Bee Teachings on Resilience + Consensus / Ang Roell

In this episode, regenerative beekeeper Ang Roell talks with us about how bees teach us about consensus, planning to thrive and the parallels between bee health + human health within our current agricultural system.

We discuss / 

*Their lineage + family history of beekeeping
*The complexity of collaborating directly with the natural world to earn a living
*White folk’s cultural displacement of heritage + assimilation of whiteness
*The role of bees in ecosystems + why they are necessary
*How bees were brought to the US and became part of our agricultural system
*The parallels between the health of bees + the health of humans in our current moment
*Why bees don’t need saving
*How we confuse consumerism with a solution
*The connection between identity, resilience + place
*The importance of meeting basic needs + collaborating to survive + thrive
*How bees model consensus + planning to do better
*Their proposal for a regenerative beekeeping school to re-skill folks for their own bee practices

If you enjoyed the episode, also check out:
//Bees hold Sacred Time w/ Alysia Mazzella
Self-Care as Social Justice w/ Anana Harris Parris
Sovereignty + Responsibility w/ MaryGrace Allerdice

LINKS /
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Join our FREE online community
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Book a 1:1 session
Purchase a gift certificate
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Ang’s website --> Get Ang's FREE e-book “Radicalize the Hive”
Ang's IG
Watch Ang's Ted talk
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Honeybee Democracy by Thomas Seeley

Transcript

mary grace allerdice: 0:15

My name is Mary Grace and you're listening to the homebody podcast. Here we explore what it means to practice embodiment, which is practicing home inside our own selves and also within our wider body, which is the earth. These spiritually and artfully minded conversations center healing, magic, astrology, intuition, art, wellness, creativity, social and environmental justice as the practices that help us witness more relationship, meaning and purpose. We are here to approach life as a conscious process. And my hope is to enliven you and encourage you to hone your intuition, connect to your own center. So together, we can cultivate more wisdom and self trust and be dynamic agents of beauty. People who are fully awake, and with our power and tact, we're here to be more intentional as we approach the creation and caretaking of life. And we are here to make room for inquiry, sensitivity, and joy. Thank you for listening.

Ang Roell: 1:28

Yeah, and it's never going to be perfect. And that's so it's, it's a lifelong commitment to do that work not only with my work with honeybees, but with my work with people. And with the work that's inside of myself to engage and know, like, I don't really know what I'm doing. But I'm going to try to listen to the knowledge keepers around me that are ecological or indigenous or elders who hold incredible wisdom from being endemic from another. You know, that's, for me, that's, it's a shift in perception and understanding. It's also a shift in activism. That's, I think, very important to get to a stage where you can act from a place where you're humble and knowledgeable, but then not to get so lost in like, Oh, I have to understand everything before I take an action that you become immobilized.

mary grace allerdice: 2:21

Hi, everyone, and welcome. I'm your host, Mary Grace, and I'm really glad that you're here. This week is the second show this month where we are talking about honey bees in some capacity. two episodes ago back in Episode 65. We had Alysia Mazzella talk with us about our candle making process, the importance of working reciprocally with honeybees and the natural world in general. So go back and listen to that episode, if you haven't already talked about sacred time, reciprocal processes, and some really, things that I didn't know about honey, about bees, and also about what our candles are made out of, and why it's really important to know where they're coming from. Today, my guest is Ang Roell. And Ang is a biodiverse beekeeper with practices to raise resilient and adaptive bees, they sell queens and starter hives. And in this episode, we talk about why it's important to really know where bees are coming from, and how to keep them in ways that are regenerative. And both of these guests in really beautiful ways talk about the complexity of this very direct relationship between the natural world and their livelihood. And I really appreciate how vulnerable and complex they are and also the consciousness and the beauty and the attention that they both really bring to it. I think it's important. And honestly, I think all of our livelihoods come from the natural world, whether it's super direct or indirect. And I think the more that we can really learn from folks who have a very direct relate connection between those two things, I think the more reciprocal or regenerative we can learn to be. So before we jump into this episode, I want to thank everyone who showed up for our last group healing circle last weekend, it was the last one that I'm doing for 2020 there's just a lot going on in December and I need a little bit of space to orient and wiggle around. And I will keep you posted on future dates but it will be in 2021 So thank you to everyone who showed up last weekend. Also, I just dropped this month's astrological forecast videos into the Patreon so if you would like to support the making of this show, and also its future episodes, you can become a patron for as little as $5 and get access to those videos that I create every month in addition to this podcast. You can also get access to free prompts that I make each month based on this month's astrology they are a gift and that is on purpose to Like this podcast, and you can click the link below and get them delivered straight to your inbox. If you want to hear more about the eclipse that we just came off on the 30th, and the one that's coming up on the 14th, you can go back and listen to last week's episode where I talked about that and a little bit more detail. And then we're in an interesting moment. Right now we're kind of straddling a big astrological moment, we have some mega shifts once in a lifetime, Astro weather happening towards the end of this month. So make sure you come back next week for more on that as well. And again, if you want more of a heads up around that, or if you would like prompts to help you personalize or integrate some of this celestial movement, you can check those out at the links below, the prompts are free, and the videos you can get to support the show for as little as $5. So I recently had someone give me feedback. They were newer to the podcast, and they just appreciated how I talk about astrology in a way that doesn't sound like math. And if you are someone who isn't great at math, like me, that is a total compliment. I have a BFA in dance. And the only reason I pass college algebra is because we got to write papers. And so thank you so much, Susan, for saying that I really appreciate the feedback. And I'm only bringing that up to say that the function of these prompts as an offering as a gift, if they're something that's helpful for you is to really make this movement and language more personal and more accessible to folks who really like they're either not an expert in that they really don't have an interest in in it, but they do want to be able to access it as a complement to their life and what's going on. So I hope you'll take advantage of that. And then lastly, I spent some time in the bowels of my scheduling system a couple of weeks ago and made gift certificates available. So they are good for any one on one sessions or a series of sessions. Whether it's an astrology session, or spirit healing or guidance session or Taro, you can purchase one for as little as $25. And if you want to buy a certificate that is $100 or more, then you start to get money back that you can use for your own session. It gives you a principle certificate, and it's a gift that will end up in the trash. I approach all of my work from a place of trying to do my very best at witnessing people and listening to others. And as opposed to fixing people. And it's my job to hold. I approach it as holding healing space and facilitating sessions where we can meet our own knowledge in our own hearts and collaborate with spirit with the stars with each other. So if it's something that you need, or something that a friend needs, I think it could be a beautiful gift and a way to contribute to their path, whatever journey they're on in this moment. So especially when folks gift each other astrological sessions I've noticed whether it's friends or family or partners, people who are in really direct relationship I found that it can be really it can really help people lean into a greater space of self acceptance and also accepting the people or persons that they're in relationship with. And even beyond that appreciate how we are so different and where that complementing energy is or where the friction energy is with attention. And I think people find the visuals and the language and the beauty in learning each other's maps and sharing that so you can find the link for those below if you're interested and I look forward to meeting some of you one on one. Let's get back to our guest. So Ang Roell runs They Keep Bees -- which is a queer-led farm and food business based in western Massachusetts. So be sure to check out their free ebook called Radicalize the Hive is available for free on their website which is also links below. And you can also check out some honey and other products in their shop also on their website. I really loved talking with Ang. There was so much like Libra love going on here we had both just had our birthdays back in mid-October when we met for this conversation and and as a way of talking about all of the intricacies of bees in a way that is like a vortex it just sucked me in with their extensive knowledge their way of speaking. but also their amazing laugh, which you're going to get to hear quite a bit and in today's episode and shares how much you know how bees really model consensus for us and relationship for us and how to organize and plan to do better. That modeling resources and the things that we need to thrive and flourish. We talk about the role of bees and ecosystems and where the campaign save the bees came from and why it's not one that they necessarily subscribe too, we also get into a beautiful conversation about the connection between identity and resilience and place, as well as you know how we can sometimes confuse consumerism with a solution. And why that's problematic, if not dangerous, or exacerbating a problem. It's a really great conversation. And like I said, you'll get to hear and laugh, which I think is so valuable, in addition to their extensive knowledge that is just woven really well and beautifully throughout this episode. So I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Please remember to share it with a friend. And if you can take 20 seconds to leave us a five star rating and our review on Apple podcasts, it supports the show so much I can't even tell you and it is completely free. And now I'll leave you to our conversation with Ang Roell. I love to let people introduce themselves, because they usually do it so much more creatively and robustly than I would do it. So would you mind just kicking us off by telling us who you are, what you spend your time doing in the world? And how you how you're showing up?

Ang Roell: 11:19

Yeah, so my name is Ang Roell. I use they/them pronouns, I'm a white, Ukrainian American beekeeper, and I'm also non-binary. And I spend a lot of my time working with and tending to bees and the stewarding or cultivating land that is on or near BS. And I think that I show up in the world as a as a person that embraces change, and bridging experience and difference. And who is really interested in learning different learning about our different, like constantly learning about our different social structures and hierarchies and where there's power and where there needs to be disruption and trying to share in that learning and knowledge with other people to affect change.

mary grace allerdice: 12:30

Yeah, and it's, I think that it seems like bees are a big part of like, yes. You're how you're in communion with those ideas about like power and how we can be together. How did bees become like a central pillar of your work? Like, what was that orientation? Like? What's the backstory?

Ang Roell: 12:51

Um, yeah, so. So the backstory is sort of twofold. For me, um, I come from a Slavic family. We are by nation borders, Ukrainian. And this is all my matrilineal lineage, I don't have a lot of connections to my paternal lineage, unfortunately. So I talk about my family and then I also just recognize that there's, there's a part of me that will never be completely whole, because I just don't have access to that. Um, yeah, so so in my maternal lineage, these Slavic line of my family comes from what is called Ukraine today, but is actually a people called Lem Coase, who traveled all through the the Carpathian Mountains, the mountain range there. And so actually are more like, like spread across the borders of Poland and Ukraine and Slovenia, that part of the world, there is a very deep connection to the honeybee, and always has been, it is a heritable practice, meaning that you cannot be a beekeeper unless you inherit the sort of right to steward bees. And this isn't so much true anymore, but was was true historically. And there's like a deep respect and appreciation for the honeybee. And so this spans across the Slavic region, but the where it's held now is Slovenia, where they actually have as a country done a better job of integrating and listening to the indigenous peoples from their region than some other countries around them. And so what that means is that policy about food and pollination is actually shaped around honeybees, and the needs of pollinators like honey bees. And it means that there's just like a reverence for this creature that exists. And it's been passed down over many generations. So I come from a family where there were beekeepers and I know that just historically from stories that my great grandparents told me, and so there's that connection, this like ancestral knowing is how I refer to it. And then really just becoming captivated with them when I was working in urban at volunteering in urban agriculture in Miami, and having that transfer to working in urban Ag in the Boston area. I sort of took that curiosity and I started going to these meetings, I met this French beekeeper named john clubroot. And, and john Claude was like, Oh, yeah, cool. Come help me with my hives. And so he takes me on this adventure of beekeeping. We drove his truck out into some suburb of Massachusetts, and like, I'm not from this region at all. So like, I am just like, lost anywhere at this point in my journey here. I'm like, where are we and what are we doing? I'm tasting out to the suburb to pick up a whiskey barrel like an old cask. And we take this whiskey barrel, and we take it from this man because it is full of bees, and it's been full of bees for a while, and he's just been letting it be a hive, but now his grandchildren are being like attacked by bees. And so he wants it move. So we like plug and load this whiskey barrel onto a pickup truck and haul it back to his B yard. And that's where we take it and transfer it from the barrel to highs and it's like in this process of like, flipping this whiskey barrel over and opening up the bottom and seeing like, what the natural head is, and what that transition from the natural hive into like a managed hive looked like and just becoming completely captivated. I was like this is I want to be doing this all the time. Um, yeah, so that's, that's really where it started is it you know, it just was this thing that I was curious about and curious about and then like, a door opened up, and then it was like a whole world of opportunity really opened up and I met a lot. My beekeeping is, is more, we try to follow the natural pattern patterns and rhythms of the hive. And then also own that like to be in any kind of production agriculture, you're following the rhythms of the hive to also be able to make a living, working in the natural world, which is complicated in a capitalist society. So like we're not when I say the words, natural beekeeping, I'm not saying that all beekeeping is like natural and like this is the way, the way that the bee is just to like live in the forest and be part of a forest ecosystem. And what we're doing is different. But we are trying to do it in a way that is respectful for the creature that we're collaborating with and working with and is teaching that respect and passing it on to the customers and clients and communities that we get to work with. Yeah, but I have this door opened for me of just a natural beekeeping. And it was like one mentor after another that I engaged with, was really committed to learning the different ways of the honeybee. And so they were able to open me up to all of their mentors, who were the quirkiest beekeepers I've ever had the blessing of crossing paths with but it's just it was like a wild thing where I opened one door and then several doors opened at this point in my life where like I didn't have a lot of elders and I didn't have good mentorship. And I was hungry for that. And it was just really beautiful. Like I only found it in this one slice of life. But I found it and it really was a lightning rod for me to just start opening up my my understanding in a different way.

mary grace allerdice: 19:11

I love that that kind of brings up something that I wanted to, I have to kind of plan to talk about later, which maybe we will and we'll go back to it. But this this way in which we are so displaced, I think on like multiple levels and have inherited a lot of generations and generations of displacement and how that kind of removes us from the kind of like mentorship that you're talking about are these containers of like learning and stewarding and things like that.

Ang Roell: 19:41

Yeah, yeah, that's a big truth.

mary grace allerdice: 19:46

I yeah, I think before we get like full on be a I was reading something that you said about your grandmother that I really loved and how she just encouraged you to take big risks. So something that she kind of left you with like, what was some of the the dreaming that she modeled for you? or What was she holding for you?

Ang Roell: 20:10

Beautiful question. Um, I think there's a few things about

Unknown: 20:16

my grandmother that that still hold as models for me one,

Ang Roell: 20:20

she she very much believed that she very much believed in like prophetic dreaming, she was absolutely certain that she had that capacity. And that that was a capacity that was passed down through my maternal lineage. And I think that just connecting this to this piece about displacement, so many of us are displaced by the society that we live in, and the migrations that we have to do or were forced on people. And in that,

Unknown: 20:54

especially for those of us that are, I can only speak for those of us that are white, because I'm white. But in that for, for white folks, what I see happen is that we reject what we were before we were white folks. And so we reject all of the actual culture that we have more had, and gave up to assimilate into quote, unquote, whiteness. And so what happens is this displacement that you're talking about, right, is that we give up old ways and old practices and what is ours and like, what are the gifts that we inherit, and we start rejecting those, and I can actually like, trace through my lineage, where those those things started to happen, and then really were happening. And she modeled for me not giving that up, right. And just that one act of being like, I know, I do this thing. And I know that this is like a magic thing that I do. And I don't understand it. And I don't have the complete story. But like, I know, it's real. She modeled that just holding on to lineage in that way and holding on to magic for me. So that's one. And then she just had so much hope for what I was capable of, in a way that I didn't experience anywhere else in my, in my family. constellation she just didn't. She sees she saw all the good in me, you know, like I miss, hopefully, that's what people get to have as grandma. But like, that was so empowering to me, because I was wild. Why are you a little kid trapped in an apartment in New York City, like bouncing off

Ang Roell: 22:35

the walls all the time?

Unknown: 22:39

Like, so obviously, that was very challenging for all the adults in my life, and to have one adult who was just like, no, you're good. Like, you're, there's something here, it's

Ang Roell: 22:48

gonna work out. You're, you're, you're a good sweet little creature is just like, was really affirming. Yeah, so in both of those ways, I think she gave me these affirmations of what was possible. She also expected me to like go to college, go to grad school, like become a doctor, like she just sort of had maybe too high expectations, but I just always appreciated that there was in her eyes, there was so much possibility. And that is a beautiful thing for any child to have. Yeah,

mary grace allerdice: 23:21

I would agree with that. Do you mind giving us a little backstory or lesson for those who don't know, like, you know, why are bees necessary for our survival? What is kind of the role they're playing within this ecosystem that we're a part of?

Unknown: 23:44

Mm hmm. Great. Yeah. So there's, I if you know, you Google honeybees, right now, you'll come across this sort of adage about how one in four bites of our food are pollinated by bees.

Ang Roell: 23:58

That's true. Um, I'm sure that that'll be slightly different depending on where you are in the world, but they typically pollinate most tree crops. And a lot of tree crops are important for us to eat and survive and have things like fats and sugars, etc. So

Unknown: 24:18

they're important in that sense, but that's sort of this like thin slice of what matters about bees. And it's also important to name that that fact is, is historically backed by the fact that honeybees are not endemic to the United States where I live. And they were brought here to be used as a tool for pollination, to expand what we know today of as industrial agriculture, like the colonial system of agriculture, and so that fact about how they pollinate one in four bytes of our food is true, but it's only true in the context of the food system that we currently live in. Right.

Ang Roell: 24:55

And so, I just think it's important to detangle that like they're unnecessary. pollinator there's also lots of other pollinators. And there's different types of ecosystems that we could be living in, where they would still pollinate some of our food, but not all of it. So just putting that out there. Um, they are important for our ecosystem because they also help cross pollinate. other foods that we we eat, and they create a balance for flowering plants of pollinating them. So they are sort of these. I sometimes jokingly call them nature's fluffers, because they are cross pollinating both in species and interspecies pollen. And that's vital for a lot of trees to produce the fruits and nuts that they need to make seed and continue to propagate. And so they're important for our food system. They are important for the ecosystem around them, because they're helping to create seed and bus, the next generation of different trees and flowers. And then there I think, for humans also mystically, or spiritually an important creature for us to learn from, and that we see because we have like an 8000 year history of recording and writing and thinking and being in relationship with honeybees. And so yeah, I think it's important to name because I think we separate out our food and the creatures and the humans that produce it into this bubble over here. Right. But actually, this is a creature, a super organism of an other being that we've been trying to understand for thousands of years and interested in and interacting with for that whole time. Yeah.

mary grace allerdice: 26:46

What How would you describe kind of the State of the Union right now, as far as like, as a species? He's mentioned a lot about how, you know, we were, we brought bees to become a part of this industrial agriculture system that we now have, and so that and so what are some of the the ways that that we've been participating in those things? Like, what what is that done to the bee population? Or, you know, how they are in the world right now?

Ang Roell: 27:19

Yeah, so

Unknown: 27:21

we brought bees over colonists brought bees over here, mostly from European the European continent, though there are bees that are endemic to Europe to the African continent to the Asian continent. And there are also types of honeybees endemic to South America as well. A colonists brought the like European honeybee here, and used that to pair with monocrop agriculture so that they could create an abundance of crops. And they bred bees and expanded bees and that and when there was drops in access to sugar due to importing honey would be something that people would really rely on. And that started shifting, like a lot of people homesteading and having bees started shifting at like the turn of the 20th century. And then we sort of entered into a period where they were growing and expanding and being moved across the United States to pollinate huge mono crops.

Ang Roell: 28:26

And when

Unknown: 28:27

when that started happening, there became a sort of bottlenecking of the species or the types of bees that were available here, because the what these were being asked to do was so taxing for them and stressful, that only certain bees could survive that and

Ang Roell: 28:46

do it well. Right. So the selection that farmers worked with bees, and they sort of started selecting for very specific traits, right, they're raising their bees, they're splitting their bees, they're making more bees from the bees they have so they're breeding. And in doing that they're selecting for specific traits. But what happens when you have a bottleneck like that that's so vast, and then also specific basked in that it's happening at this big scale and specific and that we're only looking for a few traits. What ends up happening is that

Unknown: 29:18

you lose a lot of the genetic material of a species. And because we have these closed agricultural borders, for bees in the US, we we've lost also the opportunity to bring in genetic material and produce more resilient bees. And so all of that has led to bees that are in function in this large industrial agricultural system, but are sick a lot right and at the same time, we have added on to that different different species of parasitic insect that have Tax the knees a lot and one of those is called a varroa mite. And that particular my feeds on the lymphatic system of the honeybees. It's called the fat bodies. And so it basically acts like an autoimmune disease for honeybees where they can't ever really get all the way healthy. So every stress from the outside is much more stressful because they have these overactive or underactive immune systems.

mary grace allerdice: 30:26

I you're talking about bees, but I'm like, Are you talking about humans? Because basically, the state of the human being? Yeah,

Ang Roell: 30:32

yeah, I

Unknown: 30:32

mean, that's, it's, it's ironic to be a person with an autoimmune disease, like drawing these correlations, and then being like, oh, and also this is like, what's happening to my body? Um, yeah, so. So essentially, what that has created is a Bee, that is a Bee that is constantly taxed by a parasite.

Ang Roell: 30:56

And on top of that, is

Unknown: 30:59

never able to live in a really healthy environment. Because we have this mono cropping system of agriculture, that's using pesticides, that's moving bees by like, semi load around the country. And at the same time, our local like, your are locally, colleges are changing because of climate change and the type of like, living dama style development that we have a need. So more grass more like non native plants more or less before inch essentially. And so it's harder to have a bee operation where you don't participate in the industrial agricultural system, because you have less forage available for your bees where you are, right, so those two things have led to, just to to the state of bees being that they are in them in a lot of manage systems, bees are sick, they're moving a lot. And in the Manage systems where bees and humans are sort of staying in one ecosystem or bioregion. It's a really challenging it's a really challenging career path and risky career path to choose. And and I would say like my, my deepest concern right now comes from like, what happens over the next 10 to 20 years. And as far as climate with respect to climate change, and how that impacts our humanity, and also pollinators, and whether it's like, going to ever be viable, again, to have have honeybees all over? Like have every backyard be full of honeybees, right? Like, like the idea that everyone would grow some of their own food and raise some of their own bees? Like, is that even going to be viable in a lot of parts of the world? And if not, like, what does that mean for the future of agriculture, like the relationship with between humans and honeybees?

mary grace allerdice: 33:11

Yeah. Something I think about a lot as well. I've heard you say that, you know, a lot of people that everyone asks you that they're like, how are the bees doing? And your response is, like, bees don't need saving mind. Kind of sharing some of what that response is rooted in.

Ang Roell: 33:33

Yeah, um, okay, so so the bees in the ecosystems where they have access to food and can be left alone by humans and adapt are fine, Arizona, Southern California, Florida, like they don't need us. They're doing great and they have adapted and created these different ways that they manage for the varroa mite. Where the varroa mite becomes an issue is when humans and bees try to have a relationship and we're producing honey or pollen or some other sort of product from the hive. Because we have to be able to manage them. It's It's long and complicated, but basically, that's where the issue starts to starts to take place. Right so the idea that bees as a wild or endemic to any region creature need to be saved is like it's it's absurd. They're either going to adapt or they're not going to adapt like any species on the planet. And, and it's also rooted in the sort of trying to uphold this industry of beekeeping. That doesn't work anymore because

Unknown: 34:46

when you buy bees as a backyard beekeeper be curious person coming into the practice or the industry you purchase these usually from people who are running their bees all over the country and then she these into packages and selling you these,

Ang Roell: 35:02

like bees that

Unknown: 35:04

are tired and sick already, right? Or bees that have been through cycles of stress already. So what you're ultimately purchasing when you don't know any better is bees that aren't from your bio region can't necessarily survive there and already have been under a lot of stress as a as a

Ang Roell: 35:22

collective of creatures. And, and so this movement of saving the bees by a coming in as a person that doesn't know anything and taking an action it it creates, just creates this idea

Unknown: 35:42

that we as humans are going to save any one thing when we are barely treading water on dealing with our own societal issues.

Ang Roell: 35:53

And as an activist, it's something that just

Unknown: 35:57

is a consistent lesson for me because as a young activist, you're always like, I'm

Ang Roell: 36:00

gonna save this thing. And I'm gonna save that thing. And I'm gonna end

Unknown: 36:05

houselessness, you know, like you're a young person with a lot of energy, you don't know what you don't know. And you often end up like being being having to face the reality that like you are one person and that really to change any collective conscious takes more than one person, regardless of how passionate you happen to be. So I just I really relate to this idea, because as a, the, the premise of saving the bees is essentially a premise that was started by the industry to promote the sale of honeybees to create an additional like industrial arm so that they could move more bees and make a different kind of money. Because the industry as a sell as as it's been functioning is broken and no longer working, right. And so instead of just continuing to use those 60s, they sell them to you and you buy them for a bunch of money. And you create and you perpetuate unhealthy bees wherever you are. And you think that you're doing something to save bees, and you're just buying into a dysfunctional system, right? And then you because you think you've saved the bees. Now you're not going to take that next step to like, investigate, what is this all about? What is how does this industry function, what's really going on here, what's behind this curtain? What happens when I open up the store, and so you lose this opportunity to learn about like the vastness of what these are and what they can do. And you walk away from this experience thinking that you've saved something when really you

Ang Roell: 37:41

just sort of compounded the problem.

mary grace allerdice: 37:45

Yeah, I've been thinking so like, I've just gotten really, really, really obsessed and passionate about regenerative agriculture in the past couple of years. And it's like, the one thing that gives me like any hope for being a human is then then, and the other, I think I appreciate what that movement is trying to teach us, which is something that again, like when we were all indigenous to somewhere, and when we were all in real active relationship to the land, we naturally understood it. But now that like all of our needs are met or mediated through an industrial system that is so harmful and so destructive, that we're now experiencing it full on in our bodies, the species are experiencing that in their bodies and exposing that like to me like approaching something regeneratively is like helping us understand like, actually, these things are so complex, like it's not as easy as like buying a box of bees from wherever you do that on the internet. And it's not as simple as it's all interwoven, and it's all interconnected and the problems all mishmash around the same thing and that's kind of helping me understand where you're coming from and like relationship to this like kind of specific species and what's going on there.

Ang Roell: 39:07

Yeah, I mean, I think

Unknown: 39:12

I think a lot of consumerism gets generated from especially white folks feeling an urgency or a need to change something and then feeling like we can put our exact finger on what that is right? Like like we can buy that and that'll fix it. It'll be done you know, and and that's it's a false narrative that we really need to unlearn and we unlearn it through investigation through curiosity through being humble that really like I'm I don't think I'm fixing anything. The bees are showing me what they need to adapt and I'm trying to mimic what they're doing. Which is, is what like successful beekeepers all over the world are doing and Who are indigenous to two places everywhere. They're like, Oh, yeah, I'm doing this. And I'm doing this because this is what the bees want, right? I'm not trying to make 1000 hives, so I can put them on a truck and send them to the almond pollination in California. Like I'm, I'm trying to be responsive to what it is the bees want and to

Ang Roell: 40:21

figure out how I can untangle myself from the system a little bit more. Yeah, with every step that I take and realize that that's not that's work that's never going to be done for me.

mary grace allerdice: 40:34

or perfect.

Ang Roell: 40:35

Yeah. And it's never going to be perfect. And and that's, so it's, it's a lifelong commitment to do that work not only with my work with honeybees, but with my work with people. And with the work that's inside of myself to engage and know, like, I don't really know what I'm doing. But I'm going to try to listen to the knowledge keepers around me that are ecological or indigenous, or elders who hold incredible wisdom from being endemic from another place, you know, and that's, for me, that's us. It's a shift in perception and understanding, it's also a shift in activism. That's, I think, very important to get to a stage where you can act from a place where you're humble and knowledgeable, but then not to get so lost in like, Oh, I have to understand everything before I take an action that you become a globalist, right, like it's a top for sure.

mary grace allerdice: 41:31

Yeah, for sure. No, I love that. And just like it's a whole, like the complexity or the path or a path. One thing that I, I love, you know, you talk a lot about, like resilience with bees. And what that means, and a lot of also, everyone should just go listen to your TED Talk, which I'll link below this, what kind of this question was kind of stewing for me, but like, it seems like, you know, a lot of the resilience of bees is like, related to place, like there's, and it's connected to a place and something that I've been thinking a lot about as a human. And something that I've been really working on or sitting with or healing around is that like, our identity is not like separate from the place that we're in. And I feel like that's definitely seems to be true for bees based on what I've learned from you. And that were resilient when we're connected to that. And I think there's a lot of implications there, but I'm not the bee expert. So what are what are the things that like, you know, you mentioned bees teaching you about, like relating to place or relating to others? Like, what are some of the things that they are teaching you about how to do that? Well, or to do that in a way that's more in alignment with how we actually work? and thrive?

Ang Roell: 42:52

Great question... Yeah, um, I think that it's something that's been coming up for me, or that I've been noticing a lot recently is that these thrive in a space where they their needs are met, their basic needs are met, right? Like they, they do well. For example, I have bees in Florida. And I've just been noticing the difference between this one location that we keep these and this other location and just drawing comparisons. So same ecology, same nectar flows, but just noticing the difference between these two spaces has been in practice for me over the last two months. And I've just, it's sort of like, it dawned on me, and then I realized how, like, silly it was that it had to dawn on me in the first place where I was like, Oh, yeah, they be thrive when, like, all their basic needs are met. And I'm like, Yeah, like, of course, that makes Wow, that we thrive when all our basic needs are met. And I think that, you know, for, for me,

Unknown: 43:58

I'm in my like, late 30s. And I have several friends who are, are 30 or below, and I think of them as like, friends and also guides in a way towards

Ang Roell: 44:10

like, how to put the world into the right balance. I think that there's there's perceptions and understandings driven down from the generations before me that have that started to shift, right like around my generational time, but then have completely transformed when once we get like a few years younger than me and so it's really cool to learn from people. Like a lot of people are for universal basic income right now a lot of people are for everyone having health insurance, everyone having access to food, everyone having access to housing stipends. And my learned a response to that is like, No, we have to like we're in a society we have to like participate and earn the things that we need and then and a lot of folks who are younger than me that's not their learned response. Right, so my, my learned responses that I'm pushing against theirs. And then I'm out in the natural world with this creature that I work with every day. And just noticing how much better they are when all their basic needs are met. And, and just observing the health difference between one hive who needs interventions consistently, because there's something missing from the larger ecosystem, and the other hive that has all the pollen and nectar and water that they need to be functional. And then tracking those two hives over the course of the season and seeing our two yards of hives for us seeing like how much better these bees do, like they thrive and they create so much more. And they, they produce and perform. And this is the same like the same mother lineage, right? Like I don't have thousands of different mother lineages that I'm running through my my operation. So these are like sister colonies, except essentially, there isn't that much genetically different between them. And yet they are, their performance when they have that basic need met is so profound. So that's like Ben very up for me, because I think I'm finally integrating some long, some long taught and like hard earned learning, just by like realizing that. And then you know, that that sort of pushes against what we know about them was we know that there are these hard working creatures that everyone has a role in their social order, but that can be true. And it can also be true that like, work isn't the driving function, like they're actually all have a role because they're working together to, to survive and thrive, hopefully. But it's not, it's so different than what we think of as work like they're not. I mean, that I don't know what their consciousness is, but that's not how it is in hive, right? They are trying to, they're trying to gather and forage and, and create food so that they can raise the next generation. And they're thinking about how they can work together to do that. Functionally, it's not that they're all going to work because they have to, and they have to earn X amount of nectar droplets before they can,

mary grace allerdice: 47:19

or they get kicked out of the hive.

Ang Roell: 47:22

It's, it's just so it's interesting to be learning with them and unlearning with them at the same time and just be like, Oh, I, you know, I didn't even realize how much I had applied work ethic to this, this creature until I started unpacking it and noticing something that I started looking at, because I was interested in like, which of these two places makes more honey? And then I'm like, Oh, the one that has all of the things that needs that one does, obviously, right. So I was looking at it through this production lens and ended up learning about like, how much of what we're capable of is reliant on where we are, essentially. And that is speaking both from a place base, but from sort of what we have access to and what resources are available to us. Yeah,

mary grace allerdice: 48:12

it's been really highlight, like, we have been gardening a lot this year. And I do not, we have like a you know, we live in the city. So we have a yard and we've been gardening and there's been like a and now I will garden forever, hopefully more and more. Because something really healing and we realizing that like food doesn't cost money, like food is just exist within a system in which it just like there, you know, like it doesn't cost something. And I think there's something of that relationship, like having access to what we need. That is actually quite simply like not mediated by a destructive system. It's been really, I can't I'm still working on articulating like on a soul level, like how that's really done something to me and for me. You talked about how bees are really a great model for teaching us like how to build consistent consensus or, you know, bees. Yeah, I won't say any more than that. But and how it seems to me to that again, that that place this like how the consensus is like a local happening. contingent on their own community. Do you mind talking about like, what that model looks like? Like what we learned from that?

Ang Roell: 49:28

Yeah, totally. So. So hives, I've said I've you referred to this word and haven't defined it. So hives are what's referred to as a super organism, right? And that means like, many small consciousness is working together as one organism for like, the greater good. So it's sort of like what I like to compare it to is like our body is made up of lots of cells, and they all work together, hopefully, so that we can exist in on this plane and that would be Similar for bees, except like, pieces of our body don't fly away to bring food back to us, right. So they're, they have this own they have this body autonomy but collective consciousness. So, in the super organism, there are lots of different ways to communicate. They communicate through vibration, they communicate through dance, they communicate through, sent, and they communicate through, like exchanging food. And so so when we think about how they build consensus, they make decisions by based on all of those different communication channels. So for example, a queen is constantly moving, there's one Queen for every hive. Usually, with there's there's a lot of rules in beekeeping, but they're also not rules once you get out into the wild world of honeybees. Like, men treat mentees of mine will call me and be like, my hive is doing this. And I'm like, Yeah, they're there. Yeah, they have their own consciousness. Right about them, we think about them, we understand like, basically, this is how it should work. And also, sometimes it doesn't work like that at all. Um, so usually, there's just one queen. And she is she's laying all the eggs that are going to be raised into young and adult bees. And so her health and vitality are important to the hive. So they're passing, they're touching her and passing her scent from her to every single bee in the hive. And that's one way that they communicate about health, they also communicate about the needs of the hive, basically, the the workers who are responsible for maintaining the interior of the hive, they will go around and see what they need and make those requests to the foragers. So they're doing a lot of that through vibration. And then the foragers do

mary grace allerdice: 52:03

the

Ang Roell: 52:04

do a dance called a waggle dance, which some of you may have heard of where they share where food locations are. And that's, they're basically dancing the coordinates of where they found a food source so they can send other bees there to bring it back to the hive. Um, but where they build the most consensus is when they swarm so every hive is every hive of bees is out collecting nectar, pollen, water, tiny bits of mycelium, propolis, all these different things that they need to function on and to feed themselves. And they're bringing that back to the hive. And the book, the goal there is to continue to expand that hive and expand that hive, so it gets bigger and bigger as an organism. But there's sort of a ceiling or a cap to how big it gets before it's really functional. Because it disrupts communication. If the hive is too large, they can't, they basically can't send information from here to here, because it takes a long a longer time, right. So their functionality as communicators against degrade. So

mary grace allerdice: 53:13

what they do is that once they have a lot of these, it becomes

Ang Roell: 53:17

very crowded, they have an abundance of food, they swarm. And a swarm is a reproductive model, they basically are creating a daughter hive and the mother hive is leaving to go somewhere else. And in that reproductive model, they have to be able to communicate about where the next best location is. Now, what's cool about honeybees is there, when they're foraging and growing, some of those foraging bees are already looking at locations for when they get bigger. So I love that because it's sort of like always holding out the possibility that we're gonna do better. I like that transference to humanity, especially in the times that we're currently living in because I'm like, it's, I like that there's at least five of you looking around to see what's gonna happen when we're a little bit better. Um, so right, like dreaming into into different futures is a really important thing for me, and I think, for our humanity. So, those foragers, they're scouting locations, they're called scout bees, and they're, they're measuring the locations with their bodies and occasionally bringing other like sister bees back to those locations to see how big is it how dry is it? Does it have a good entrance? Is it safe from bears, etc. And they're telling that by like how high off the ground it is. So once they reach this necessity to swarm, the hive itself raises a queen which they can do from any egg in the whole hive, they have to feed a very special diet and they start, they start grooming their queen down, so like feeding her a little less, so she gets a little Leiter so she can fly. And once she's ready to fly, they'll pull her out of the hive, half the hive will leave. And that will become what we refer to as a swarm. So it's the elder Queen, and half of the hive. And they now need to get at least two miles away from the daughter hive, because otherwise they're going to compete for resources. And what they don't want to do is they don't want to leave their lineage, their legacy in a place where they're then going to come back and create a cross competition of resources, we can learn something from this

mary grace allerdice: 55:33

brilliant.

Ang Roell: 55:37

I'm ready, right? So so they don't want they want to leave that have with a lot of food and the best possibility of rearing this, like finishing this Queen and making a new daughter. And so they're going to try to go at least two miles away. So they the Queen evacuates, the hive, this huge cloud of bees evacuates, the hive, they go off, and they often will just hang in a cluster from a tree or a branch or something. And those scout bees, those foragers will go out to those locations. And they'll start taking sister bees to those locations, and they'll create a dance or a pattern for that location, come back to that cluster, stand on the cluster and dance that all of the information about that location. What's amazing about this is that it's never the end, Tom Seeley, who's a brilliant bee researcher h s written several books about th s communication style where whe e the bees never they choose t e best dance that is for the be t location, they don't just choo e the best dance, because it loo s good, right? Like it's not abo t the aesthetic of the dance r that, like the most people a e doing that dance, it's not abo t the peer pressure, it's real y about which of these decisio s is going to be the best possib e decision for us. And in all f the research and analysis th t Seeley has done. The bees alwa s choose the best possib e location, according to what he s identified are the t p priorities of a hive. And o they are able to build a consensus, which is brillian. And simultaneously, they're ab e to build a consensus that's t e best possible choice for them o make. So I think we have a l t to learn about the possibiliti s of consensus from fr m honeybees. And I think that e have a lot to learn about t e reality of staying like small o that communication can happen n channels that feel effectiv. Yea

mary grace allerdice: 57:44

no, I love that as a dancer. So very much are like super attracted to that model or consensus. Do you mind talking about as we kind of start to wrap up some of your songs the camera before we started recording you were mentioning like a grant that you've been working on and some of the work that you're planning to do over the next few years about teaching skills and how to become a more sustainable like generative beekeeper the importance of diversity in the field? Do you mind talking a little bit about that work that you're up to?

Ang Roell: 58:16

Yes. So um, oh, gosh, the years really flow together now. What year is it? Um, well, this time, in 2018. I got this like little grant from my university I was working with at the time to interview different beekeepers in the field and tell their stories so that I could create a text book called radicalize the hive. That's all about community centered beekeepers. And then also is my sort of long winded theory about industrial agriculture and why we're here in our relationship to agriculture from my personal perspective. So this little book became a teaching tool for some classes that I taught and also has become a way for me to understand the the diverse array of beekeepers that are out there, because when you first come into beekeeping as a commercial industry, you get access to you know, who are the biggest beekeepers who has the most fees like like it's a measuring stick.

mary grace allerdice: 59:25

I'm actually not important.

Ang Roell: 59:27

Yeah. I was giving a talk in Canada last year. And it was it was a very charged subject that I was talking about making people uncomfortable. And so one of my hecklers was one of the hecklers that was heckling me shouted out halfway through my thing. How many bees do you have enough?

mary grace allerdice: 59:51

How big is your dick, sir?

Ang Roell: 59:56

We'll playmeasur ng sticks l questions right. Yeah. Um, right. So So this book really, really created some pathways for me to communicate and talk to and introduce my students to beekeepers from a wide array of backgrounds. And I tried to really center people are identified as people of color women, people identified as queer, trans and ask my, my young beekeeping community to interview and reach out to these folks. And so also trying to actually just connect create human connection between newer beekeepers and sort of alternate beekeepers who are not old white men who've been doing commercial beekeeping for five generations, right, like, how do we get students and beekeepers from a diverse array of backgrounds connected and just talking to each other. And so what came out of that was this text radicalize the hive, which is a free ebook that you can get access to through my website, just plug in your email, and I'll send you a copy. And it's also available on this platform called Open books. So it's completely open source, and full of stories as well as just different tools for young new beginning beekeepers. Um, so from that work, I reconnected to an old friend of mine who is a queen breeder, and we started chatting and ended up doing some research about queens together. And from that work, what's come about is sort of a generative or regenerative beekeeping school that we've just recently proposed. And what would happen in this bee school is that we would collectively teach the strategies that we've learned and adapted from working with views of how to mimic or imitate the swarming response in our managed beekeeping practices to reduce the Varroa pressure in our hives, and to create diverse bees that we can select from. So our objective isn't to find like the best Queen and then just only have daughters of that Queen, our objective is to have a lot of different strong queens that are strong for different reasons that can then be cross mated with each other. And so so with that objective in mind, we have started crafting this B school that will call in folks who are interested in learning these alternative practices, and would offer scholarships and stipends to folks who are identified as urban beekeepers, bipoc beekeepers, Latin ex beekeepers to really tie the thread back to creating a creating and supporting more diverse array of beekeepers. Because obviously, communities of color are keeping bees and there are black beekeepers and their lack next beekeepers, but access to like Queen rearing Queen production, making more bees learning these, like sort of these hard they're just harder to access skills. You know, there aren't a lot of people who know how to do these things, because we've lost the skills over generations in the industry. So how do we sort of re skill so that folks can go on to have their own generative practices of beekeeping? And that has been it's been something I've been really charged around for the sense I started this the book of just thinking about how this could happen, and now have have been able to actualize that into like a curriculum with evaluation tools, but a fund foundation will hopefully give us some cash flow to start up. And yeah, so that's that's I think what I've been most charged around has been really exciting over 2020 as more attention has been shifting to supporting black owned businesses, to learn about black indigenous beekeepers in the US and and to think about what are the tools and skills that folks might need so that this can continue to become a more collaborative and diverse industry. As I've said, I'm a white person, but I'm also a queer person. And so I have some experience for what it is to be ostracized or sort of pushed to the edges in this community and I've been able to because of the elders I ended up getting access to I was able to build and develop this like quirky business model that was rooted in a lot of my really actually nerdy science background, um, and and to survive and thrive. But it's been a really hard road. And so what does what does it look like to open up different pathways for other folks to move through this industry in a way that isn't just like commercial beekeeping on a massive scale and pollination? To survive? What does it look like to say no, you can stay in New York or in Michigan and raise these And create your own adaptive bio region bees and be endemic to the place you know that to be adapted to the place that you are. And creating a community of connection with those honeybees that we're working with, like that business model is already happening. So how do we, how do we scale up all of us so that we can keep doing that and then create a network of people who can swap genetics and share bees and find the adaptive traits that are really working for honeybees and share them. And in that way is sort of detangling everything that I've talked about here, right, we've talked about this industrial model of agriculture, and it's like pollen, that we are reliant on the pollination to feed us and also to pay the beekeepers to stay alive. We don't have to be, we can actually have a different world a different way of doing this and sharing information and materials. And so that's one of the reasons that my book is open source and all my education materials are free is like I want the skills that I have to be accessible to somebody that doesn't look like me, and I want the skills that I have to be adaptable for someone else's practice. Like I want you to take my, my datasheet and be like, I'm not using this, but I'm going to use this and this and this and make something that's even better for you or your practice. It's really beautiful.

mary grace allerdice: 1:06:22

Thank you for sharing that. Just and also like pioneering that in your own way in your own field. What is the best way for people to follow you? You mentioned your website where people can get your book for free? What is your website and where people to stalk you on the internet?

Ang Roell: 1:06:41

That would make sense I websi

mary grace allerdice: 1:06:45

I'll put it below anyways, like I know what it is, but I will, it'll be in the show.

Ang Roell: 1:06:49

It's a www.theykeepb es.com. And that's where you c n learn about my beekeeping pra tice, I do some organi ational con Not really. Yeah, I do that. And you can learn a little about that as well. I have an Instagram it is at they keep bees and we're very active on there. And we are going to be rolling out a couple of opportunities to support our work. In the next couple of months, we're going to be rolling out a T shirt line for they keep these which I'm very excited about with some fun slogans. And we're going to be rolling out a line of those like beeswax wraps that are made with some pen dyed fabrics, plant based dye fabrics. So I'm excited about that. And those will be sort of fed into an opportunity to support the educational work that's happening here at the farm and and just continuing to create a space here at the farm that is queer centering and queer affirming and about people having being able to build community on land when we're able to be together again in the real world. Yeah, so you can follow me on there for all of that. We also have a Facebook it's at they keep these as well. I think that's all the social media handles that I can think of. Cool

mary grace allerdice: 1:08:21

Well, again, they'll be I'll track them all down and hyperlink them so that they're in the notes for everyone. Yeah, looking to find. Is there anything else that you feel like we missed or that you want to drop into the conversation for folks? Do you feel good? I feel good. Yeah. I feel like you dropped a lot in a beautiful way. And I really appreciate it and like thank you for your time. And thank you for just kind of sharing that with all of us.

Ang Roell: 1:08:45

Yeah, thank you for asking. This was really lovely.

mary grace allerdice: 1:08:50

Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the conversation, please leave us a five star rating or review, subscribe to the show and share the episode with someone else who would enjoy it.

Ang Roell: 1:09:02

Be sure

mary grace allerdice: 1:09:02

to check out the links below the episode and the notes for more information about anything that we talked about on the show, free resources and also how you can join our free group where you can talk about the episode with other like minded folks. Thank you for being here. Peace.