Common steps and sub-activities
Listening to bees
You will laugh at me, but I don’t mind if you do, when I tell you that for a while I thought it was the frequency of the pitch of the bees hum that caused all the spiritual experiences.
So I investigated the pitch, the tone, the variations caused by weather, the variations caused by type of bee and age… and then once all this was done and I looked at sensory deprivation I realised that humming, as long as it is a constant pitch and frequency produces spiritual experiences by being similar to white noise. For those who wish to laugh at my silliness see the Frequency of a bee’s hum.
Unchanging sound is the same as no sound. So if you place yourself near a hive and listen you are sensorily depriving yourself!
There may be some contribution from Resonance, but probably not a great deal.
Any form of humming can induce a spiritual experience, so it is not exclusively bees that have this effect.
Bees can be found as important symbols of spiritual experience in numerous cultures, for the reasons why see Bees in the symbolism section.
Bees can also invoke spiritual experiences by their honey. Bees often feed on plants which contain hallucinogens and by eating their honey a person can inadvertently or deliberately have a spiritual experience, so bees have a special place in the affections of many older cultures for this reason.
If we simply use the number of examples of bee symbolism in all cultures as a guide I think we can see that there is every reason to believe the humming from a hive of bees is and has been very effective at promoting spiritual experiences.
Listening to a hive of bees – if you can find one – moreover is not going to make you vulnerable to brain washing or any interference from third parties. If you like bees and can find a hive or group of hives this technique offers few dangers from other people.
European Bees [my husband and father in law kept bees] are also not dangerous, [I cannot vouch for other bees] even when they swarm. They only sting when they are frightened or they think they need to protect the hive from danger. A honey bee dies after it stings you, unlike a wasp, so they have to be sure you are an enemy first before they attack. I was never stung by my husband’s bees despite their proximity to the house – I was buzzed during thunderstorms because bees hate thunder [a little ironic given the symbolism].
I can imagine that you may have difficulty finding a hive and beekeeper who is happy for you to just sit there and drift off to la la land, but who knows, for a small sum…..
But the real and saddest problem is that we are losing our honey bees at a very alarming rate due to our use of mobile phones and pesticides and also as a result of an increasing number of nasty parasites and breeding practises. Finding a healthy happy hive these days may be quite a challenge.
New research carried out at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has found that bees buzz differently near mobile phone signals – causing behaviour that endangers colonies.
The research has shed light on another modern threat to bee colonies, which are already being killed off at a massive rate by pesticides and parasites.
Researchers placed two mobile phones in beehives and operated them alternately in standby mode and in connection to each other.
Results showed that when the phones were on standby, the bees’ buzzing did not change, but when the phones were activated, the bees’ buzz frequency rose significantly.
"This is clear evidence that the bees are sensitive to phone signals and are disturbed by mobile phones," said research director Daniel Favre.
Favre explained that bees normally only humat a high frequency when they are about swarm. He said that mobile phones could therefore cause the bees to leave the hive prematurely, before the queen has fully matured and there are no larvae to feed.
The disappearance of bees would have a devastating effect on the environment, as many trees and plants rely on them to reproduce
The first major indication that bees were increasingly under threat came in 2006, when there was a wave of bee deaths in the US. Some beekeepers reported losing 90 percent of their populations, and the term "colony collapse disorder" was coined.
Egypt, Japan, China and several European countries have since reported large-scale loss of bee populations.
References
- Bees: Nine Lectures on the Nature of Bees by Rudolf Steiner
- The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times by Hilda M Ransome
- The Buzz about Bees: Biology of a Superorganism - Jürgen Tautz
Observations
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