Thiele with an unorthodox hive–picture from his website Gaia Bees.

One of the lectures I went to at the National Heirloom Exposition in Santa Rosa earlier this month has really stuck with me. It was a talk by radical biodynamic beekeeper Michael Thiele that, frankly, I walked into biased against. But by the conclusion I could tell that the whole audience, including myself, left deeply moved by what Thiele had to say.

The reason for my bias was that I was not too impressed with the two other biodynamic lectures I attended. One was just too pseudo-scientific even for my intuitively biased brain. The other lecturer, when asked why biodynamicists follow certain unusual practices such as burying dandelion flowers stuffed into the mesentery of a cow responded, “because Rudolf Steiner said so.”

Thiele was different. He is influenced by, what I believe to be, the true spirit of Steiner’s ideas rather than the dogma of his followers. Steiner, I think, would want us all to continue to use our sense of intuition rather than rely on what he said to do. Thiele balances what we know from science about bees with an intuitive relationship with bees as a whole, and complex, organism.

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