that mom and help her, educate her. find that mom, because these moms are absolutely taking it on, so find those moms, because they are nursing all of us, and mom in the greater sense of the word, right? the planet, the earth, mom. whoever mom is for you today, find that mom and help her. >> i would like to thank all of our panelists tonight. our program has been food fights for the 21st century, women's voices driving change. our panelists. my name is kevin o'malley. thank you all for being here tonight, and with this, i would like to close this program on the commonwealth club of california, celebrating over 125 years of enlightened public discussion. [applause]

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] >> coming up tonight at 8:00, a debate on evolution versus creationism with the science guy and author and founder of the creation museum, ken ham. here is a preview. worldview isn this that somehow no one and his family were able to build a wooden ship that would house 14,000 individuals, and there is a boy and a girl for each one of 14,000, andout

these people were unskilled. as far as anybody knows, they had never told a wooden ship before. furthermore, they had to get all of these animals on there, and they had to feed them, and i understand mr. hamm has some explanations for that, which i find extraordinary, but this is the premise, and we can then run a test, scientific tests. early 1900s built an extraordinarily large wooden ship, the wyoming. masted schooner, the largest one ever built. it had a motor on it for whingeing cables and things like and it was not as big as the titanic, but it was a very long ship. it would twist in the sea. it would twist this way, this way, and this way, and in all of that twisting, it leaked like crazy.

the shipcould not keep dry, and, indeed, it eventually foundered and sank and lost all 14 hands, so there were 14 crewmen aboard ship built by very, very skilled shipwrights. >> evidence concerning one race. when you look at the human population, you see a lot of differences. based on darwin's ideas of human evolution, darwin did teach there were lower races and higher races. would you believe that back in the 1900s, one of the most popular biology textbooks used in the public schools in america talk this, at the present time there exist upon nurse -- upon earth five races or varieties of man. can you imagine that that was in the public schools today? and yet that is what was taught,

and it was based on darwin's ideas that are wrong. >> you can see all of that debate tomorrow at 8:00 eastern on c-span. communicatorse with author asterisk taylor -- astra taylor. recently released letters written by president warren harding detailing his long-term love affair. us all tonight beginning at i are on the c-span networks. >> on the next washington gentzel looks at top issues facing schools. then a discussion of the common core standards initiative and the u.s. education policy.

facebookr phone calls, comments and tweets. >> now, a look at the use of honey bees by the u.s. military. university of california authorhy professor and studies the social and political use of bees. this is part of a community history project called shaping san francisco. [applause] >> good to be here. thanks, chris and lisa. this is a great place to be. to -- iplaces are tied

get a little closer? how is that? i am uncomfortable being this close to the mic. it's not about hearing, i think it is about recording. no one has ever had a problem hearing me. ofis rare to have this kind this political, intellectual space. it's not academic. here. being thank you very much for having me. , istart with i want to say kept postponing it, i'm not done with the project. i will be done by may, school will be over, it will be fine. of course it is may and i'm not done with the project. you will see some different pieces that i worked on, but

it's really the first time i put together the talk so you will hear some of it that is freshness and newness and roughness as i go forward. there will be three basic arts of the talk. about the history and the industrialization of the be really quickly. who areound people beekeepers. you will know part of the story. kind of a necessary starting point, the economic history of the honeybee. we will talk about the broader project. i will try to reframe the way we think about bees. we know the narrative of the bees and we will keep returning to it.

you already know in the first paragraph what is going to come from the same tax, the same people being quoted. i will talk about why and how i am reframing it and then i will give you a piece of the larger project which is on the militarization of the honeybee, a different take on the history of our relationship with honeybees. , accident.art i will come in and out of reading this. a beekeeper, you never want to make the 5:00 news. he said i saw the station wagon entered the freeway, i saw the kids in back. it was like slow motion. it was a done deal or i even stepped on the brakes and i knew it. jeff slammed on the blakes of the -- the brakes of the

international semi-. he swerved and the weight of the trailer shifted behind him. and i dumped. it was the right thing to do, but the outcome wasn't pretty. the trailer flipped, landed on the guard rail. fragments ofnto old pine box. boards along with millions of bees becoming this massive cloud that engulfed him in his truck and then settled on both sides of highway 90, making traffic in both directions come to a complete stop. jeff lowers his head as he tells the story. stares intently and blankly as he describes it as a bad day. the station wagon kept going.

the station wagon saw what happened in his rearview mirror. jeff started trying to pull the pieces of the high back together in frantic motion and realized it was an impossible task. chp gets on the scene and he gets there and gets out of the stung.rst thing, he gets the caltrans workers nearby get .tock, they get pissed day, at, it's mother's number of years ago. mother's day, traffic stopped, 13 miles in one direction, seven 90 and legally stopping traffic in both directions. the headline in the local newspaper, the sacramento bee, the story titled, it was a real mess. and it was. took almost a day for them to

remove the shattered pieces on the highway, putting the few hives they could back together and putting those in the nearby caltrans yard to water them and keep them cool. the majority of the bees formed massive clumps that hung from the pedestrian overpass is nearby. they could not figure out what to do with them and they called service and incinerated them. they incinerated the piles of hives nearby because they didn't know what else to do with it. the disasterhen happen until 4 p.m., it stopped traffic in both directions. that night jeff had to climb into the back of another truck and drive that truck with the rest of the bees all night to bring his bees back to minnesota where his cousin dealt with the remnants of the legal mess around the accident.

the incident has haunted jeffrey years. there are many remarkable things about the story, the sheer scale of the incident, the massive waste of bees and labor that had gone into building the operation over many years. wereillions of bees swarming around trying to find their lien. several talked to hundred beekeepers over the last seven or eight years about the a beekeeper in pennsylvania brought this up to me. he has been all over the news. he said there are two types of commercial beekeepers in the united states. those that have had accidents, and those that will. i research assistant at uc spent 2000 scanning newspapers and trying to find incidents. he found over 68 incidents of

trucks carrying bees that have collapsed or tipped over, making these incidents much more common , and we have scanned and just try to find them haphazardly. there have been scores of be accidents and there will be scores more. so much of our dependence on the be, contemporary agriculture as we know it would not be possible without the honeybee. is a necessary condition of the honeybee. even now we know they're going to happen, there is not much about it.e done the industriousness of the hive, the feasibility to be mobile -- the bee's ability to be mobile

makes their role in industrial agriculture indispensable. , the size ands yelling configuration of the --ustry are often seen as the consequences of working in the industry. i was interested in that political history. i thought i would do it economic history of the bees and i want to get the structural conditions that brought this industry into being. when i looked into it, it got more and more complicated. other elements of the story came materialss the jury that became part of the retelling of these incidents, theapiary industry made economic history one that is very difficult to tell.

so while this incident is not critical, not intentional, the fact that it is often deemed ofcceptable, the conditions the modern vn the politics of its making. it has turned to the modern form of production order to survive. part of what i want to argue today is more in those relations of production but more than the industry itself, more than has beenre, but what produced of this is the modern honeybee. the modern industrialized be. i mean this in a very material sense, not simply symbolically. i argue in the larger work that the actual material form of the honeybee, it's exoskeleton, its

size, shape, color, have been fewsformed over the last centuries. i looked at a number of different aspects of that changing of the making of the modern be in the book through the most consequential event is in modern agriculture. this is probably the most consequential remaking of the honeybee that is out there. i will start with this. the almond industry. anytime time you read about the bees you will read about the almond industry. it has the largest impact of any agriculture crop. the almond industry is huge in california. it is larger than the wine industry in terms of economic cost. 80% of the worlds almonds are produced in california. if you haven't been through the central valley and february and

march, just the pollination, this incredibly fragile individual pink blossom of the almond tree. it's a remarkable bloom. you start thinking about it as you drive through and the scale of it, you have this remarked -- this remarkably fragile thing on the one hand. literally hundreds of miles of these, the beauty, the enormity of the industrial landscape is simply stunning. you get a sense of a little bit of the size. what is remarkable is that up to 80% of the honeybee's in this country are shipped to california. all the honeybees in this country, most are put on the back of semi's and brought to california to pollinate almonds. it is basically what makes beekeeping economically viable at this point.

production at $10 a hive, and about four hives per acre, now is about $170 per hive. spent more time on beekeepers and paying for bees and their keepers than they spend on irrigation in the central valley. of themassive part almond industry. about 2 million hives that are truck and make possible about 50 pounds of almonds and hundreds of other crops. i'm focusing simply on the almonds right now. trucked 50-60,000 miles a year. they are fed corn syrup and and it's sugar water done on a totally different

cycle. rather than bees filling up colonies in this bring, if you're in minnesota or north dakota, a lot of beekeepers keep their bees -- they will start feeding their bees in the dead of winter so they're ready to be shipped in january and february out of north dakota and south dakota because the bees are at full capacity, so they can make more money for the hives when this bring comes. this is an old map and you can see so many different things. you are a beekeeper now, you go to california. the east coast route is a central route. now everybody goes to california and they go back to their routes because the almond pollination is so economically lucrative. so this is jeff many years later, one of his semi's is

loading bees. most people have not heard much until this mysterious thing came into being. most beekeepers don't believe -- they in calling believe it is a collective term from 2006 to talk about the way bees were dying in a new way to read it was actually -- there are all kinds of ways that bees are lost every day becomes more of a public term that is used now. most people think most of the dial had to do with a lot of different actors -- factors, and not just as it was to find. u.s. department of agriculture, colonies over 32% of

in the country were lost. in 2009, 29 percent of the colonies, in 2010, 30 5% of the colonies. in 2013, 40% of the colonies. over 6 million hives have been lost since 2000. this is where the story usually stops. what is interesting about this story is that the loss is happening every year. the total number of bees in the country is actually pretty stable. every year we have a strange paradox where were losing more bees than ever before. it's a question of what is going on.

disappear, thes populations decrease, the bees don't reappear. what actually happens is this. many people here have split their hives? you have a large population in one hive and you basically take six ofthat hive five or the frames and put them in a new box and give them a new queen. now more often you just mail order the queen. business ingrowing the apiary world is actually queen reading. you get your queen, put her in your box, and you have to hives when you started with one. what is happening now is that beeneekeepers -- i have beekeeping pretty much off and on my whole life. -- maybes used to take

twice a year i would slit my hives. willcommercial beekeepers lose 100% of the hives they started in the beginning of the year and still have 100% at the end of the year. they started with a hundred and lose 100 or more and they reproduce that number during the year. so beekeeping is a totally different thing now. there are number of things that are threatening them. it's not because simply they are just die. we have to think about the production and reproduction of the population and what has changed about beekeeping. it is different than managing. , we do more and

the deaths of our bees. i'm not worried about the bee population disappearing, not unless the beekeepers do, which is very possible. of the bees in this country are basically managed by about 1200 beekeepers. i would say 50% of those have massive beekeeping operations. it will keep new people coming into it as long as they can make a profit off of it, and we will manage the debts the same way we manage cattle. now the modern be has a shorter

lifespan, more parasites, more viruses, more bacterial infections and colonies living shorter lines -- like send any time and aviary history. bees have a certain personality, they develop as they grow. even though the bees switch out quickly, they will become much or a hive. they don't do that anymore, they're being replaced annually. commercial beekeeper would keep them for years, almost all of them flipped after one year. the modern be, all of the , nothing hases come close to this.

the modern be lives a more precarious life. we have done more research than ever before. they live a more precarious life than any time in the multi-millet until history they have shared with humans. the conditions .2 economic and political conditions of the industry itself. i'm always wary of crisis because it is in the moment when people talk about crises that -- istypes of gary things what pulled me into looking at the bees, and i'll will come back to that in a minute. it is a lot of effort now more than ever before to try to figure out what is going on and in some sense it is a crisis because of the changing rate of the population dying off.

we have more money going into that research right now. genome,the newly mapped you have toxicologist, you have bacterial entomologist trying to figure out what is going on there. you have all kinds of other theories about what is causing the collapse, cell phones, electrical transmission lines, armageddon, cape town south africa, in for tradition of the u.s. ovulation my south african bees. the zombie fungal parasite has more teeth than you might think. there is all kinds of struggling to find one kind of element that is causing it. there is less consensus over what is causing the collapse. to some ofe back that struggle over consensus but

there is less consensus now than ever before. it raises some questions about what we are doing and how we are thinking about dealing with and how we approach the question of the die off. so much of it has been oriented around what is happening to cause the crisis around the bee rather than asking the more fundamental question -- how to the conditions of honey beekeeping arise in the earth place? for are the conditions precarious. not because the scientific elements are not important, as a beekeeper i draw that knowledge often. i don't think the matter what we do going to ultimately figure out what's going on i isolating mall elements of the problem and trying to come up with some technical solution through those narrow scientific means.

for the long-term, i don't think it's going to make much of a distance. -- much of a difference. the most common factor you will see, newspapers will talk about it and say the set of variables is complicated. when you said that everything is a variable, everything is part of the cause, it tells us nothing about the calls. if there is more than that he gives us new ground for a politically informed engagement. there is no analytic traction for the meaning of vibrant politics.

it will allow for different way of engaging in apiary politics. to include epistemologies to politics, the racial history of e, other ways in which knowledge is being produced about bees. today we will hear about militarization, to asked those questions of how we might know the bees differently by asking different sorts of questions. the broader project. i did not have to really talk about this. i ultimately, honestly in the beginning did not want to write this book. i kept these my whole life. i love keeping bees.

the make a very nice site thing. come homer job and and take care of bees in a quiet, tranquil, relaxing situation. the encyclopaedia britannica says there are more books written about bees than any other species other than humans. people have been writing about bees for a long time. i love bees, don't get me wrong. i love the sound of the swarm. i love the smell of the hive when it is opened on a warm day. i love the perverse pleasure, after you have been stung enough the vitamin doesn't affect you -- the venom doesn't affect you. i also felt that my inches of

other things, were more important than the quotidian beekeeping stuff that was going on. as i talked to histories of chemical warfare, the politics andilitary drones, ap elements of the story kept distracting me. , b andabout liberalism bees became part of those stories. everyone has something to say about the. there,what is going on it stuck with me and resonated with me. bees have a strong history of being used to delineate and define the very definition of what it means to be human. but then something happened that pushed me even harder.

my be started dying. honestly, i tried everything. oil, andeppermint might be cap dying away never done. it was kind of a rare occasion while. now if you are a beekeeper, you lose these all the time and that is a part of what we do, you get used to losing hives. at first i was really desperate about that loss. you have 15-20 hives and they start dying and you start panicking, you say what am i going to do? i'll try these organic methods. that didn't work. i'm desperate, i will try it. none of that worked in the end. i said ok, what is going on here? i use my access to research journals that i get free and

started looking at these journals and trying to figure out what they were saying. i became dissatisfied with the way they were talking about. to doing thisturn , in on bees on my own terms the terms that i approach the questions. i want to do and epidemiology of honey bee. i took seriously the knowledge and production theory about it. i wanted political theory. ways ofop different thinking. something in the abstract, it's something i care about and something that may be pushing me in many ways to do it. as i said before, i don't mean this in an abstract symbolic way . i want to think about the history of those.

i became more attuned to the other side of it. it's about what humans are doing to bees. human nature is partly major history of understanding bees. ecology of the empire. where i will go into little more detail on how i was talking about the project. both the ways in which bees have again, i'mormed, and -- talking about

how we bred them and how the material is coming to be out. but other central way is the militarization of the be. there is nothing new about animals being used in warfare. or sis, dogs, chicken, to name a few. -- horses, dogs, and chicken, to name a few. they have used flesh -- beatles to eat the flesh of prisoners. hundreds of millions of insects were cultivated in tens of billions of beatles and mosquitoes were cultivated and .eployed one general released hundreds of millions of insects in china and world war ii that cause the

death of tens of thousands of people. are played ine infested beesague . there are torture techniques in saw cropthe cold war eating beetles dropped in the country and most recently insects have been used in guantánamo as part of tortured there. people are afraid and they have brought people in and put them in confined spaces with these and spiders. bees have been used in warfare -- think about an army if you have someone entrenched in a cave or for anyone to get them out, throwing hives into the fort. if you have armor, the bees can go through that and around it. it is now believed by many historianst apiary

cause the radical drop in bees in the 16th century. you can see the catapult that would launch on in me fortresses. the adam knowledge he became deeply intertwined around this time. my interest lies not in that long history today of apiary history,or even modern how science made the better be. ,he ways during world war ii the tongue of the be right here, how they bred the the that we to this size tongue so it would produce more honey and wax. military shell casings were coated with wax so water would

not damage them. enabling the busy little insects to do jobs for war. interesting lines in this particular modern form of the honey bee. ofre has been a long history four. -- longa different war history of war. it was not easily defined for quite a different type of warfare. in 2002-23, famously in the speech, it was said this is more

than any war on intelligence. part of the war was part of the outon terror is, to find about things we cannot see. as rumsfeld said, the war on technology requires a new technology on warfare and new intelligence, being amped up figure out what is going on. all of a sudden in a war that is andlearly undefined ambiguous, getting to know and understand objects within that context is very difficult. question of the

suspicious looking individual, all raises questions about an individual's and 10. the efforts in this war, trying to understand the world around us. the bee has been brought into that form of for fair. the technology for this develop where hand in los alamos i worked in new mexico on it earlier project. dealing with the history of the they want to find out where the pollution was. they kept finding it in beehives. so they said we will use that as some kind of indicator. they started taking bees and change the problem of

contaminating honey to having bees the extension of human sensing over the landscape. deployed 60,000 bees hive. they will fly anywhere within a two-mile radius. a will collect the honey from every water source, every pollen source in that area, and they will bring it back and put it in the hive. you can place an bee -- place to be have an area and then monitor it. 400 beehives were deployed around the world in 2005 for surveillance, to find out what kind of chemical weapons were being used and try to develop a blunt weapon and

different areas. as one officer homeland security the one bees -- to see pollen sticking as a positive charge. you go back to the hive and the honey and pollen and nectar will become part of it. that was the first stage. there aretle later, other resources such as the ability to smell. the defense and research project agency is one of those think tanks for the military. realized they were trying to develop a mechanical means to smell for landmines.

they tried to develop other means. at the same time, in tomorrow just realized how effective bees are if they have an ability to smell that, so much more than that of dogs. the experiments were done at los alamos and devoid around the world. you basically make an the chemicaletween and the bees. then you can trace that by tracing these flight patterns. you can actually see these moments here. you have a be generated map of the minefield.

you can map the minefield of a particular area. here's the early experiment done on port. you put some cap chemical in here. tagged things are the bees. at laces thatoyed due to take chemical weapons. people govern straight up for three reasons. you cannot work at night. they did not fly under certain degrees. the spearmint's are frustrated with the way that bees would get distracted by other things. how do we control them a little better so they can do more with

the research that we had. so that started to isolate bees as individuals. and byartment of defense .arbara -- darpa are trainedm cells with a chemical mixed with sugar water. every time you smell it and aart salivating, -- that is better picture there of that. they were put in cartridges. the cartridges a put into different boxes. graftxes then measure and

the extension of the tong. you can train these for multiple chemicals. you would have all kinds of , it will imitate what chemicals are present. there have been more radical .nterventions i'm doubtful of the success of them. what that basically started to do is actually -- berkeley has done this with all kinds of insects right now. they grow these in the larval a answer grows in the right way au can control the bees,

massive amount of money has gone into that element of the research. trained fromg eating nothing but the chemical resources. , don't want to over emphasize and that is what drew me to this in the first place. on beeney is being spent research for military purposes than agriculture at this point. but not from small elements of it. there has been a whole new set of be breeding in the military. this is a picture of the , training of virginia

researchers to do this sort of research at the end at the university of virginia. one element is simply the materials in the history of the making of the be. there is another element to the story out wanted to tell. bee is the story of how the has built into the making of the human and the military strategies in particular. i want to give you two quick examples of that. one is the history of forming itself. 1989-2003, the central military strategy of battlefield tactics was air land battle. basically it was what we saw, a air invasion, a lot of

invasion backed up by land invasion. a massive military show strength. that philosophy was redone because of the nature of the current military threat that was challenge during the war on terror. a whole set of people started defining new military strategy. it will be fully operationalized by 25th teen. centralized strategy of u.s. military operation. andidea is to decentralize the soldier has a great deal of autonomy. that make decisions of their own. there is a decentered set of -- i just lost my place. operation,ized force continuous and

synchronized real-time communication. so swarming become one of the architects of that is one of the architects of this report says the u.s. command and in the animalears kingdom large before -- long before does in human affairs. are of the behaviors readily applicable to military tactics strategies. off actually draw entomology. you will find famous into my largest, it becomes the means of understanding and designing swarm tactics for military strategies as well. you have a whole set of network communications that come from these entomology things. this is not symbolic.

actually a set of detailed studies of material behavior of bees and other insects and they are using those to become the basis for a new set of military tactics. militarized -- military humans become apiary in a second, swarm applications for military tactics. is broken into separate units, very different than the earlier moments of military warfare. a second example is the use of these in drones. there are couple of different elements at play here. isst of all, the drone -- it hard to coordinate drone use. if you use a drone, it had to come away from the incident.

leaveone would have to and a new one would have to come in. it is hard having two different pilots next to each other and so far away and being able to fly well together. but they realize they could do and what they started mapping, algorithmsthematical ,erived from insect behavior programming it into the drones, they started programming in 2012 and we had our first multiple drone strike controlled by six usingent operators, but digital pheromones from electronic sources in satellites , to coordinate the different drones together.

they become locked into one autonomous element and they can actually increase lethal force of the drones considerably. this element of the collective swarming of drones who become one of the central new tactics in drones. it is, do have one soldier in one place controlling multiple like could never have happened before. is not derived from a symbolic element of these but derived in the ways in which the zen ants behavior work -- in which bees and and behavior works. , a couple of different elements. i want to bring the relationship of animals, economic and military interview is a critical

site to think about how the the is being remade symbolically and materially. at the current moment we are facing the most serious crisis , and a closebee accounting of the many places and forms relationships are being made at this moment are central. politicalntive to the andomy, the chemistry molecular biology on the genetic engineering and genetic laboratories. all these elements need to be heart of understanding contemporary be. something that has been produced of this long, historic old relationship. critical national history is not about preserving and

protecting the or developing a proper style for these. it is about rethinking the , the order that we used to understand contemporary bees, and the means of creating new possibilities for being in relationships with these. i believe it will open up more possibilities because those interested in the health of the bees would have to come to terms colonialism, race and industrial relations, at the heart of understanding apiary history. there is the possibility of fostering beingw ways of imagining with bees.

it is about proliferating new, less precarious biology's in the future. thank you very much. [applause] is holdi'm trying to do these histories, different analytics to think about bees and the way they are being constituted through time, and thinking about that to understand not just the history of the bees but the crisis it self. i want to know what is causing the death of these bees. i don't think it is related to one particular chemical or viral parasite.

we can see the be differently and understand how the relationship we have with the bees is going to be and the material be it self, how it has been made in the way that it has. that is kind of the gist of it. >> i will open it up for everybody's questions and comments. >> it is really hot up here. >> maybe we can open the back your again. militaryfrom the applications, can you talk about the natural history of the bees and how colonialism was involved, and while we got in this carry a state and what you think we could do about it. >> that is a bunch of questions there. the colonial histories had everything to do with the construction of the hive.

90% -- the model of the hive is made from the same architecture itself. it's part of a certain political thatt of architecture became the conditions of factory work and also the condition of the bees. colonial all kinds of relationships that became interested through the race of the bees. honeybees were not part of the united states. it was part of the european settlement particularly in the east going west. that was a very black, small be. that be almost entirely disappeared.

about sub species or races of these. the different definitions of race amount of the theyorizations of race came out a century before. those became part of the defining of bees and part of the selection we had. now the bright yellow be became the most popular one. that's one example. and then what we can do about it , this is a tough one. in explaining what i'm talking about is explaining how we think. so much of those relationships are over determined at the starting point. what we are told now is to plant them a garden or plant them flowers.

none of that will do any difference for the bees. it is amazing how many flowers it takes for the hive colony per to produce a honey that it does in order to survive. it's such a large quantity, the question -- had we come to terms that bees are dying rather than actually making a radical change? easeu want to deal with and you have to take on the difficult questions of race relations and political economy. ask, is not a chemical or medicine, it's about reworking industrial agriculture.

stories are often told in two separate domains. you have to deal with empires to deal with the collapse. >> so i am wondering, are there while bees that have been unadulterated by , and do youation think it's desirable if there are such bees to try to nurture enhance -- i think you get the gist of my question. someone may know better than i

do but there are 25,000 native bees in the world. the honey bee is one of those species but there are very few that actually hive and few that are mobile. the honey it is really hard to have that many bees brought into the field , it is impossible with native bees will stop native bees have been shown to be efficient, but on the scale that we have, there is no way we could actually have the cross we have. there are two different answers. going back to native bees where possible is a great idea, cultivating small farms and having other lands, but right now in the central valley, there are two things in the field -- is a plant then there is dirt. there's nothing in between.

these will starve if they stay there. there's a tremendous amount of bloom and then after that, there's nothing for them to eat. there's no way they can be anything but mobile. but thed return them, answer is less a return then to find the native the and real the or going backwards. developing different relationships with the bees and taking that seriously, and enforcing those things with agriculture, it's not to abandon these bees because they are not native or have an industrialized or whatever and find the native, natural bees will stop it is what kind of future relations do we want to have with those bees and making them in ways that are not related to industrial agriculture or militarized in the same way question mark is in is producingt different types of these or imagine different ways of being with the these, not return to

previous these. does that make sense? >> just to follow that real quick and i will come to you guys. the urban bee is quite healthy and there are tons of these in every city and i see wendy in my neck of the woods in the mission district. is that heart of the vision you are describing? reminding us all that at the end of world war ii come a 45% of the fresh roadies was grown inside of the city because of the victory gardens will stop >> you mean the bees that are wild bees? there are two elements to that. the 1970's or 1980's, there's a big feral population. havethe rise of one might imagined you wake up all feral bees. some people argue all bees that survive more than one or two

generations have to be managed by humans. so the relationship is much more it became really tight at that point. if they go and make a hive in the way we imagine in our heads and come in and out of nature in the woods, they are not going to survive very long will stop there are a few exceptions like one researcher in washington says he may have found one, but it is very rare. the wild be doesn't exist anymore than the wild cattle does in this country. it is more of a fiction. keepersent of the heaping bees in the city as a solution, i think it's great to keep these. i think we should do that. it raises our attentiveness to bees, but i don't think it's going to save the bees anymore. bees, all of the

kind of these you get in those i'm going ton say do my own beekeeping here and get a clean somewhere else, that queen is a part of it. part of the voter ability is that the bees will be susceptible to that of the chemicals will be susceptible to that. there is no easy way out. i think you might care about these more because you keep them, but small urban beekeepers are not going to transform in of theect way the scale contemporary collapse of the >> you wereop saying that [inaudible] >> the rate of the collapse is much higher.

the rate of death of these right now is much higher than it has ever been. colony collapse disorder was a particular way of dying, which is something that has happened in different places in the past but has come back. it is a definable thing and still exists. but saying there are these off andthat he's fly leave the hive early on, that does -- that they particular way of dying called colony collapse disorder. is causing not what the 30% of the deaths. there are all kinds of ways bees are dying in the current moment. colony collapse disorder is a small part of it. even if you don't with that and had a certain idea about a virus and pesticide combination, it won't deal with a larger voter ability which is causing bees to die in multiple different ways.

itis not -- i'm not saying doesn't exist. i'm not saying there are not a lot of deaths of these will stop i'm saying taking it on in that particular way as a specific is these we need to address and the way we have in doing it is not going to get us out of the high mortality rate. observations. maybe one more optimistic one. i take my classes tracking wild i have been able to monitor that over the year through these last projects. the good news is in the last four years, the hives have been able and the wild trees -- last friday, we saw they art doubling. finde two more hives to the woods, so it is encouraging there is that behavior and

remarkable capacity for this animal to adapt to changing circumstances. so just a touch of optimism. i think you have been thoughtful and thorough but i thought you left an 1850's misconception to the audience in the use of the hive as a moment of industrialization. add thatust like to evolved out of humanity towards these, so the notion of the the space and not killing bees prior to 1850 when bees were salford every year. that was an effort to be a humanistic relationship to the bees and i thought a very pivotal woman in our history offer a are trying to more symbiotic relationship. i think that is the history that is often told, and it goes buthe history of the hive,

the history is not through the skip. it's through the observation hive and it is much more through 1850, which you give a much greater control of the hive and it becomes the model for it. not the first humanity hive that came out of the world there which was celebrated as a humanitarian way. that was tied to the notion of civil people do it this way and backwards people use skip hives. that history is one that is deeply infected with a class element of that moment and a lot of people didn't keep the queen. the monastery records at the time, they kept their hives over and over again. i think that's an erroneous

jump from the skip hives when actually the history of it being built into the hives goes to the observation hive which is about that controlling factor. conversationhe between beekeepers developing those hives and then the people that lang strop developed with his hives. notion of thee humanitarian movement that goes on because the politics are there, racial and colonial politics in england at the time and because there's a history of not doing that. history.e i think it's an important moment but there's a different writing of it than that way we normally tell the story. fundamentally agree with the connective links you have made in the eager conversation, but post 1850, as

the hive became standardized and became the most familiar hive in america and he's considered the father of american beekeeping, then the industrialization of the keeping and a mass scale of the easily removable frame hive that allows a lot of people to keep bees changed from a cottage industry to a long-term industrialized economy. i agree with the evolution after 1850 but i don't agree with before and within the british situation where the step hive was the common hive of ordinary people, wealthy and ordinary landowners. , there werely movements in the 1840's to bring up the rights of the cottage or being a generic term for anybody being on a small has a like scale to more productive scale

trying to improve their lives through agriculture and books were written specifically for that group of people to socially enlarge their lives through more intelligent and management of agriculture. that was another social liberal you are aware of. >> i'm wary of the humanitarian element of the stories. we can get into a detailed history of the hive here, but there are a lot of elements were beekeeping has been used to keep people up, whether world war i soldiers or ringing them back to health as a means of social regeneration. that's the idea of the reconstitution of the human subject through the be and that's about that making the the and making the human together which i think is part of the story. the idea there's a humanitarian that this that story,

is about a social uplifting story, i'm wary of that both in i knowes and later, but your work, so i would be interested to talk about that. >> if i hadn't done this, i was going to do a history of the hive, doing a more history version of this talk. >> we can keep going forever. >> you talk about the military strategy and i was wondering when that started in your mind ?n terms of your analysis "crimes andbook

civil disorder" written in 1995 with a two page segment about riggle mass which some of us here have been super involved with. they were remarking on the fact that this icicle phenomenon had developed a swarming tactic and they had no idea what to do because they were not prepared for something that had no head that they could chop off and make it go away and it filled the street and moved around without any obvious means of communication. something the was military needed to learn from, so i'm wondering about the there's al stop >> deeper history to this swarm which is a central part of it. how do we deal with the mob, how do we deal with the rabble question mark what do we do with that and whether it can be harnessed and what happens -- this is from world war ii and world war i, what's the potential danger of that?

that's always something that has fascinated social theorists. later, themuch 1990's and during the 60's that they realize they had to develop new tactics to deal with a decentralized element. in russian about it military manuals because they brought a series of anarchism into the story. but the modern element of the lease and the specific tactics that started in the 1990's because the military and police have become so tightly associated that they share these tactics so they are going back and forth, but it's an interesting observation because i know the modern police story of swarms and their use of swarms and i know the social and political theory, but i did know that connection. >> when somebody pointed out the

activity as a swarm -- -- something inated by heard you say about the military fooling around with the physiology of the bees to make them do what they wanted them to do. >> i thought maybe they are working on that. >> i kind of stuff over because i'm always a little wary. i can look at the money going into this program and say there's a load of money going into it, into the mechanical changing insects. effectiveness i know from knowing a lot of good entomologists and they are very doubtful. just because people throw massive amounts of military money doesn't mean it will work. it's something to be scared of and as someone who studied seen they, i've

flights of some of these insects and they control them like a drone. you can actually control the wing pattern and make them go left or right of the it is so sloppy and these are the best scientists out there. they are a long way from being able, even though they can do this electromagnetic element of , intrigued bys it, scared by it, but it feels like area 51 to me. it's that kind of thing. >> great talk. i'm interested in the potential depth of the study on the intelligence of these as a collective. how is that done? who is doing that sort of research?

what is the literature out there that says maybe there's a lot we don't know about this creature? >> in terms of collective intelligence, i have a hard time dealing with the because the object of the study is almost always the ease and that the hive will stop it interesting regulatesda and usda one and the other regulates-have different regulations because of that stop what's the unit of analysis? are pretty dumb, but collectively they can do quite a it. artificial intelligence is very excited about that, official -- especially ella terry artificial intelligence. the idea of the drone being like a bee that can make those decisions, they've programmed an algorithm into the drone and have it fully autonomous of thought that is the dream of artificial intelligence. i know there's a lot of research

that goes into that part of it and what i'm amazed by is the capacity of these often go back to breaking it into components of the bees and the abilities of the be where they don't know exactly how to deal with the collective that is both individual and a single totality at the same time. if you isolate the components, you lose the object you're trying to ask questions about. it is remarkable how people have not come to deal with each other, having very little research on the intelligence or ability of the behavior of the hive. think we think to focus on the individual. there is a whole thing in a mega hive of out any addition and they

get saved when the bees come out to the ocean. >> it's on my list. >> it's a rate novel, but that's the weird part. you talked about in the colonial days, there was a spotlight the and we now have this yellow and black the. are you saying americans hate black evil so much that we see it in everything? >> it is part of the selection process that went on in marketing bees in the 1860's. the italiane by queen, she's beautiful, she's yellow, she's fair skin and more docile. they are talking about the behaviors of the bees, but the point of it is there's always a way of an how we understand ourselves is a projection.

it's also the means by which we look back at the world we make ourselves. element is very much part of it any broad history of selection of the be that became a central be in the u.s.. nine teen 12, dean 21 -- i might get my numbers backwards -- but from 1921, there was the chinese exclusion act and we put a united aids. bees it was dropped into thousand two .ecause bees were dying they wanted to bring the population seven people found it buying ahan killed -- whole new shipment from australia by plane, it's cheaper than keeping them throughout the

year and you make more money that way. it's cheaper to fly them over than to do it that way. there's an element -- i totally just lost my train of thought. until 2002, we open the borders, but that's only 2002. the laws were the same language in the same senators were forlved in passing the laws the racial exclusion act. that became the same logic and words and language. you get into the scientific history of eugenics which was hugely important and some of the essential eugenics scientists were beekeepers. the ideas of animal husbandry became part of eugenics where beekeepers and animal husbandry people, like the person who ran

the school harbor was an expert and he uses that logic of breeding animals to breed people to make better humans and parse out and let the bad animals die. same logic in human population, that agrarian history of eugenics very tightly and the bees are very mild implicated in that history. >> a tiny correction on the renewedn act -- it was 10 years later and again was made permanent in 1902. the time you are talking about is interesting because jane is feeling was running in the u.s. senate and his campaign slogan is keep california white. you could see it in the lovely francisco."al san there was this panic about not having white bull running the farm lands in california in that exact here you are talking about.

>> who needs to get in here before we call it a night? >> i just want to mention the rand corporation study on swarming that was up there for a while will stop wheeze to run it chronically on indymedia. just as the terrorist concepts were coming in. >> it became the central means of replanting -- this idea of remaking the u.s. military based around the swarming tactic. i'm surprised how little press it got given how central it was in the remaking of the u.s. military and u.s. military tactics. they got very little press even its importance. >> i think we have had a great night. thank you.

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