To bee or not to bee: notes from the apiary

For the first episode of our forthcoming podcast we took a tour of 2,400 years of stories about bees and beekeeping in order to explore how language works today. That tour Included spending some time on a roof in east London where Edward keeps a couple of beehives. Here we are kitted out in our finest apiary apparel.

If you’re inspired to take deeper dive into the world of the hive, then we strongly recommend the Vino Farm youtube channel which charts the journey of Jim the beekeeper as he tends to his ever growing bee yard on his New England homestead. Jim’s channel is unique among the very many beekeeping video blogs available online, in that he’s learning to bee keep in public, committed to learning aloud and in a constantly experimental mode. There are lots of videos of much more experienced beekeepers, many of whom have inherited their craft from generations of beekeepers, but these can be harder to follow, steeped as they are in well-worn habits, and reliable good practice. Watching them can be a great way to learn what can work, but not necessarily why.

Working our way through the conundrums of human civilisation is a parallel task: do we inherit, relatively unquestioningly, the wisdom of the generations that preceded us, or is tradition ‘the tyranny of the dead’? If we set our intention of building ‘new and surprising worlds’ then must we abandon what has come before?

As well as sharing a boundless interest in bees, as a method Vino Farms offers another narrative lesson that we’ll be returning to in our fifth and sixth episodes: Jim’s approach embodies a playful injunction to live experimentally, built intuitively upon an idea like negative capability. From this vantage-point, the knowledge of the past ceases to be a chain to the settled and established, but a proposition, a hypothesis, a testing ground. But in the knowledge that all such inheritances are just stories we approach them with a unique combination of tentativeness and decisiveness, trapped neither by our caution that ‘we might have it wrong’ (we will! Inevitably! And that’s OK) or the dogmatism of those who came before us.

The narrative mode is necessarily experimental, lurking between these poles.  Conducting an experiment combines the holding of a tentative hypothesis (a concession that we suppose rather than know) with a clarity of choice and a decisiveness of action.  To live experimentally is to live with a willingness to make choices and take action in a context of not knowing.  There is an honesty to this which compliments and coheres with the awarenesses that springs from our understanding of the storied world - because such understandings cast radical doubt on our ability to know. As Simone De Beavoir wrote:

Just as the scientist, in order to know a phenomenon, does not wait for the light of completed knowledge to break upon it; on the contrary, in illuminating the phenomenon, he helps establish the knowledge; in like manner, the man of action, in order to make a decision, will not wait for a perfect knowledge to prove to him the necessity of a certain choice; he must first choose and thus help fashion history. A choice of this kind is no more arbitrary than a hypothesis; it excludes neither reflection nor even method; but it is also free, and it implies risks that must be assumed as such. The movement of the mind, whether it be called thought or will, always starts up in the darkness. And at bottom it matters very little, practically speaking, whether there is a Science of history or not, since this Science can come to light only at the end of the future and since at each particular moment we must, in any case, manoeuvre in a state of doubt.

- The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Philosophical Library, 132-133)

Our question then becomes, what can we use to set the parameters for the experiment if we are sceptical about the nature - and even the existence - of ‘reality’…