From Beekeeper to Beelover: an interview with Jonathan Powell
“Sometimes a man must go alone into the forest and die into its heart, so he can bring back the forgotten pieces of this world.”
Jonathan Powell, trustee of the Natural Beekeeping Trust and chairperson of the first international Learning From the Bees conference, held in 2018, for which La Donaira was a proud sponsor. Jonathan is leading the bee rewilding conservation project at the farm, and we took some time during his last visit to sit down and discuss the fascinating life journey that brought him to the point he is today. We are happy to publish the first part of a long-form conversation roving wide and deep across several dimensions. The interview begins in media res, as he was ending a phone conversation with his family.
You were speaking to your son about a greek farmer and a famous scientist?
I was speaking to my wife about a Greek farmer while my son was jutting in with pictures that he was doing of circles and squares and triangles. It was a sweet conversation. I was discussing working with you and Vicky and spirituality in beekeeping. It reminded me of this book called Honey and Dust by Piers Moore Ede, where a young Piers travels around the world to find out about bees after a life changing car accident. He goes around Europe, Syria, India, Australia and he added to his list of people to talk to Eva Crane [since deceased], a very famous bee scientist from the UK. He went around her house, and very typically English, had a cup of tea with her. He asked Eva:
“What do you think about spirituality and bees?” and she just dismissed it in a very English way: “Poppycock! I’m afraid my dear. A good beekeeper is someone who has achieved a sound scientific knowledge of the job”.
He left that meeting completely deflated, his heart had sunk because his quest was just numbers and processes and science to her. After that he went to Greece and he met a wonderful organic farmer on a hill side he had turned into Eden. He kept bees, and as he worked with the bees he asked him:
“Do you feel like a god when you are working with your bees?”, and the farmer looked at him with a glint and a smile and said: “Simpler than that. We feel like there is a God”.
Piers was elated.
When I was working with the bees and explaining them to you yesterday, all the time I was thinking: “yeah, I want to live in the word of the farmer, the peasant farmer, who feels the experience of spirituality when he works with the bees”.
We have in this world a strange situation where we´ve gone from a period of, innate spirituality and enlightenment to help us understand the world, to one where more and more, science has replaced it. It has taken over from the great mystical story tellers that you used to get in Ireland and the church, and now we have almost completely gone from spiritual enlightenment to a world where we have almost instant access to knowledge backed by science – I will make up a word for it “from enlightenment to electronment”.
What has happened is that for a large amount of the population, their lives have moved away from the mystery and the spirituality that the greek organic farmer knew, and we have moved to a colder world of electronic entertainment, jobs in dull offices, processes and things. Even our arts and story writing has been tinged by the language of science and we´ve lost those magical stories. It’s not entirely lost but I´m saying it is for a lot of people – this is why people often feel deflated and do not have the joy of the greek farmer.
If you take people away from those environments which are controlled by the internet, by the TV, by the media and instead go into the hills, walk amongst the forests and the flowers and if you then place your hand on a hive to feel the experience of the bee world, in that time, in that place, with that wind, with those noises, with those trees, you can then use your imagination to merge into the world of the bee. You see yourself with the bees – merged in that second – no us, no them. If you do that then you go beyond the language of science which simply reduces the hive into a number of boxes, cell dimensions, properties, casts or developmental stages. You get into a different language; it is a diminished language – that feeling, that emotional experience, a natural language, a nature language a nurturing language.
Coming here allows me time to get away from the airport, the driving, the job, the internet of things, and experience this quiet language. That´s the value of places like this. – Sorry long answer to a simple question!
Jonathan:
If you think about it, the bees have been here for at least 30 million years. There is a fossil of a bee 30 millions year ago and so there is an argument to be made that they are a far more evolved species than us, and in fact any species that can live in the world for so long without going through an extinction event is just incredible. There are very few species that have done this, particularly once you get above the microorganism level, so there is something special there. We take great pride in our science, but I think we need to be a lot more critical about our science and our progress.
The problem is, it seems to me, whenever we have scientific progress, we often forget about all the negatives that come along with it. The classic example is the nuclear power industry in the 1960s. You would see these headlines like ¨LIMITLESS POWER THROUGH SCIENCE¨ and there were all the logos of electrons spinning around nuclei. “White heat” was a phrase used for industry, and everything was positives, it was all positives, positives, positives, but there was no scientist saying we have no solution for all the nuclear waste that we produce, and that is just one example of almost everything that humans do.
We jump in and we make this progress, but we always have this subtraction, this going backwards as well. We still do not have a solution to nuclear waste after all of these years. So we must be critical of science and applied sciences, and what science has actually done, and then consider the bee, this evolved being that has not gone through an extinction event. When the bee is industrious, when it is collecting its food and making its home, there seem to be no negatives, in fact, completely the opposite, there seem to be positives: there´s the pollination, the fertilization, and how, when it goes within the hollow of a tree, which is effectively a wound inside a tree, it lines the inside of the tree with a healing propolis that stops the development of the cavity which would ultimately destroy the tree. You can say they are far more evolved than us because they have learned how to be in this world and be industrious and at the same time be positive, whereas with many things that we do there is so much destruction.
It´s quite an inspiration to think about that. You can see this in many animals, but I think there is something special about the bees because we spent the whole day just talking about them and how things work in the hive and we hardly touched on any of the knowledge science has accumulated about them. Even more incredible are all the things that we don´t know about the hive. I think not knowing is a highly undervalued experience, and can actually be a brilliant starting point. I was taught beekeeping when I was 10, and all through my life I´ve been learning it, and then I got into natural beekeeping. One day my wife just turned to me and said:
“Jonathan, do you feel the bees?”
and I said, “Well yeah, I know all about them”, blablabla, and all this knowledge that I had, and then she did the devastating thing of asking the question a second time –
“Jonathan, do you really feel the bees?”,
and then I knew at that instant what she was saying, that all of this knowledge counted for nothing…
We had an experience with the bee bed yesterday with someone who knew nothing about bees. I took her through a meditation about the life in the hive, the darkness, the smell, the vibrations, the communications, the scale, and then she just went in the bee bed and she just meditated. She doesn´t know anything about bees, but she used her imagination and meditated on the bees, and when she came out her face was transformed, her whole experience was transformed: at that point in time, she had become a better beekeeper than I was!
At that point, at that second, she was a top, top beekeper. I don´t like the word beekeeper. Bee person, bee experience: anyone can achieve that, but it comes not from a point of knowledge, it comes from a point of not knowing, but observing, feeling and being with the bee-ing…
We use the word bee-ing, a german word, to describe the bee because when you look at the colony, its not an individual bee, and it´s not three castes of bee, male bee, drone, worker bee. There is also female bee and queen, but it´s not these either. It´s not the ball of bees inside the hive, because without the comb there is no hive, so the comb must be part of the colony, and the comb forms the womb in which the young are reared, but it´s not just that. It is also the propolis which surrounds this wax (resinous substances mixed by some magic alchemy of the bee enzymes from the plants of the surrounding landscape which cover the inside of the hive and provide protection against fungus and infection), that skin, as we call it, which is lovingly maintained by the bees constantly, day in and day out with additional oils from the environment to keep its properties flexible and alive. And then there is the atmosphere in the hive, which has to be perfect around the actual individual cells where the babies are growing. The humidity needs to be high otherwise the larva will die, and yet only 5 cm, 10 cm away, is the honey where the humidity has to be low so that the honey can get to 18 to 19% humidity before its capped, so that is also part of the hive. It´s almost as if the air is the blood that flows through the skeleton of the comb sitting within the propolis, and that propolis allows the atmosphere to breathe in and out of the hive, maintaining this stable temperature and pressure of water vapour…
And then you think, well, this structure in which the skin is attached to the actual tree itself – that too is part of the bee-ing, and then also the tree: a tree without a forest around it is isolated, a tree we know communicates with other trees through its roots, when you have a forest they work together so that in a very high wind, the trees work together to protect each other. A single tree in a field is easily knocked over by a strong gust of wind, yet within a forest they work together, so there are so many layers it´s really hard to say that a bee is a thing with six legs and wings and antenna, it is a forest, it is the roots, it is the earth, it is the sky, it is the flowers and (yeah, I´m getting carried away!) this is what we need to see and feel. Unless we see and feel these things, we won´t protect them. If we just see a forest as something that could be bought for a sum of money then, it is no different to anything else that can be bought for a sum of money. It could be a Ferrari, if it has the same value as a forest. We say this Ferrari costs 100 000 pounds and this area of woodland costs 100 000 pounds, so we make them the same, but they are not the same. A Ferrari and a forest are not the same, and we are in danger of putting a value on everything but appreciating neither the forest and the trees nor the electrifying pace of the Ferrari. We will protect these things if we grow to love them, and that would be my mission: to share the love of bees, and as bee lovers we talk about the love of the bee-ing, which is the whole environment really.
In 1930 my Grandfather won a prestigious silver cup for his honey at the annual London Honey Show held at the Crystal Palace. A year later he returned the cup and was given this tiny silver replica cup. As a child I remember the cup lived on the shelf by the stairs, my eye was always drawn to it as I ran up and down the stairs. After he died his oldest surviving son, my uncle, looked after and cherished the cup. I was showing my uncle and his sister my bees this weekend, and I was stressing how I do not keep bees for honey. Only if we love bees and all nature, not just value it, will we protect it. My uncle reached into his pocket for something, and then pressed it into my hand, saying as he did this “Dad would have wanted you to have this.” It was the cup. Just as I was admiring the cup, reflecting on how it has been loved and protected for over 86 years, a bee landed on it!
How did you make that transition from a bee keeper to a bee person? You are now motivated by the love of bees and it´s not even about getting the honey anymore, so talk a bit about that.
Definitely not about the honey. I was taught beekeeping by my grandfather, and my grandfather was doing beekeeping in the 1920s. In 1921 he won the world cup for honey and he got a big silver cup which later was replaced, the following year with this little tiny cup. There were always bees around and he taught how to do beekeeping at the time. The whole thing was, being a child I didn´t have much pocket money so we would make as much honey as we could so we could take it to the shop and make some money. We would make the hives out of old wardrobes and furniture because I had no money to make the hives, so that was how it went. And then, just before I went away to university, we started getting much more aggressive chemicals in agriculture, and the bees were destroyed by the chemicals. You would just see mounds of bees in front of the hives, they were rising in agony from the pesticides that were put on the crops.
Like DDT?
Not DDT, unfortunately DDT had been banned by then. It was whatever had replaced DDT. The chemical industry always tells you “If you ban this, we will have to use something worse.” My reaction to that rather simple argument is: “Well, ban that worse thing as well.” What are you thinking? That is not an argument!
So it was a sad ending to the bees, and then I went through life and I came back into it. What had happened in the meantime is that we now had this tiny little mite called verroa, which had been spread by the human transportation of bees. It had come across from the asian genotype of bee into the apis millifera bee that we know, and then rapidly spread across the world. Because of transportation, because of the way modern beekeeping is going, where bees can be sent in a package from one country to another, things spread through nature at an incredible speed. There is no time for them to adapt and survive these things. The speed of change (this is the problem with climate change), is so enormous, so fast. When I came back into beekeeping, beekeepers were now dealing with verroa. The first thing that happened was to look for a silver bullet, a technological solution, and so they put in pesticides into the hives to kill the mites (and hopefully not kill the bees!), and they put in acid-wash where they burn the hairs of this mites (which also incidentally burns the hairs of off the bees), and I was shocked. So I thought there´s got to be a different way of doing beekeeping because I dont want to redo beekeeping if I have to tip pesticides and chemicals and treatments into the hive: this is no life, this is no joy, this is horrible. At the same time somebody gave me a permaculture magazine and in it there was an article by David Heif talking about natural beekeeping. Because of my knowledge and experience with bees I instantly knew that this was the way forward, but what I did was, I took on the mindset of natural beekeeping as a conventional beekeeper. It was still boxes, and it was still knowledge, and it was this scientific knowledge of getting into a more natural state for the bees, but through this, the natural beekeeping developed, because I came in contact with people who were getting deeper insights into bee spirituality. My fellow trustee in the Natural Beekipng Trust, Heidi Herman, she is one of those influences, and another trustee, Gareth John, and sometimes when you speak to people they suggest books, they suggest thoughts…
My greatest influence has been my partner. You know, she asked that simple question, she gently challenges me to think deeper. You have other inputs: the bee-ing of Jonathan involves the bee-ing of my daughters, my son, to see their development, all of these things… You go through life as a journey and you pick up these things, so my transition to a more spiritual, more in touch person with the bees has been a sum of everything, its the sum of my grand father and the cup, its the sum of my father, my mother, my experiences with the world, my children, my successes, my failures, and with the people Ive been living with, so maybe this is me just growing older and finding things.
I went back to my old university when I was 45, and I looked at it, and I could feel my presence walking around the streets of that city, Cardiff, but I felt a great sadness because I also felt that as a young man I was lost at that time: following this, following that, not taking time to pause… so I can look back at points of my life, and I can say, I didn’t quite get it, I was quite lost! You said to me “How did you get to this point now” – this is a long way of saying, I got to this point now, but maybe, if I reach the age of 80 I´ll look back to myself now and Ill think “You know that Jonathan, he really didn´t know anything!” [laughs] but thats ok because today, at this point, in this second, I´ve been thinking about and just enjoying the unknowing. Maybe, that little value will still be with me when I´m 80. You see some people who reach a very great age in life and they’ve still got it, they’ve still got that sparkle, and then you see some older people who say “I know what I like: I like this food, I don´t like that food, I like this type of writing, and not that writing,” and so when I grow up I want to be that unsure person, still not knowing, still being tickled by the experience of discovering something new and still being open to the fact that I don´t know, there is still so much to learn, life is a miracle that you can learn second by second. If I keep that going, that will be good! This is sounding like its well away from the question about bees you asked, but when you start looking at the hive and experiencing the hive, it is about everything… I often think that if you had a hospice where people where dying you could introduce people to just sit by the hive and just look at the entrance of the hive, the life coming in, the life going, the purpose and industry of the bees.