A Spoonful of Honey – On Bees, Nature, and the Unspoken Encounter

I could eat a spoonful of honey every morning.

It has become a small habit. I take the honey, put it on the spoon, and eat it. But sometimes I pause. What is it, really, that I am eating?

I am not simply eating something sweet.

I am eating a small piece of a society.

Honey is the bees’ energy reserve. It is gathered from flowers, processed by the bees, and stored in the wax comb as a common provision. The bee does not make honey for human beings. Honey is part of the life of the bees, of their survival, and of the collective life of the hive.

And yet here I am, thousands of years later, holding a spoonful of honey.

It is a strange thought.

A Society Without Language

Bees live in a social community that is far older than human society. The same is true of ants, many species of birds, and several marine mammals. They have developed forms of cooperation, communication, care, and division of labor long before human beings began organizing themselves into cities, states, and institutions.

Yet we tend to observe these societies from the outside.

We study them. We classify them. We investigate how they communicate and organize themselves. We can describe how bees work, how they find nectar, how they signal to one another, and how the hive functions.

All of this is valuable knowledge.

But knowledge is not necessarily the same as closeness.

Perhaps this is where practical philosophy begins.

Practical philosophy does not ask only: What is this? It also asks: How do I relate to this? How do I live with it? What does an encounter do to my way of being human?

Silence

There is something strange about the life of bees.

They work without explaining themselves.

There are no conferences. No strategy documents. No meetings about how to organize the next meeting.

There is only the hum.

An entire society is at work.

I know, of course, that this is a romanticized way of putting it. Bee society cannot simply be used as a model for human society. Bees live according to biological conditions that cannot simply be transferred to human social life.

But perhaps we can nevertheless allow ourselves to be challenged by them.

We humans talk so much.

We explain, evaluate, justify, document, and communicate. We produce more and more information, yet at the same time seem to have become less capable of being in silence.

Perhaps nature reminds us that life is not primarily something that needs to be explained.

Some things can simply be lived.

Obedience

I have also been thinking about the word obedience.

The bee does not obey a leader in the way a human being may obey an authority. The queen is not a political ruler. There is no little king or queen giving orders to the workers.

And yet a remarkable order emerges.

It arises from below, through biology, signals, reciprocity, and the interdependence between individuals.

Perhaps accord is a more precise word than obedience.

The modern human being has good reasons to value freedom as self-determination. History is full of people who have had to struggle to free themselves from authority, tradition, and subordination. We should not romanticize that freedom away.

But freedom does not necessarily have to mean complete independence.

What if freedom could also mean finding a form of accord with the life of which we are actually a part?

Not submission.

Not giving up the self.

But ceasing to regard ourselves as the center.

Joy

And then there is joy.

I do not know whether a bee experiences joy in the way I do. It would be anthropomorphic to claim this without qualification.

But when I watch bees flying from flower to flower, I can nevertheless experience something that resembles joy in their activity.

Perhaps it is my own joy that I see.

But perhaps it is also something else.

The living has an intensity of its own that does not require human language in order to be real.

I experienced something similar this summer when I encountered a dragonfly.

It rested for a moment near me. I no longer remember what first made me notice it, only that I suddenly stopped and watched. It was so small and yet so completely present. I had no reason to believe that it registered me in the way I registered it.

And yet something changed in that moment.

I stopped looking at it as an insect about which I could acquire knowledge. I was simply there with it.

It was not an encounter in the human sense. We did not speak. It knew nothing about me, and I knew very little about it.

And yet something happened between us.

Something unspoken.

And precisely for that reason, difficult to explain.

Distance and Gift

We have acquired a great distance from nature.

Not only physically. Many of us live in cities, buy our food in shops, and live surrounded by technology. But the distance is also intellectual and existential.

We have learned to regard nature as something outside ourselves.

Nature is out there.

We are here.

But that is not really so.

We are nature ourselves.

We breathe, eat, sleep, reproduce, become ill, grow old, and die. Our bodies consist of the same matter as the rest of the living world. We depend upon plants, animals, microorganisms, water, air, and soil.

Perhaps part of our present ecological crisis is also a crisis in the way we understand ourselves.

We have forgotten our belonging.

Arne Næss tried to put some of this into words through ecosophy: the human being is not an autonomous self standing opposite nature, but a self whose identity expands through belonging to the living world.

That is a philosophical formulation.

Yet I do not need the concept when I sit with the spoonful of honey in my hand.

I feel it before I think it.

For honey has begun to mean something more to me.

When I eat a spoonful of honey in the morning, I can think of the bees. Of the flowers. Of summer. Of work. Of the hive. Of a society that existed long before my own.

And I can think:

I did not make this.

It is a gift.

Not a gift in any sentimental sense. The bees have not decided to give me honey. And yet I receive something that has come into being through another living community.

There is something humbling about this.

Human beings like to regard themselves as creative, inventive, and self-sufficient. Yet every day we receive gifts we have not produced ourselves.

Air.

Water.

Food.

Light.

Soil.

And encounters with other living beings.

Perhaps one of the tasks of practical philosophy is to teach us how to receive again.

Living with Nature

I do not think the society of bees should become a blueprint for how human beings ought to organize society.

That would be to misunderstand both bees and human beings.

But bees can disturb our assumptions.

They can remind us that a society does not consist only of individuals who happen to live together. A society also consists of dependence, reciprocity, and something greater than the individual.

And perhaps bees can teach us something else as well:

That life does not always have to be a project.

That there is a form of activity that does not require self-presentation.

That silence is not emptiness.

That dependence is not necessarily weakness.

And that perhaps we can be free without constantly having to stand outside what we are a part of.

A Spoonful of Honey

So there I am in the morning.

A spoonful of honey.

I could simply eat it.

And I do.

But sometimes I pause.

Because this honey is not merely sweet.

It carries a society within it.

A society I cannot enter, and which I can never fully understand.

And yet I am connected to it.

Perhaps this is how it is with nature.

We do not always have to understand it in order to stand in relationship with it.

A dragonfly over the water.

A bee on a flower.

The hum of the hive.

A spoonful of honey in the morning.

Perhaps this is what nature can still teach us:

that the world is not merely something we are supposed to know about.

It is also something we belong to.

And perhaps that is why a spoonful of honey can be more than something sweet.

It can be a small reminder that my life is always already woven into the lives of others.

Including lives I can never fully understand.

Including lives that can never answer me in words.

I eat the honey.

And for a moment I feel that I am not standing outside nature, looking in.

I am part of it.

Reference

Næss, A. (1989). Ecology, community and lifestyle: Outline of an ecosophy (D. Rothenberg, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1976)