Dear Aljaž,

 We met last year at the end of April in Udine. There was an instant connection between us, and from that moment on, things moved very fast. On the way to Topolò, we stopped at the beekeeping store and loaded the car, put frames, hive boxes and all sorts of things on top of us, double-checked that we got everything to start a three bee-family apiary in Topolò. The next day we checked for a good place that was both in the heart of the village but also away from it. A place where beekeeping could be celebrated and where bees could teach us something.

We are experiencing a time of planetary thinking. For the first time in history we—the human inhabitants of the earth—are able to know what is happening everywhere in the world at the same time. Out of this connectedness, knowledge, awareness, we try to understand the earth and weather in a different way. We constantly jump from the planetary – the horizon – towards the local – the ground. And this is one of the things bees teach us: To look at the superorganism as a whole organism and to acknowledge the single bee as a detail. Think big and small at the same time. Bees live in a constant exchange with the environment, everything that changes outside will trigger a change inside. An endless game between the outside and the inside.

Dear Erika,

 I find it fascinating that bees could be the mediators of our understanding of how the local and the global intertwine. In times of the crisis of the global, focusing solely on the local has proven fatal, leading to the resurgence of empowered nation-states and local fascisms. There must be another way of addressing both the local and the global. Could it be that bees have something to say about this?

But being a student of bees is hard: not because they tend to teach in non-verbal, almost mysterious, quasi-religious manners—with buzzing mantras and repetitions—but also because they represent an ideal way of engaging with the world. Bees do not destroy; they produce and actively improve their environment. They diversify, countering the homogenising and imperial tendencies of globalisation, in alignment with the imperative of planetary thinking: “A planetary thinking is primarily an imperative for diversities.”(1) Bees unknowingly dismantle our fixed epistemic oppositions, such as the divide between inside and outside: they turn landscape into their home and they turn their home—the hive—into landscape, by filling it with nectar and pollen. For bees, the distinction between home and landscape is already blurred, much like the distinction between collective and individual subjectivities. With bees, one cannot help but consider both parts of the binary distinction together. Their practices are a living example of the fact that the Gordian knot of nature and culture, inside and outside, collective and individual, has never really been untied or cut. Can we learn from this? Isn't our learning from bees akin to the story of a student who can never fully surpass their teacher?

1. Getting to Know the Beeflora

EM: I agree. It’s also because they show us the Invisible. It’s about the field of life (Kinji Imanishi) and the field of living. What nurtures their existence (field of life) is in the same way nurturing their field of living, the environment around the hives. It is the opposite behaviour of people towards the earth. And bees exist on Earth for much longer than humans do, so their survival strategies are proven to be good.

“Never before have we left more traces on the body and skin of Earth (what we call the Anthropocene). Never before have we objectified it so much, yet never has Earth made itself known as a subject to such an extent as it does today. In fact, the climate crisis is the sensitive emergence of Earth as a subject, as earth acts freely beyond any possible control. We are no longer masters of its behaviour, either cognitively or pragmatically. Earth has begun to do what it wants again. The climate is where we grant life a strange form of freedom. Unlike on the ground, where movement is slow and often interrupted by excessive resistance, in the sky everything is defined by its ability to move and transform."(2)

Bees live close to the sky but need the abundance of the earth. Topolò is surrounded by a beautiful and rich forest, fallow agricultural land, gardens. The plants all contribute to a great beeflora, which we discover by tasting the honey. In spring it is the Wild Cherry (Prunus avium), blooming like big white crystals scattered all over the forest, then the Maple (Acer platanoides) joins in with its bright green colour. These two trees are already a great source for spring honey, if temperatures and hive development allow bees to collect more than they need.

What else did you discover in close proximity to the hives, looking at the beeflora of Topolò? 

AŠ: I started taking more interest in plants when we got the bees. In summer, both Tilia and chestnut flower, those are the ones we wait for and hope that the weather will be kind to their flowers. Later, blackberry and ivy provide crucial food for the winter. I began noticing all the plants in our village, especially the beautiful lavenders and borage plants. One of our neighbours started planting borage specifically for the bees – by the way, did you know that borage flowers refill with nectar every two to five minutes throughout the day? The plant I fell in love with the most is Malva sylvestris. I vividly remember truly noticing it for the first time last summer, as it began to fill the landscape around the apiary with its bright purple flowers. Bees love to dip into its pollen. When they leave the plant, full of nectar, they shimmer in the sunlight, covered in a layer of silver pollen. If I were a plant, I would definitely be a malva.

EM: Yes! Rome is full of Malva and they are the first to flower after the summer heat. I love them, too.

AŠ: I found our bees, yet again, to be remarkable mediators between us and the plant life around us. For most of my life, plants represented absolute otherness in which I did not recognize myself and which throughout the history of Western thought did not satisfy even the basic conditions of vitality: a plant does not move, does not perceive or feel, it is not a living thing, rather, it is an unfinished thing, “something that is even less than a thing, something that awaits completion in its being productively destroyed, utilised for higher human ends of nourishment, energy generation, and sheltering.”(3) Why waste time thinking about a non-thing? The plant was not included in the great project of Western metaphysics precisely because of the impossibility of placing it in an unchanging, incorruptible, eternal substance. In an interview I conducted with the philosopher Michael Marder, he even asserted that “the project of metaphysical philosophy is formulated against vegetal being, against a being that is not at all distinguishable from becoming: that which is mutable, constantly generating itself, regenerating, decaying, and so forth.”(4) Do you know the phrase like watching grass grow? It is synonymous with extreme boredom. However, as the bees brought me closer to plants, they shifted my perspective from being to becoming. They made me watch and truly see grass and other plants grow, move, and act – something no philosophical or theoretical tractatus could make me do. I got a bit lost.

Speaking of shifting perspectives, what about Rome and its seasons? I heard you experience more than one spring in a year!

2. Encounters With Others

 EM: The Mediterranean is a biodiversity hotspot with a great variety of plants that are endemic to the region. Their survival strategies are magnificent. They know how to survive hot and dry summers and then grow during cool and humid winters. When plantlife comes back at the end of September it feels like a second springtime. Then the golden light in October bathes everything in a mild and gentle atmosphere. One year I could even harvest honey after an intense flowering period of the Nespolo (Eriobotrya japonica).

Bees challenge us to see the natural world in a deeper way and allow us to get closer to nature’s secrets. The superorganism maintains a constant equilibrium within the hive. They seem very active, but not all of them are. Certain bees are always resting so that the organism as a unit stays flexible and will never be exhausted. There are a lot of things we do not understand when we start working with bees, but with time we build up an experimental knowledge that is based on experiences (Erfahrungswissen).

Trans species as a way of connection to the natural world is a fascinating trip and by sharing a moment of equilibrium it turns cosmic.

“Yet, what living things seek is in fact perhaps not activity, but a peaceful life while maintaining constant equilibrium.”(5)

This moment spills on the one opening the hive, but it also changes the atmosphere around the apiary. Because bees create fields of life. For people who are sensitive to this, they can experience the fields.

“When we talk about the field of living, we of course can imagine a kind of spatial extension, but the field of living does not mean merely a space for living, but it is a continuation, a living extension, of the living thing itself. [...] It may be relevant to translate ‘life field’ as the field of life rather than the field of living. The word ‘life’ in English is one word, but in Japanese seimei (life) and seikatsu (living) have quite different meanings.”(6) Life is more about existence, vital force, while living is more about working, organising the basic needs. 

A friend of mine once called the roof-top apiary in Berlin “beeheaven” (Bienenhimmel) and I still remember this encounter. We spent hours talking about the world, watching the bees flying in and out.

You had some special encounters at the apiary this year as well, right?

AŠ: I used them multiple times as, again, mediators between me and other inhabitants of Topolò. So we made our apiary in the beginning of May. The emigrants who left Topolò during the Cold War usually return to the village in the height of summer. Some of their houses are in very close vicinity to the apiary, which came as a surprise for everyone that summer! Some of them didn’t like the idea: “They’re too close!” and “What if they come in my house?” were two of the most used phrases about our bees. I started inviting people to go do an inspection with me. There was a sudden flip. Some of them went through all of the phases of beekeeping with me: inspections, giving them food, water, treating them, extracting honey, cleaning the equipment and moving the hives. But it was a flip towards me, too. We suddenly had a common love, a thing to do and a place to stay together. By the way, did I tell you we wanted to make a club called “I fuchi di Topolò”? Translated both as “The drones of Topolò” and, of course, “The fuckers of Topolò”. Stupid jokes we do when we are surrounded by bees! I wonder if this is a shared feeling among beekeepers: that staying with bees opens people up in tangents they would normally not cross – social, ethical and epistemic ones. Is there a specific story of bees as bridges to other people that you also like to share?

3. Comb Reading

 EM: Back then in 2009 I put some hives on the rooftop of Kraftwerk Mitte Berlin, which was an abandoned industrial building that Dimitri Hegemann managed to lease from the City of Berlin to organise cultural events and host his Techno Club called Tresor. He agreed to the beekeeping activity on the roof but was very nervous when I organised the transport of only 3 hives. It was in February and the German Opera Berlin studied for a show inside the Kraftwerk with around 1000 people on stage. I promised to not disturb them and keep the 30.000 bees that were in the 3 boxes closed inside and carried carefully across the building, up with the elevator to the 10th floor, then another 300 m across the rooftop. The Hausmeister was my company and Dimitri was later informed on the phone.

All went well, but the installation of a new apiary is always exciting, because suddenly there are so many bees around and all of them are “superorganisms” that are not under our control. I like to keep bees in urban areas that are in touch with the cultural and artistic scene because it is rewarding for both sides. The curiosity of the cultural world fits very well with natural  beekeeping.

“Living things maintain themselves and what is created in turn becomes a creator. If this process is called living then living itself is the leading principle in this organic body. [...] In other words, for living things to live itself must be the ultimate objective.”(7)

By changing the goal of beekeeping from honey production towards art of life/art of survival, they show themselves in a more diversified way. The architecture of the combs is an art piece on its own and reading wax combs is a good way of studying hive development. Honey is precious and regarded as an extra. We are generous with the bees, because generosity is a good answer to abundance. The development of the superorganism responds to abundance. Wax-sculptures develop only when bees have the space to build them and when there is enough nectar so they want to produce honey. By maximising space and minimising exploitation there is always a surprise when opening the hive. Even the honey tastes different because it will carry a wax-scent, which after a while will disappear. The trace of the permeability of fresh beeswax.

 AŠ: I think this could be a strong critique of organising space based on principles imposed on a community from the outside – a critique of transcendent spatial organisation. I see bees and their wild building of comb as embodying a need for a more immanent organisation of their environment. There are notable similarities to how the people of Benečija/Valli del Natisone navigated the border that divided areas once connected through economic, social, and familial ties. Bees constantly find ways to implement their own methods of comb building and space organisation, even when beekeepers attempt to keep them orderly and controlled. The same goes for the people of Topolò and the inhabitants of villages on the other side of the border, Livek and Livške Ravne: when the border cut through the pastures they once used together and when it cut off the familial relations, people needed to get inventive as to break through the way their lands were organised by this huge bureaucratic machine, called the state. And out of that situation acts of solidarity between two peoples, such as smuggling of basic goods, were born. Both bees and the border communities exemplify acts of epistemic disobedience against the spatial organisation enforced by Modernity: for bees, it’s a resistance against productivity-driven control, and for borderland communities, it’s a resistance against the militarised control of their lands.

4. Secrets of Honey

EM: I love honey and the less I touch bees during production the more mysterious it gets. It’s not that I like every honey they make, but there is honey, when everything turns out to be just perfect. And this is what I am looking for. Bees do not make the same honey. It is not true that all of the colonies know how to produce excellent honey. There are some colonies that are exceptional. They know how to create something that is incredible. I want to find them and harvest honey carefully because this kind of honey is curing the body, mind and soul.

 “Of course I do not think that organisms understand beauty as we do. But I would frankly admit that there is an aspect in living things or in the life of living things that cannot be explained only in terms of a drive to survive. That is, intentionally or not, living things gradually became beautiful. [...] And is there not something that could be called culture, although it is of course different from human culture?”(8) 

AŠ: Even though I wouldn’t necessarily put surviving and becoming beautiful into opposition, as two different modes of expression. If we say that ‘becoming beautiful’ is something other than surviving, we are equating the beauty of non-human beings to the one of the human or, better, we are trying to understand the former through the lens of the latter. Human beauty is a disinterested one, according to classic aesthetic theory, but more importantly, it is also a result of the one of non-human beings! They created beauty, taste, smells – for a sole purpose of survival. To survive, meant to be more beautiful than the beings beside you. They knew that inventing beauty would help them survive. And beauty becomes more with connecting it to survival and staying-in-life, not less. I was always sceptical of disinterested beauty as a mere expression of life. I want to believe that it is more of a propagation of life. It’s propagation through expression. I like that. All the beauty comes from plants wanting to be pollinated: they created sweetness, sugars that are later transformed into liquid gold by the first true craftswomen – the bees.

5. The Relationship Between Human and Non-Human Worlds

 EM: Bees, more specifically honeybees of the genus Apis, like Apis mellifera, exist for millions of years. They have never stopped existing. They survive as a superorganism with many individuals, but only one queen at a time. The queen survives many years, the individual bee only a few weeks. The hive-knowledge is built by the workers, who are rather short-lived, and then transferred to the bee family, which will survive. We as humans are able to maintain a relationship with bee families that we will get to know over the years.. They become like friends, even though we never exchange a word with them. It’s all about caring for each other and sharing our environment. 

AŠ: I agree. Sharing an environment is something we have to learn. I doubt it that humans ever really knew how to share their environment with non-human beings. To me, places like the apiary or, if we back away from bees and draw more general conclusions, common land too, for example, are places where the school of democracy, communality, and cooperation is in session; the school of learning from another, human or non-human entity. “[L]earning is not a predominantly mental function, but a ‘movement’ of life, involving the human subject as a whole and in relation to the various environments that constitute the ecological world.”(9) I think it’s crucial to put human beings in ‘movement’ in specific places which promote and propagate co-working, co-managing, and co-living. Only by placing us in places soaked with these values can we truly make a change. Also, I think we should establish as many places as possible for observation and learning how to see. Only by taking the time to learn to see how to build, how to harvest, how to create abundance, how to live, can we envision new possible ways of co-existing with the world. 

And dear Erika,

Today I woke up at 5AM. I was desperately waiting for the promised sun after days of only clouds and rain. When the sun started rising, I waited some more, until I was sure it fully lit up our apiary. I went there, greeted the bees, and sat on a provisional bench, overgrown with vegetation. I thought of words to finish our correspondence on bees, I couldn’t really find them. But a sudden simple ‘thank you’ came into my mind: thank you. I would have never sat in the middle of grass and flowers, carefully observing the repeating flights of bees, if it weren’t for you. If everyone had the possibility to learn and do the same, the world would be a better place.

With love, gratitude, and admiration,

Aljaž

This conversation first appeared in Robida 10: Correspondences / Korispondence / Corrispondenze (2024).