Through the Wild Lens: A Multidimensional Look at Honeybees
This workshop opens a six-part sequence of live-streamed offerings. Each workshop is a standalone class and is booked individually. Through the Wild Lens: A Multidimensional Look at Honeybees introduces Apis Arborea’s evolving approach to regenerative apiculture and the wilding of honeybees as a self-willed, free-living species. Together we explore what becomes possible when we meet honeybees not primarily as livestock, but as novel wildlife embedded in living ecosystems and shaped by their own evolutionary intelligence.
Across the workshops, we return to a central question: How might our understanding of honeybees deepen if we learn from them in their natural habitats, on their own terms? The work is grounded in ecological ethics and Rights of Nature sensibilities, and it draws on biomimicry, deep ecology, and emerging ecological science.
Through the Wild Lens: A Multidimensional Look at Honeybees offers a guided entry into the world of wild honeybees, with a focus on the biological and relational foundations of nest life. Together we will explore what wild nests reveal about resilience, adaptation, and the “architecture of we” that arises through eusocial being.
Topics include:
- Life cycles in wild nest conditions and how they shape nest development, reproduction, and seasonal rhythm
- Microbiome and holobiont perspectives, expanding the frame of bee health beyond the individual organism
- Nest dynamics and the nest as “tissue”, naming the living, distributed coordination of thousands of bodies as one ecological presence
- Will, agency, and sentience, explored through ethology, observation, and the ethics of how we relate to other beings
- Mammalian qualities and their implications for stewardship, nest (hive) design, and birth rights
This live-streamed workshop is designed for interactive learning and lively conversation and welcomes participants of all experience levels. Led by Michael Thiele, it invites a grounded and practical reimagining of apiculture in relationship with natural ecosystems, centering the species and learning with wild honeybees themselves.
Recordings will be available after the workshop. Scholarships are available upon request.