By: Stephen Bishop
As an introvert, I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I’m glad conferences are back. The pandemic was a nice reprieve from mingling and socializing, but too much isolation is unhealthy. So it’s nice to see things mostly back to normal, which means bee conferences are now back in full swing.
For my day job, which pays for my beekeeping addiction, I often have to attend farming conferences of different sorts. If I go to a big cattlemen’s conference, I see a lot of boots and hats and flannel shirts. Everybody more or less looks the same. If I go to a big organic or sustainable agriculture conference, I see a lot of Birkenstocks and high-waters (apparently I was born before my time) and unusual outfits. But even in their unusualness, everybody more or less looks the same.
But a beekeepers’ conference really is unusual. It’s one of the few places in our modern society where folks from vastly different viewpoints mingle and interact. At a beekeepers’ conference, you’ll have your good-ole-boy-farmer contingent, back-to-the-land hippies and homesteaders, millennial hipsters, the science and academic sort, and even doomsday preppers. You’ll have young and old, rural and urban, and conservatives, liberals, and libertarians all together in one space. In our modern age of echo chambers and self-segregation, that doesn’t happen much anymore. The one thing that all of these folks have in common is that they like keeping thousands of stinging insects for fun. Go figure.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that beekeepers’ conferences are a safe space where people of all stripes can come together and talk about bees to their hearts’ delight. To steal a phrase from Planet Fitness, it’s a “judgment-free zone.” Out in the real world, talking about bees is often a good ice-breaker or conservation starter with the general public, but it’s not always the best conservation holder. If you’re like me, you may have had the experience where someone asked you a simple question like, “How often do you get stung?” or “How much honey do you get from one hive?” You quickly answer it and seize the opportunity to further elucidate them on all things Apis mellifera, only to have to stop your lecture on queen mating habits thirty minutes later because helicopters are circling overhead and a SWAT team has arrived to rescue your hostage listener.
Yep, you can see it in the general public’ eyes when you’re talking to them about bees: they think you’re interesting, but they also pity you because you’re bonkers. And I think that’s why I like beekeeping so much. It draws together people who are a little bit kooky, who are misfits even within their own respective groups, who can put on the facade of respectability, but deep down just want to binge on a good bee conversation—and for a few hours while you’re at a bee conference, it doesn’t matter whether you’re wearing boots or Birkenstocks, whether you’re a conservative, liberal, or libertarian; you’re just a beekeeper just like everyone else.
As a I reflect back on my time as beekeeper, I firmly believe that it’s not the honey that makes beekeeping so rewarding—but the people you meet and talk bees with, people who are likely on the opposite side of some cultural or political divide, people whom you never would have met without bees drawing you together.
So if you get a chance to go to a bee conference this year, go. You’ll learn some more about bees and meet some interesting people.
