So that others may live

Joseph and I have tended bees for the last 6 or so years. Last winter we lost both of our hives. We keep them where my mom lives out in the country because we are too nervous to have them in our suburban area where they could get into pesticides in the neighbors yards. But keeping them at my mom’s house in the country means they are 115 miles from where we live. Bees need regular care. This year we committed to checking on them every two weeks so that we could do hive maintenance and check on them. We drove the 115 miles today to look in on them, and to our disappointment discovered what look like queen cells. 

When a hive is not happy with its queen, the bees will try to make new queens, but our understanding is that the queens the bees would make in our hive wouldn’t be as strong as the queen we got that was reared by humans to be particularly strong. So, part of regular hive maintenance is to remove these queen cells. A queen cell is a long protrusion of wax with a larvae in it. Today, Joseph held the frames and I scraped off one, two, a dozen queen cells. As the goopy innards of the larvae spilled out, I didn’t flinch the way I thought I would have (in the past, Joseph has always scraped the queen cells off, this was my first time). While I did not delight in this taking of life, I knew that the taking of these few individual lives would make the collective hive that much stronger, and bees need to have between 60,000 and 80,000 bees of critical body mass to stay warm through a northern winter. So the hive depends on having a particularly strong queen that can steadily lay a lot of larvae throughout the summer. 

Later in the day after removing the queen cells, I was thinking about how focused western civilization is on the rights of an individual life, and how conversely sometimes the sacrificing of a particular life can better serve the life of the collective. I certainly don’t like to be the one who chooses who lives and dies, but it is heavy on my mind and heart how the collective choices humans make in these times will determine to large degree the composition of the community of life for the next ten million years. What sacrifices can I make so that others may live?