There was I, blithely going my own way, when an email from a reader stopped me in my tracks and made me rack my conscience as if the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada himself was at work.
This followed my Newsletter last week in which I described shifting my hives about 25m with the help of my bee buddy, Dennis, and then getting stung when I subsequently tried to feed the bees.
I said that the standard lore among the beekeeping priesthood is that you should move a hive less than three feet or more than three miles to make sure that the bees don’t become disorientated and keep going back to the place where they expect to find the hive, where they will eventually die in confusion. I said that Dennis took the heretical view that the bees were smarter than the priesthood reckoned and was confident that most would adjust easily to a new position and quickly find their way home.
At the end of the piece, I recorded Dennis’s advice, where he said, “Be prepared to lose some of them who keep going back to the old place.” This was the cause of the trouble.
‘ “Be prepared to lose some of them who keep going back to the old place,” wrote my accuser. So they aren’t smarter than “the priesthood”. You just are losing the foragers that orientated to that spot. You could’ve moved the hive much further away (3+ miles ?) and then back to your new spot. RIP to those foragers🙏, but I’d say those stings are your karma.’
Ouch. The impact of this rebuke was like walking into a wall with your eyes closed.
I simply hadn’t considered the possibility that I might be doing something morally questionable in leaving those homeless bees to their fate…
…but now you come to mention it…
The accusation brought up a lot of uncomfortable questions and self-scrutiny. I had to acknowledge that – if I gave them any thought at all - I had regarded the deaths of those homeless bees as some form of collateral damage (in the commercial lingo the US military adopted to shroud civilian deaths in acts of war).
But how many bees would I have been prepared to sacrifice that way? 20? 100? 1000? And by what criteria of judgment?
I would never abandon a dog or a cat so heartlessly and leave it to find its way to a new home or die. Still less a child. Why would I do it to a bee which depended on me?
Looking into my own past, I had to acknowledge that a savage and brutal indifference to the pains and deaths of animals was ingrained in my character at an early stage. My childhood in the countryside in the 1950s included the routine slaughter of living creatures. All my boyhood friends owned rusty air-guns or had free access to their fathers’ shotguns and we roamed around, casually killing rabbits, pigeons and – I am ashamed to say – starlings and rooks with conscienceless indifference. In late summer, I would swat flies in the kitchen with the sole of my slipper and my mother gave me a shilling for every 100 I claimed. It never occurred to me that they had any kind of right to life. Not many seven year-olds in post-War Britain would have been acquainted with Wordsworth’s lines in True Dignity:
He who feels contempt
For any living thing, hath faculties
That he hath never used, and thought with him
Is in its infancy
But I no longer have any excuse of infancy or ignorance. Nearing the end of my life, I have come to be a disciple not only of the gospel of love but also, more distantly, of the Atman of all living things as expressed in the Hindu Upanishads. How could I so thoughtlessly have committed this sin against my own charges?
Well, actually, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds and not so sad as my correspondent made out. After a few days of leaving them alone, I removed the foliage which had been screening the entrances to my hives and found that my colonies had made themselves at home in their new spot as if to the manor born. When the sun shone, both hives were going gangbusters with foragers zooming in and out, showing no apparent uncertainty about their destination.
Meanwhile, the nook beside the garage where the hives had previously stood was effectively beeless. I went back on several days to check and never found more than five bees buzzing around looking a bit bewildered.
In exchange for giving tens of thousands of bees a better life in the sun, therefore, I might have lost – I’m guessing – maybe a couple of dozen. Wouldn’t you call that a reasonable exchange, by any measure of a cost/benefit calculation? I might easily have lost that number - and thousands more - trying to transport them three miles. The whole lot might have escaped and swarmed around in the back of the car. And then I might have died, crashing into a tree, and an altogether different cost/benefit calculation would have been required.
In summary, then, if the karma I had to suffer as a consequence was a single sting on my cheek, I think I can live with that.
So if it’s all right with you, Torquey baby, I think I’ll now ease myself off that rack.
Which is best for each bee and the hive? New or old position? You didnt deliberately set out to harm them nor to damage their home. You set out to improve their individual and collective lot. Could you have done anything more to assure trauma was minimised? Seems not.
My animal lover conscience prompts me - if you could have saved more bees, and you know you could, you should have. May I suggest if you move a hive with an active colony, you understand and work with the ancient wisdom, or in fact, learn more. Here’s another part of tradition, to go with your ‘loose grass in the entrance of the moved hive’ - place a nuc with an old drawn comb inside, for the lost & the lonely to shelter and come together. Every evening take them back to their family & replace the nuc to catch tomorrow’s abandoned, then repeat for all the other little lost souls, until you’ve discharged your duty as ‘keeper’.