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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology

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From:
stephen rice <[log in to unmask]>
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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 7 May 2014 01:29:51 -0400
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I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that organic farming came out of Steiner's work.  True enough that biodynamic farming is 'organic', but there've been lots of anti-pesticide or anti- chemical fertilizer advocates over the years who've had nothing to do with Steiner and his ilk.  My own involvement with organic farming grew out of reading Carson's "Silent Spring" in the mid-seventies  -- and, it's true, from living as a hippie on a nascent commune.  There were a lot of strange ideas going around, but no one I knew thought it necessary to seal a concoction of herbs in a hollow cow horn and bury it in a swamp on the night of the full moon, dig it up and month later and use it as fertilizer, as I have seen done in biodynamic circles.  
     My own introduction to Steiner came at about the time I began keeping bees.  My wife was teaching in a Steiner school and my children were attending it. As part of the indoctrination parents were urged to participate in seminars and attend lectures. We read books and articles by Steiner and on anthroposophy.  They urged me to read Steiner's work on bees.  I was then doing a PhD in philosophy and was unable to adopt the proper non-skeptical attitude to what the great man had said. I read a few pages of the bee work and decided it, as the rest, was worth reading only for amusement. 
  Not long after that I was beekeeping with a friend who had been influenced by the biodynamic side of things and by Steiner's lectures on Bees.  There was trouble with varroa and he reported that Steiner said that the reason bees get diseases is because we keep them in squares and force them to build their comb onto square frames when they should be in rounds (that being the vibrationally purer form) and building comb as they like. Fine, I said. Let's do the experiment. Put them in tubes and hollow logs, let them build natural comb, and see what happens.
     They died. Of varroa.
     Of course it was impossible to see what was happening in the nest without doing serious damage to it. And if we did, they would abscond.
The one useful thing to come out of it was getting an idea of nest architecture without frames. They would sometimes build conical structures that would end in a hole the size of a bee. Those spots must be really easy to insulate on a cold night. It was also fascinating to see that, even without frames to guide them, very often the comb would be built in long rows parallel to each other.

Here is one of my favourite lines from an anthroposophical text:  "But mankind fell more deeply into matter than was intended". 
 As has been noted, these people don't think very clearly. In fact, they don't seem to want to.

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