The Most Important Animal in the World

The relationship between humans and bees has been reflected in European art since ancient times: in legends, in the form of jewelry, paintings, and sculptures, artists pay homage to these tiny creatures that weigh less than a gram and, as a swarm, are so intelligent that they amaze us.

Bees are kept at many Waldorf schools. Even today, children and young people there can marvel at the constant landing of the small, buzzing insects, whose yellow pollen legs fly back to the hive from collecting nectar. They also see how bees hide under leaves when it rains. They fly in a prancing manner to show their colleagues the way to blooming trees.

Buzzing school beekeeping

Dominik Moritz is 30 years old and has been a teacher at the Rudolf Steiner School in Hagen for two and a half years. When he mentioned in his interview that he was not only a Waldorf teacher, special needs teacher, and specialist teacher for crafts and fine arts, but also a beekeeper, the staff committee was thrilled. The school apiary had been abandoned after the school's apiary was destroyed by vandals a few years ago. Moritz got the job, is currently a fourth-grade teacher, and is rebuilding the school beekeeping. Currently, around 15,000 bees buzz and hum in each of the three hives. The long-term goal is to establish a beekeeping club, where students in grades six and seven will be introduced to all aspects of beekeeping – including the gentle, quiet work on the honeycombs after smoking, once the bees are anesthetized.

At the Hagen school, the faculty is working with the book Bienen in der Waldorfpädagogik (Bees in Waldorf Education), edited by Alexander Hassenstein. It contains over 200 pages of tips on how to pass on knowledge about bees in various subjects from year one to twelve. In the lower grades, students can extract honey, hear the legend of Saint Ambrose, and observe bees. In middle school, they can explore the geometry of honeycombs in mathematics. «In fourth grade, our focus is on how we can protect wild bees – we build insect hotels and care for flowering plants in our school garden», says Moritz. In the upper grades, physics offers an opportunity to study the so-called catenary curve. The lower edge of a naturally constructed honeycomb corresponds to the catenary curve. Engineers use this in bridge construction. In biology classes, the social intelligence of insect colonies can be explored.

Learning with and from bees

In Hagen, the beekeeping block takes place in third grade. Students remove the empty honeycombs from the hive, open the wax caps, and extract the honey. At this age, it's important for children to lose their fear of bees and engage in hands-on activities, Moritz believes. A highlight of the class for him is when children first dare to carefully hold a drone, the male worker bee, in their hand.

«My class cleaned the hives with me a while ago. Unfortunately, an entire colony had died, and we buried the dead bees together. Some students wanted to dig a separate grave for each individual bee, but we decided against it, because even in winter, bee colonies still consist of around 15,000 bees. But we made it a very dignified and honorable ceremony, something the students will certainly never forget», says Moritz. In addition to working on the hive, bee education also includes working in the surrounding area: planting meadows with blooming flowers, locating nests of bee predators such as wasps, and relocating them if necessary.

At the Wiesbaden Museum, former Waldorf student and current museum’s director Dr. Andreas Henning curated the exhibition Honiggelb – Die Biene in der Kunst (Honey yellow – The bee in Art). Around 140 exhibits from seven centuries explore the relationship between humans and bees in art. In antiquity and the early modern period, the bee was associated with attributes such as diligence, community spirit, peacefulness, chastity, wisdom, and defensiveness. Honey was considered the food of the gods: Jupiter's childhood diet of honey and milk is one of the central myths.

At the summer festival at the Hagen school, students can build bee watering troughs. They paint clay flowerpot saucers with patterns in colors that bees can see – blue and green, because bees can't perceive red and yellow, even though they have five eyes: two compound eyes and three dot eyes. «If the children then put a bit of moss in the trough, the bees can land on these little islands and drink», explains Moritz.

Natural beekeeping

Even as a child, Dominik Moritz was an insect rescuer: if he saw a bee or bumblebee sitting on the ground, he would carefully pick it up and place it back on a bush. When he was studying education in Witten-Annen, he was given the task of setting up a wild bee colony with students for his final teaching test. «That was something very special for me, because it combined my passion for insects and being a teacher.» This moment sparked his interest in beekeeping and Moritz completed a traditional beekeeper training course in Bochum. «But somehow I didn't like a lot of things, because some of the things we learned there weren't natural. For example, that we were supposed to separate the queen bee from her colony with a steel grid», says Moritz.

Then he became aware of Mellifera – an association that has been committed to natural beekeeping for decades. Mellifera advocates the view that the entire bee colony, including its combs, is an organism and respects the bee as a whole in the tradition of Rudolf Steiner. For beekeepers, this means preserving the integrity of the brood nest, ensuring that bees build natural combs, and that reproduction should occur through swarming rather than artificially through the purchase of bred queens and worker colonies. «Getting to know Mellifera was very liberating for me», says Moritz. Since then, he has only kept bees in single-room hives, which means the entire colony is housed in a single, uninterrupted space, and the bees build their own combs. Moritz has two colonies at home, and there are currently three colonies at school. «When people ask me how much work beekeeping is, I always realize that being in contact with bees is a great joy and relaxation for me – I don't need a wellness weekend to recover, I just have my bees», Moritz smiles.

Henning, curator of the exhibition Honiggelb in Wiesbaden, states: «Over the course of cultural history, the bee has not been assigned a clear essential character, but rather combines plural attributions. This distinguishes it from animals characterized by a single trait, such as the pious lamb or the cunning fox. The symbols of the bee are much more ambiguous and even contradictory. It is interpreted as industrious, useful, clean, chaste, pious, virtuous, wise, obedient, and oriented towards the common good, but at the same time as defensive and aggressive. It produces sweet honey, but causes considerable pain with its sting. It lives a life of division of labor and is thus ruled by a queen at the head of the state.» Every era has created its own symbols – the allegory of peace as well as that of aggression. For example, one work of art in the exhibition shows how, in a siege, the attacked throw beehives at the attackers. Napoleon Bonaparte chose the bee as his imperial symbol, replacing the Bourbon fleur-de-lis. At Napoleon's coronation ceremony, coats, trains, carpets, and curtains were embroidered with golden bees, which were intended to symbolize diligence, order, and immortality for Napoleon.

In the 21st century, the bee is a symbol of sympathy and represents species and nature conservation. Beekeeper and class teacher Moritz also hopes that working with bees will lead to an attitude among students that respects nature and protects creation: «It's important to me that the children learn how important bees and other insects are for feeding humanity. Without them, our world would be different! Fruit, vegetable, and oil plants in particular depend on pollination by bees – without bees, we wouldn't have enough food, which is why, for me, the bee is the most important animal in the world», says Moritz.