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Bees – Lectures by Rudolf Steiner

Dornach November 10th 1923

This is the way things stand-I'll talk about this more next time-with the artificial breeding of bees. You can increase their production of honey, all the work they do, and even the worker bee's capability of accomplishing this work.

The only problem is, as Mr. Muller has just stated, that this whole procedure should not be carried out in a way that is too  rational and business-like. Next time we'll investigate more thoroughly the matter of breeding of bees, and we'll see that what proves to be an extraordinarily favourable measure upon which something is based today may appear to be good, but that a century from now all breeding of bees would cease if only artificially produced bees were used.

We want to be able to see how that which is so wonderfully favourable can change in such a way that it can, in time, gradually destroy whatever was positive in this procedure. And we want to see how, specifically, beekeeping can become of great interest in getting to know all of the secrets of nature, particularly how something, on the one hand, proves to be very fruitful but, on the other hand, simply leads to death and destruction.

And so it is that beekeepers can indeed be very happy with all the progress that beekeeping has recently experienced in such a short time, but this happiness will barely continue for one hundred years.