Making the Connection: Honeybees, Food, and You: Christy Hemenway at TEDxDirigo

As the founder of Gold Star Honeybees, Christy Hemenway is working to reintegrate honeybees and farming. The movement toward small, organic, local, diversified farms creates a ripe environment for this. Hemenway offers classes and workshops across the county to teach new beekeepers about stewarding bees. She makes the connection between bees, our food system, human health, and the health of the planet.

It's crucial.

We need it.

We need to be connected to ourselves,

and to each other,

and to the world around us.

We need it because
it brings us strength,

and solace,

and love.

And so, at the same time,

connections make us vulnerable.

It leaves us open to being damaged,

to being hurt by others.

And this makes us strong,

but it also, makes us fragile.

I'm struck by
the incredible importance of this.

Back in the spring of 2007,

I became a bee keeper.

And there's nothing
like the magic of bees

for changing your world's view.

When I started keeping bees,

I started to see the world
through completely different eyes.

Where I used to see a decoration
on your dining room table,

now I see bee food.
(Laughter)

And where I used to see
a bright yellow blemish

in an otherwise
pristine green lawn --

again, I see bee food.
(Laughter)

Vegetables and gardens,
apples on trees,

weeds and wildflowers,

stuff that grows
in the highway medians --

all of this is bee food.

The longer I looked at
the world this way,

the more connections I saw,

and the deeper,
and deeper they got --

Everything was connected
to everything!

It was mind blowing!

Now, I'm not from Maine, by the way,
whoever had the bet. (Laughter)

but I like living here,

and these guys, MOFGA,
are one of the big reasons

because I'm very big
on the idea of organic food.

And MOFGA is the biggest and the oldest
organic association in the United States.

(Cheers and Applause)

So we're pretty lucky here in Maine,

but you can't really live
in this United States

without realizing that
there's something a little less than organic

going on with our food system.

So travel back with me in time --

Let's go back to 1971,

Richard Nixon is President,

and Richard Nixon just appointed
a man named Earl Butz

to the position
of Secretary of Agriculture.

He is the head of the USDA.

And for the next 5 years,
from 1971 to 1976,

Earl Butz promoted a policy

and he directed it
right at America's farmers.

And Earl's policy was this:

plant fence row to fence row!

Plow every piece of land
that you can get your tractor on!

Get big, or get out!

So, Earl brought us Big Ag,

and it began to transform
the way we grew food in America.

He brought us industrial agriculture.

And 'big' was suppose to mean 'better'.

Now, it sounds efficient...

And if it's efficient, then
that should mean more food,

and that should mean cheaper food,

and that should mean
fewer hungry people!

Ergo big... is better!

But buried down beneath all this efficiency
is this concept of mono-culture.

That's what you call it
when all those big farms

are growing just one crop each.

Thanks to Earl, a lot of people
bought into this and decided

that this was truly
the best way to farm.

But mono-culture is not
how nature does things.

Nature doesn't put all her eggs
into one basket like that.

That's way too risky!

Nature insists upon balance
and on diversity.

Because diversity works!

It works to control pests,

it works to replenish the soil,

it works to maintain balance ...

Nature creates a whole
different kind of efficiency,

and it's sort of
a magical outcome, as well.

The magic isn't what's happening
in industrial agriculture.

Industrial agriculture
creates industrial problems.

A mono-culture farm creates
the kind of imbalance

where a single pest that thrives
on that single crop

that we're growing
on our mono-culture farm

can easily wipe out
the entire farm.

And so, to prevent
that kind of disaster

our industrial farmer
uses pesticides.

And mono-culture farming
also depletes the soil very quickly:

we plant the same thing year after year,
after year, after year... in the same location.

So to counteract this problem,

our industrial farmer
uses fertilizer.

Now, it was one thing for me,
as a bee keeper,

back when I though about putting this kind of stuff
on the food that we were eating

but then, I made the connection --

Wait a minute, wait a minute,
we're putting this stuff on the bee food!

(Laughter)
What were we thinking?

And speaking of bees, as we are,

there's another thing that comes
into play in mono-culture farming,

for instance,
these are almond trees.

In the state of California there are
over 750,000 acres of almond trees,

and if you try to picture
how big that is,

that's about the size
of the state of Rhode Island -- it's a lot.

So here we got this 750,000 plus
acres of almonds and, of course,

the almond grower wants his almond trees
to make lots, and lots, and lots of almonds.

And so, they hire bee keepers
who bring the bees to the trees.

So, bee keepers load
their beehives onto pallets,

and those pallets
get loaded up on trucks,

and those trucks drive across
the United States to California,

and those bees just pollinate
the living daylights out of those almond trees.

And in the bee world,
this is a really, really big deal!

This is the largest migratory
pollination event in the country.

So, three weeks later,
there's that bee keeper back there

and he's loading those beehives
back on the pallets,

and those pallets are going back
onto the truck,

and we got to get those bee back
out of there --

You know why?

Because almond trees
only bloom for 22 days... 22 days.

So for the other 340 some days
out of the year,

there's nothing in those almond grows
for a bee to eat: it's a bee desert.

In other words, industrial agriculture

created industrial bee keeping.

And to a bee keeper, that looks like
a lot of broken connections.

So now, let's fast forward
to the year 2006.

That's when we discovered that
we're having a pretty serious problem with bees.

Entire hives were collapsing,
they call it.

What it meant was that bees
were vanishing, they disappeared,

and no one knew why.

This is the bee problem that became known
as CCD, or Colony Collapse Disorder.

And here we are, 5 years later,

scientists still don't know
the reason for this bee problem,

although we've sure thrown
an enormous amount of time and money at it,

and all of that in the hope
of finding a single solution

to what we hope was a single problem.

The researchers can see now
that CCD doesn't have just a single problem,

or just a single cause, that it's caused
by a combination of things acting together.

And this is where things
start to get really scary

because the number
of possible combinations

and the number of possible connections

is infinite and unknowable.

Now, honeybees are really closely connected
to their environment and they're small.

They're small enough that when
there's a problem with their environment,

they act as a really good
early warning system.

So, it's with good reason that honeybees
get called the canary in the coal mine.

But just what is it
that the bees are trying to tell us?

What are they warning us about?

I believe that
what the bees are saying is this:

our food system is broken.

Mono-culture farming and the use
of pesticides and chemical fertilizers

are destroying the best
and the most important part of nature's magic.

And they're telling us that it's time
to stop believing that big is better,

and to start working to restore the balance

and rebuild the connections
that we all need so much.

Now, in what I do for a living

I spend a lot of my time
talking about bees,

and a lot of worried people
have come and asked me,

"Can we turn this thing around?

Do we stand a chance?"

And what I try to say to them is this:

we are all connected.

And so every bad thing, every toxin,
every poison, every imbalance,

every negative attitude...
all of these affect everyone.

And that's where we're the most fragile.

But hey, we're all connected,

and so the reverse is also true:

that every good thing, every joy,

every pure wonder,
every positive intent,

all of these also affect everyone.

And that's where we're the strongest.

But there's something else as well,

because we're not all just
connected to each other,

we're also connected to nature,

we're all part of that magical alchemy,

and as subtle and mysterious as that is,

and as difficult to define,
and hard to quantify,

and as damaged as it may have gotten,

it's still the strongest part.

And it's the part that makes us able
to listen with our heart, and when we do,

to understand that when you tug
on one thing in nature -- one thing,

you're going to find that it is attached
to everything else... everything else.

Thank you.

(Applause) (Cheers)