Getting into beekeeping has been a life altering experience for me. I've been taking a close look at how I live and how Americans generally live, what we consume, and how we don't really get it. I promise I'm not turning into a crazy, pretentious eco-hippy, but rather my philosophy is becoming more adamantly conservative, but not in the right wing sense.
I've been a fiscal, social, and governmental conservative for a long time: don't waste it, don't waste people (but don't tolerate crime), and keep the government out of things. About eight years ago I became a religious conservative (before that I was an agnostic conservative, but I just didn't really know). To a degree I've always been an environmental conservative: I love nature, convinced my family to wash and re-use Ziploc bags when I was 13 or so, buy cars that get good gas mileage (saves me cash, too!), avoid wasting water, etc., etc.
Lately, that conservative core has been convinced that we're spiraling out of control in this world. As Dave Ramsey (the guru of getting out of debt using common sense) likes to point out: we spend money we don't have on things we don't need to impress people we don't know. And it seems that the biggest export of the U.S. is that philosophy. We waste so much, pollute so much, have a really twisted idea on how to get our food, and have a governmental system that lines the pockets of the wrong people with lots of cash to get it all done.
When all is said and done, I don't have any solution to this problem other than what Ghandi said once: Be the change you want to see in the world.
Kinda crazy that a little bee would show me this.
Bob
One thing I love about bees is that there is no leader. All members of a hive just follow a few simple pheromone or genetically driven behaviours , and out of these seemingly random interactions comes this emergent property of self preservation and order that is more then the sum of its parts. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we as a society followed this same 'bottom up' approach instead of entrusting our collective well being with any political or social ideology.
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