Thoughts on Bees (Ben Falk's) Honeybee Democracy by Thomas Seeley

A well known permaculturist and homesteading expert Ben Falk, recently shared his insights into our relationship with bees reading Thomas Seeley's  Honeybee Democracy.

To Quote Ben:

"Mind blown several times about honeybees by reading Honeybee Democracy  by Cornell researcher Thomas Seeley.  Yet this book is a striking  example of how Science as an institution is often fundamentally perverse  and near-sighted, how it grants itself superior authority and gives  itself rights that the public has never given it to destroy living  nature for partial knowledge at best.  
For his studies he hunts  down wild hives, kills the colonies by stuffing their entrance cavity  with cyanide and then cuts down the whole tree to bring the hive back to  his lab for study. He offers no justification for killing a couple  dozen hives comprised of hundreds of thousands of living beings. The  right to do so is apparently implicit simply because it's "research." At  one point he says he was "saddened to kill so many bees but excited  because I was the first human describing in detail the homes of wild  bees."  So apparently it's just about him - about doing something deemed  by himself or his authorizing institution to be worthy. No member of  the community who's commons was taken by his research was ever asked if  killing off a couple dozen wild hives in Thompkins county was ok with  them. Certainly the bees themselves never approved of the killing. In  what world is killing a subject justified for some potential promise of  benefit to the subject?  
The most telling part of this situation is  how emblematic it is of science as a whole - with its best foot  forward. Far more perverse and sinister science projects abound but  Seeley clearly seems to care for the honeybee. This is respected sound  research in today's world. Yet no justification for killing off hundreds  of thousands of living animals is even ever offered to the reader. No  justification is needed apparently. The superiority of his project is so  clear and so far above the needs of living beings that it doesn't even  have to be justified. It's speciesism so thorough that no explanation is  needed.
Some of his findings could have been easily attained  without killing any bees purely through observation alone - as has been  done by thousands of years by honey harvesters. For a supposed scientist  Seeley makes vast assumptions throughout his work - such as that the  bees don't know he's observing them, that observing a dead system is the  same as a living one in real time, that others haven't observed what he  has before, etc.
If killing thousands of living beings is  justified why not explain how that is so? And if the supposed reason is  for the benefit of the honeybees themselves why not do everything you  can to learn from them without killing them? Why not have a summary of  how what you learned can be applied in service of the bees? There's no  application of his research in this book - no chapter on how to make the  ideal wild swarm nest box to attract bees and give them a secure home.  Seeley applies some of what he learned to conjectures about how humans  can make better decisions as a collective group - interesting to be  sure. His research also, like much research, illuminates how incredible  and sophisticated other living beings are. The navigational and  communication abilities of the bees are astounding no doubt and he  brilliantly explains this. But why do we need to know yet another of the  thousand ways other living beings are amazing? Is it not enough to  simply know that they are? Do we not already know enough about nature as  a whole to respect it? Are we really suffering for a lack of  information upon which when we gain more we'll finally treat the rest of  nature with respect and kinship? Of course not. This seeking of endless  pieces of information for information sake alone without wisdom is a  hallmark of a society disconnected from the subject we study. It's an  objectification of nature and reduces the reality of the subject to the  limitations of our means of inquiry. Like any other piece of solid  research Seeley's work will be partly right and partly wrong. We'll see  over time that some conclusions missed a larger more complex piece of  the reality of the subject. Our knowledge is inherently partial. Yet  today it's implicit in the institution of science that it's perfectly ok  to destroy the lives of subjects to gain partial knowledge which is  often of dubious value to begin with.   Seeley got his name on a book  and a bunch of peer-reviewed papers on his resume but the honeybees  themselves have gained nothing in the process. Science in this way is  simply another way that colonialism is administered in the service of  ego."

You can purchase the book here:

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9267.html

Or watch the authors personal thoughts here:

If you would like to read a related article I wrote about the bees and a study done on the effect of pesticides on our pollinating friends, check here:

https://steemit.com/food/@ecoknowme/new-research-sponsored-by-syngenta-and-bayer-shows-harm-caused-by-neonicotinoid-pesticides-on-bees-so-no-honey

What do you think?  Are we on the right track or do we need to seriously reconsider our relationship with nature as it relates to bees and other lifeforms?  Share your thoughts and bonus points for solutions based answers!

To the Bees!

@ecoknowme