Talking to bees
Talking to bees
By Clive Doucet
A bee is a bee but not exactly the same bee. There are more than 3,000 types of bees on the planet. Each Queen Bee is a little different. Some are more aggressive than others. Some have better defenses against the feared Varroa destructor mites. These mites are capable of wiping out an entire colony to the last bee in just one season. This isn’t a trivial problem. Varroa makes the COVID virus look like a small-time operator. Fortunately, there are some bee colonies which do have the genetic strength to defend themselves against the Varroa mite. Not many but some.
The world of bees is genetically complex. Italian bees are a favourite of beekeepers because they’ve been domesticated for a very long time, are peaceable and produce a lot of honey. Russian and African bees are vibrant producers, strong but also aggressive. They don’t like you or anyone else playing about with their hive home. Nonetheless, the fundamentals of being a bee whether its Russian, Italian or African remain the same – to produce honey and defend their hive against invasion.
Bee life also remains similar. During every bee’s life cycle, they all take a turn taking care of the young, cleaning the hive, standing guard and foraging for nectar. It is the guard bees that will fly up into your face and attack, which is why beekeepers like to wear some head protection when they open a hive up. Once bees perceive a threat to their home, no matter how peaceable a hive is, the guards will attack very quickly and precisely. You will be bitten before you have time to defend yourself, and it will hurt. This is why beekeepers also have a live fire smoker handy to blow smoke into the hive after it has been opened. You don’t want to hurt the bees, but you do want to deaden their capacity to react with an attack.
Humans are similar to bees at least in their desire to defend their territory. The Trump tariff attack on Canada has brought Canadians together in a way that usually only a war does. In Quebec and Alberta, support for Canada has skyrocketed. Polls show that support for separation has hit historic lows in both provinces. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, whose first reaction was to announce Alberta would not support any attempt to limit oil and gas exports to the United States, has suddenly discovered she’s leading a parade that no longer exists. All polls show a clear majority of Westerners think oil and gas should be included in the Canadian tariff defence, not given a pass.
Times have certainly gotten weird. The morning news has begun to feel like news reports from the front. Each day brings more unexpected and destructive bulletins from the Whitehouse. The United States has supplied sufficient arms to Israel to allow it to pulverize a country which is essentially without defence. Gaza is no larger than the land from Belle Cote to Petit Etang, near where I now live in Nova Scotia. The latest news as of this writing is that an Acadian type of exile is the next step.
The threat to annex Canada and Greenland, which at first seemed like something out of a comic opera, suddenly doesn’t seem so funny. Trump is pushing the U.S, a founding UN member, back to the international conditions which prevailed before the Second World War when “might makes right.” Remember Czechoslovakia.
The United Nations was invented to give all the nations of the world some protection against the natural and primal desire of the powerful to increase their territory based on strength, not compassion or reason. History teaches us that dividing the world into “them and us” can work for a time for the strong, but ultimately it doesn’t because the reality is, like bees, there is no them and us. There is just us.
I have this image of a new chick struggling to hatch. The chick is trying to peck a hole from the inside through the shell to the outside world. It’s hard work. In every country, there are millions of people also trying to peck their way through the suffocating shell of extreme nationalism. At the same time, millions of other people are anxious to keep the hole closed tight. In this way, they want to make America Great Again even if it takes the oppression of others. The problem is oppression never made any country great. It turns people into jailors and jailed, them and us. Neither is a happy place.
Clive Doucet is a former Ottawa city councillor for Capital Ward and author. His last book was Grandfather’s House, Returning to Cape Breton. He lives in Grand Etang where he keeps bees.