> some people do the same thing 
> year after year after year without 
> learning anything new,
	
For some, the struggle is real - Long Island NY beekeepers and EAS members
will remember Clifford Still fondly, who, despite being a pharmacist, and
thereby accustomed to mastering new and highly technical information on the
fly, would attend EAS every year, coming several days early to pay for, and
attend the "Beginners Track" short course.

For, like, 20 years.

He never took even the "Intermediate Track".  He was a fine beekeeper on the
tangible level, never riling up any of his half-dozen backyard hives, a
smooth manipulator of frames and bees.  But he simply was unsure of himself
when it came to diagnosing and dealing with even simple things, like finding
a queen cell, or noticing that there was no brood in a hive, and so on.
He'd make phone calls, he'd send photos attached to text messages, he'd ask
folks to come over and look over his shoulder.  He was such a nice guy,
everyone lent him a hand, of course, but he described himself candidly as a
"first year beekeeper for the 27th year in a row". 

And there are some beekeepers who want to make decisions "by committee".  I
see this a lot in hives that are placed in community gardens in Brooklyn,
NY.  I'd be asked to take a look at a hive, I'd run through the brood boxes,
declare the queen in need of some immediate "regime change", and then get
copied on an infinite number of emails, Telegram posts, and even Facebook
posts, while they debated the merits of requeening vs letting nature run its
course, when each and every superseded hive since the 2000s in the urban
core of the City has failed to produce a viably-mated queen, most likely due
to wind turbulence from buildings  and massive bird populations reducing
drone numbers at whatever DCAs the drones create.  (My theory is that part
of the problem might be that DCAs get started over the roof of each and
every Starbucks, as that's where unattached male humans tend to congregate
during the day, and there are way too many Starbucks.)

None of these folks are uneducated, nor are they slow learners.  It is more
of a preference, of unknown origin.  We'd need a good psychologist to work
out what is going on, but we had Richard Taylor, and no beekeepers even
noticed that he was a renowned psychologist/philosopher. (see "Metaphysics"
[1963], "Action and Purpose" [1966], "Good and Evil" [1970], "Virtue Ethics"
[1991]) I did go to the OARDC Wooster Ohio "bee museum", and sit on
Langstroth's bench while wearing one of Richard Taylor's straw hats, hoping
for enlightenment via osmosis at both ends, but I don't think the tactic
worked.

But, apple growers will attend talks by the local extension agent, listen
with care, take good notes, and do EXACTLY what they are told, without
question.  They want to make money, and they trust the Ag infrastructure to
serve up best practices on a silver platter.   Unlike beekeepers, who can do
nothing else, they never question, argue, or debate.  On the other hand, I
did see an apple grower pollination client pull out the spray rig when he
had a discipline problem with his kids, and I just had to tell him that
there were some problems that could NOT be solved by spraying.  :)

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