Conway Hall was a quaint looking building that nestled between a sleek modern office block, a low rise block of flats that was built in the sixties, and a Victorian mansion. The neatly tended Red Lion Square gardens sat opposite and contained a coffee shop, London Plane trees and an abundance of benches for visitors and office workers to sit and eat their lunchtime sandwiches.
The Ethical Society was running a talk that had a dramatic title: ‘the decline of the honey bee and the end of human kind?’ I soon found the seminar room, but not before trying to gate crash a ticketed secular sermon by an organisation called the ‘School of Life’. I later discovered that the sermon was entitled ‘On inspiring brilliance’ and was to be given by a conductor and was going to be was all about leadership. I peered past the ticket bouncers, and caught a glimpse of the room where the sermon would be given; it had the appearance of a grand church hall.
After helping myself to a free cup of tea, I found a seat in our seminar room and started chatting to Andy. Andy was a member of the Meetup group and also told me that he recently had joined the Ethical Society. He was a student: ‘I studied business and IT, but I want to move into acting; I think that is more where my skills are’. Like me, Andy didn’t have anything other than a mild curiosity about bees.
Our speaker, Luke, was a bearded man in his early fifties. He started his talk by giving us an apocryphal quote that is often attributed to Einstein, that ‘if the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live’. Luke then reeled off a list of food products that are dependent upon honey bee pollination. His point was simple: bees are important.
Luke assaulted us with bee facts: there are thirty thousand different species and they have been around for about thirty million years. Hives are put on the back of trucks in North America and are driven around to chase the different seasons of different crops. We were treated to photographs of different hives: African hives, North American hives, hives in clay pots which were smashed to get at the honey, and hives in the form of wicker baskets.
He told us about bee behaviour. Bees are clean: if a bee dies, worker bees immediately drag its corpse out of the hive. When bees swarm, scout bees look for a new home and then report back to their colony. Queens can lay anything between two and three thousand eggs a day, and they are all looked after by other bees, who spend their first two to three weeks in the hive. It can also be a tough existence: queen bees fight to the death; they’re the only kind of bee that can sting and sting again. Male bees have a rougher time. They either die straight after having sex, or they’re kicked out of the hive at the end of the season, left to die cold and hungry.
Luke was an urban beekeeper. As he talked, he shared pictures of his various colonies. There was a hive on the top of Conway Hall, on the top of the London School of Fashion, and even in the gardens of Kensington Palace. During a long question and answer session, he addressed the subject of bee diseases, which led onto a discussion about pesticides, and what the ‘man in the street’ might do to help. Interestingly, but perhaps unexpectedly, different bee keepers have different opinions: some call for the banning of pesticides such as neonicotinoids, whereas others believe that a ban would cause older and arguably more toxic pesticides to continue to be used. Another interesting point was that city bees seem to cope remarkably well with city pollution, which apparently has little impact on the purity of the honey they produce.
It turned out that our speaker wasn’t predicting the death of the bee, or the collapse of human kind. Rather than a story of death and catastrophe, it was a talk that was filled with anecdotes and pointers towards on-going bee-related debates. It was a talk that refuted scaremongering media stories.
At the end of the talk the meeting chair, who was called Tim, told us that the next lecture would have the title: ‘cults and brainwashing: the hidden and not so hidden epidemic’.
After an extended question and answer session, where our speaker was asked about his favourite type of honey, whether a swarm had a monetary value, and what type of bee there was on the roof of the hall (apparently they were ‘ethical bees’), I had a brief chat with Tim about the society.
Tim told me that the society used to be known as the South Place Ethical society, and had been in existence, in one form or another since the 1790s. The registration form I picked up in the reception hall later told me that it was an educational charity that organises courses and lectures relating to ‘the dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism; and the cultivation of a rational and humane way of life’. Tim told me that it was the last remaining ethical society still existing in Britain. I later read that elements of wider aspects of its movement had been absorbed into the British Humanist Association.
I stepped into the street. It was raining heavily. My phone told me that it would clear up in an hour’s time, so I went back into Conway Hall to find Tim. Apparently, there were a bunch of ethical people who were heading off to the pub.
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