05/19/2026
Nathan TeBokkel’s Woodman Lecture, ‘What is it Like to be a Bee?’ Phenomenology and Romantic Forms of Estrangement, is this Thursday, May 21, at 4PM! Register link in bio. We’re sharing more of his work with bees, which informs this presentation on the abiding questions of the humanities.
First image is Nathan moving a swarm to a new home.
Nathan writes: The short video with the yellow flower is me high-fiving a bumblebee. Bumblebees often sleep on or inside flowers. At dusk, you can find the bees sleepier and more stationary, so they’re less likely to fly away when you approach. If you move slowly, they’ll lift one or two legs. The scientific literature calls this a “disturbance leg-lift response” and interprets it as a defensive warning behaviour triggered by a presumably threatening stimulus, yet also finds that bumblebees, famously gentle, are less than 1% likely to sting after this gesture. Since more strongly sting-associated warnings include abdomen-curving and pelting (at least in honey bees), and since honey bees may raise their legs in a similar fashion during grooming invitations, I wonder if this gesture isn’t something more ambiguous like surprise, something nicer like a potential welcome, or a movement that precedes stress and defensiveness, surprise, or welcome alike.
Third is a sweat bee, a native, metallic green species that is either solitary or lives in only small colonies. She had landed on me while I was beekeeping and stayed on my arm as I drove to another apiary—she was resting and feeding, because sweat bees eat the salt in human sweat.
Pride month: these are honey supers, smaller 8-frame boxes I put on top of a queen excluder, which is on top of the rest of the hive, once the colony is full and has stored enough honey for the winter. This way, the queen won’t go into these boxes, which means no eggs and no baby food (pollen), so the bees will only fill them with honey, which we can safely harvest.
This is my mentor John Hiemstra, who is very patient and very knowledgeable. He is 80 and has been beekeeping since he was born, when his dad, a beekeeper in the Netherlands, used skeps and a horse-drawn wagon.
