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.
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!
The honeybee is important because
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.
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 mechanizationhas gone into beekeeping
to make it profitable.
And that has brought down the honeybee in its vitality,
in its 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 you're 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 Valentines 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's there's enough natural
nectar and honey on the hive
to supplement whatever feed they get out of the syrup.
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 down hill.
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.
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.
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 its 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 neuro- toxic, 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 seque- ncing of the entire honeybee genome,
honeybees are distinctly lacking enzymes that break down poisons or toxins.
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
that 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.
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.
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 interfering, 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?
Well 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 she's 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 lets 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 wondoo.
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.
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.
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 man- aging 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 Yassky's 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.
Lets 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 beekeeper's 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.