Peter Borst quotes Kevin Kelly:  “That leads us to wonder what else is 
packed into the bee that we haven't seen yet?”

There is seeing and then there is the complex intellectual process of 
describing what you see.  I believe, Peter, that when it comes to bees you 
may well have “seen it all” as have many wise old beekeepers on this list.  
All the discussion, all the theorizing, all the arguing revolves around 
describing what we think we have seen.  This is a purely intellectual 
process and it can never be complete.  It is a process of breaking things 
down to whatever level our woefully inadequate intellects can grasp.  It is 
also a process that involves filtering everything we see through our own 
preferences and aversions so by the time it gets processed by the intellect 
it can be more a matter of what we want or don’t want to see than what is 
actually there.  Science, logic and math are the tools we supposedly use to 
take this filter away and get at what are sometimes pretty complex sets of 
facts, at least by human intellectual standards.  The difficulty comes when 
we fail to see how far away from a complete picture we are with even the 
highest level of intellectual understanding.  Fortunately we are not 
limited by our intellects and we have the possibility to “grok” things as 
Heinlein would say.  It is what allows beekeeping and living to have the 
potential to become art.  It happens when you have really seen what you are 
looking at.  You may have looked at tens of thousands of beehives but one 
day you have an epiphany and suddenly you realize something you didn’t 
before.  The ultimate possibility is that in that moment you “know” a 
colony of bees for the first time.  I can’t say it’s happened to me, but I 
hope we all have that experience at some point in our lives.  

Steve Noble

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