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Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guests are Michelle Cassandra Johnson and Amy Burtaine. They are two dear friends who are also bee lovers, and together they have co-written a new book. It’s called The Wisdom of the Hive: What Honeybees Can Teach Us About Collective Wellbeing. Let me tell you a little bit more about Michelle Cassandra Johnson. This is her sixth book. She is a wisdom teacher, an activist, a racial equity consultant, an educator, and an intuitive and shamanic healer. Amy Burtaine is an anti-racist trainer who has coauthored a book with Robin DeAngelo on facilitating white affinity spaces as an anti-racist practice. She is a teaching artist who lives with two beehives. Amy, Michelle, welcome.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: Thank you. Thank you Tami. Lovely to be here.
Tami Simon: Tell me right here at the beginning how each one of you, and this is by way of introduction, came to be introduced to the bees and fell so in love with studying bees, tending for bees, learning from bees that you would come together to write a book like this.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: Yes. The bees came to me, I believe, in a dream. And this was in 2019. I woke up when I saw the amount of money I had just spent on beehives and on all of the things one needs to tend them. So the reason I think I woke up from a dream connected to the bees is I wasn’t really conscious of ordering any of these things. It was four in the morning and the only time I actually became aware is when I saw the $400 or something that I just put in my credit card and my eyes like opened very wide in that moment. And I had never taken a beekeeping class. And this is how some of the mystics talk about bees, that they visit us, that they choose us, that they come to us.
So the bees arrived. I have a few friends who are bee priestesses and bee guides and bee lovers as well. And one of them helped me hive my first two hives in May of 2019. And I have learned so much from the honeybees, and I’m really excited to have had the opportunity to co-write this book with Amy.
I know Amy will share about her journey with the bees, but they chose me. The other thing to note is, my mother was very sick when the bees came to me, and bees are psycho pumps, which means they work between realms. And one of my friends, Carla, who is a bee priestess, she suggested that the bees came to me during that time to help my mother transition. My mother didn’t transition, but we thought she was going to transition and go to the other side, and she didn’t. But I think the timing is synchronous for sure. So that’s how they came to me.
Tami Simon: Now Amy, before we get to you, I just have a couple follow up questions here because I can imagine someone listening, saying, hold on a second. Michelle has friends who are bee priestesses. What does it mean to be– I didn’t know there was such a thing as a bee priestess.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: It’s a spiritual lineage, a nature-based practice. Amy and I actually went to one of the spaces in the UK that, for a long, long time, has taught nature-based shamanic practices. One of those wisdom streams is focused on the honeybees. And what we also understand is that honeybees show up in many spiritual lineages and wisdom traditions. Um, and so in certain lineages, people can become bee priestesses. It doesn’t mean they have to have bees in their space or even a direct physical relationship with bees. It’s more the mystery around bees. It’s also the very real lessons we’ve written about in this book around interconnective interconnectivity around sustaining a hive around vibration and attunement around the themes of darkness and lightness and polarities, and how these things live within us and how we work with them.
So that’s a little about a bee priestess, but there it’s like sort of any other wisdom stream where we’re steeped in the tradition and a reverence student of whatever that might be, in this case, honeybees.
Tami Simon: Alright, we’re going to have to talk more about bee mysticism. But Amy, what about you? How did you become such a bee lover?
Amy Burtaine: Yes, I really love that– reverence student. Because that’s definitely the wording that I would use, that Michelle just talked about. I, first of all, I love that you, Tami, were like, you keep punching the word love, and it’s true. I love the bees, I love them. And I can’t even explain it other than like Michelle said, like, I think if you love the bees, you’re called to them, you love them. And for me, my first real contact– and Michelle and I tell many of these stories as well in the book– was when I was living in Brazil. I was in my early twenties and my partner at the time and I lived in this rural corner of Brazil. And a neighbor of ours had 16 hives. And we went one night, he invited us to come and harvest honey.
And so we spent all night, first of all, all day sort of pulling hive boxes off because they were quite full. And then you have to wait until nightfall so that the bees don’t want to come back and get angry, understandably. And we, of course, have to very sustainably think about how much we should and can take.
We shouldn’t always take honey, but in that case, there was plenty. And then we spent the entire night in this shed in the dark, because it was in a part of the country without electricity, by candlelight, like uncapping frames and spinning honey until four in the morning. And it felt, I. Surreal on some level, it felt magical.
It felt, it’s a, it’s a, a memory that is burned into all of my senses and all of my being and, and ever since then. And, and even before then and after then, like, anytime I’m around someone who is tending bees, I want to go do it with them. I want to learn, can I do that? Can I be a part of that? And I kept, I’ve had continuous dreams in my life about snakes and about bees.
So they’re just two creatures that keep coming into my dream space. And so bees would keep coming into my dream space over and over in all kinds of ways. I distinctly remember that night in Brazil as being like a pivotal moment for me of, of deep reverence and love. And then after that I was hooked. I was like, how could I not want to be involved with the bees whenever I can?
Tami Simon: In The Wisdom of the Hive, you both write about bees as a superorganism. And I thought that was very interesting. I’d never even heard that term before. What, what does it mean that bees form a hive and that that becomes a superorganism?
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: Yeah. I think about this a lot and feel into this word of superorganism and the energy it contains. And there are other superorganisms as well, like ants or superorganisms. Um, and what it means is that a, a bead does not an, an individual bead does not think of themselves as separate from the hive or the whole, they don’t even embody that kind of way of being or thinking. Their consciousness is shaped around the reality that they are part of the entire hive. And it’s not just the bees. The honeycomb is part of the superorganism. The vibration and sound is part of the superorganism, the movement, all of the things they bring into the hive propolis, which is tree resin mixed with an enzyme from the bees, which protects each cell of honeycomb and seals the hive. That’s part of the superorganism. Pollen is part of the superorganism– nectar that they then transform into honey. And I imagine there are other things that are part of the superorganism that humans actually just– we don’t understand, because we’re not honeybees. But it means they understand that everything that they do is for the good of the hive, for the collective hive to sustain the hive and support future generations.
And I think about this a lot because I feel like this is the energy humanity needs to embody and adopt in so many ways because so much of our conditioning can be about individualism and how we’re separate instead of how we are connected to the whole. And so much of our conditioning can be about the here and now.
And we can feel separated from the past and healing back and also the future. And bees are immersed in their work to sustain a hive. Um, some of the time they won’t even experience the benefit of the nectar that they’re bringing in. They’re creating it for the future because of their life cycle, which is quite short, depending on the season and where the bees live. So that’s what a superorganism is. It’s one whole hive or body that is working together to sustain the organism, including all of the different parts of that space.
Tami Simon: Now you mentioned ants are also a superorganism. Are there any other superorganisms that we know?
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: There are some that we might not termites or superorganisms as well. Um, and there are a few others. Amy, do you know if others, I’m thinking,
Amy Burtaine: I don’t know in the same way that this, this is actually not a superorganism, but there’s a unity consciousness that the bees have sort of a, that that can be mirrored and paralleled kind of in the way that schools of fish move kind of at the same time, or starlings.
So there are ways that even in other because I’m not a biologist, right? I don’t know the technical, what makes something or not. And for, for us, I think part of the beauty of the metaphor of it, and that’s what Michelle and I were really drawn to in writing this book, is how the bees can be such a metaphor, as Michelle said, for us as human beings.
Imagine if we cared so much about one another. And the collective survival of our planet and each other that we acted in concert like the bees did, that we did things in harmony, that we didn’t try and think individually and destroy each other or destroy our resources, but only worked for the good of the collective. Like it blows our minds how beautiful and deep a lesson that is and how deeply we wish that we as human beings acted that way.
Tami Simon: That’s what it brings up for me, is I wonder if that could be part of humanity’s future, at least in a, as a metaphor for how we could care. I think that’s part of what you’re pointing to in The Wisdom of the Hive, is that perhaps this is something we can learn and take and see modeled by the bees. Now, you also refer to bees as an indicator species, and I wonder what their current state of health from your perspective is indicating.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: Hmm. I was just thinking about indicator species. So penguins are also an indicator species, and what this means is that how well they’re doing is connected to how well we are actually doing as humans.
And of course, we’re deeply connected to them and the more-than-human world and the ecosphere. Um, and there’s, there’s different information out there, scientific information, right, about how the honeybees are doing on colony collapse is often what it’s called. Um, they’re also subject to, um. Varroa mites, for example, and other pests or sort of invaders to their hive.
Of course, what we are doing to the planet humans affects the health of the honeybees as well. So climate chaos is forcing bees to, and other pollinators, I’d say in other parts of the ecosystem to have to adapt based on our behavior. And they’re being asked to adapt rather quickly and in ways that sort of feel untenable to me.
And yet, bees have been around for millions of years. And so part of me, again, I’m, I’m not a scientist either, right? Amy mentioned this. Part of me is, is like they’ve, they have survived in, in so many ways for this long. Um, and it makes me wonder. Um, what they’re doing to adapt and to survive, and yet we know there are so many factors influencing their health negatively I would say. Um, and, you know, we are bee lovers and tend our bees in hive boxes, which is not actually how a bee would live. They typically, a hive would live in a tree. So often I think about this too, like I care about them, and I take care of them as much as I can. And I recognize that even in the way I am tending them that, while I’m a more natural beekeeper, it’s not exactly the same as the way they would choose to live and to be.
So I’m constantly learning from other natural beekeepers about how to tend the bees in a way that really aligns with the way they want to live. So that’s kind of a mixed answer. I, colony collapse is still happening. We’ve both lost hives. And at times when we shouldn’t have lost them, right?
The winters, the weather’s unpredictable, the temperature change, it’s really cold, and it gets really warm, and they break cluster, right? And they go out and get resources, and then it takes energy to cluster back together during the winter and even to stay warm. And so there are these ways we know they’re not doing well because we’ve experienced the loss of hives to, I would say climate chaos in our behavior.
And I’m holding on to this idea that the bees and body wisdom that has allowed them to survive for so long.
Tami Simon: Amy, anything to add to that?
Amy Burtaine: Yeah, as an indicator species, I think about, you know, it’s such an overused cliche, but like the canary in the coal mine, right? Like in some ways if the bees can’t survive, we can’t survive.
Like, you know, one third of all of our, or one out of every three bites of food we eat is pollinated by bees and other pollinators. And so, you know, I do think that there is an indication, like as we’ve seen in many species, right now, and the climate collapse that’s happening, that like, no, this is not a good sign.
And what I love about what Michelle just said is that we believe, or I want to believe that the bees are wiser and more adaptable than maybe we as humans will eventually be. And I hope they outlast and outlive us no matter what shifts happen on the planet. And what I love that Michelle brought to the book in the first chapter is this idea from our friend and, and fellow bee tender Ella Daley, that maybe the bees are here to save us, right?
As opposed to this campaign that we have to work hard to save the bees. The reason we wrote this book is what if we studied them, you know, followed them, believed in them enough that we acted with them and like them. In ways that could help us change how we show up in the world and on the planet in, in more gentle, holistic, life-giving ways.
So I think when I think about an indicator species, really, you know, the lesson obviously is for us, no, we don’t want to lose the bees. We don’t lose any of the species on the planet, but I hope they have a wisdom to survive. What I want us to take from this is they’re showing us what we need to shift in terms of learning from the bees.
Tami Simon: For those of us who have not spent very much time next to a hive, unlike you, you write about in The Wisdom of the Hive, you can listen to the sounds of the bees. You can hum along with it and attune and watch their behavior. But for those of us who don’t have that experience. You know, I mean, the only association I have with the bee, I’m not called by the bees in my dream. I just don’t want to get stung by a bee. And it doesn’t go much further than that. What could you share with us? Like take us into their world. If you were, take me to planet bee. What’s it like? Take me to the hive.
Amy Burtaine: Well, I mean, I wish, I wish I understand the fear, Tami, because I have it too. I will admit, I wish romantically, romantically, I want to be one of those beekeepers that goes in without masks and without gloves.
And I don’t, because I’ve gotten stung enough and it hurts. I’m not gonna lie. But Michelle and I talk about even that is a lesson, right? The bees are saying you’re going too fast or back off. So there’s even the sting is something you learn to work with and appreciate as a, be tender. But, but what I wish people could experience is definitely the hum. There is an oral experience of being with and around bees when they swarm or next to the hive or just their sounds on a warm summer day as they’re coming in and out. Or even if you put your ear up to the hive box that is vibrationally calming for your nervous system. I will say that like for me, I feel really cleaned out in a way, like in a good way when I’m with the hives and settled that, you know, the sound is very healing.
So I feel very settled when I’m with the bees, which is like sort of counterintuitive because you’d think I’m going to this like giant swarm of, or, you know, colony of stinging in sex. Why would that settle me? And yet that’s exactly what happens. Um, and, and I’ll I’ll say one more thing and then I’ll pass it on to Michelle.
There is a smell I. About everything with the bees. And so it’s heady, it’s intoxicating in that there’s the sweetness of honey, but there’s also the smell of propolis and wax. And even like, if anybody can go to a grocery store and pick up a beeswax candle, and I encourage you to do this and take a deep inhale, it’s so delicious and so subtle.
Many of the smells and yet really deep and profound. And I, I’ve often said like I, I feel like a bee tender or, or folks that really love and worship honey. I’ve started collecting it. When I go to different parts of the world, it’s almost like being a sommelier because the products that the bees create, the propolis, the wax, the honey speak of the past, what was happening when they collected it. They speak of the weather, they speak of the flower bouquet, they speak of the– there’s so many flavors and stories that are deeply in the hive. So those are two things that I wish people could experience. And I’ll pass it to you, Michelle.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: Yeah. I was thinking about the smell and sound and how I was out at my hives earlier, right before this actually. And um, at around this time of day, you can smell it. It smells like nectar also fermentation, and it’s the bee bread they’re creating from pollen to feed the brood, to feed baby bees. And so I love going out into the bee yard and, and this time of day and smelling that and just feeling how intoxicating it is and also the journey.
Um, Amy just spoke about this in a way that. Um, if I smell honey that I’ve harvested from one of my hives, it takes me through the entire process of what it must have been like for them to leave the hive, to forge the resources, to fan the nectar, to take out the water. Um, it’s 80% of the water that’s taken out to transform nectar into honey, to think about the flowers they visited to collect that nectar and the pollen as well.
So it’s like I can open the jar of honey and it takes me through every, it’s like a shamanic journey, I will say. It takes me through every part of the process they’ve moved through, as does their wax, which Amy named. I think the world of the bee, what first came to me when you asked this is like, everything’s alive.
I just stood next to my hives and they are fanning their wings because they’re hot and they’re trying to cool off the hive. They are buzzing very loudly. So there is the sound. Some of that’s from the fanning of the wings and some of that’s from them buzzing into the hive, because the foragers come back in the early afternoon or later afternoon and early evening.
They’re all coming back to their home hive. I’ve had the honor of watching the bees do the waggle dance, which is the dance where they share coordinates with the other bees about where resources are. So everything’s in motion and alive. And even as I think about the sound. It’s not a foreign sound to us when we hum, which many of many people have hummed, right?
When we om, if we work with sound in that way or seed sounds, it’s the same vibration the bees make. And so while people may feel like most of my association with bees is fear, there’s this universal vibration that resides within us that also resides within the bees. The other thing I want to name about the world of the bee and it relates to everything being alive and them being a superorganism, is what you would witness if you went into the hive is all of these worker bees in different roles.
Um, bees, when they are first born, they clean out their cell and then the first role they take on is becoming a nurse bee. And the nurse bees tend the eggs, the larva, the brood. So they’re tending future generations. Um. Yeah. And then they become worker bees tending the hive, right? They may take pollen from their bee sisters that come in with pollen.
They may fan the nectar as they transform it into honey. Um, they’re, you know, there are bees that are attending the queen as well, who depending on this season is moving about the hive and laying eggs or maybe doing some other things preparing to swarm. You would also see bee sisters passing on nectar from one sister to the other, or building honeycomb, right?
So we see this building, we see this birthing, their undertakers that take out the dead bees because they want to keep a clean hive and they don’t want disease to spread. And their final role is to become a forger, to go gather resources to bring back to the hive. Um, and so I, I love this. There’s, there’s much more to it, but I love thinking about all of the different moving parts of the hive that one would experience. And I also like thinking about this related to our roles as humans and our contribution to humanity and the more-than-human world. And the cool thing about bees is depending on what the hive needs, they can revert back to a, a previous role, right?
So if they need more nurse bees, they can revert back to that. If they need more undertakers for whatever reason, if they need more builders to build the honeycomb, right? Or to measure my bees, we’re doing this today, this festooning where they link arm to arm, leg to leg. And they’re measuring because they want to start building their honeycomb, their symmetrical honeycomb and hexagon.
So this is also related to everything being alive as well. And this is what one would witness. There’s the sound and the smell and the journey outside of the hive. And there’s the, what would you see if you opened the hive and went into that world and what can that teach us?
Tami Simon: And just to deepen my understanding a little bit, tell me a little bit more about the queen bee and the lifespan of bees. Of course, I want to learn about the queen bee and then what’s going on here.
Amy Burtaine: You go first, Michelle.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: Okay. Yes. Everybody wants to know about the queen bee. Of course. I get it. And people think the queen actually sort of runs the hive, and that’s not true really. Right? They’re working together and she’s attuning to because there’s one queen.
I actually have had a hive with two before. Um, how’d they get along? They were fine actually. Oh, okay. Great. They were fine. I’ve heard it happens every once in a while. I don’t know how it happened, but I actually was able to witness these two queens in this hive. Um, so it, so the bees are working together and attending the queen.
And her main responsibility as we understand as humans is to lay eggs. Right. And the hive will not be able to I was with you until that point.
Tami Simon: That doesn’t sound that inspiring. But anyway, keep going.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: Well, she’s laying eggs for this hive to sustain itself. Okay. Yeah, yeah, I understand. Yeah. To have this workforce, she is not always laying eggs this time of year. It’s spring. It’s the time of expansion. So she’s laying a thousand to two thousand eggs a day. And that slows down actually in midsummer as they’re preparing for fall and then eventually winter. And so she moves about the hive.
She lays eggs when there’s enough honeycomb for her to do that. She can lay fertilized eggs to create worker bees, who are female. She can lay eggs and decide that they’re going to be male bees. Drone bees. Somehow she has this technology where she can say the hive or the hives told her they need, we need more drones.
Um, this is happening with one of my hives right now because it’s mating season. Um, or we need more worker bees, right? And she is, is listening and then laying eggs accordingly. Um, and when the hive, a hive swarms, this is the other thing the queen does, she um, the hive creates a new queen. So when a hive swarms, it’s them giving birth, half the hive leaves with the elder queen and the rest of the bees stay in the hive with the new virgin queen who eventually has to take a, a maiden flight and go to the drone meeting place and mate so that she can come back and lay eggs.
Um, so that’s what we understand. Amy probably has many things to add to the life of the queen, but that’s what I understand about what the Queen is, is doing and how she’s working with the other bees.
Amy Burtaine: I will add, Tami, I would say, if you want a feminist take on this, you know, the bees are matriarchal. I mean, there’s no doubt, right? Most of the bees, the worker bees are female bees. Only the drones are male. The drones do not have stingers, which is interesting. The drones are actually delightful and lovely and sweet. It’s so interesting. I mean, I love how it turns human gender roles and gender ridiculousness on its head, right?
That they serve the females and the, you know, there’s just that. It’s just, it’s so beautiful and different from the stupid, unnecessary, harmful roles we create as humans. And I do love that the sisters are working together and there is a deep sisterhood and a deep communication. I do love that they can all play all roles.
It’s not like we humans were like, well, I don’t do that. I’m too good for that. I can’t take out the trash. I can’t, you know, like they are. Doing whatever is needed and in, in service to their queen, certainly, but not in a hierarchical way, in a way that I would say is survival of the superorganism and love of self and of the community, right?
We want to keep the community alive, we want to keep the environment healthy. So we listen to her, we smell her pheromones, and she’s putting out pheromones all the time. And they are paying attention. Like she is directing things by the way that she’s, you know, allowing pheromones to do what they do. And I don’t know the mysteries of all that, so I have, we have, I mean, and every time you see a queen, it’s sort of like, there she is. How do you recognize her? How do you know she has a longer abdomen? She’s much longer than the other bees. And, again, I constantly call myself a novice beekeeper, not only because I haven’t been doing this that long, but because I feel it’s like in any spiritual journey, I feel like such a beginner, I’m not a master.
So oftentimes I can’t find the queen. Sometimes when you buy queens or you buy you know, hives, they’ll mark them. Sometimes beekeepers will put like a little dot of some sort of paint on them, and that’s easier to find. Um, and sometimes you just don’t, you’re looking and you don’t see them.
And when you do it, it feels like you, you know, got like the cracker jack prize or something. Like, something, you know, it’s a really, ooh, there she is. There she is, and you want to be very careful that you don’t crush her putting the frames back in that you don’t accidentally, she’s flown out or gotten somewhere where she could get smooshed.
You know, you really want to take care because if you accidentally kill her or she gets lost, the whole hive can die. So it’s really, um. Hive can also reproduce a new queen. It doesn’t mean they will die, but she’s that important. Um, so yeah, I have, I have deep love and I think people’s sort of romanticization of the queen.
I’m like, yeah, bring it. She’s all that. And it’s not, as Michelle was saying, it’s not just about her.
Tami Simon: No. You mentioned that it’s not so much necessarily that we humans are going to save the bees from their colony collapse and become these bee tenders, but that there’s this potential, this interesting idea that the bees could be part of our thriving and flourishing.
That they have a role to play in that. And I’m curious how you both see that. What are the bees doing, do you think that is interlinked and intended towards us potentially to help lift us up? God, they’re, they’ve got their work cut out for them. But like, what are they up to?
Amy Burtaine: I mean, I would say it’s not their job, but we would be wise to listen and learn, right? Like I, yes, they have their work cut out for them, but that’s not, they’re on another level of, you know, whether we make it or not is intertwined with their survival. And I think it is our job, which is why we wrote this book. Like, we don’t expect everybody to have bees or have access to bees. We would like to create a world where people are less afraid of them.
But more importantly, we want folks to have access to these lessons. So, you know, we, in the chapters of the book, we talk about many of these lessons, right? How bees have the ability to attune to one another, which we as human beings would do well, to be able to attune emotionally, vibrationally with one another, move more in concert together, move more in harmony together.
There’s also– one of our chapters is all about medicine. Like everything that the bees create is medicinal or nutritional on some level. And what if we as human beings, rather than think about what can I get, you know, in late-stage capitalism, what can I acquire or have for mine and my own? What is the gifts that I bring to the collective?
What is the medicine that I bring to the collective at this time? What are the things that I have to offer, whether it’s my local community, the broader community, like those are the types of lessons that we deeply wish and want people to. Rather than being from a scarcity and fear-based, oh no, are we going to make it? What if we show up in a place of, like, we have so many things to offer. And we offered them more freely and abundantly, for example, in the way that the bees do. There’s a lot more that I’m thinking, but I want to pass it to Michelle.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: Yeah. What came to me first is– and we’ve written about this, the human to nature hierarchy or human to more-than-human world hierarchy.
And this idea of the bees saving us flips that on its head. It’s like, what if the more-than-human world and not just the honeybees, right? What if we’re, we are so intertwined with it, or we have more to learn from the more-than-human world, then the more-than-human world could learn from us, right?
Because the honeybees are, I mean, they’re so mystical to me, and they’re practical. They’re like building a hive. They’re birthing, they’re dreaming of a future. Some of which they may not see, right, but they understand they’re building anyway. When they swarm, they leave without a home and they trust they’re going to find another one.
This feels so potent to me during this time, given everything that is unraveling and being dismantled, like to have that kind of faith. And trust and to know we can’t do it as individuals, but we have to do it together. This feels like how the bees might save us. Um, it is not to burden them. I just think there’s so much to learn from the more-than-human world about Amy name this abundance and generative chaos or what we perceive to be chaos, which may actually be a lot of order really, right.
The unfolding, the planful unfolding, the preparation they put into swarming. They don’t just leave, they prepare over time to do that, and it’s auspicious and it means this, the hive is healthy enough to do that, so. Um, I feel like we need to, to really think about and feel into our connection to the more-than-human world and take direction from the more-than-human world in particular bees because they are superorganism and can teach us how to emulate those same qualities that a superorganism embodies.
And I’m also thinking about, you know, one of the I think most profound experiences that I’ve had, and I have this experience a fair amount, but is when I sit with the bees and I listen in a, you know, a, a dominant culture that says, and this is complicated because of some of the identities I embody, but dominant culture that says, do don’t be right.
Get more to Amy’s point about capitalism. Yeah, more is better. Um, don’t think about your community or those around you or your actions and how they will impact those around you. Now, human and more-than-human and into the future. Don’t think about legacy and lineage of these systems of oppression that are so persistent.
Um, and, and when I sit with the bees, I feel like they’re saying, listen to us. Watch us look at how we do things. Someone could do this with a tree, a grove of trees or a body of water, or the sun and moon, right? Or the stars, you know, it doesn’t have to be honeybees. It’s like, what does, what are these different elements of the more human world and the multiverse?
What do they have to teach us when we actually listen and position ourselves as students and like humble students, instead of I know the answer and how to fix this, right? Which is, I don’t know how to fix this. The mess that I feel like humanity is in, I don’t know how to do it. And I’m doing the best I can.
And Amy is too, to think about, as Amy said, what is the medicine I can offer now at, at this moment? What is the medicine I can offer? I also feel like the bees are asking me to do that, and us to do that as well, in the way that they’re inviting us to watch them, to be with them, to build a relationship with them so that we can change our relationship to self and really to the greater world.
Tami Simon: Now, I’m sure you’ve both thought about this a lot and it’s kind of a corny question. I almost don’t want to ask it, but I have to, which is the word bee, bee, because you’re talking about, you know, it’s not about doing and achieving more and you know, having more success within late-stage capitalism. B, B, B. So what do you think about that word? Just be, we don’t even need the second E, just B, the sound, B. And the bees.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: Yeah, I think it’s complicated. And what I mean is that as I am in this body right now, during this time of unrest, which is not new, when many old patterns are persisting, when there are multiple genocides happening, climate chaos is happening, collective grief is happening, reactivity is happening.
It’s complicated because it can feel difficult to just be in this and, and to just allow ourselves to, to settle into the uncertainty. Present now, which again, I don’t think it’s new, but the degree to which I’m feeling uncertainty and, and like, where are we going? The intensity, it feels a bit different.
The flavor of it feels a bit different and things are happening rapidly. And so I know that when folks like us say, be right, listen, watch, observe, sit, that, that can be like completely irritating because things are falling apart. And, and what I know from my experience as a yoga practitioner for many, many years, and as a yoga teacher and as somebody who studied different wisdom traditions, a part of the medicine in, in most of them, the through line is to, is to sit and be, to watch, to look at what’s here now, to, to observe what happens in my nervous system when I acknowledge everything’s falling apart, right?
In a way that I don’t even understand or recognize. And somehow through that. To practice gratitude, to find contentment, to practice equanimity, right? These things that can feel really challenging and feel connected to being. So I feel like it’s essential that we learn how to be in this instead of run away from it.
And this is the wisdom that I think we can gather, or one of the pieces of wisdom we can gather when we sit and observe the more-than-human world, right? There’s destruction happening in the more-than-human world all the time. And, and still parts of the ecosystem are doing their, their work and living into their different roles, right?
And the seasons continue to shift. Um, so I, I understand it’s difficult to, to, to be with this and in it, and I think it’s part of the medicine.
Amy Burtaine: Yeah. I really appreciate the things you just said, Michelle. I’m, you know, I, I’m an anxious person. I, so I think a lot about that notion of, I. Us as the training to be a human doing, not a human being. And I tend to do all the time and keep myself busy. And the bees are busy, but there’s a different busyness than my sort of self-imposed or constant cycling busyness. And so I want to continue to be a student of just being and listening and watching. And, you know, I’m thinking about this, you know, for folks that can’t see Michelle and I, you know, I’m a white woman.
Michelle’s a Black woman. We’re best friends and we’re both activists and trainers and folks that work for social change. And I don’t believe that we can just be the ways we have been. I, as a white woman, cannot continue to just be complacent or unaware or unengaged or complicit in the ways in which systems of oppression and racism and, and all the other isms are hurting people I love. So I think there is a way that we also need to be differently in order to survive.
Tami Simon: I think. I just think it’s interesting, just for a moment, just to take this a little further. As I said, part of me is annoyed at myself for doing this, but I’m going to continue Just that you weren’t looking at the written word and you just heard it.
You’d be, we’re talking about bees be, you know, it’s just interesting, like the sound. It’s just interesting that however linguistically that occurred, that we called these winged little creatures bees. That’s interesting.
Amy Burtaine: Yeah, I agree. I agree. I also think that whatever though, I forget what the word is, but like sonically, it said like bee like to me it sounds almost like a buzz. Like there’s the, it’s the right, it’s the right English word in, in Portuguese, it’s bel, you know, I think it’s the same in Spanish. I don’t know. And other languages I would love to find out.
Tami Simon: Interesting. Okay. Now, Michelle, you mentioned the swarm and I’m visualizing a swarm in my, in my mind, but I don’t really know why bees swarm, what they’re doing. What are they doing?
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: Um, well, I, I just caught my first, or gathered, I don’t like to say, caught my first swarm about two weeks ago. Although the other hives had swarms, often they swarm too high for me to get them. And this one landed. I actually used a singing bowl and sound to invite them to drop down to a place where I could gather them and put them into a box and add them to my beard when a hive swarms, which is different than absconding, so sometimes hives will abscond.
For, we don’t always know the reasons. They find a better location. There are less resources in the area they’re in than they need to travel. Um, my partner actually, before we, we lived together, I gave him a hive that absconded and they took all of the beeswax and they took the honey. Sometimes they abscond if there are other pests, sort of like, I mean, ants are superorganism too, but they can, they can become annoying to the hive, right?
As they’re going in and out of the hive. Um, so that’s different. I want to name that, that might look like a swarm to people because the bees leave, but they never come back. And all the bees leave when they swarm. The hive splits into two. And often they swarm because they do it during the springtime.
Typically. I’ve had some swarm other times, but during the spring they have the best chance of surviving if they plan to swarm. If they swarm in the, in the spring. And sometimes they swarm because they are running out of room. Um, it’s also the period of expansion. So part of me believes they swarm when, when they’re in this period of expansion and they’re healthy enough and they’re like, we’re going to go.
To a new place and we’ll leave this hive and half the bees and the virgin queen in the hive. So there’s a lot of preparation that goes into it. They need to have enough workforce and male bees, and they need to have a healthy queen who can, the elder queen, who can go with the swarm. They need to have a new queen or a new queen needs to be ready to hatch very soon.
Um, and they create many queen cells so that they can ensure they have a queen. Um, and they actually stopped feeding the elder queen in preparation to swarm because she is heavy and she has to take flight again, and they need her to be able to do that. And, and what happens is it’s very loud, so it’s.
I have heard a swarm with my windows closed in my house and gone outside. It’s like, you will not miss it. You will hear the sound go out and bees fill up. They’re barreling out of the hive and they fill up the sky and they actually go and create, it looks like double helixes and hexagons in the sky.
And they’re doing this to disguise the queen. There’s no way I could reach up into the sky and grab the queen, but apparently they’re doing this to disguise where she is, and then she lands somewhere and they all land around her to protect her. So that’s the sort of physically what happens. And energetically what’s happening is they’re healthy enough to split into two.
Um, and it’s great because, you know, my hives have swarmed every spring and they’ve populated the neighborhood with more pollinators. I don’t know how my neighbors feel about that, but one of my neighbors loves it because he has many vegetables in his garden from the bees that have swarmed from this apiary. Amy’s also seen a swarm too.
Amy Burtaine: Oh yeah. Lots. Um, yeah. I, I’m, I was thinking actually Michelle of when we were in Britain and at the, at the training we were at, and this is the other thing, Tami, and you know, we love this, but it feels really woo-woo, but I love it. Like, you’re welcome.
Tami Simon: Woo-woo’s welcome here.
Amy Burtaine: Great. Because the bees are, we are in communication with them. They feel us. They are, as Michelle talks about, like psycho pumps, they are, you know, they are able to move between realms. They’re like, many things happen that you’re like, wait, that’s, wait really? That, like Michelle dreams about bees and then a swarm shows up the next week.
Like they talk to her in dreams. When we were at this training, you know, mystical bee shamanism workshop in Britain, you know, it was a group of women and female identified folks and there was a swarm that came, I think the second or third day we were there. And some of the participants were outside and got to be in the middle of this swarm of bees, and then they landed right next to the retreat center.
And I’d never seen this before at the base of a tree. Usually I’ve seen swarms up high and sort of decided and took over this tree as their new home. And it was, it was incredibly beautiful. We would all go out and sit and meditate and watch the base of this tree, which looked very much like a vulva. It was very beautiful.
The way the bees kind of bearded on the outside, like, you can’t make this up. Like, it was like, is that, is that really happening? Like it was really beautiful and we, you know, you could think, well was that just, and maybe it was, maybe it was just like we were there at the right time and it was fate, but there’s something that you feel like.
If you are connected to the bees, you notice signs. And so even with swarms or I, I recently had a, a hive that absconded and Michelle and I were talking about it. And I think it’s because my family and I are about to make a really big move and they know that I’m going to be leaving. And there was something about there, it’s time, which was both for them and for me, that feels very, it’s not, doesn’t feel random. It doesn’t just feel like an accident.
Tami Simon: Well, let me say something that might sound challenging, but I just want to say it, which is I understand, and as you’re talking, I am applying. Lessons from the bees and from the swarming activity to things that are happening in my life. Now, I could interpret that in a certain way, like the wisdom of the bees is speaking to me.
Or I could say, I’m a really creative person who often finds meaning in all kinds of things, and I’m finding meaning in this conversation. Yay, creative mind. And that’s okay to me. And I wonder how you see that. Because I think sometimes what brings up a critical or a judgmental voice in people is when they think people are like, well, you know, I’m sure that the bees are sending me this message versus I’m having a creative interpretation of, of, you know, multidimensional, interesting world. I’m wondering how you both see that.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: I love this because I think we try to make meaning of things. And this is how we make meaning of, of our relationship with the bees. And what we’ve observed and witnessed, and I appreciate this, it doesn’t feel like a challenge. We are offering one way for people to think about the more-than-human world and in particular, pollinators and superorganisms, right?
For someone else, it might be, and I mentioned this earlier, how they think about the sun and moon or they don’t think about that at all. They don’t feel like they’re connected to any of those things, right? They just see themselves as I’m in this human body at this moment in time, disconnected from these things these two folks are talking about, right?
But, but still, they’re trying to make meaning of what’s happening. We’re all doing that and I welcome this the way, this is the lovely thing about a body of work. Such as The Wisdom of the Hive is people can receive it and make meaning of it and apply it in the way that they need or want. Or they can, they can take what they want and they can leave what they don’t.
I mean, we’ve offered so many different things in it. Ways of thinking and practices and prompts and, you know, the way someone’s going to answer one of the prompts, right? It’s going to be different than someone else. We’re here for that. It’s an opening, it’s an invitation. Um, this is how we’ve tried to structure it and share this information.
And so that’s how I think about this. Um, people don’t have to fit into a box or be like us where I am dreaming about this swarm. And then they actually do it the next day. I think they’re communicating with me, but who knows what they’re doing. That’s just my story about it and I’m cool with that.
Amy Burtaine: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I, I think we all make meaning of things and who knows if it’s right or not right? And I, you know, thinking about. Making meaning I don’t know any more than the next person does. Right. If what’s, I think it means something because we imbue it with meaning. And, and like Michelle said, the book is really, we don’t, we’re not invested in whether people fall in love with bees or not.
We hope that they do. And if they feel drawn to, they will also help to create environments that are healthy for bees. But what we really want our folks to use this as a, as a sort of a spiritual practice, as an exploration, and as a way to get connected to their own attunement, vibration, intuition for themselves and with themselves, with others, other humans on the planet and with the more-than-human world, as Michelle said.
And our, a dear friend of ours who lives where I live, named Bea. I took her class years ago called Intuition University because kind of like you said, Tami, like I had friends who would be like, you know, when I met my partner, I just knew, I just knew. And I would always be like, I never just know, like, how does that happen to people?
Like I never had that experience. And one of the things that she helped me see is how to connect with my own intuition. And so I think more than, does it mean that the bees are connecting to me because I’m moving. I want to connect to my intuition about am I moving in integrity in my life with myself and others?
Does this feel like the right way to be right now, in this moment? Um, am I listening and slowing down enough to connect with myself, to connect with those that I love? That’s the meaning that I want to draw. And sometimes, to me, I make, I draw that connection that like, ooh, my intuition was already saying this was going to happen, and then it did.
How miraculous. Um, but I think I’m more interested in people’s deep connection to intuition and connection that we, what Michelle and I desperately want is for people to create, to be more invested in mutual care than just individual care.
Tami Simon: What would you each say is your intuitive sense about what the bees are doing in darkness that’s been meaningful to each of you in terms of your own journeys through dark periods?
Amy Burtaine: I love that you asked this question, Tami, because this is one of the chapters that I actually got to write and I. Michelle and I talk a lot about how, you know, we, myself included my son. Many humans fear the darkness. We fear the literal darkness. We fear the symbolic darkness. We fear that not knowing.
Um, and I am deeply in love with the work of Michael Wheeler, who, you know, talks about the long dark that we are in as human beings in this time on the planet and the collapse of many systems. Um, and so for me, what I love about the bees and what they’ve taught me about darkness is the polarity of the dark and the light that the, the bees live in the dark, birth in the dark, feed in the dark, build in the dark, but using the light, they bring the light in, in the form of nectar and pollen and sunlight and water, and build worlds and universes in the dark.
And there is a communication. Back and forth between the light and the dark. It’s not just, oh God, I’m in the dark and I’ve got to get out of it as quickly as I can because I feel uncomfortable and miserable. Right? There are some things, as Francis Waller says, that we can only learn in the dark. That we can only learn by going deep into the darkness up.
And, and that doesn’t mean people getting lost in their own darkness, which sometimes can be a really complicated place for people, but that rather than run from darkness, we embrace that there is a, a softness, a quiet, a listening, a learning, a rooting, a germinating that is necessary, that happens in the dark in order to, you know, for things to bloom.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: I am thinking about the womb space, and I don’t mean this just physically. I’m thinking about the energy of a womb and the darkness that is present within a womb, physically or energetically. And often folks will talk about the hive as a womb space, and Amy named some of the things the bees are doing in the, in the darkness and how they’re still work, I mean, most of what they do is in the dark.
Um, and I’m thinking about how creation happens in the, in the darkness of a, a womb space, right? Um, that that’s how we, we actually come into being. And I, again, I don’t mean this just physically, it’s like when we, when we create a project or when I work on something, I don’t know every part of what it will become or be or how it will unfold.
And that to me feels like the darkness, right? And a willingness to allow for the unfolding, right, to not have all of the answers. I think this is the medicine, the darkness provides, like cozy up with the darkness. And remembering, as Amy mentioned, the polarity and connection to, to light. And also how these, the darkness and light live within us too.
This feels really essential, particularly because people are describing the times we’re moving through as, as the long, dark or dark times. Um, and I think there’s a way we can talk about these dark times and, and sort of divorce that from creation and destruction and how intertwined they are. And I, I’m not sure that’s very useful, right?
When I’ve experienced darkness, when, and what I mean now is like loss or grief in my life or not, not being able to see how I would make it through something, right. When I’ve had these experiences, it’s been really important for me to, to be present to it. It’s been important for me to understand that it wasn’t going to last forever.
It’s been important for me to understand like. Oh, I can’t fix this, whatever this might be. And in some ways, to trust the darkness. And I feel like I’m going to turn 50 in August, which I only say that because I’ll be half a century old, and I don’t mean I’ll be old. I don’t know what I mean. But I do think about becoming an elder a lot.
And what I’m thinking about as I approach this solar return, like how much more comfortable I am with the darkness, like I’m, and how I need to understand how to move in the dark. And for me, this is ancestral as far as I understand in my lineage. My ancestors had to move in the dark because that was the safest time to, to make passage, right?
That’s in my DNA and like that, it’s like imprinted within me. And I think it’s part of the technology and the wisdom that we need to draw from now to figure out how to make it through these times. And the darkness is part of that. People want to bypass it because it can feel uncomfortable and there’s no way to bypass the darkness of this time. And we must remember the darkness is generative, that, that things are being birthed as well.
Tami Simon: Alright, two final questions. This one’s an everyday bee question. A bee lands on me while I’m outside. Let’s say in the summertime eating something. What do I do that is in a positive relationship with the bee that I do not want to have stingy? What do I do?
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: It’s counterintuitive. What people do is start swinging and fanning their hand and trying to get the bee off, and that just agitates the bee. And the bee really doesn’t want to sting you. It wants the sweetness, it wants what you’re eating or drinking is drawn to the sweetness of that.
And people’s reaction will make the bee sort of fly in one’s face back and forth, right? Looking at you. Their buzz, their vibration will shift the pitch, the tone of it. And so as much as possible to breathe, to stay calm, to understand the bee is there for what you’re eating, not to sting you. They die when they sting us, except for the queen.
They die when they sting us. And so they don’t actually, they’re not out to like die that day. They need to go back to the hive with some of the sweetness that you have, right? That’s what they’re searching for, which is such a like. Aren’t we all sort of searching for sweetness in that way? Can we remember that in those moments when the nervous system’s like, I’m about to be stoned, right?
They’re just in pursuit of sweetness and maybe connection. And maybe connection. So don’t fan your arms all, all around. That’s what I’ll say. And Amy probably has other tips.
Amy Burtaine: I mean, one thing I will often do is go slower. You go, you move the counterintuitiveness is you go slower. So move slowly. You learn to do this when you’re keeping and tending bees as well. Just move slowly, calm your own energy down. If you want it to be off of you, you might grab a leaf next to you and you know, put the leaf up to where it is on you and let it climb on the leaf and then gently put the leaf to the side. You know, just give it away without having to swish your arm to exit your body. But I would say slow down and calm down. It’s just hard if you’re scared.
Tami Simon: And then finally I said we would talk a little bit more about bee mysticism. And I’m curious to know if you could each share a story, a story that feels like it was some kind of mystical connection, if you will, some kind of inner level connection of a message that you were receiving that was important to you in your life and development from The Wisdom of the Hive. And we’ll end on this note. On the story note.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: There are many, but the one I’ll in the one I’ll share is one that’s in The Wisdom of the Hive about the– it’s a chapter about sweetness. And the first time that I harvested honey, which when I first brought bees here, I was not planning to harvest honey.
And one hive became honey bound and I needed to, to harvest that. Um, and the other hive died, and it was in wintertime. I feel like the bee, the hive was active. And I saw a bee come out of the hive and I feel like we locked eyes and I knew something was wrong, but I was afraid to go into the hive.
It was my first year beekeeping. It was in 2020, in December of 2020. I had a dream about the bees and for a few years now when something’s been wrong in the hive, the dream, the bees do communicate to me through dreams. Um, things will be rearranged in a hive or I’ll see parts of the hive dismantled.
And now I’ve started to have other dreams like about the swarm, which is abundant. It was not about death, but this dream was all about the hive dying. And I woke up from that dream and the hive was dismantled. And there were flowers, morning glories, purple morning glories in this dream, which has everything to do with astral travel.
And it was very mystical this dream. I woke up and I said to my partner, we need to go in the hive. They’re, they’re not alive anymore. And we went in and they were not alive, and they left us an entire super, which is an entire box of honey. And so the dream felt mystical and the messaging about their death and the connection with the bee and, and also having to– I sort of contend with my grief in that I was heartbroken. I was like, the hive is dead. I could, I saw all of these bees and I, my heart just felt like, I don’t know if it will be repaired. This was near the– we were in some ways already in COVID and didn’t know it. So it wasn’t lost on me that I’m looking at this lifeless hive and thinking about humanity and what was happening, and then the bees were like, and we left you a box of honey and we left you a box of sweetness.
And, and for me, the, the teaching in that is about this lesson of like when things are falling apart, when there’s death, when there’s loss, often there is some experience of sweetness somewhere. And they just showed that to me in real time and we had nothing to harvest the honey. And so we had to like use– my husband’s a chef. We had to like rig up something to harvest honey because we had weren’t prepared in the middle of winter to do that. Right? The season is connected to it as well. So the dream and the like energy of death and sweetness, that’s the story that I will offer about this mysticism and the way they communicate.
Amy Burtaine: I love that story, Michelle. I think the thing that came to me when you, when you asked Tami was Michelle and I talk about in the book the practice of walking the Sacred Figure eight or the li Miscut or the infinity symbol, right? Which is also the bees fly and waggle dance and move in that shape.
And we had been taught in the experience we went to abroad to use that as sort of a meditative liminal space of exploration. And deepening into a question. And there was a– we are in it again. My partner just lost his job. And so there have been times in my life where I have been worried, and it brings up old childhood fears of scarcity, right?
About will there be enough? Right? Will there be enough money or will there be enough things or time or whatever, right? And I think that’s really common to human beings, that fear of, will I have enough? Will we be able to survive, if, you know, and, and the spirals that we take ourselves into. And so I decided to bring those fears and that practice to the limb mist where you put, you know, one polarity would be abundance, the other polarity would be scarcity.
The middle is, you know, where the, where the line intersects is called the knot, the KNOT, but also the knot, the NOT. And so it’s this really beautiful practice of sort of walking around the figure eight back and forth and, and. Meditating into and experiencing these two polarities. And I kept walking between abundance and scarcity and abundance and scarcity and abundance and scarcity.
And the thing that came to me at that moment, and I, in the same way that you said, this feels cheesy to say, but it’s, it felt really profound at the moment, is the message that I received was, the more you give away, the more you have. And that settled me so much. And it wasn’t a denial of people are in real circumstances of difficulty and not having enough.
It’s not about, you know, don’t have boundaries or give yourself away, you know, but, but whatever we have, which I think is another lesson of the beast, to give my laughter, my energy, my love, my time, my care, whether it’s, you know, or my money or whatever I can give is so much so enriching that I can stop calculating, right?
Like, yes, I have to, we have to figure out how to make it work in a modern human life and. That deep lesson of the more I give away, the more I have, the more I receive was really profound for me. And I think the bees offer us so much. We have to be very conscious about what we take from them. Not overtake, not over harvest, be in a really reverent and respectful relationship of what we ask and take from them, but they give it.
It’s a beautiful gift and I want to be in that place of abundance, of offering abundance to others as well. So I think that’s what I would offer.
Tami Simon: Amy Burtaine, Michelle Cassandra-Johnson, I have to say, I think I might be buzzing. They’re the authors of the new book, The Wisdom of the Hive: What Honeybees Can Teach Us About Collective Wellbeing. Thank you both so much. Beautiful work, beautiful offering. Thank you.
Michelle Cassandra-Johnson: Thank you.
Tami Simon: Sounds True: waking up the world.
