Ang Roell: Collective care and responsiveness in the hives of honeybees (ep414)
“One in four bites of our food is pollinated by honeybees, but at what cost in the system that we are in now? How could that look different if our agriculture was more localized, regionalized, and sustainable?”
In this episode, we warmly welcome Ang Roell—founder of They Keep Bees—to discuss their practice of working and learning with honeybees as models of resilience, care, and responsiveness. Ang’s work, which demystifies bees to decenter logics of power-over relations and consumer-driven work culture, frames a conversation around how we might learn from hive-lives in times of collapse.
Join us in this invitation to re-member our webs of interdependence—to slow down, swarm together, and work within rhythmic fields of collective care. And join us in alchemize: radical imagination for collective transformation, to experience two practices led by Ang: “You are a honeybee” and “Pollinating networks of collective care.”
About our guest:
Ang Roell (they/them) is a facilitator, writer and beekeeper. They reside in the Connecticut River watershed, where they co-operate They Keep Bees. They Keep Bees raises Varroa resistant queen bees, leads climate adaptive research, and facilitates skill shares.
Presently, they are working with Island Bee Project, a group of beekeepers in New York City, and they and their partner are building an alliance of Northeast beekeepers who are LGBTQ+ and BIPOC-identifying who want to continue to expand their professional development in the beekeeping world. Support this endeavor and their “Pay it Forward Fund” at their website, They Keep Bees, and sign up for their Substack newsletter to receive Ang’s reflections about navigating change — weaving in lessons from honeybees and the more-than-human world.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: Hopelessness Has Done Nothing For Me by Johanna Warren
Episode-inspired artwork by Eleanor Young
Dive deeper:
Learn more about Ang’s business They Keep Bees, and stay connected through their newsletter
The Mind of a Bee, a book by Lars Chittka
Learn more about researcher and behavioral biologist, Tom Seeley
Discover more about the non-profit organization, Island Bee Project
Find out about Ang’s hands on workshop, Queen School and more
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, a book by Tyson Yunkaporta
Learn more about Melanie Kirby who runs the Adaptive Bee Breeders Alliance and Megan Mahoney, who runs Mahoney Queens and Bees
Expand your lenses:
If you feel inspired by our work, join us on Patreon for more extended and bonus, behind-the-scenes conversations!
transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Ang Roell: These quotes, like one in four bites of food is pollinated by bees or 70% of the food that we consume. They're not wrong. They're just information taken out of context. And I think what's important to know is that in order to sustain the monocrop, large scale industrial agriculture that operates in the so-called United States currently as our quote unquote food system, is that bees have to be trucked all over the country to pollinate these huge swaths of monocrops. Often because there is no ecosystem around these monocrops, there's no way for them to be pollinated by local pollinators, native species of bees, etc., because there is just one crop that blooms at one time, which is unsustainable for the pollination environment around it, right? So bees have to be brought into those circumstances, and they serve in a contract of pollination.
Pollination is a subsidized cost of farming because it's so expensive to move bees around the country. And so many of them die and need to be replaced in that process that it ends up being a cost of doing business for farmers and it ends up being a cost that they can write off. And what happens in that is that you lose the care component of what happens to that animal. The farmer is invested in their crop. They see whatever that happens to the bee as the cost of doing business. And the beekeeper is maybe—I don't want to make this about the beekeeper or the farmer because it's not, it's about the system that they're like interwoven and committed to—but what I do want to say is that…
…in this system, honeybees are exploited as labor and a cost of doing business, which doesn't create a relationship with any reciprocity or care or tending within it because it just can't, because it's extractive by nature.
And so yes, like one in four bites of our food is pollinated by honeybees, but at what cost in the system that we are in now and how could that look different if our agriculture was more localized, regionalized, and sustainable.
Kamea Chayne: It sounds like the beehives that are a part of this big intensive agricultural system are really being treated as tools of productivity. And as you say, just the cost of doing business rather than being honored as living and breathing and beautiful creatures and beings with agency and senses of aliveness of their own. And one of the things that I'm keeping in mind is that honeybees are not native to what is now known as the United States and yet the entire food system there is so heavily reliant on pollination from honeybees. And I know you started touching on this, but can you share a bit more about how this came to be? Is this also due to the variety of food plants that specifically require honeybees as companion pollinators? Is it more so the scale that it operates that can't be sustained by other native pollinators? And otherwise, why does the modern food system rely on the mass transport of honeybee hives when I would presume every bioregion has its own native and local populations of pollinators?
Ang Roell: Yeah, every bioregion does in fact have its own native and local pollinators. Certainly at scale, those pollinators aren't going to be as efficient monocrop pollinators as honeybees because honeybees have what's called “nectar fidelity”, which essentially means that they find a source of food and they feed on that source of food, even if the conditions change and there's a better crop available, they'll feed on that source of food until it is completely expended. And so they'll pollinate clover until there's no more clover left. And for them, this is about efficiency of communication and having multiple bees visiting nectar source, they're trying to maximize what they get from that pollination service that they're giving to that plant and what they're able to take back to their young.
But in an ecosystem that would happen over several cycles right? So you would have maple bloom and for example and then you would have black locust bloom which is another tree crop and then you would have tulip poplar bloom which is another tree crop and so that succession allows for a diversity of diet for the honeybee and so they can live in many different ecosystems throughout the world because they can pollinate in that nectar fidelity way within that ecosystem without exhausting all the resources in that ecosystem. They can live in relative balance.
When you're talking about moving like hundreds of hives into an ecosystem, they have to have that scale of nectar fidelity on which to feed. And so to get to your question of like, why is this happening in the US, right? Why are we moving so many bees? And what was the starting point? Like, how did we get here kind of thing? I think we got here through the colonization of this continent that is now called the US. I think we got here through small farms becoming big farms and that sort of get big or die mentality that happened in agriculture over the last hundred years. I think we got here because we don't have enough Indigenous stewardship to make informed decisions about the agroecology in the different ecosystems within the US and how to sustain and care for those types of ecologies. Yeah, I think it's not, there's no like simple answer to how we got here.
It's a multi-layered moment, but because we now have monocrop agriculture, we have honey bees being trucked to different places, we have these huge scales to produce fruit and vegetables in this country, we have this huge demand for large swaths of pollinators to be able to pollinate those fruits and vegetables.
Kamea Chayne: And not to mention the amounts of pesticides that are used in industrial agriculture as well. And I wonder how that all works because it feels pretty common knowledge at this point that pesticides are not healthy for pollinators or any insects. And yet the food system relies on the support of pollinators. So I don't know, how has the industry contended with that sort of conflict in wanting to use agrochemicals to maximize yield, but also knowing that they need pollinators in order to, quote unquote, maximize efficiency?
Ang Roell: Yeah, and I think it becomes this massive compromise for both farmers and beekeepers. And I think I want to differentiate, there are many different kinds of beekeepers, there are small scale bee breeders, there are treatment free beekeepers, there are backyard beekeepers, there's like all these sort of subcultures of beekeeping that exist. But what we're talking about really is this, this industrial scale of agriculture that is activated in the U.S. and is almost like this hamster wheel that everybody in large scale agriculture is on, that it's like very hard to make any change, right? Like to stop using the pesticides or to stop moving the bees so much. It just feels like the scale is so massive and allegedly the demand is so large that we just can't possibly stop and make a change in this system. And so there's been an increased use of different kinds of pesticides or alternate pesticides, there's been a need to use miticides in honeybee hives because we've seen a huge bloom of the Varroa destructor mite, who is a parasitic mite that feeds on honeybees and who jumped hosts from a different type of honeybee called epicerena in the 90s and has since moved all over the world.
And we have more of those parasitic or pathogenic concerns in beekeeping still, we have figured out ways to use miticides and use biological hive manipulations to lower mite counts in the beekeeping world and we figured out how to breed and deal with that challenge, but we always sort of have another one of those coming down the pipeline is what it feels like to me is sitting within the industry. And then, and because of that, it's very hard to pay attention to the systemic, well, what are we going to do about the pesticides and the like large scale agriculture? Do you know what I mean? It's sort of like the farmers and the beekeepers get siloed and because they get siloed there is not a systemic and collaborative thinking that's happening around a solution for how to care for this entire system.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, there's a lot of layers to this. And taking a step back does allow us to kind of see the bigger picture of these different elements and relationships slash relationships that should be there but may not be present due to the incentives and how everything works. And earlier you mentioned this reason for honeybees to have this adaptive trait of nectar fidelity. Unfortunately, due to the incentives of our extractive system, that adaptive trait has kind of been weaponized against them in ways and capitalized and exploited in the name of so-called efficiency. And then also along these veins, from my understanding, part of the work of small-scale beekeepers that has gone into cultivating bees that are more resilient and adaptable to their changing environments has been to really understand and to breed bees specific to bioregions.
So with that in mind, what do we know about the impacts of moving honeybee hives? How have people outside of industrial agriculture related to or collaborated with hives in terms of movement and moving them and past what threshold of perhaps a sort of force productivity or transporting beyond certain distances does it actually become a strain and detrimental to the well-being of honeybees?
Ang Roell: Yeah, I mean, so as far as the logistics of moving bees, the technology is there to make it easeful for them as a creature, right? But we know from moving a lot of bees that when you move a lot of bees, you also spread a lot of pathogens. And so if you take hives that were in California with hundreds or thousands of other people's honeybee hives and they all had different pathogens. Now they all have all of those pathogens. And so there are things that beekeepers can do to bolster their hive's health and those things are certainly happening in certain parts of the industry.
But beekeeping is not a very well regulated industry overall and so there's not mechanisms for accountability in the same way that vegetable growers had the organic movement in the seventies.
There's sort of like markers, maybe practices or best practices, but there isn't necessarily an organic beekeepers association that is committed to a certain level of care or practice.
But yeah, what we do know about the movement of bees is that when you move bees, you potentially move pathogens. And it's very important on both ends of the trip, if you're moving bees, to make sure that their nutrition is very diverse. So they have a lot of pollen and nectar coming into the hive where they're being fed those by whomever is tending the hives. And then on the other end, when you move them to a location that there is that nutritional boost that happens when they get to the secondary location as well, and that you're monitoring those beads for any signs of brood disease so that you can act accordingly when you do encounter any diseases or pathogens that are potentially now introduced into your new bio region.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for this. And also we had the honor of recently collaborating with you on two practices for our ~alchemize~ program, one of which invites participants to take on the speculative perspective and experience of bees with an intention to not anthropomorphize, but instead to invite perspectives that are maybe not wholly human or more than human. And this you share as part of the reason why comparing the concept of work of humans within systems of capitalism to the work of bees can fall flat.
I was really excited to get to converse with you here on the show to get to dive deeper into this with you. So how would you expand then upon this concept of work in hives and even their power configurations in ways that decenter logics of extraction and hierarchy?
Ang Roell: I really appreciated working on those practices because it got me thinking about this. And I was also reading a book by Lars Chittka, I believe, called The Mind of a Bee, simultaneous to receiving that invitation. In a lot of my own work, I've sort of reflected on the work that I want to do in the world and being a beekeeper and working in the hives and having the time that I've had to work with bees over the last decade, there's a lot of contemplative time. And then you're working in this world, like a completely different social structure. There are completely different mechanisms for communication. There are completely different ways of seeing and there are completely different needs. So you're working with an organism where you're also working in this sort of world that you get to peer into and learn a lot about.
And so in my work, I've written a lot about what I think we have to learn from bees. But I think that I can even own that some of my old work feels anthropomorphizing. And so when you invited me into writing up these practices, and as I was reading through The Mind of a Bee, I was really thinking about a few things. Wonder, first and foremost. That is just something that I return to over and over in working with honeybees.
There's such wonder and awe in getting to bear witness to [honeybees], especially in this moment when there's so much we're up against within the context of the beekeeping industry….
and we're a very small business, we work with other very small businesses, and we're trying to exact change within the industry and change how we raise bees and how we care for bees and what role they have to play in our communities and society, which is a tall order. And within that, I'm still thinking like, what do we have to learn from them? There's just a constant reminder of wonder and awe. And then there's this idea that like, the work that they do is just innately different than ours. It's like kind of incomparable, which is I think something I wrote about a bit in that practice.
As you said, it's their work, I guess you could say it's purpose driven. I have a personal bias right now about like the concept of purpose. I feel like purpose is important, but we've had such a focus on it over the last little bit of time that feels almost like a perseverance to me.
But if I look at honeybees, the work they do is about care.
It's about caring for their young. It's about feeding and providing optimal nutrition to the next generation. And then it's about imparting knowledge to that generation so that they can then do the same. When they reproduce, they split off and they leave the original hive. And this hive that will take just minimal resources and the old queen will swarm off. And the legacy they leave behind for their young is all of the resources they had and an almost fully emerged queen, right? So they're leaving this like legacy of abundance. And then they're saying, I'm not gonna compete with you. So I'm gonna go over here two and a half miles away where we won't be in the same ecosystem and thus not competing for the same resources. That's their work in the world. That's what they show up to do. And so it's just so different than what our quote unquote concept of work in the world is that it's almost like an invitation into unlearning that and learning a totally different understanding of the concept of work.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I think that's really powerful. It's like, what would our daily lives look like if we didn't have these incentives or requirements of like working in order to make a living, working in order to earn our basic rights, to be able to have money, to buy what we need. Where will we spend our time? And maybe in not to oversimplify things, but at least as exemplified by the honeybee hives, work is not extractive or productivity based, but really, as you say, care driven and really about just building and enhancing relationships and building resilience and building collective present and futures.
Ang Roell: Right, and it's for honey bees, it's also in service too, right? I'm just thinking about this right now, but it's care driven internally. And then externally it's in service to pollination of the trees and plants within that ecosystem. So in both ways, it is in no way like our understanding of the word work.
Kamea Chayne: Right, yeah. It feels like it's all oriented around enhancing well-being of oneself, of the collective, of the broader environment, and really enhancing reciprocity in all sorts of manners. And also, when you talk about how beehives don't really act like monarchies with the queen on top, but run more like cooperatives because of their deep interdependence, I can't help but also think about how even human societies configured in so-called hierarchical and oppressive ways, in reality are still deeply interdependent, even though that power is sort of corrupted into a power over as opposed to power with. Because yeah, even extractive systems that look like pyramid schemes rely fundamentally on the labor of those primarily at the bottom in order to function, meaning that those at the top of the pyramid really are not on their own or better off, like they are still interdependent as much as they might try to deny that fact.
So then I guess the question would be whether this becomes more so about perception and language and narrative that of course then contributes to shaping our reality. And also whether it is also a call for the global majority to understand and reclaim power in our collectivity and in our interdependence.
Ang Roell: Thank you. Yeah, those are amazing questions. I feel like there is something in connecting to alternate narratives about the natural world and the world around us and concepts of interdependence and what we have to learn from the world around us and re-remembering a different kind of connection to it. I don't know if I want to say that it drives our connection to each other and our ability to build power with. I'm kind of stuck on the, the concept of hierarchical systems as interdependent because they really are right. We were just talking about the farmers and the beekeepers, like a beekeeper stopped moving bees, it would just bring that entire industry to its knees. Right?
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, it's kind of like a veil, like an illusion.
Ang Roell: There's so much power, like so much unclean power that we have that. I want us to be like leveraging together, really.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, it's like the power in unions and people's movements when people recognize the power that we can have through organizing. Like we could stop the functioning of the entire world if people saw these connections and rather than like looking upwards and validating the power of those at the top through, I don't know, trying to beg for something from those at the top. Realizing that we hold the power because we are the reason that the world runs primarily.
Ang Roell: Right, and this concept of balance of power then becomes really just a narrative, like you're saying. It's just a story that enough of us have accepted so that it's true. And then the reality is that we have a lot more power than we're ready to embrace maybe.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I mean, definitely all of the above, like, because of the systems in place, like, those are the quote unquote top do have more, quote unquote resources. Also militarism to keep people in check if people don't follow the rules and the criminal justice system and also, yeah, there's a lot that are trying to reinforce this deception that is going on.
Ang Roell: Right, and maintain the illusion of empire, most certainly. But I feel like, what I always wonder in this, how do we leverage this collective power is, like, how do we hold each other? How do we know that we have enough resources to have a two-month-long general strike? Who are the people that need to be called into our movement at these production levels, at farm levels, at labor levels that will be able to organize to make sure everybody has enough resources to get through those kinds of power leverages, right? And that's the stuff I feel like I don't have the answer to.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I definitely don't have the answers either, but I think these are really important questions to ask. So I appreciate you thinking through these things with me. And I agree, I just think there's so many things that we can learn from the more than human world, especially when we move away from kind of categorizing or imposing our limited concepts and logics onto them, and instead try to expand our own views and ways of relating to the world instead.
Another theme that has stood out to me as I engage with your teachings is responsiveness which encompasses the comfort hives you co-manage built to mimic the cavity of a tree that are responsive to the needs of bees, and also honoring the fact that honeybee hives live and breathe in ways that are responsive to their broader environments, modeled through how they have times of expansion and contraction. What would you like to highlight on this theme of responsiveness, perhaps as a form of being more in tune with the needs of one another and the world? And what lessons do you think honeybees would want to impart to us on this subject?
Ang Roell: Yeah, I love that question. Responsiveness has been, thematically for me in the last couple of years, I think I've been trying to find my way back to my responsiveness. I've had a lot of acute traumas and griefs that have left me feeling like I'm in a reactive nervous system pattern. And I don't think I'm alone in that. And simultaneously for me, it's so frustrating because I think of myself in a somatic way in a like personal work way as someone who's fairly resourced and knowing how to regulate myself because I've learned and taught myself that over time and had a lot of amazing teachers in that realm as well.
So yeah, there's just a difference for me between responsiveness, which as you said, is this sort of being in balance with the ecosystem and the people around you versus reactiveness, which is for me, an experience of feeling out of sync and out of balance. And so then more easily triggered into hyper-vigilant emotional states, etc.
So I think there's something for us to learn or unlearn about being connected to our bodies, to remember about being connected to our bodies that we as humans have lost our way from because of colonization, trauma, systems of oppression.
There’s always feels like there's this call when I'm working with honeybees to get centered in my breath, like down-regulate myself, feel like I'm present in the moment. And definitely as I get older, feel like I'm also conscious of how my body is moving in all these repetitive ways and doing that with care. But every time I work with them, I feel this call to slowness. I feel like as I'm lighting a smoker, which is this puffing of air, sort of, it's like a bellows that you puff with, that's where smoke comes out of the end. And as I'm lighting that and I'm puffing that, it's cueing me into my breath. And so then I'm conscious of how I'm breathing, which is slowing my breath.
And then I'm going into the hives. In order to work with them, that down-regulated state, that calm state is essential because as soon as I start becoming more reactive, I'm moving faster, I'm making mistakes, and I'm going to get stung. Which happens. It's a part of the work that I do. But also, there's this way that they cue my nervous system to help me down-regulate. And so I guess that's an invitation, or I feel that as an invitation every time I am with and around them. And I hear that reflected from a lot of other people as a remembering or a call into “I need you to slow down.” I need you to be present here with me. I need you to move slower. I need you to breathe more. And I need you to keep remembering that and coming back to that. And so if that's the practice that they're inviting me into and people into when humans are stepping into honeybee space, I imagine that that's the practice that we're being invited to also carry away from the hives, right?
When you are with people and you are trying to be present and care and get in rhythm and collaborate with other humans, how do you slow down and down-regulate and find that presence so you can be embodied with them in that moment in the same way that you would do with a honeybee hive?
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have additional links and references from this conversation in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, Ang, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an honor to work with you for Alchemize and also to be in conversation with you here. So again, big gratitude to you and everything that you do. For now though, what final words of wisdom would you like to leave us with as Green Dreamers?
Ang Roell: Oh wow, big question. I think I'm finding a lot of connection right now in seeds and their stories and just this idea that something so small can have such a huge impact and that happens with queen bees because they're kind of like the seeds of honeybees. It happens with seeds and the people that hold and move them but just so much possibility and so much potential held in one tiny little seed. I think when I'm feeling despair, when I'm feeling hopelessness, I come back to meditation on different seeds in my life and the stories of them, as well as just the hope and possibility that they contain. And that's feeling like a really grounding exercise for me in this current moment.
