Killing More Honeybees
experiences farming on the eastern shore of Virginia
Many of you already know me, but some of you may not. When we moved to our farm in 2010, I had no idea what I was getting into. But without the folly of youth, we wouldn’t start much of anything, would we?
If my younger self had known exactly how much work farming would be, he simply would never have begun. I had idealistic notions of working “with” Nature rather than “against” Nature — as if somehow she would spontaneously provide food without effort from me. It turns out that nature is quite happy producing literally anything, and it’s up to me to make sure these are plants that can nourish human beings. It turns out this doesn’t happen without a lot of work.
The same thing is true in the mind. The mind will entertain any ideas, but without constant weeding, tending, and composting, the mind rapidly becomes overrun with weeds, brambles, and ideas that aren’t particularly useful for us. A feral mind makes it extremely hard to focus, so we must cultivate the mind like an inner garden.
One good thing about farming this long is that if I have bad ideas, they aren’t locked away in an ivory tower. If it doesn’t work, there’s no way to convince myself that it did: the plants just die. If you have to eat your ideas, your imagination becomes rather more careful. If I had stayed in the academic world, I could easily have lived in the clouds of crystalline thought, estranged from practical experience and divorced from feedback from the real world. But farming doesn’t allow that, at least not if you want to do it well!
I began farming fourteen years ago and jumped into the deep end without a lifejacket. But that’s how I approach things. I’ll change my computer and cellphone language to a new one to force myself to learn it. Or I’ll install Ubuntu on my computer to force myself to figure it out. I prefer immersing myself in such a space and learning from within it. With virtually anything that I do, I like to develop a relationship with the process from beginning to end, from seed to seed. When I taught myself chromatography, there was no one else there to advise me. I just read Pfeiffer’s booklet on chromatography and tried it out for myself. This is something that is often lacking these days. Pfeiffer himself (in the Face of the Earth) describes how people can act and think, but most people cannot imagine what they read and turn it into a reality. That mediating artistic feeling is often lacking the necessary intensity to adapt a spiritual idea into the messiness of practical reality. All action is a compromise with the facts on the ground, but it should still be recognizably the guiding principle. A tomato, no matter where it is planted, should still look like a tomato — even if the way of tending it varies drastically.
In the school of hard knocks — a.k.a. “practical experience” without guidance — I made a rapid series of educative (and expensive) mistakes. If I were to do it again, I would definitely apprentice somewhere because learning from someone with experience lets any attentive apprentice stand on the shoulders of giants. In my defense, I simply could not find a farm nearby that integrated animals and vegetables the way I imagined. I read every beekeeping book known to man, but I had experiences with bees that no one else had heard of. Life is not contained in books any more than life is contained by matter. Life is far too unruly to be circumscribed by our meager words.
He said something I’ll never forget: “Bees are bugs. Bugs are bad. Bugs eat plants. When I see bees, I spray.”
I remember going to a daylong beekeeping workshop at the Virginia Biological Farming (VABF) conference with Gunther Hauk, author of Toward Saving the Honeybee and founder of the Spikenard Honeybee Sanctuary, our gracious neighbors up the hill from the Josephine Porter Institute. Gunther described “pseudoscorpions” that live in European beehives but, at least at the time, weren’t found in the United States. On this point, I have personally found — and photographed — a pseudoscorpion in my hives. I told Gunther this and emailed him a photograph I’d taken in 2013. These are clearly predatory creatures, but they eat varroa mites. They are a wonderful symbiote feeding on parasites that drag honeybees down. You never know what you’ll discover in your own backyard!
My love for bees is why I turned fields into meadows, planted flowers, and opened up wild spaces. Capturing swarms and taking calls from the surrounding area kept me busy for a while. But then a neighbor got into the migratory pollinator business and brought thousands of hives within a stone’s throw of my few Warré hives. Our neighbor would open IBC totes full of high fructose corn syrup and let it flow out into tubs for the bees. In this environment, countless bees would drown in the sugary flood, and the rest would attack each other at the feeding site. This ferocious frenzy turned them into pillaging mode, and they assaulted my hives, stripping them of their honey and leaving nothing but corpses. Moreover, my neighbor on the other side of our farm called me — angry that a bee had stung his cleaning lady. The bees had merely shown up outside to drink some condensing water near an air conditioning unit during a drought.
I asked him whether he was doing anything to the bees. He said, of course, he was killing as many as he could! He said something I’ll never forget: “Bees are bugs. Bugs are bad. Bugs eat plants. When I see bees, I spray.” My head spinning, I asked him to clarify what he meant. It turns out that, yes, this man believed that honeybees eat his soy crop, and whenever he saw bees arriving on his soy flowers, he would spray insecticides. When I calmly tried to inform him that soy yields increase if insecticides are simply not sprayed while the flowers are opened, he said he farms 5000 acres and that that was the “biggest goddamn lie” he’d ever heard. Between the destruction of my hives by one neighbor and another who intentionally sprays to kill bees, how can we win against such ignorance? It can feel absolutely futile.
I had to develop a different view of my work here. I am surrounded by conventional agriculture. So what’s the point? It’s this: life adapts to all pressures if we allow it to evolve. As pests adapt to pesticides, honeybees — if allowed to breed naturally — adapt every year. The same principle holds true for “open pollinated” seeds — and is also why eugenics is always a dead-end. My work is to cultivate a space for life, make the biodynamic preparations every year, and allow life to evolve on my farm.
Another neighbor of mine always thought what we did was strange. To this day, I’ve never mentioned biodynamics to my neighbors. I don’t talk about what I do, I just go do it. Finally, we had biodynamic pork available from our farm, so I took it over to my neighbor. The next day, he came back and said, “Stewart, that’s the best damn bacon I’ve ever had in my life, and I should know because I used to raise hogs! I don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re doing something right.” Bypassing theory altogether and going to experience, we can skip doctrinal disputes. Taste and see. What you read of my writing is not how I talk to customers. In fact, I can’t. Most people aren’t open to it here, so I have to bottle it up, contain it, and in that process of retaining these ideas, they transform — like preparations — into something new.
Imagine an eventual collapse of conventional agriculture. Where will microbiology come from to repopulate those poisoned spaces? It will come from my farm, which wrestles annually with drift from careless (and illegal) herbicide and pesticide spraying. But with each new wave of poison, what I spray out evolves at an accelerated rate precisely because poisons are present. The forces of life will return from your back garden. We are cultivating oases of life, which become seasoned at metabolizing the very poisons that saturate our Mother Earth.
There is nothing more important than the small plot you tend and improve yourself. Done well, a single small garden with deep, rich, biodynamic soil is able to sequester more carbon than a large farm — even an organic one. Never underestimate the value of what you are doing. Because of the intensity of crop rotations in gardens and diversified farms, you get more life packed into a single growing season than ever naturally occurs in the wild.
When you cut down a Christmas tree, more than half of its carbonaceous structure is left in the ground as roots. Even if you burn the Christmas tree, it is still a net carbon sink because most of its body is below ground. Each time you pull up a crop — preventing most from going to seed — and immediately plant another crop, the roots of each successive planting keep accumulating organic matter… even without adding compost! This is why, as Alan Chadwick says, we can make a garden more fertile with each new crop. Even if no one thanks you or gives you credit, we are all making “inoculation” points of biodiversity from which the health of the earth can be restored.
I wish we’d gotten cows earlier. I’d (wrongly) assumed they are big and, therefore, more work. If you are starting an operation, building fencing is essential. I didn’t have anyone to show me how to do this, so I had to figure it out myself. I unwisely started with hogs — which are the most expensive animal to keep if you feed them grain. Hogs are the one animal on a farm that produces no marketable byproduct until it is dead. Cows produce milk and precious manure, chickens produce eggs, sheep have milk and wool, etc. But a pig’s manure carries all sorts of parasites that easily infect human beings, making it unsuitable for gardens without aging it for years. I’ve learned the value of animals who need virtually only grass to live. Not only are they more profitable, they’re beautiful for the earth. As a Christmas tree leaves most of its carbon in the soil, so too with pasture. Goethe says, “Plants live by giving, animals live by taking,” which is true. Animals destroy the sugars that plants condense out of sunlight. But this also means that cows can only emit what a plant first drew out of the air. Moreover, most of the carbon of a plant’s body is below ground. As long as grass is not repeatedly overgrazed, root pruning does not occur. Additionally, the work of Dr. Elaine Ingham on golf courses (where the grass is all mowed several times a week) found that spraying out compost tea prevented any root pruning from occurring. That’s right: even regularly shorn golf courses can build organic matter in the soil.
If grazed correctly — and I can’t say I always get it right myself — pastureland becomes ever more fertile. Each time cows graze down the grass, the growth cycle restarts. When grass goes to seed, its photosynthesis grinds to a halt. As long as it can be kept in its vegetative state, it continues to create sugar and send it into the soil. Alan Chadwick recommends mowing down cover crops when about 20% of the cover crop is flowering. When a plant creates seeds, it consumes an enormous amount of energy in the soil. With rotational grazing, we are able to compress multiple lifecycles for grass into a single year, accumulating the abundant generosity of the cosmos into the earth.
Here’s the paradox about diversity: you can’t force it. Steiner himself says in the Agriculture Course that if you try to force diversity, it will fail: “If we think that by inoculating the manure with these bacteria we shall radically improve its quality, we are making a complete mistake. Externally there may seem at first to be an improvement, but in reality, there is none.”1 If you do not first provide the forces necessary to sustain microbiological diversity, no amount of artificial imported diversity will work. If I were to bring in cows, sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens — and put that diversity onto a barren field with no grass, the diversity would die out because there is no nourishment for the animals. You will know a tree by its fruits, or, as Goethe puts it: “Only that which is fruitful is true.” This is the heart of biodynamic agriculture: it isn’t about forcing something that is unsustainable. On the contrary, it is about providing all the necessary conditions (and forces) so that biological diversity is a spontaneous and emergent phenomenon. Moreover, a phenomenon that grows and stimulates others to new life. Consider, for example, oak trees. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer writes that this tree is one of the only ones that thrive healthily and without disease in monoculture stands. The soil created by oak leaves is so balanced that dozens of other species quickly emerge around oaks. By contrast, pine trees tend to only foster more pine trees. The impartial generosity of the oak tree is what we must seek to emulate: becoming like oaks by creating a generous soil in which diversity may spontaneously arise.
Many people reduce the biodynamic preparations to microbes. Yes, there are undoubtedly microbes in the biodynamic preparations, but the preparations are not reducible to microbes any more than a human being is reducible to the microbes we carry. Rather than thinking of the biodynamic preparations as “probiotics” (microbes), I think a slightly more accurate way to think of them is as prebiotics: the foods — viz., forces — necessary to sustain microbiological diversity. After all, in biodynamics, we do not say that a compost pile is alive because it has microbes in it but rather that a compost pile has microbes in it because it is already full of life potential. If the compost pile lacked food for microbes, there would be no microbes doing their work. While it is not perfectly accurate, we are providing the life forces necessary so that microbes, plants, animals, and humans can thrive. But we have to start with the proper forces, or no amount of imported diversity can sustain itself.
I got into farming by studying classical liberal arts in college. We read Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Arendt, and Nietzsche, but with an emphasis on agrarian thinkers like Wendell Berry. I seem to have been one of the few people who had the opportunity to start a farm based on my inspiration — or one of the few who took it seriously. I’ve found that if you wish to think like Steiner, the best way is not to read Steiner. Why? Because Steiner almost never read Steiner. Instead, Steiner read literally everything he could get his hands on: scientific literature, religion, theosophy — and much more. As astrologer Gary Caton (who works with the Celestial Planting Calendar, part of Hugh Courtney’s legacy) said at our Valerian workshop this week at Gaia Herbs, culture is a copy of a copy of a copy. The more we stick with current culture, the muddier the images become. If we wish to understand where we are, we have to understand where we came from. I take this seriously: studying Latin, learning Greek badly, dabbling in Biblical Hebrew, etc., and mining all of the ancient sources of wisdom I can in one lifetime. It is a constant effort, and there is never an end to our striving. Only from that greater informed context of culture and history can we think like Steiner rather than just repeating a copy of Steiner’s thoughts. Reading Virgil’s Georgics shows astronomical timing indications for tending plants and animals, many of which are confirmed by biodynamic research. Reading Paracelsus expands the biodynamic understanding of the world. Jacob Boehme discloses the secret nature of plants. As Rudolf Steiner says, “One needs only to know Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme to know theosophy. Everything that they wrote is given from a deep spring, with immense deepness and magic power.”2 By this, Steiner refers to his own vision of theosophical insight (1906) — not that of Blavatsky — specifically as he articulated it in Theosophy (1904).
In the end, it all comes back to work in the garden. Tending plants, weeding, hoeing, making compost, adding the right amendments, etc. It takes time and effort to become proficient at anything. Some say it takes somewhere near 10,000 hours or ten years to master a craft. And only someone who is a relative expert in a field knows how much time and effort goes into mastering that small corner of existence. Those without expertise cannot respect the expertise of others but instead, think all opinions are created equal. The respect of authority should always be grounded in a track record of attentive experience. Attentiveness without experience is good, but it lacks the base of knowledge to understand what it’s seeing; experience without attentiveness, though, is completely useless. In the vast ocean of experience, mine is always but a tiny drop in an infinite expanse. The smallness of my experience compared to the totality of experience in no way implies that my droplet of experience is not larger or smaller compared to other droplets. Everyone is a specialist in their own experience — the only question is how attentive we are. As long as we stick with our experiences, it’s much harder to go wrong. We might misinterpret our experience because we’re lacking the appropriate concept, but as
impressed upon me, it is our task to read things the way in which they can be seen to be true. If we start with a charitable reading, we’re much more likely to find the truth of a thing — which is its light.Someone who has a lot of experience but fails to interrogate it for the flecks of gold contained within manure does not make progress. An inattentive gardener does not learn what the garden has to share, no matter how many years the inattentive gardener grows. No amount of experience becomes anything if we are not paying attention to the spiritual meaning at work in it. You can’t force people to pay attention or observe. This is part of why one person has a green thumb while another person kills everything they touch.
We try to limit inputs on the farm to what we can make ourselves: compost, biochar, leaves from the woods, etc. We’re even moving towards making our own wood ash for our own lime source. I do mix in an organic fertilizer blend formulated by the late Michael Astera (The Ideal Soil) but at stimulant rates. More and more, we are relying exclusively on rapid crop rotations, biodynamic preparations, and our own compost.
How-To: Balancing Biodynamic Soils
Working two to four farmers markets for most of my time farming is rather taxing. We don’t rely on intern labor, so efficiency is paramount. When it’s just three people on your farm year-round, you learn what time is well spent and what time isn’t. Because farming is a means to the goal of freedom, it facilitates my life, while efficiency in farming allows me to pursue the spiritual themes that are closest to my heart. When I’m out in the field, I’m contemplating the plants. As an idea arises, I’ll jot it down. By the end of the day, there may be ten sentences or so — enough for the bones of a reflective essay.
We raise all our own animals. The cows provide precious manure and sheaths, and we grow all the biodynamic herbs to make our own preparations. The herbs we grow are likely not the best objectively, but for this particular place, they are ideal. We prefer to keep animals born here and progressively reduce the number of imported animals. In utero, an animal’s gut is sterile. It receives its microbial population from its environment. Therefore, the animals born on a farm are usually more “at home” with that place, having grown up there. In a way, the calves born here belong to this place more than I myself ever will. Unlike them, I am in but not of the world. Several generations in, we are beginning to see a new expression of this dynamic in our cattle.
I farm for the sake of freedom.
likes to say she’s a farmer who writes, while I’m a writer who farms. The difference is as subtle but as real as a sandy loam versus a loamy sand. But a farmer may think, and a thinker may farm.
Why do I farm? For the sake of freedom. But what is the point of freedom? The aim of freedom is love, which means sacrificing one’s freedom to pursue the one thing you love. I value independence and creative expression, good food, health, and bringing the fruits of all this to others. I want to give people tools to establish greater freedom for themselves without needing outside inputs. If I am useful in the journey of others towards freedom, then that is enough for me. Freedom isn’t something to be stored up as unused potential but something to be given away in dedication to a cause we love.
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture IV
R. Steiner, Berlin, 3rd May 1906
Powerful! And profound!
Thank you for giving away your freedom to write that =;-)
I now have, in eloquent words, what I have been *feeling* and trying to accomplish for (many) decades, in the midst of spray-happy neighbors and chem lawns (landscapes, not gardens).
In the 70's, when Roundup first came out, it was to touted (in the actual literature) as degrading *totally* - to water. "Very safe." No surprise there.
Many blessings sir - kudos on your ability to write about farming.
Elementals too! ❤️