DeepSummary
The podcast host interviews Ang Roell, a facilitator and thought leader who works with honeybees. Ang discusses how in industrial agriculture, honeybees are exploited as labor and treated as a cost of doing business, lacking any reciprocity or care. One in four bites of food is pollinated by honeybees, but at the cost of an extractive system that moves hives across the country to pollinate monocrops.
Ang explains that this system arose from the colonization of the United States, the growth of large-scale agriculture, and the lack of indigenous stewardship. Moving bees spreads pathogens, and the use of pesticides compromises both farmers and beekeepers. However, Ang argues that the true work of bees is about care for their young and providing for future generations, which is fundamentally different from human concepts of productivity-driven work.
The conversation explores how honeybee hives operate more like cooperatives rather than hierarchies, and how even oppressive human systems rely on interdependence. Ang invites listeners to learn from the responsiveness of bees, slowing down and finding presence through practices like breathing and moving with care when working with the hives.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Honeybees are exploited as labor and treated as a cost of doing business in industrial agriculture, lacking care and reciprocity.
- The work of honeybees is fundamentally different from human concepts of productivity-driven work, being driven by care for future generations and service to their ecosystem.
- Even hierarchical and oppressive human systems rely on interdependence among different groups.
- Honeybee hives model responsiveness, collective care, and alternatives to hierarchical human systems.
- Practices like slowing down, breathing, and moving with care can be learned from observing and working with honeybee hives.
- Ang Roell invites listeners to learn from the resilience, care, and responsiveness exhibited by honeybees and their hives.
- Small things like seeds (and honeybees) can have a huge impact, offering hope and potential for positive change.
- Indigenous stewardship and localized, sustainable agriculture could provide alternatives to the exploitative industrial agriculture system.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “Right. And it's like, for honeybees, it's also in service too, right? Like, I'm just thinking about this right now, but it's like it's care driven internally and then externally, it's in service to pollination of the trees and plants within that ecosystem. So in both ways, it's like, not about like. It is in no way like our understanding of the word work, you know?“ by Ange Roell
- “Right. We were just talking about the farmers and the beekeepers, like, if beekeepers stopped moving bees, it would just bring that entire industry to its.“ by Ange Roell
- “I'm finding a lot of connection right now in seeds and their stories and just this idea that something so, so small can have such a huge impact.“ by Ange Roell
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Episode Information
Green Dreamer: Seeding change towards collective healing, sustainability, regeneration
Kamea Chayne
12/26/23
“One in four bites of our food is pollinated by honeybees, but at what cost in the system that we are in now? How could that look different if our agriculture was more localized, regionalized, and sustainable?”
In this episode, we warmly welcome Ang Roell—founder of They Keep Bees—to discuss their practice of working and learning with honeybees as models of resilience, care, and responsiveness. Ang’s work, which demystifies bees to decenter logics of power-over relations and consumer-driven work culture, frames a conversation around how we might learn from hive-lives in times of collapse.
Join us in this invitation to re-member our webs of interdependence—to slow down, swarm together, and work within rhythmic fields of collective care. And join us in alchemize: radical imagination for collective transformation, to experience two practices led by Ang: “You are a honeybee” and “Pollinating networks of collective care.”