Ang Roell: Collective care and responsiveness in the hives of honeybees
Dec 26, 2023
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Ang Roell, founder of They Keep Bees, discusses the need for localized, regionalized, and sustainable agriculture. The podcast explores the exploitation of honeybees in industrial agriculture, the power of collective organizing and resource mobilization, the importance of responsiveness and slowing down, and finding hope and connection through seeds.
Honeybees can teach us about collective care and responsiveness, offering lessons for building sustainable agriculture.
Moving honeybee hives without proper regulation poses risks to their health and well-being, emphasizing the need for accountability in the beekeeping industry.
Deep dives
The Extractive Nature of Honeybee Exploitation
In the current agricultural system, honeybees are seen as tools of productivity and are exploited as a labor source and a cost of doing business. They are transported across the country to pollinate large-scale monocrops, resulting in a lack of reciprocity, care, and tending towards the bees. This extractive approach has consequences for the well-being of honeybees and the overall ecosystem. The need for localized and sustainable agriculture is highlighted as a potential alternative.
The Impacts of Moving Honeybee Hives
Moving honeybee hives spreads pathogens, which poses challenges to their health and well-being. While technology allows for the logistics of hive movement to be useful for the bees, there is a lack of regulation and accountability in the beekeeping industry. The movement of bees, especially on an industrial scale, raises concerns about the introduction of pathogens and the strain it puts on the bees. Nutritional diversity and monitoring for diseases are emphasized as important factors in minimizing detrimental effects.
Responsiveness and Lessons from Honeybees
Honeybees provide valuable lessons in responsiveness and being in tune with the needs of one another and the world. Working with honeybees emphasizes the importance of being centered, present, and regulated in order to establish a balanced connection with them. This practice of slowing down, regulating one's breath, and being present can extend beyond the hive and into interactions with humans. The invitation is to embrace responsiveness and care in relationships with others, mirroring the honeybees' approach to their tasks and service within their ecosystem.
“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.”
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