Rethinking Beekeeping: Dr. Torben Schiffer on Wild Honeybees, Sustainability, and Ecological Balance

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Dr. Torben Schiffer. Torben is the author of a number of books and studies and focuses primarily on wild honeybees, including the book What Bees Want, which you can find here. His insight into their practices is invaluable, and I think you'll really enjoy this conversation.

Andy:

Torben, thanks so much for taking some time to chat a little bit about this podcast. This podcast has been a project to learn about growing food and the fact that we all know the way we're growing food today isn't sustainable. Whether it's t’ Whether it's the way we're sourcing chemicals, the destruction of the soils, or climate change, there are innumerable reasons why we can't continue to grow food the way we are today. That's not just about food but also our pollinators.

The pressures on native pollinators are incredible right now, between, again, climate change, the way we grow our food, pesticides, general destruction from suburbanization, and so on. Then, we have to figure out where something like a honeybee, which is not quite domestic and not quite wild, fits into the system. Where have they become part of our food commodity system? Right? Where are we trucking them around the country?

It's a very complicated mess that we've gotten ourselves in over a number of generations of poor management, and basically, what we're trying to do is step back and say what are we doing wrong? What should we be doing, and how do we get there? And it's not just about being more ethical with the bees themselves and how we manage them, but within a bigger context right Within a bigger food system, within a bigger ecosystem, and that's a really complicated and nuanced question, but we have to start somewhere, and that's what I feel like we're kind of doing right now.

A lot of people are coming to the same consensus. I know you are, and you've had some really interesting research that you've been working on. I'd love to chat a little bit about that with you. So, for folks that aren't familiar with you, could you introduce yourself about that with you?

Dr. Torben Schiffer:

My name is Torben Schiffer, and I have been working on wild-living honeybee colonies that are supposed to be extinct here in Europe or in Germany, but they aren't. So I did my research for Professor Jürgen Tautz. He's a kind of icon when it comes to honeybees here in Germany or in Europe, and he hired me because he saw some of my research on television in a documentary. Then he gave me a phone call and asked me to work for him, and I did, and during that period when I was working for him for four years at the University of Würzburg, I was doing my research on wild living colonies in Germany, and I found out that at the beginning of that research, you know, I was just a little bit worried that I wouldn't find any wild living colonies because they were supposed to have extinct.

For the first wild colonies, I drove almost 800 kilometers to research, and now I know they are in literally any forest. I can find them in any forest. And that was very interesting because my scientific research field was to do research on the biology of colonies in the wilderness, in tree cavities, and compare them with the living conditions in boxes and managed hives and point out if or whether there are any side effects and just learn about it. So, and yeah, I could point out that there are indeed a lot of side effects, and I could then figure out that literally any side effects that we are tackling are the rhomboids or the foulbrood. Is it all the diseases is literally fighting the symptoms of our own established husbandry system, which is not really old.

The fact that we have keeping bees in boxes throughout my whole lifetime doesn't mean a thing because if you ask my grandfather, who passed away last year, his father, for instance, has been doing beekeeping in straw hives and he had been doing beekeeping or was doing beekeeping in straw hives and you know the whole thing conveyed right up to the second world war and because, you know, before the second world war you couldn't keep bees in such densities as we're doing it today because we didn't have any industrialized sugar production that we can feed those bees. So, we had to be in balance with the natural resources.

You couldn't put more bees in cities or certain locations and just ignore the balances of natural resources, so we had to live with the resources, and we couldn’t take more out of the system than it was out there, a system than it was, you know, out there. And today it's a totally different story. So after the Second World War, we had industrialization 2.0, which means, uh, we were just 2.3 billion people after the Second World War. Now, we are up to 8 billion people.

And in the last decades, we have lived in that. The natural resources were unlimited until I was born in the 70s. So, in the 80s, there was nothing like sustainability discussions or something like that. So it was all like, uh, bigger, wider, more, and you and get the most out of it. And in that perspective, we have conveyed that to the bees as well after the Second World War because then we learned how to manipulate them, how to get more out of the bees, how to compensate for the side effects of that husbandry system, how to adjust or how to compensate with sugar feeding, and then, you know, ignore the natural balances. It's very much.

It's a very close analogy to industrial agriculture, really.

Now we can tell that quite a few scientific research articles have appeared, a few dozen that I know of internationally that point out very clearly that, you know, the density of honeybee farming is now putting the food out of the mouths of other species, basically dragging them into extinction. What is happening in industrialized countries like Germany is that most of the countryside is agricultural, and so all the hundreds of species that our ecosystems depend on have no place to thrive or to live there anymore because of that agriculture.

So they have gone into the cities, or the cities are the last resource of no pesticides being used, and so on. And now the cities are kind of being drawn by modern beekeeping and by the hype of beekeeping because it is, um, you know, the story is being told that everyone who is setting up a beehive in a box in the city is doing that for sustainability and is helping the bees, and it's a fairy tale. And it's not only a fairy tale, it's the last untold catastrophe in the 21st century.

Is the biggest scandal to me that throughout the whole Western world, the the narrative is being told to the people who, most of them, most of the beekeepers that I know, most of the people who start beekeeping, have good intentions. So, these people are idealistic people. They really want to do good to nature and the bees, and then they end up learning an industrial mass husbandry system that is based on medication and compensation and which has a very huge impact on the whole environment, and it's very easy to understand, but the lobby is ignoring it because that's where the money goes right yeah, yeah, you know you've brought up a bunch of different points that I think are really important to talk about, right?

Andy:

First, you've brought up this idea of, like, wild honeybees and how that compares to, and I kind of alluded to it before, this idea of domesticated honeybees because they're not really domesticated, but they're also not completely wild either. Additionally, you know we have the issue of non-native honeybees in the United States.

So, that adds another layer of complexity to it. And you've talked about the fact that, like, if we think about these ecological systems, our agriculture, we don't do a good job of fully accounting for the externalities of our agricultural system, right? In the same way, here in the United States. Currently, Gas, we don't account for the cost of things like fuel pollution. Currently, Gas is $3.50 a gallon, which is very cheap compared to where you are because we're not fully accounting for the true ecological destruction of using gas. And you know, obviously, even that's still flawed.

But the point is, as you brought up, our drive to have a safe food system so that we never have shortages has decimated our ecological framework, which ultimately supports that agricultural system. We don't think about how it supports that agricultural system, and it's just a really messy, convoluted situation. And then you add well-meaning people who don't know much about ecology or insects, saying, "I'm going to have bees because this is good for my to or whatever” or whatever.

You alluded to the fact that a lot has changed regarding the wild honeybees in Europe, and I know they're much more likely to be wild there than here. They generally don't survive very long here, so what do you think is driving the fact that you're finding them more? Are there more, or are you just better at finding them?

Dr. Torben Schiffer:

Well, I wouldn't say that there isn't any difference, to be honest, because if you look at Thomas Seeley's research and Thomas Dyer Seeley is one of the biggest researchers in the world when it comes to wild living honeybees and he's done his studies in the United States bromide, which is, you know, for beekeeping enemy number one, you know, the wild living bees in the Arnold forest for instance in the United States don't have a problem, right, they have adapted to that you know parasite and they've gone through a bottleneck.

So that was a kind of selectional process there, and he had samples of the genetic lines that were living in that forest before the varroa mite came and afterward. So you could tell that you know some of these genetic lines have died out afterward. But the bees living in the yonder forest do have varroa mites; they don't have any problem with it, and they have changed not only genetically a little bit, but they have adapted within a few years, which is tremendously fast. And that's what you would always have to expect or what you could always see if you were a human being. Wendy Barrow once said you don't know anything before you stop doing anything and see what nature would be doing.

If you look at it as a biologist, if you look at evolution and natural selection, natural selection is evolution itself. So, without selection, there is no evolution, right? And it's all based on a very simple principle that a parental generation generates more offspring than is needed to sustain the population, and then the face selection comes, and Mother Nature selects an adaptive class out of that mass. That is the engine of evolution and adaption. So if we hinder that, based on, you know, medication or interventions or manipulations, then there is no evolution anymore. And this is what we see.

We're using bees as a tool. It is a tool of industrialized agriculture, but that's not what the species is here for, and that is not how the ecosystems have been working in the last millions of years. And so we are. You know, modern beekeeping is a mess; as industrialized agriculture is, it is heading to a dead end. And as we are poisoning the soils and we're destroying the top soils of the earth with industrialized agriculture, which is, which is just, it's not really needed, because we can just change to regenerative agriculture and we get more food out of the same system that we do now. We don't use all this chemistry, and we don't have to use all the pesticides and can solve all these problems, even global warming. So, the bees are certainly a part of it.

The biology of the bees is not serving the beekeeper or serving us humans, being human beings, as being kind of honey factories and boxes that we can manipulate and subdue to our personal needs. But this species has been long on the plate, you know, on the face of the earth, before humans even developed. I mean, you know, showed up on the pace of earth. So it is a very old species, and it has sustained for millions of years.

And now we, as beekeepers, think that we can change the genetics and make them better or improve them to our, and what we're really doing is we are changing the genetic code, not by producing new genetics, but by taking out of the genetic pool the behavior that we choose that is good for us or benefit to us, and then we kind of try to compile that together and create a bee that is serving our needs and it's not getting better in through the perspective of mother nature or the bees itself themselves. So they are getting weaker and weaker, and you know so.

They lose the abilities that are direly needed in order to survive independently in nature. Of course, they then collect a lot of honey. They, you know, do not sting anymore, and so on and so forth, which makes it convenient to exploit them, but they are getting weaker and more and more dependent on medication and manipulation, and that is something that is just not right.

Andy:

It ultimately comes down to the fact that there's an inverse relationship between what we can benefit from them through that domestication process and their ability to survive without us. Right, yeah, and if they can produce more for us, we must put in more. So it's really, it's a zero-sum game in a lot of ways, except we're creating a system of perpetual need from us, and then we're playing this evolutionary arms race against nature, which is trying to kill it off because it's domesticated and it doesn't have those skills to exist outside in the world.

Dr. Torben Schiffer:

Yeah, you got it. When it comes to honeybees, it's not as easy as it is with, let's say, dogs. You can take a wolf, and you can create dogs out of it because you're in control of what semen and what egg cell or female you are choosing. But when it comes to honeybees, the queen is flying out and mating with up to 20 drones, and so there is a huge genetic variety or diversity that, almost every time, kind of gets back to what is needed for the bees themselves. So if you really take your hands out and this is what is going on all the time, I mean all the wild living bees and their drones are in the air and are at the mating places, so there is a mixture of wild and domesticated bees.

To me, as a scientific researcher, when I look at my bees, and I was a beekeeper before, I did that research, right, so, I didn't know anything about bees, which was really clear to me after I've started that research it is like it would be an analogy. Like you know, ask a fisherman about deep-sea crabs' natural behavior, and he doesn't know. He just knows how to catch them, but he knows nothing about their lives or their life circle. Or you know what they are, what their behaviors are, and what they. You know why they are doing this. So he doesn't know anything.

He just knows how to catch them, and that's like the beekeeper he knows how to manipulate bees and get the most out of them and how to tackle the side effects of the husbandry system. This is what beekeeping is all about. But he doesn't know anything about the, the natural wonders and behaviors that bees are able to show in natural, in natural conditions, and this is very comparable to, um, I mean, how much we have lost track to the natural balance can be plainly seen if you do research on wild-living bees. It is like if you really, if you do research on bees and boxes is like doing research in an intensive farming house on animals and trying to figure out their natural behavior.

This is just impossible, right, yeah? Or if you go into the zoo and just research the natural behavior of elephants. You would maybe conclude that they like to be fed bananas from children, and then, you know, go to Africa and send your child with a banana to an elephant herd, and you will be faced with another truth, right? So yeah, it is absurd. It is absolutely absurd to put a polar bear into the desert and, you know, then fight the symptoms of the side effects. This animal does not belong in that place, and bees do not belong in boxes on the ground, not being manipulated by the beekeeper.

You know, the brood is enhanced. It's like, you know, tuning an engine. This is what beekeepers do. They enhance the brood field, so you have many worker bees. But when you increase the brood field, and you have a massive brood, you automatically increase the varroa mites, and at the end, when you decrease the amount of volume, and the colony gets smaller when it comes to the wintertime, the oversized varroa mite population is still there. So your need is to use chemistry. It's easy to understand. It's absolutely easy to understand this.

But in beekeeping, it's like the British people. I don't know if you Americans say that, but there is a saying they can't think out of the box. So, the beekeepers can't think out of the box because they are only looking inside their boxes and think that this is the reality. But what they are looking at is a broken and tortured animal, subdued to the personal needs of the beekeeper. It's not nature, and it's not natural what the bees are doing in the boxes because their behavior shifts to a totally different behavior when they are allowed to live in normal conditions or in species-appropriate conditions, like in a tree cavity that has just 40 liters of volume, not 200.

And you know there is a limit to the intake that they can take in because the volume is limited. So after they have taken in their storage security, which is their first and most distinctive instinct to survive or establish its survivability, they will do anything they have to to create storage security. After that, when the intake is pushing down the brood in the cavity, the bees will turn to behaviors like grooming each other, biting off the mites, cleaning themselves, and propylizing the inner walls, which is the autoimmune system of the colony. And so they are not flying out anymore very much. Their lifespan is, you know, enhanced extremely, and the life circle, like the queen, stops flying, acts, and you know, or just very little, there's not that huge overturn of life that you would see in a box.

Because what we're doing in boxes is like first we put them on the ground, which is a selective factor, so the ground is killing beehives in the wilderness. Bees would never choose the ground to live in. If they have another opportunity or if they have a cavity up in the tree, they would choose that. And that is because, you know, if it comes to evolution, all the bee colonies that have populated tree cavities close to the ground have gone through the selectional phase, and they have failed.

Because bacteria, mold, and all the spores are getting airborne, and you know the whole thing, the whole colony consists of organic material that these microbes want to consume, they are confronted with many problems, even with climatic conditions, more moisture, and so on, than they would face in a tree cavity far away from the ground.

We kill the queens, enhance the volume, and just tune the bees to our needs. And then by doing that, by adding empty boxes, empty boxes, empty boxes, we are kind of putting the bees in an emergency situation where they think, oh, we have no storage security. So, the bees only care about establishing storage security, which they can never achieve because the storage is always taken off, and an empty box is put on top. They wouldn't turn to behavior like wash boarding, grooming, or propylizing the inner walls, so they would automatically create.

Because of the foraging bees, they get worn out within a few days, and they have an accelerated lifespan, and they have, you know, more offspring that is being created, and they have, you know, shorter life, and so the overall overturn is much higher, and so the varroa mite population is growing. And this is, you know, all unhinged from natural conditions. Basically, this is nothing you would see in the tree cavity, and a friend of mine, Jonathan Power, from the Natural Beekeeping Trust in England, once said a bee would never get into the honey business because the price is too high. That's what he said, and he's right because it always comes. It is always based on the overturn of energy that goes through the hive.

It doesn't even matter if you place bees in thin-walled hives on a rooftop, in the sunlight, in the wind, in the, you know, in the rain, in the weather conditions, where you have very unstable conditions, where the box is gaining or losing temperature as you would expect it, in an uninsulated you know the exposed position. Do yourself a favor and, as a beekeeper, stand on a roof in the city on a sunny day, and you will feel like, okay, oh gosh, it's gonna get 60 degrees or whatever. Then after that, if you survive staying there all day, go into a forest and see that the temperature drops 25 or 30 degrees, and it's very stable.

So, the natural surrounding of honeybees is the forest. So the forest has its own microclimate, and they are, they are covered by the leaves, so there's no direct sunlight, no direct wind, there is no exposure to, you know, to the harsh weather conditions, and they are living in very stable climatic conditions in the forest, and you wouldn't see the heat peaks that you see daily in the city. It's very linear, the climatic conditions.

And then you have the tree cavity itself, which is thick-walled; you have the open-fiber wood, which absorbs humidity, and, when it comes to wood, wood is a very special material because it combines three very important physical features in one material, and that is it is good insulation, it has a heat capacity, it can store heat and it can absorb and emit humidity. So, all that combined creates a rock-stable climate within the tree cavities, and you can do some climatic measurements. I did this outside and inside the tree cavity, without any heating component inside, without a colony inside. It's like, you know, a heartbeat line, and the climatic conditions in the tree cavity are rock stable, and this is like a passive house. It's like you know you build a home that doesn't need any energy or whatever. So it is.

This is what the bees were living in, and they need that linear climatic conditions in order to create or establish their food temperature and hold it up to 60, 36 degrees. And you know, now think of them being in a box on a rooftop in the city. They have to cool the house, they have to heat it up. They have, you know, these huge overturn and if you look with a thermal camera and the whole boxes are kind of glooming, everything that you see in colors is a waste of energy, and when it comes to our houses, this would be fossil fuel. If it comes to bees, that's nectar. And so you know, a box like you know, a huge modern box with a volume up to 150 or 200 liters, has an overall overturn of nectar which can exceed 1000 liters in one summer.

If you look at a tree cavity or a colony in a tree cavity in the forest, it needs between 30 and 60 liters of nectar. That's all. Wow, the footprint or the exceeded overturn is about 20 times as much as a normal colony. And now think of, if you look at Sealy's work on wild living colonies in the Arnold forest, which is really interesting because the Arnold forest is a huge forest and there is not much going on, there's not much civilization whatsoever. So you had the ecological balance with all the hundreds of other pollination insects or insects that are feeding on nectar or are dependent on nectar, and the density of honeybees in such surroundings, in natural conditions, was, throughout 40 years of his research, he had just one bee colony in a tree cavity in one square kilometer. That's all.

Now, if you go into such a forest and you put one box into the middle of such a square kilometer, that'll mean it's like 20, you know, 20 tree colonies living in that square kilometer. And then you, of course, exceed the natural resources because all the nectar resources in that area are occupied by, you know, all the hundreds of other species and birds and beetles and Hoover flies and butterflies, and you know it, know it's all occupied. So that's, you know, that's the only food source for the most important creatures that we have that are keeping our ecosystems running, and we are very much depending on these creatures.

And by saying that, we are now taking more nectar out due to modern beekeeping than ever. This is just unprecedented. We have never taken that much nectar out of the system or the cultural landscape than we do today with, you know, based on modern beekeeping and compensation.

Now, in Germany, we have cities like Berlin, which has 25 bee colonies per square kilometer. Each colony uses up to 20 times as much nectar as one living in natural conditions.

So that is absolutely insane. If you convey this to the fishing industry, just as an example, that'll mean you would have about 25 fisher boats in one square kilometer of ocean, and so a bee colony normally forages in a circle of three kilometers. That means you have a circle of six kilometers in diameter, which is a surface of approximately 28 square kilometers. So, in each of these 28 square kilometers, another 25 or 20 bee colonies would be there. If you sum this up, this means that every square meter in Berlin is being foraged by more than 500 bee colonies. And if you look at the fishing industry, that would mean you would have to cut yourself through 500 fishing nets if you wanted to dive in the ocean.

In fishing, they would be there from the early day on when the sun rises until the end of the day, and then that's beekeeping. So we are literally starving the other species to death because the amount of nectar in a certain location is always limited. You can calculate that; we did this for Berlin for the first time, and the numbers are shocking. If you have the normal density, which would be natural, like the natural balance, like one bee colony and a tree cavity per square kilometer, that doesn't mean that more than 99% of all the nectar production of all the plants in that field, in that area, more than 99% of the nectar resources would be left for the hundreds of other species, like the beetles and the other wild bees and butterflies and wood flies and whatsoever. If it comes to Berlin, we can calculate that up to 90% of all the nectar that is being produced is now ending up in beekeeping boxes. That is a catastrophe.

And at the same time, the beekeeping lobby is kind of using the narrative to disguise itself in preservation. You know, they pretend to do something good to nature. They are kind of kidnapping all the idealistic people who really want to do good to the bees and to nature, and they kind of drag them into the system of industrialized agriculture and exploitation yeah. We see that with like the term greenwashing is pretty common here right I don't know if you guys have that same term, um, but just the idea of taking something and trying to paint it as being actually beneficial for the environment.

Andy:

You know the Starbucks model: You buy this cup of coffee, and it's going to do all these great things. But it's still doing those bad things, too. But we're not going to talk about that part. You're paying four dollars for this coffee, so you know it's doing good things.

Dr. Torben Schiffer:

You have many of these industries, or many of these brands, now financing beekeepers. These ordinary beekeepers are doing modern beekeeping in cities and on rooftops, and then they get the honey, and then they just take that honey and give it away to their customers as a kind of present. People would, I mean if they would understand that a glass of honey is nothing but a glass full of species extinction because this is what it is.

It's not our food, right? All the flowers, the whole evolution, has never had us as the major consumer of nectar on it's, you know, on its radar. Yeah, this is the only food source for all these species and creatures that are literally carrying the ecosystems on their wings, and we are part of these ecosystems. It doesn't make any sense for us to rob them of their only food source and drive them into extinction. And for a substance like honey, which is unnecessary for us. We don't need this. Nobody's going to die if we don't eat any honey, but we are certainly going to die if we wipe out all these species-relevant species. You know, system-relevant species, sorry, yeah, and so that is what I'm fighting for that people really get an idea of that.

Nectar is limited, and in my presentations, I always show a bottle of water just as an example because you can really see what's going on. And I say, just imagine that this bottle of water full of nectar is the amount of nectar that is grown in that city where I'm doing the presentation. So how can an unlimited number of people who want to have their share out of this bottle be right, can be just, can be sustainable and it's not? I mean, every child can understand this, you know, yeah, but still they would ignore this and try to argue that the amount that they take out of nature is not a big deal. But if it comes to numbers, that's hilarious. It's a statement that is far away from the truth.

Andy:

Now you brought up the fact that the honeybee populations are much more first off. They're much more efficient in the woods for a number of reasons because of the way they're living, but one of the things you've inferred is that the populations are much smaller. So, like with a typical Langstroth hive, I usually see 40,000 and 75,000 bees living in a Langstroth hive at its peak right. So, how many bees are living in one of these wild populations?

Dr. Torben Schiffer:

Well, you know, I've never counted them.

Andy:

Yeah, me neither, no, no.

Dr. Torben Schiffer:

But you can think of, you know, if you have a hive that reaches up to, I mean, an ordinary hive has like two boxes full of brood, that's just the brood field, and you add another two boxes or three boxes for the, for the, for the harvest, so a single box would be the perfect size for a tree cavity. So, it is about 40 liters, and that's all. Everything is in that 40 liters. So the whole brood field, the whole intake, everything is working in these 40 liters and there is no enhancing of volume.

There is no, you know, no such thing. So the amount of bees is certainly no different because everything that has been wasted in form of heat loss and nectar, or because of the exposure on rooftops, and once you know, or you take out the harvest or whatsoever, all the loss is in natural condition, is conveyed into physical bees and then they swarm yeah and out of colony which is living in a tree cavity of 40 liters, you will see that two or three swarms will go out.

So, from one colony, you have the oscillation throughout the year of its reproduction phase, where one colony creates two swarms or three swarms upstream. Then you have three or four bee colonies in one square kilometer living there and then the selectional phase will just adapt the bees and kill everyone or every colony that cannot survive in that location. And no one is using medication or substituting anything that the bees cannot do. So that's why they are adapted, really, so that oscillation means that all the observations from the beekeepers when they see a tree cavity and they say, oh, it survives only one year, that was dead.

It's just silly because it's not about the individual colony, it is about the population, right, and this is something that I had to learn because I'm doing monitoring on like 150 wild colonies. I've set up some rewilding projects in Germany, and I started here around my house. I'm living in the forest. I started with 15 colonies, right, way too much for one square kilometer. So if it comes to normal densities with one colony per square kilometer. So I had like 15 artificial tree cavities.

So these are tree cavities of the hives I've built, the shiver trees. They simulate the physical effects of natural tree cavities. That's what they do. So we have hung them all up, and then we have the selectional phase, and now, in the third year of that project, we only had one colony left, and then the swarms of the forest came back. This year Now we have four colonies living in that area. So you see, we are now in the fourth year of that project and we have four thriving colonies being left.

They have never been fed, they have never been treated with anything and they are well. So that is how nature works right. Within a few years, they have just adopted all the bees who were not able to set up the comps properly, who were not able to set up the comps properly, who were not able to get the storage in or had other problems or genetic failures. They died out within the first winter.

Mother Nature doesn't have any emotions and doesn't compensate for anything, so it just kills every colony that does not have the right abilities. So we see now that these bees are very well adapted and we had a lot of comp building failures at the end, at the beginning, when we started. So, 75% of the colonies could not set up their comps freely, without any boxes and frames, and all these colonies died in the first year. So we've lost 75% within the first year.

Now, all the swarms that have come back from the forest this year, not a single one has had that comp building failure. So you see, the system is cleaning itself if you just keep your hands out, and that a single colony is dying in a tree cavity that you are observing doesn't mean a thing because the queen,, which is in that cavity throughout the summertime or the early time of the summer is not the same queen at the end of the summer, right, because it's going to swarm.

We had another project which really made it clear. We had a school project, and we hung up some empty tree cavities, and a swarm moved into one of them. to another tree in the schoolyard, and then you know the new queen failed, so you know that tree cavity was empty but still the old queen. The next year, that swarm or that colony, this queen from 2019, she moved into another tree on the schoolyard, and then you know the new queen failed, so that you know that tree cavity was empty, but it was still the old queen, and the next year it swarmed back into the old one. And you know that tree cavity was empty, but it was still the old queen and the next year, it swarmed back into the old one. And you know the colony that has been left in the new tree has been failing as well. So it was still the same queen; it was three years old, but the colony, you know, it was just another location where she was in.

Now, as a beekeeper who cannot think out of the box and is observing a tree cavity that is failing and empty in springtime, which is very likely, it doesn't mean a thing. That doesn't mean that the population has been failing. It does just mean that evolution is working and that natural selection is working, and there is no need for any intervention because if you interfere, you're killing evolution, right, and if you just keep your hands out, the system still works great, and it's everywhere.

The same people really need to understand that they love the bees to death by compensating by using that medication, by, you know, compensating for the genetic failures or even creating these genetic failures themselves. As you know, by breeding or even simply by keeping bees in boxes, we are causing genetic corrosion, which is unclear to most beekeepers.

Because you know, if a bee colony in a box survives, it doesn't mean it can survive in a tree cavity. And the best example is that you know, the rewilding projects that we have been doing and that most of the bee colonies could not set up their wild combs without any wax sheets. So, if you have them in boxes, they wouldn't die right in a tree cavity. They would be dead because they would lose their temperature regulations due to the building of the combs or the comb structure.

So, they have a certain radiation system, and they have to attach the combs to the top of the cavity. Then you have these pockets that are being created by the combs, and the warm air stays in these pockets, heating up the whole storage, and it works like a radiation system. When the temperature drops, the whole storage is still warm and heated. It has that heat capacity and the bees. They only need to heat up a little bit to compensate for the temperature loss from the outside, and the climatic conditions will be stable. So if they cannot build, that comes in the top and they start at the bottom and reach like one-third or just leave an empty space at the top, they'll be dead. So they'll fail to survive.

And in a box, you would never see this, so you would. We probably breed from these bees, so you will increase the genetic corrosion on the species by keeping them in boxes. And there are 20 more examples that I could point out. We have a lot of selectional factors that we could identify in natural tree cavities that are not there in boxes. So if a polar bear learns how to survive in the zoo, it doesn't mean he can survive in his natural, you know, surroundings, in Antarctica. It's a totally different story, yeah.

Andy:

So you've brought up an interesting point: how we raise bees today doesn't make any sense. So, if I'm someone who does want to, I'm passionate about honeybees, and I enjoy doing it. Still, I don't want to cause ecological destruction or destroy the honeybee populations. What should I be doing ethically, and I'll use that term loosely here to keep bees?

Dr. Torben Schiffer:

I recommend just hanging up these empty tree cavities because of what we have been doing throughout the last century, especially because of the First and Second World Wars, especially in Germany and Europe, not to keep bees because bees don't need to be kept. You know, bees need a place to thrive and to be allowed to unfold their genetic architecture to fully unfold their abilities and live in natural conditions. So the best thing you can do is what we are doing now. It had been a long time since I could free my bees fully from any interventions from my side. Before I could do this, I had to free myself from everything I had learned about beekeeping.

Literally, what I do now is just hang up these empty tree cavities because of what we have been doing throughout the last century, especially because of the First and Second World Wars, especially in Germany and Europe; we have conveyed all the ancient trees. You have chopped them down. We have, you know, cut the ancient trees down and all the trees that we have chopped them down. We have, you know, cut the ancient trees down, and all the trees that we have here, they are not, they are just 70 years old or something, so it's very young trees, and you don't have that huge uh, normally you don't have a huge amount of these huge, um, of 40 liters tree cavities. Of course, you have the woodpecker cavities, but they are way too small.

Now, it needs a few more decades before these tree cavities increase in volume due to bats moving in and hanging up to the top and just breaking loose a little bit of the wood and the molding part of the cavities so they increase in volume throughout decades and we have wiped out that natural habitat of species-appropriate cavities. before, and I've just rebuilt natural tree cavities. And then I did the measurements, and I could tell, okay, we have the same stable conditions here that we would see in natural tree cavities. So we hung them up in certain locations, certain forests, and about one-third of all the cavities that we hang out on are being occupied within the first year of wild swarms. That is why I have physically reconstructed the tree cavities,

Of course, they escape out of boxes, but it doesn't matter because, by the time they move in these tree cavities, they free themselves of any legal obligations here in Germany because they have moved in freely and because I didn't kind of take them into my property by catching them. I'm not claiming any interest in these bees, so I'm not catching them and putting them in, but I just let them go, and they move in freely. So, I'm not a beekeeper. It's the same system as a bird's house. You just hang up birds' houses, and you see the birds are moving, and so you're doing the best thing that you can do to birds by giving them shelter and giving them the species-appropriate habitat that they have lost due to our deforestation and then the whole system starts working again. So what we're doing is we are setting up structures that a wilderness can develop again, and this is working out really well.

And the good thing is, when I started that, I said goodbye to honey 100%. I said you know, I don't need this anymore; I won't eat any honey anymore. And you know, I tell you what, my cupboard is full of honey, and you know why? Why this is because of the oscillation of offspring and selection. So you always have one colony, which sets up two swarms. Then natural selection comes, and you have one colony left. There is always one colony or two that are dying throughout the wintertime. And the good thing is the combs and the storage. They are not starting to decompose as they would do in boxes on the ground. But you know, even months after the colony has died or flown out, they look as if the colony has just left; they look brand new; there's no more whatsoever.

And then we can take out that honey. And we took it out not because we were interested in honey, but we were just interested in what? What happened to the bees? Did they starve or whatever? So we brought them down, put them in the laboratory, then we opened them, and we did our kind of autopsy on all this colony, all these colonies, and then we had all of a sudden we had okay, there's five kilos of honey, okay, what are we going to do with it? Okay, just press it out. You know so. And then we did.

The amazing thing is that honey is way more antibiotic than the honey we know in the modern beekeeping system. So it's like it's, it's even a huge, you know. It's a competition. You know, you know, manuka honey. We're shipping that around the world, and you'll pay like 200 euros for one kilo of manuka honey because it's so antibiotic.

The reason why natural honey is so antibiotic is that it has been unproven until now, which is why I think this is the case. The whole cavity is propolis, right, and it is a very good antibiotic material. So there are, there's scientific research that tells you that if you take bees out of a box and put them into a box that is propolized, within a few days, you can prove that they have much fewer bacteria on the bodies in the bodies and the immune system stops working on that high level. Because they are not infected, they are not fighting these and, you know, these bacteria or pathogens. So this is like our skin. It's like an outer immune system.

And then you have the therapy for people who have problems with their lungs or whatever. Asthma. So they breathe the air of colonies from boxes, right so, and it helps them with them, with the lung and with the, you know, with the inflammation. That's because we have propolis, which has antibiotic features, and you can smell propolis. The reason why you smell it is because fresh propolis has a lot of ingredients, and they are evaporating into the atmosphere. So now think of a box that is barely propolis because it only has smooth walls and bees. Propolis opens the fiber root, so a tree cavity is fully covered in propolis, and you have these antibiotic features. All the antibiotic ingredients get into the atmosphere of the tree cavity, and the air is soaked with those ingredients. And we can prove, we could prove in scientific research when we did some wipe tests of mold and whatever. You put these mold tests into that atmosphere and they were sterilized by the atmosphere. So everything that this atmosphere touches is sterilized, and that is a miracle, even the humidity that the bees create by digesting honey in the wintertime.

So, 20 percent of honey is water, and then you're in the sugar molecules themselves. There's a lot of water that, when digested in the body of the bees, gets free. So,Regarding one kilo of honey is about 700 milliliters of water, which is a side product of digesting honey. It's like warm energy, it's CO2, and it's water, and that water is then condensation underneath the storage comms on the walls on the propolis, and then it mineralizes itself with the ingredients of the propolis, and the bees are going down and recollect that water and feeding the brood with it in the springtime. And if you take samples of that water, you can prove that this water is an antibiotic. So they are drinking their own antibiotic water and have their own water cycle inside the cavity and water supply. When it comes to boxes on the ground, the water in the corners is automatically causing mold, right? So, mold spreads on the combs, and the bees get infected. And if you dissect these bees, you can see that all their intestines are infected with the mold, and they are literally ill.

So you know these antibiotic atmospheres called Nestduftwärmebindung. It’s a German word that you cannot really translate, which means that the air is soaked with these antibiotic ingredients of the propolis. So then you have the concentration gradient, right? So these substances are not stopping by the honey, right? So they will kind of get into the honey throughout the time it is in that cavity. So it's like a good wine in a barrel: the longer it stays there, the better it tastes.

The longer the honey stays in a propolis tree cavity and has that, you know, antibiotic conditions, the more antibiotic the honey gets. So, in the end, you get out only five kilos of honey, but you can sell each of these kilos for up to 200 euros. So that means that five kilos of honey are worth about 1000 euros. If you want to achieve that due to ordinary beekeeping, that would mean you would have to get about 100 liters of honey out of that colony to sell it for 10 euros per kilo to get the same amount of money. And you're busy throughout the whole summertime. You have to, you know, manipulate and interfere all the time with the bees, which has nothing to do with preservation. And the good thing, again, is that the honey that we are taking out is in balance with the natural resources, so it's sustainable. It's much more antibiotic, and honey is not a mass product when it comes to the future of beekeeping and honey itself.

Right, it has never been a mass product. If it comes to medieval times if you were just a farmer and you were feeding on honey, they will burn you; they would just kill you. It was for the kings and queens, the beekeepers of the medieval times. They were privileged people; they were allowed to carry weapons and were somewhat superior to the ordinary people, so it was never. It was a mass product.

Now, there are 8 billion people on this planet. We cannot meet the demands of the public for honey. Even today, about 25% of the honey in the market is not really honey. It's just sugar, water syrup, or whatever. So if we cannot do this because it's unsustainable, we should stop it.

And the future of honey or beekeeping is not mass production but the production of class by preservation. You know you can do preservation, and as a reward, because of the engine of evolution, which is selection, you always get a certain amount of honey, which automatically fills your storage for your personal needs. And that's a high medical, it's a medical product. It's not something that you would use finger-thick on your post in the morning. But yeah, I mean, there is a way to be in balance with sustainability, with preservation, with helping the bees, with the natural resources, and literally, to meet the demands of most of the beekeepers out there who are starting beekeeping because they are idealistic people. Most of them are starting beekeeping because they want to do good to nature and bees, not because they want to get into the honey business.

And then they automatically are dragged into the honey business, and then they are kind of, you know, they, they get, they get into the system where they need to pay a lot of money for all the tools they need every year, for the medication for the sugar, for the glasses, for the, you know, for all the tools they need every year, for the medication for the sugar, for the glasses, for all the tools that you need. And then, of course, the bees need it. We pay this because this is expensive, right. And then you are in the system. You are a payer for the Honey lobby, right? This is what they are doing with you. They are kind of disclosing the system, or they're trying to guide the system as something good to nature and bees, and then they are kind of taking your money, and you know, and the whole thing is a mess for the whole environment I gotta imagine that the bees, as you're bringing them up, the difference in the, the honey quality also, you know the bees are healthier.

Andy:

Then, they have systemic impacts on the ecologies where they live. Right, you know, the birds that are eating those bees are how those bees return to that ecosystem, providing better health benefits than sickly bees. That's hopped up on chemicals, and that's really important, too.

Dr. Torben Schiffer:

Yeah, that's that's a good point, you know, uh, and that's really important too. Yeah, that's that's a good point. But, you know, taking that point into account, you really have to think of it. When it comes to Germany, just an example, because I know the numbers here in Germany, um, we have a million bee colonies being kept in boxes, right, so it's a million. And that means these million boxes are now using the amount of nectar of about one million tons every summer. So it could be like only 150,000 to 300,000 kilos of nectar when they lived in natural conditions.

And then, of course, you would have to wipe out the exaggerated density of bees because this is highly unnatural. We cannot keep 25 bee colonies in a square kilometer in a city. That's insane. So, if you clear the system, think of that amount of nectar that we take out of the system. It's a million tons. And now think of how many hundred thousands of tons of wild bees, butterflies, whore flies would be created or would develop on that nectar if it would stay where it belongs. And then imagine, of all the birds, of all the predatory birds, of the bats, of you know, of the hornets, of you know it's. It's the whole network of species that are affected by the fact that we are taking a primary, primarily food source, which is, which has no substitute, out of the system and using that in such an amount for us as a luxury product that no one really needs yeah it is horrific, and the hype of beekeeping is ongoing.

So then the number of bee colonies within the cities is increasing, which is unbelievable at the moment, so people really need education on that matter. It all comes back to the bottle right that I show in my presentations. How can an unlimited number of people getting their share of nectar be right if the nectar is limited and if it belongs to these species that have been on the face of the earth a long time before we showed up?

Andy:

Torben, this has been a really eye-opening conversation. I've learned quite a bit. For folks who want to see more of the work you're doing or are interested in learning more from you, where can they hear from you? Are you on social media or YouTube? I know we talked a little bit about something else you've got going on.

Dr. Torben Schiffer:

I'm not sure if you can talk about that quite yet, but, yeah, please tell us. I've done much of it in German, but I haven't translated it into English until now. But, um, what I did, a lot of my research, is in the book What Bees Want, which has been published this year in America What Bees Want. I have written an article which is named the True Price of Honey, and we are working on an international documentary on that matter. So, with the same name, I will send you that article if you like, and you can share it as you want or as you wish so that people can connect with you. Or just email me, and I will send them a copy of the article the True Price of Honey, which summarizes what I've been talking about. But this is all with the sources and numbers, and it's all in that article.

Basically, I've written a book called Evolution of Beekeeping, but it is only available in German at the moment. But you know, maybe you have some German listeners who are interested in reading that book. Maybe someone has some contacts who would like to translate the book and just sell it in America or whatever. So just contact me.

Andy:

Yeah, that's awesome. You definitely have some content up on YouTube. Can you reiterate what the documentary is called?

Dr. Torben Schiffer:

The documentary that we are working on is the True Price of Honey.

You know it's in the first footsteps now, but we have created a trailer right now, which will be published soon. And we are working on that international documentary because it's not another book that will change the world. Before we solve our ecological problems, we must solve the educational problems right because these people are out there. it's not another book that will change the world.

They really want to do good to bees, they really want to do good to nature, and they are kind of betrayed by the beekeeping lobby and brought into a system that is doing great harm not only to the bees but to the species of the bees but also to the life of the future generations.

Andy:

Yeah, all ecological problems really are social problems in our relationship with that ecology.

Dr. Torben Schiffer:

Right, yeah, so it's all about education. That doesn't mean we cannot eat honey, but we can. As I told you, we can have that honey out of preservation, which is in balance with the whole system and is beautiful. So, you know, always tell the beekeepers, when I'm talking to beekeepers, that tell them, you know, believe or not, but you could go on vacation, guys, you don't have to do anything, just set up these tree cavities and be happy when the bees move in and when they die out. That's it. I mean, it's your opportunity to get your share, and that's it. You can't do more than this if it comes to preservation yeah, be thoughtful.

Andy:

That's what we need, Torben. Thank you so much. This has been fantastic.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode 137 of the Poor Proles Almanac.