All of this tweeting about beekeeping, thanks to @simonmlewis, set me to thinking about bees and what is so special about them anyway.

I was bit by the bug – literally – years ago when I was only ten.  Technically,  I wasn’t bitten – I was stung.   My arm swelled to an angry red  and the fingers on my left hand puffed out like a cleaning glove filled with air.  I had to wear a sling for two weeks, which meant no swimming in the hot Michigan July.  I wasn’t deterred by the incident, it only drew me into daily investigations of the pear tree outside our kitchen window. It blossomed white with flowers, attracting bees in the spring, and in the late summer,  wasps carved tunnels in the fermenting fruit that laid fallen, uncollected.  I would poke around in the bruised spots on the pears, dodging angry wasps, capturing them under glass jars to get a closer look.  The unfortunate creatures were treated to untutored dissection at the hands of my curiosity.  I’m sure these impromptu explorations ripened my curiosity for beekeeping,

It wasn’t until years later,  a continent away from that pear tree, I had the chance to find out a bit more about the bees through more structured avenues.  The Federation of Irish Beekeepers’ Association run a summer school at Gormanstown in July of every year, complete with real live honeybee hives.  As fascinating as the bees are, the beekeepers are a study in themselves.  There is a Deadhead community feel to the summer course, and everyone is welcome.    Only, we are not following a band,  but the Honeybee, instead.

Lingering in the corridors, anticipating the next workshop, I’ve many times been affronted with the question “how many hives do you keep?”    This is always a bit of a sticky question.  I’m longing to talk shop, swap stories with these fellow enthusiasts.  The truth is though, I’m only a beekeeper at heart. I’ve a preliminary certificate in beekeeping.  I own a very white bee suit (as I’ve been told many times at demonstrations), which is fitted out with veil and gloves.  I am only short a smoke can.  And a hive, or two.    I started at one stage to study for the diploma, but I didn’t have a suitable place to keep bees in the city to satisfy the practicals.  Though apparently, I am told, some of the highest yields of honey come from suburban bees, thanks to the abundance of flowers in concentrated areas.

I haven’t been to the summer school in years now.  Two children later, I’ve given up the idea of rearing bees in my attic and am content thinking about, and sometimes re-reading, my abundant literature on bees.  My kids are old enough this year to sit through a lecture and I am thinking I’ll bring  them back for a day or two of the course.  They’ll enjoy the couple of hours looking at the anatamoy of the bee, viewing the honey on display, looking at a beehive from behind the safety of glass,  and playing “spot the queen.”  They are naturally fascinated by anything I am excited about.  I found this same magic true of teaching.  If you lean in real close and look at something, anything,  the students always want to know a bit more about it.  Just as if you hold a storybook preciously, reverentely, between your hands, they just squirm with excitement to be read aloud to.

My passion and enjoyment for learning about bees reminds me of a tragedy that frequently occurs in the educational world of teaching. This tragedy is the stringent interpretation of what is meant to be a marvellous collection of curriculum choices and ideas ,  coupled with  a barrage of books that must be “gotten through” at primary level.  At the post primary level, these pressures become known as the junior and leaving certificate.      Jim Gleeson of the University of Limerick put it candidly during his presentation at the Re-Imagining Learning Conference in Limerick in May:   fragmenting of the curriculum and subject planning can “easily become a disconnected series of facts and events with deadening effects on lives of teachers and students.”  I can not agree more.

Refreshingly, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) is undertaking a Junior Cycle Review that considers placing some of the decisions back into the educators hands in a more local-based decision making process.  John Hammond of the NCCA presented a New Framework for Learning in Junior Cycle at the conference in Limerick.  The framework advocates for greater student connection with learning, schools empowered to develop courses of their own, as well as curriculum that is less prescribed and students enabled to gather evidence for their learning which may be assessed in a more balanced way over the three years.

This is where I start dreaming about beekeeping again…

Bees are efficient, political: totalitarian by nature, working as if they are one organism as opposed to individualists.  Through their distinctive lifecycle the honeybee adopts a particular role: they are cleaners, feeders, nurses, collectors.   One can witness how this community comes together to  moderate the temperature of the hive, protect their queen, feed their young, forage for pollen and nectar not to mention the interesting roles the males and females play in this community.  Bees communicate with the language of the dance, and they navigate by degrees in relation to their angle to the sun.  Foraging bees, in their virgin flight, will take their coordinates and thus know to return to their own hive.  I know that if you move a hive from Dublin to Wicklow, the bees will have a better chance to find their way back to their hive than if you move it a couple of meters across their native yard.  Furthermore, poetry has been written since ancient times and novels have been dedicated to these fascinating creatures.    Einstein’s take on the necessity of the honeybee in pollinating our food supply, though over-exaggerated, highlights the importance of the humble, cantankerous creature:  “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.”  There are moral issues to consider when one finds they have to make the decision to exploit the poor bee as they rob them of their rich, winter supplies and replace them with a sugared syrup.  Though the concentration of the syrup provided leaves some calculations to be considered and equations to be solved.  The dissections, the lifecycles, the food chain, the environment, the diseases, the phenomena such “colony collapse disorder” (CCD), causes, cures.  The spreadsheets of record keeping are growing, the observation blogs are filling up and the social networking sites are buzzing with the sound of a global student community reaching out across the world to find other schools, perhaps in Russia, maybe Hawaii, or even folks in Galway,  with common interests.

Now, can you think of a more integrated subject that could be more exciting than that of the honeybee?  I suppose you can.  What rich fabric makes up your own interests, your community’s interests?  The GAA?  Forestry?  Irish Traditional Music?  Life abroad?  I am sure the lists and the community and global supports are endless.

As I’ve heard many times in these educational circles a quote from John Dewey: “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”  A change in the way we teach and learn is an argument no longer needed as we are sold – we want to move on and forward – but what is going to fill these gaps?      As is the motto from my beautiful, native state of Michigan:  Si Quæris Peninsulam Amœnam Circumspice: If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.