In recent years, the mysterious disappearance of bees has puzzled specialists from around the world. In the United States alone, the population of honey bees declined by 50% compared with the mark of 50 years ago. Scientists estimate that nearly 700 species of bees are currently endangered. No one can determine the exact cause of the "bee apocalypse", but among the main problems are the effects of toxic pesticides, loss of biodiversity and climate change.
German beekeeper Thiele
Michael Yoshin Thiele, a German living in California, believes that the problem can be solved by returning the bees to the wild. Since its appearance on our planet more than 100 million years ago, bees have been a key species for the forest environment, and 90% of plant life depended on pollination. But with the beginning of commercial beekeeping, bees increasingly began to live in conditions that did not correspond to their natural habitat.
Since 2006, Thiele worked with a team of biologists, beekeepers and botanists to launch beekeeping projects: from workshops on installing log hives in backyards to courses on building beekeeping nurseries inside organic farms. In 2017, he founded Apis Arborea, a platform for sharing beekeeping knowledge. The name of the project fully reflects its philosophy. “We always appreciated bees only for what they do for people, ” Thiele says. “It's time to tell what they do for our ecosystem as a whole.”
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Fateful dream
For Thiele, it all started with sleep. “In February 2002, I had an incredibly vivid dream about bees, ” says Thiele. “I saw how Roy suddenly appeared in the wild.” This vision not only did not arouse his fear, but inspired awe. Soon there were several more dreams related to bees. By spring, Thiel, who was studying as a lay monk in the Zen Center of San Francisco, asked a local beekeeper to lend him at least some equipment. By a strange coincidence, the next day a swarm of bees appeared right in front of his house. “I worked in the garden, ” he says, “and suddenly my wife calls me, and I see a swarm of bees clinging to my things.”
Since then, Thiele, a 54-year-old man with a broad smile and bright blue eyes, has dedicated his professional life to bees.
Trick Methods
After a few months, Thiele began to feel that something was wrong in ordinary beekeeping. At that time, the Zen beekeeper practiced various meditation techniques, from silent retreats to individual classes with Zen masters, and he began to develop an almost spiritual connection with his bees. Thiele diligently tried to "understand their needs." “It can be said that I got another, new feeling that I did not know before, ” Thiele admits. Soon, he began to realize that his bees did not live as they would like.
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He looked for answers in the scientific literature about how honey bees live in the wild, and realized how much this little-known area of knowledge. “Most of our research is on bees living in captivity, ” he says. “It's as if everything we know about lions was based on studies of lions living in zoos.”
Scientists support
In the 1990s, when the infamous parasitic tick first began emptying hives across North America, Cornell University Biology Professor Thomas D. Seeley conducted a study on wild honey bees from that region. Surprisingly, the wild honey bees that lived in the Arnote forest in New York State adapted to the tick much better than their captive counterparts. Like Thiele, Seeley found that there was a huge gap in knowledge about wild bees. In his recently published book, Life of the Bees: The Untold Story of the Honeybee in the Wild, Seeley helped fill that gap. Many of his discoveries, based on observation of wild bee colonies in the Arnote forest, echo the thoughts of Thiele.
For example, one of the first things Thiele questioned in beekeeping was the location of the hive. “Many people plant their apiaries at ground level, ” he says. “But wild bees instinctively prefer to live about 6 meters from the surface.” Seeley reported the same observation in his book, explaining that wild bees build nests far from the ground, probably to prevent attacks by bears and other predators, and also to not be covered with snow in winter.
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Wider and higher
Thiele later began to doubt the density of the hive. “The average volume of forest hives is about 40 liters, and between them there are always more than 200-250 meters, ” he says. “Most beekeepers place much more bees in hives designed for 160-180 liters of volume and located very close to each other." As Seeley points out, the high density and large size of the artificial colonies are designed to increase honey production, but do not work well in containing the disease. This is partly why wild colonies proved to be more resistant to varroa ticks, since ticks cannot spread so easily in more spacious environments.
Most beekeepers in North America keep bees in a kind of bee condominium made from folded boxes with removable frames. Thiele believes that many aspects of his design are not suitable for bees. In addition, plastic materials can also slow down communication within the hive, since plastic vibrates at a different frequency than organic material.
With bees at the same time
Over the past 20 years, Thiele devoted all his free time to bees. To watch them with maximum benefit, he even worked without the traditional protective equipment. “To better understand the bees, you need to let go of the fear of being stung, ” Thiele said. “I literally work with my bare hands to better understand the swarm. It's like taking someone's hand and feeling its warmth.”
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At school, the boy loved one girl. After 33 years, she wrote him on FacebookIn addition, when installing beehives from logs high on trees, he uses only organic materials such as ropes and wax. It creates entrances to natural nests by placing a small piece of honeycomb at the hole and covering it with tincture of propolis, an antibacterial resin produced by bees to seal the holes in the hive. “For them, it smells like home, ” he says. Thiel estimates that his projects usually result in a 50 percent increase in the population of the colony.
With the development of urban beekeeping, Thiele considers it extremely important to inform the general public about the importance of creating a healthy environment for bees to live. “Some urban beekeepers do more harm than good, ” he says. “Cheap and easy to assemble hives, which are now trending among bee lovers, are built from toxic materials and are too dense. Often, bees get sick and eventually spread the disease on local wild bees."
