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The Queen is Dead: Long live the Queen

The Queen is Dead: Long live the Queen

Author: By Jo Rushby
Date: 2025-03-11

'You hold it like a lit bulb, a pound of light, and swivel the stunned glow around the fat, glass sides: it's the sun, all flesh and no bones but for the floating knuckle of honeycomb attesting to the nature of struggle.' (Jacob Polley)

Thick forest embraces the gorge, hot, humid and damp. We are hiking in the Annapurna region of Nepal. At the lake, we spot them. Ropes coiled around their bodies, they move quietly and stealthily up the pathway. Their aim, high up in the cliffs. Honey so potent, it is said to be hallucinatory.

The party of four are reluctant to share information about the source. They spurn our offers of modern carabiners and harnesses, wary of so-called modernity, sure of their own ways. Bamboo handmade ladders are swung over the rock face, baskets placed carefully on the ground far below.

Sweet holes in the cliff proffering bounty, as bees swarm. Smoking them out of their hives, the honey gatherers drop huge silky slabs of honeycomb into the baskets. This is precarious work, and the honey harvesting Gurung community regularly pray to the animals and forest gods to protect the bees and the climbers!

The honey is not sold, rather bartered for tobacco or alcohol, sweeter addictions for some. It is a wonder to see this interaction, high up in the mountains, 'floating like butterflies and stinging like bees' as the altitude snatches one's breath and makes one higher still.

But are we the last to see this amazing phenomenon? As demand grows, harvesting increases. Honey must be packaged and spun across the oceans.

The barter system is under threat. Big companies hover around the hive. The bees cannot keep up with the work hours. So much is at stake. Bees pollinate life around them. With their demise, the landscape will atrophy and become a giant crematorium.

In the beautifully written "The History of Bees', the year is 2098 and people have to hand pollinate the trees. All the bees died in The Collapse of 2037.

It is an irony of history that countries like Nepal are seen as backward, needing to be modernized. But, right now, the calendar year in Nepal is 2081, and in many ways, given the interaction between people and nature, their beliefs, they are not behind, but half a decade ahead of US. As the honeycombs dry up, bees worn out on a perpetual treadmill, the world is ruled by a Queen with orange hair.

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