by David Papke
I will always remember the experience when, as a child who liked to draw, I was taught the concept of visual perspective - how one could place a dot anywhere on a piece of paper and that dot becomes the vanishing point where, if extended, all parallel lines meet and disappear -
(for a while I drew a lot of train tracks and straight roads). I then learned that a line drawn straight across a piece of paper could represent the horizon where the earth and sky meet and then how closer objects are drawn larger and distant objects smaller. In retrospect, understanding perspective was transformative in my drawings, but what I remember most vividly about the experience was the feeling of empowerment it gave me - the sudden ability to create a three-dimensional illusion of depth and space on a two-dimensional flat surface.
Perspective determines everything. Really. Not just in the visual arts. Our conscious mind, though similar to others, is itself unique. Awakened in infancy, our comprehension of the world evolves over time, incrementally as we experience life - physically, mentally, socially, culturally. It is shaped by observing and modeling our parents, family, and friends; it is shaped by our environment and our own natural tendencies and inclinations. Gradually, we develop a personal point-of-view, a perspective - fixed, yet also adaptable, subject to change. It becomes so intrinsic to our lived experience that we rarely think about it or contemplate how our perspectives determine what we think, do and feel - or for that matter, how our perspectives inform and guide us as beekeepers.
To begin with, we must consider the origins of our beekeeping experience - why we became beekeepers in the first place? What brought us to this somewhat odd and thoroughly unique activity? What were we thinking? Considering the number of “how I got started” stories I have heard, most of us had no idea what we were getting into, but I’ll bet that everyone who manages to stick with it are glad they did. We start with only vague notions and a nebulous desire - that is, until we first experience opening a hive and observing the wonders within, until we begin to learn the complex biology and life-cycle of the colony, until we interact with other beekeepers. From this initial exposure we begin to construct our own personal beekeeping perspective which will shape us and our beekeeping experience into the future.
Understanding new experiences and complex processes like this can be overwhelming and in an attempt to make sense of it all we often rely on a cognitive bias to help us simplify and make familiar what needs to be understood. That is not an uncommon mental shortcut, but it has consequences. For example, a ‘confirmation bias’ is the tendency to seek, interpret, or favor information that confirms one’s pre-existing ideas or beliefs. When we inspect a colony to determine a particular status, we look for evidence that tends to support what we are trying to verify, while at the same time over-looking information that might make us think otherwise. One must be aware that our perspective can influence not only what is seen but also what is missed.
Fortunately, our perspectives are adaptable under the same circumstances that created them. As our knowledge and experience accumulates and evolves over time so do our perspectives. I know this to be true for myself - I have practiced keeping honey bee colonies now for over 50 years, I have known and learned from many beekeepers over that time, I have read about and studied beekeeping all along, I have taught aspects of beekeeping here and abroad, I have been commonly known as ‘the beekeeper’ for a long time - and my beekeeping perspective is still evolving. That may be the best part of it all - that what I experience and learn from honey bees, what I feel and believe in their presence, never ceases.
Observation tells us what is before us; perspective gives meaning to what is there.