team to provide a really rich and meaningful life for our residents here." "Our job is to create a family for them and to build a community that they can really thrive in and where they can find their own niche to really be the individual that they really are." "If you take a single bee out of a hive, it actually can't live on it's own." "It's biologically dependent upon community." "And even though some humans can survive on their own, the individuals that we take care of here cannot." "They really are dependent upon on a team of people coming together to be of service to them." "And coming together in all humility, just like the bees do when they take on their individual roles, in their particular stage of life." "We have to care for nature in the right way and nature will care for us in turn." "So community is not just a human problem, it's a global problem, community with one another and nature." "So human community is the perfect training ground for community with the planet, with nature." "We keep bees because we love them and we love them because they need our help now." "Someone has to take care of them and so the beekeepers job is to see that the bees stay happy and healthy." "We now have three colonies of bees in that garden." "The children are absolutely relaxed in their presence." "They are aware of the problems of the honeybee." "So, bees belong to be all over the world and the great problem now is they are not because we are creating places where they can't live." "That's why we're doing what we're doing here in the garden." "We're trying to show you young people how to put bees everywhere." "Colony Collapse, I've experienced it." "I'm an organic beekeeper with the best of intentions." "I've gone to some hives and they're gone." "The problems are here." "They're everybody's problems now and we all suffer the consequences of that." "Commercial beekeepers cannot stop and reverse direction without risking bankruptcy." "And an alternative to rolling on the interstates 20,000 miles a year would be to go to the various monoculture productions and simply tell them," "The writing is on the wall." "One of these springs you're going to call for migratory beekeepers and they won't be there for you and you'll be out of business." "Why don't you take a small portion of your holdings and plow it under and plant it with bee friendly crops to sustain those creatures all year long not just for three weeks in the spring." "That way you will know what your situation is because they'll be there right on your property." "The honeybee belongs on every farm." "Turning this crisis around is not going to be easy and it won't happen overnight." "The bees are telling us to become true caretakers and the only solution is creating a surrounding of wild flowers and forage and diversity." "Spikenard Farm has been not only a challenge but the variety of tasks for me is just, at times, overwhelming." "You can't manage everything alone." "And the help from other human beings and other beings has to come in." "Even in two years now a much greater variety of insects are coming back." "It's very deeply satisfying." "And honeybee sanctuaries are springing up like mushrooms in this country." "People have asked me, Why do you do what you're doing?" "Do you have hope with all the mess we are in, with all we are doing in nature?" "and I would say I would have hope to the very last day to the last plant." "The bees are the most exquisite beings." "They show us what this service can be like." "The longtime ban was overturned and it's now legal to be a beekeeper in New York City." "Günther and Vivian Hauk sind nach Floyd in Virginia gezogen, where they continue Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctuary." "How to help honeybees:" "1." "Grow flowers, plants and herbs to help provide food for bees." "2." "Eliminate pesticides in your garden and lawn." "3." "Bees are thirsty." "Provide a continuous shallow basin with clean water in your garden." "4." "Buy directly from a local beekeeper who avoids chemicals and produces raw honey." "5." "Eat organic and pesticide free food." "6." "Become a beekeeper with sustainable practices."