In November I journeyed to the chilly climes of Santa Fe, New Mexico to attend the North American Biodynamic Conference. Not only was Santa Fe beautiful with its scrub brush and sage dotted hills and its star-filled night skies, but how refreshing it was to spend a few days around a large group of people who don’t think you’re crazy for wanting to fill a cow horn with manure and bury it in the ground to aid in the growth of your crops. And how nice to hear, in common conversation, how people have been experimenting with different kinds of meditations with the herbs and flowers they grow or how they work with their land and its natural contours with farming or animal husbandry instead of disregarding the natural cycles and flow of nature.

It was difficult to choose, each day, which of the myriad wonderful lectures to go to. Those I ended up attending included: The Spirit of Healing Plants with Deb Soule and Claudia J. Ford; Working with Elemental Beings with Harald and Cynthia Hoven; Water Resilience on the Farm with Hugh Williams, Don Bustos, and Don Tipping; and Experiencing Soil and Compost Through Color, Form, and Pattern with Bruno Follador. These lectures were all engaging and insightful and had elements I will continue to investigate in the future. However, the real gem of the conference for me was the lecture on Biodynamic Beekeeping with Gunther Hauk and Alex Tuchman from Spiknard Farm in Virginia. Though I am so thrilled to have be able to see these other speakers and to connect with many wonderful people at the conference, this talk on beekeeping was my primary reason for making this journey.

Gunther and Alex began their talk by reminding us that “til the last flower there is hope”; they ended by reminding us that each hive has a guiding elemental being and that from us humans, elemental beings may learn freedom and love, and from them, humans must learn how to care for nature.

In between these two pearls of insight they covered  vast realms of wisdom about the bees. They spun a grand tale telling of where the bees have been in relation to humans throughout history.  Starting with what Steiner called “the mystery centers of antiquity”, they spoke about the sacred role of bees in ancient times and of their honored symbolism as sustainers of life and fertility among sacred temples from ancient Egypt and ancient Greece.

They told us about how the industrial revolution of the twentieth century sucked beekeeping into a paradigm of production: forcing its output to be bigger and to be specialized. In doing this, the wholeness of the hive is ignored and thus weakens the bees as a whole. Because the bees are so intimately connected with the plants they pollinate, and because those plants are so connected to other insects and to the soil itself, the industrialization of beekeeping – with its ignorance of the wisdom of the bees – had a big hand in what we now see as Colony Collapse Disorder, as well as other sour implications of the industrialization of agriculture and beekeeping on the land in general. This is why the holistic approach to beekeeping is integral to the bees’, as well as our own, survival; “the laws of industry and the laws of nature are as diametrically opposed as they can be”.

This sense of wholeness we must remember to acknowledge with the bees, they said, is important because of their instincts and their “spiritual group soul”. This group soul is something that humans had long, long ago, back in the dreamtimes of our ancestors, but that we have now traded for individuality and karma, but which still encompasses the bees.  It is like a frequency that each bee tunes into; it is like an instinct of the soul that they all share. The hive mind is not the building blocks of the utopia of communism, where each being only thinks so far as their role as a cog will let them, for the sake of the communal machine, but rather it is the pulse of a dynamic entity which connects them to each other and to the great web of life, allowing them to see and feel all the connections of the life and death cycles of nature.

Within these veins of spiritual understanding Gunther and Alex wove threads of biological information about the bees and the workings of the hive. They spoke of the hive as body and of the three types of bees (the queen, the workers, and the drones) as this body’s organs. They illuminated the gestation cycles of the three types of bees as well as their various roles at different times in their lives in the hive. All this they shared with us from the view of respecting the bees for their natural tendencies and not from the view of modern science – a science which negatively affects the bees’ group soul by caring only for what can be produced and sold and by ignoring the intricate way the bees maintain their vitality.

Two points in particular which fascinated me, as I have only learned beekeeping from production oriented beekeepers thus far, were their thoughts on swarms and on drones. Swarms, they said, are a gesture. They are the impulse of reproduction of the hive. Many modern beekeepers are irritated by swarms because they are inconvenient, and many beekeepers attempt to keep their hives from swarming. But, as we learned, a swarming hive is actually a sign of health, for all living entities need change and movement to continue to live.

Drones are another part of the hive often written off as virtually useless by most modern beekeepers. However, the drones are just as integral to the hive as the Queen herself. Gunther and Alex continued with the analogy of the body by calling the drones “the nerves, or outward senses, of the hive”. The drones have bigger eyes and can fly further distances than other bees; they are also allowed into any hive, not just the one of their birth. These abilities allow them to expand the consciousness of the hives as well as connect them to each other through genetics and through the passing of information that I think humans can’t even understand. I thought this was such a beautiful image of the drones that I had as yet never pondered myself.

This talk was such a wonderful introduction to biodynamic beekeeping that I feel infinitely more prepared, both spiritually and practically, to now continue my own research into these topics as well as to enter into the journey of having my own hives. I hope to visit Gunther and Alex on their farm in Virginia and continue to learn more from them in these areas. Their synthesis of intuition and biological observations has inspired to me continue my own research into the ever-deepening relationships we must form with the bees. As Gunther and Alex said, the bees need our care, as we too very much need theirs.

Spikenard Farm, Floyd Virginia