Wondering Wednesday Question and Answer #34

What did Rudolf Steiner say about Honeybees? Part 5

What did Rudolf Steiner say about Honeybees? Part 5

We’ve come a long way thus far (about halfway; there are nine lectures total) as I’ve tried to make Steiner’s honeybee lectures accessible and understandable, for you and for me!  We are currently looking at Lecture 5, which is a bit of a smorgasbord of topics, although I can see Steiner weaving some things together in an interesting way.  I can also see influences of other things that Steiner was working on, writing and speaking about, at that same time in his life.  I’ve previously mentioned, but it’s worth saying again, that Steiner was nearing the (somewhat early and premature) end of his life, and by this time had birthed a large number of movements in education, agriculture, art, medicine, religion, and more.  

While skipping over some of his smaller points, I’ll try to deal with two major themes in Steiner’s remarks here: the importance of regarding the whole over the parts, and questions of economics.  The following essay is quite long, so get yourself a cup of tea or break it up into parts if you’re interested in making the commitment.  The very end segues to some words of gratitude I have for all of you who read and support our Bub’s Honey initiative!

First, the whole over the parts: Steiner employs an interesting imaginative device to make the point of the wholeness of the honeybee hive, and the complimentary wholeness of a human being (he’s doing this while responding to a question from some of the beekeepers about the well-known tradition that when a longtime beekeeper, or another member of the beekeeping family dies, the bees must be informed of the loss, or they could suffer serious setbacks).  Steiner asks his listeners to imagine visually zooming in and zooming out, on a beehive, and on a human being.  More specifically, he speaks about using a “magnifying glass” and a “diminishing glass,” and describes how, if you were to zoom in on a human being, at a certain high power of magnification, you would see “little dots, moving around”. 

(I find this interesting because Steiner is often accused of being unscientific and yet, as these comments show,  he is quite aware of Brownian motion of molecules at high magnification etc through these comments.  Brownian motion is the easily observable phenomenon that if you put little impurities, like milk fat globules or dust, into water and put it under a microscope, you will see the globs jiggle and shake around. The idea is that the globs are jiggling because the molecules [which are much smaller than the globs] are also moving in this way.  So, we understand now that all physical matter has this inherent non-stop “jiggliness” to it. Gasses are the most jiggly, liquids less so, and solids “jiggle in place” in crystal lattices.)

Anyway, Steiner comments that, if one were to zoom in on a portion of the human body sufficiently, these “little moving dots” would, in fact, look a lot like bees moving about a beehive. If you click on the link to the video above, you could get a sense for what I think Steiner is talking about.  Conversely, Steiner says, if you zoomed out on a beehive, the individual bees moving about would start to look like a whole, moving and acting in unison. Steiner specifically says that the hive might start to look like a muscle, actually.  

Steiner further points out that if you have a friend you reunite with after 10 years of not seeing him, every single one of that person’s “dots” (molecules) has been replaced. . . and yet you recognize the person immediately!  The point here is not different from the one Steiner was making when he was disassembling “vitamin thinking” in lecture 4: not only is the whole more than the parts; it should remain primary in terms of our understanding, and the parts are secondary. This is a complete inversion of the current materialistic way of doing science.  The whole beehive, and the whole human being are the lens that gives the most information. This does not preclude looking sometimes at the parts (and in fact, every small part of the whole carries the image of the whole within it, just at a different scale).  But if you make the mistake of thinking that the parts are driving the behavior of the whole, you are deceiving yourself and excluding huge areas of experience, perhaps for the sake of enforced simplicity and the illusion of complete understanding.

So you see, it is entirely unnecessary that it should be due to these minute creatures and plants of which we consist, that we are able to recognise one another, for it is the whole man, who again recognises us. The colony is not only just so and so many thousands of bees, the whole host of bees is a whole and complete unitary being that recognises a man or does not recognise him. If you had a diminishing glass instead of a magnifying glass you would be able to gather all these bees together; you could then visualise them as united in the same way as a human muscle. It is just this fact that one has to bear in mind with bees — that one is not dealing with single individual bees but must consider them as a whole, as belonging together as one whole.

When I was first grappling with Steiner’s ideas and trying to rectify it with my materialistic physics training, I found coming back to the above idea again and again very helpful. Our bias for the primacy of the parts is so deep it usually remains unnoticed as a bias at all.

Steiner moves on to beekeeping economics:

One of the things that seems to have generated the most incredulity from the participants is Steiner’s statement that within “80 or 100 years,” bee colonies would collapse in a big way due to our overuse and abuse of their gifts.  And yet Steiner seems to have been spot on in this prediction! The hundredth anniversary of these lectures is this November. Colony collapse disorder and large-scale concern for honeybees has been going on for about the last twenty years, and things are not currently getting better.  

In order to shed light on this question, Steiner spends some time talking about what was happening at that time in “modern dairies”.  Cows, Steiner said, were giving far too much milk through modern farming methods in which the maximization of product and therefore profit was the motive.  Steiner describes the effect of forcing cows to produce so much milk as leading to weakness in the calves of those cows, and also in subsequent generations.

This breeding for milk-production is still of short standing, but I know very well that if it continues, if a cow is forced to yield six gallons of milk a day, if you continue thus maltreating it, all breeding of cows will after a time go absolutely to ruin. There is nothing to be done.

This is pretty stark and frank language from Steiner. Looking up the current production values is interesting and shocking. It seems that even in Steiner’s time, they were forcing cows to overproduce, and today, cows are producing milk at just about exactly the rate Steiner quotes and says will be disastrous for breeding healthy animals: 6-7 gallons per day!

In this discussion of food production for profit, Steiner weaves in memories of his youth, when, despite their modest means, he had as much honey to eat as he wanted, simply because the neighbors kept bees and gave honey as a gift.

We got all our honey from our neighbours as a gift, for Christmas or at other times, indeed we had so much given us that we had honey all the year round. Honey was given away in those days.

You see the economic problem was not of great interest to me because, as a boy I ate a terrible lot of honey, as much indeed as I wanted of the honey that was given us.

How could this be? Nowadays, under the same circumstances one could not get so much honey as a gift, but in those days the bee-keepers in the neighbourhood of my parents' home were mostly farmers, and honey was just a part of the general farm produce. This is quite a different matter, gentlemen, from starting bee-keeping as some of you do while living on the wages you earn.

The question of the economics of beekeeping is a strong one then and today. It was already being reduced to “honey production” even by that time 100 years ago. It was highly relevant for Steiner. He was pointing to its inherent imbalance (the imbalance of profit motive and maximizing production at the expense of the health of the cow, bee, or land), and saying quite plainly that if we continue in these methods, it will lead to collapse and destruction of nature’s creatures and their inherent vitality and wisdom.  And yet, he acknowledges that the time is not right yet to change the world’s ways, because people in Steiner’s time were too enamored of their “modern methods,” and the quick wealth it produced.

One cannot as yet say very much against these artificial methods in bee-keeping today, because we are now living under conditions in which nothing can be done in the social domain.

To give some context, at this same time, Steiner had made strong attempts, in the wake of the horrific First World War, to convince European leaders that an overhaul of societal organization was needed.  He was giving lectures and writing books about what he called the “Threefold Social Order”.  It would be a huge digression to describe Steiner’s thoughts about this here, but one nugget I want to share is that Steiner divides social life writ large into three major areas or spheres of activity: (1) Economic Life, (2) Political and Legal Life, and (3) Social and Artistic Life, and that each one of these spheres are connected with an ideal.  In fact they are the exact ideals of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.  Furthermore, and this is something that never ceases to intrigue me, economic life, contrary to all we might understand today about economics and money today, is connected with: Fraternity!  Brother- and sister-hood, through economics?!?  What a far-out concept that seems entirely contrary to how we understand economics systems today!

For this reason we really have to say that here also we must trust that little by little men will come to realise that better social conditions must be brought about. I believe there will then be less talk as to whether things are profitable or not. 

Wow.  Well, that hasn’t happened yet, has it?  Or has it? Many people are certainly waking up to our inhumane farming systems, to the collapse of honeybees, to the need to preserve natural areas and protect soil, water and air, and to a dire need for better ways to feed each other.  There are many initiatives out there that I am aware of, in farming and banking and commerce (and I often wonder how many more there are out there that I don’t know about) who, like me, have realized how bankrupt the profit-based market economy is.  An exciting thought to me is that many millions of people worldwide may be taking steps like I am . . . and we wouldn’t necessarily know about each other, precisely because we have stepped out of the system!  I think there are signs that many of us, despite many difficulties in trying to “exit the Matrix”, are doing our best to step out of usual profit-obsessed modalities in at least some areas of our lives.  It’s not easy.

In our Bub’s Honey business, we’ve been very clear from the start that our goals do not include maximization of honey production.  Rather, I want to work toward the greatest health of my bees and educate myself and others in the process.  While I am working toward that goal, the bees themselves will respond, and bring rewards, tangible and intangible, to the extent that I am working in sync with them. 

We have not “turned a profit” at Bub’s Honey yet in the monetary sense, nor do we much plan to; but I think about the many of you who read these Wondering Wednesdays, about the several of you that are supporting our work through donated funds, physical help and technical building expertise, and your general goodwill.  I love the idea that I am making so many “profits” that are non-monetary in nature, that are in fact, based on connections with all of you and anyone else who buys honey or attends a workshop . . . connections that are more familial, more like sisterhood and brotherhood.  The bees do not work on a monetary profit model, and so why should I? They work entirely and industriously on a model of gift-giving and receiving, and are completely devoted to each other and their common work. And, if I try to raise local bees who are in touch with their surroundings, all of their work enhances the life of the entire living plant world around me.  It is a model of reciprocity that is truly inspiring.

Robin Wall Kimmerer recently wrote an article all about this in which she meditates on the serviceberry bush and arrives at the very same conclusion: That reciprocity is the key to an economic life that will enhance human and non-human nature alike. Her article is even longer than mine, but really worth reading. We have arrived at the time when Steiner predicted we’d have to make a choice, and whether we know it or not, each day we are making that choice: more family, or more dollar bills? Let’s see what we decide.

Photo by Sam 🐷 on Unsplash