By being at one with the natural world, by paying homage to the sun, by centring our lives around Spirit
or the Goddess, we can work together in community.
~ The Druid Animal Oracle, Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm,
writing about the bee.
You may well drink mead in ritual. You may well light beeswax candles. You’re aware that honey bees produce both wax and honey, after all, there’s a stylised bee, or a skep, or out of date white bee hive on the jar that you bought from a supermarket (or possibly a farmers’ market). The one thing that everyone seems to know about bees right now is that they’re in a state of crisis.
With farmers forced to spray crops with ever changing pesticides, wild flower meadows yielding to housing estates, ‘gardens’ being paved over, it really is small wonder that numbers are declining. Beekeepers have been quick
to point the finger at any or all of the above.
Phil Chandler argues that the root of the problem is the way in which we keep bees. We steal their honey and give them sugar. We ‘keep’ bees in wooden hives on rectangular frames which make it easier for humans to extract honey.
Everything that has been done since bee farming came into being has been about controlling nature, controlling the bee to make it more productive for us, homo sapiens.