Buzzing Towards Sustainability: Lessons from Honeybees and Locusts

Michael Herst
00:00:00

Hey, one more thing before you go. Have you ever wondered what we can learn about sustainability from the insect world?

Or how two vastly different insect communities can teach us about managing stress, making decisions, and maintaining balance? In this day and age, we need a lot of that.

In this episode, a sustainability expert and I explore how honeybees and desert locust communities manage stress, allocate work, make decision, keep, communicate, and maintain balance. And we're going to discover how the lessons from these honeybees and desert locusts can guide us towards a more sustainable future.

I'm your host, Michael Herst. Welcome to One More Thing before you go. My guest is David Auge. He's an author and a sustainability expert. Expert.

He has dedicated decades to uncovering the most effective way to communicate the concept of sustainability, something we need in this day and age.

With a wealth of experience spanning three decades in industry, David Auge has risen as the permanent figure in the field of environmental management and is on a mission to transform humanity's approach to sustainability issues.

As a certified Sustainable development professional, energy manager and a hazardous material manager, he speaks at businesses and environmental conferences and has invested numerous hours of practice and research into the best way to communicate that sustainability in man's search for sustainability. His book David explores how these insect communities manage stress, allocate work, make decisions, communicate and maintain balance.

Honeybees exemplify order, discipline and debate and group effort, while desert locusts thrive on growth, opportunity, and chaos and individual effort. We're going to examine these extremes.

David challenged us to rethink our approaches to sustainability and inspires us to find new ways to balance our future decisions. Welcome to the show, David.

David Auge
00:02:10

Well, thank you very much, Michael. I appreciate your having me here.

Michael Herst
00:02:14

You know, it is what an opportunity we have to inspire, motivate, and educate some people in regard to sustainability and how we can communicate that through Mother Nature. Technically.

David Auge
00:02:30

Yeah, it opens up the door to seeing this thing from a more holistic perspective as opposed to just a quick how do we fix our energy needs or our water needs or our concern of the environment and the air?

Michael Herst
00:02:45

Yeah, it is. I think that. And especially as we progress through in how the climate's changing, the world is changing.

You know, so many things are being affected by environmental issues across the world, not just here in the United States. I think it's important for us to understand that there are solutions like this that actually we have to pay attention to because.

And we'll talk about this here in a little bit. But, you know, I know that the honeybee community is, is. Is not thriving as it used to be in.

There are some issues within that, but again, we'll talk about that a little bit. I like to start at the beginning. May ask a little bit, where'd you grow up?

David Auge
00:03:28

Well, I grew up in Denver, Colorado. I had a chance to. Through the years, I did grow up, spent a lot of time in the mountains and enjoyed the environment there in Colorado.

I was desirous to find myself from. From Colorado into perhaps the Air Force Academy, but I did get accepted to the military academy at West Point.

So from my time in Colorado, I found myself going to school in New York, and then I spent a number of years in the military, and that provided me with the opportunity to see South America, Central America, Europe, and get a chance to really experience from that the world that we live in and the opportunities that are provided to us.

Michael Herst
00:04:17

Well, we're homeboys because I grew up in Colorado. That's my home, my wife's home, my kids home. Obviously they've traveled a little away from there, but, boy, I miss Colorado.

The mountains and the streams and the. The tree. Real. No offense to Mother Nature or anybody here in Arizona, but real trees, I have to say, real trees.

But yeah, thank you for your service and thank you for what you contribute to that community as well. I'm a veteran myself, and my brother is. And my stepfather was, and my uncles were, and so thank you for that contribution. I.

I think that with your background and what you had learned, I think you have an engineering degree from West Point as well. I think that. Did that help you have a better understanding of sustainability and how you approach this?

What got you interested in sustainability in the aspect of honeybees and locusts? Because they seem to me they are two separate type of insect, aren't they?

David Auge
00:05:26

They definitely are. There's a.

There's a contrast that they put on the table that is really to the extremes of the way most people believe we have to approach the situation that we're currently in.

A very centralized and organized effort, like the honeybee provides us, or the more chaotic approach, but the very successful approach that the desert locust approaches. Yet now, the two contrasts, though, on the spectrum of things, usually make one the answer and the other one the problem.

The answer being, why can't we be more like a honeybee and have our community more like what we have in the hive and make sure that what we see in the desert locust, this desire to just consume everything in sight and just only continue until everything's gone as the bad guy. But there's something to be learned from both of those.

And it's the contrast of learning from both of those that I hope to bring to this conversation about sustainability.

Michael Herst
00:06:28

Well, can you help us understand. I know there's differences, as you mentioned. You know, we look in, you know, as far back as.

Even from a religious perspective, they talk about one of the great travesties in. During our time period in humankind was locust that came through and then wiped everything out.

As compared to the honeybees, which, you know, we have a very vibrant backyard where we've got a lot of flowers, we got a lot of trees and flowers and things like that.

And every spring and summer we can sit back here and watch the honeybees work and watch how they go from tree to tree and plant to plant and this kind of thing. Um, but like you said, locust kind of. Kind of our chaos, right? What's the difference? How does this. Let me get. Let me get the right question.

Can you explain, like, the main differences between sustainability in relation to both of those? Because you have one, in my opinion, which you're going to help us understand, one that, that I see gross. If.

And not understanding the community that you're talking about at the moment, but we will. Compared to locusts, which are chaos, how do they work together?

David Auge
00:07:46

Well, let me go back to the word sustainability, because I think that's the way we can best introduce ourselves to why I even looked at these two insects.

Most people currently see sustainability as a goal, as an objective, as an endpoint, upon which, once arrived at, you can then successfully say, well, that. That one's done. Let's just move on to something else. Yet I think we missed something. The fact that sustainability is a normative term.

It's a term used to describe as almost as an adjective, something that is. Is better than something else.

The word sustainable would be a sustainable community, or sustainable foods or sustainable transport, because it's normative, we need to understand it in that regard. And not just a good or a bad or right or wrong or this or that, but as a transformation of a journey upon which we will all find ourselves moving.

The sustainability of our current living conditions, our current choices are balanced because we're looking at all of the opportunities provided and then making choices from that. These two communities, not their impact upon humanity, but these two communities make decisions as well.

So you're trying to look at life from inside the hive, inside the community of a bee.

A hive, of course, is between 20 to 50,000 insects and a collected element, which is the Hive, usually a langstroth box in the back of someone's yard or in a tree trunk somewhere across the landscape that we have around here. For locusts, you're looking at an insect which has been transformed into something unique.

If you look through my book, you've had a chance to see that a locust is actually a grasshopper that has gone through a phase change, resulting in its desire to congregate and then become in a large collection of insects, something that can move across hundreds of miles and consume everything in sight. But within that community itself, there is a balance that allows its success upon what it's attempting to do.

It's looking at both of those insects inside their communities that I'm trying to bring to the table for us to contemplate how we neither bees nor locusts can ourselves learn something about this issue of sustainability.

Michael Herst
00:10:18

What made you choose, if you don't mind, because of all the different things that we can consider in sustainability, and whether it be the planet, be our community, or us as human beings, why did you choose honeybees and desert locusts as your focal points?

David Auge
00:10:33

I felt they were the extremes in the two communities that we can see in large numbers. The honeybee is, I think, on in the United States, it's the insect for 26 different states. It's the insects those states.

Even though the insect came from Europe, it has found itself to be the insect of like Colorado and North Carolina, and I'm not sure if Arizona has it as such, but I know that's on the center of the flag of the state of Utah. On the other extreme, desert locusts are elevated to a point of distrust and hatred that they show up in the Bible as the eighth plague.

You know, in the destruction of the nation of Egypt before the, the Israelites found themselves moving out of that area. They find themselves as attached to the word plague.

And if you ever look up the word locust, you're going to find usually a book about some destruction or some melting down of society.

So because they're at the two extremes, I thought that would be the best way to try and bring this, bring this story to the forefront of people's minds.

Michael Herst
00:11:44

Do you think that overlaps in anything else that we need to consider in regard to sustainability?

When we talk about sustainability, we're talking about sustainability of our food source or our environments and, or our climate or anything along that line. Can we define or kind of have a better understanding of what you mean by sustainability as a community, as a society and culture?

David Auge
00:12:10

I hope, hopefully what it brings to light is the fact that we see the world from a, from a perspective currently that everything around us is a raw material that we build into the future as opposed to something that we can look into the past. One of the things I bring forth in the book is a story about a time I was meeting with the West Point Society of Greater Houston.

This was shortly after the 911 attacks. It was November of that year and we had an expert speaking to our group about the Middle East.

The individual brought to the table that what was going to confront our Western mindset was an approach that could best be understood by looking at two words. And those two words were its history.

He said, in a Western mindset, looking back, looking at something that we say, oh, it's history means it's irrelevant. It doesn't have any bearing upon the decision upon which we will live our life.

It's missing the point because, hey, it's history, don't worry about it. Let's go forward. However, in a Middle Eastern mindset, it's history means the exact opposite.

It means that what we're looking at is relevant and that looking back at the way things happen, the way communities work, the way things have been presented to us gives us a better perspective upon which to go forward. I have a friend who spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and Iraq during the wars that have occurred over the last two decades.

And one of the things he brings to the table is that we seem to have fought one year of war 20 times. We continue to go with a very short mindset of what exactly we wanted to impact there, not understanding that it was a longer term investment.

These two insect communities have lasted for, you know, a tremendous amount of time. And if we can look at them, we can perhaps change our perspective of looking at life in a different fashion.

These kind of come to the table from the idea of something called mimetic versus poetic.

Moimetic is, is the fact that there is a, a way of looking at what is going to confront us through the mimicking of good societies in the past or things that have happened in the past that are the things that we would like best to mimic.

Poietic, if you can use that word of poetry, is the fact that no, we just have a blank slate and from this point forward we need to make it up as we go along. I find the whole in the fact we don't look back and what I'm trying to do by looking at these two communities is look back a little bit. Let's.

Well, let's take the issue of sustainability and let's say it's humanity, but let's look at these two insect communities and see what they've done over the years, over the centuries, over the thousands of years in the past where we can learn something from what they've done and how they do things.

Michael Herst
00:15:09

I think it's an interesting approach. Do you think that the behaviors of honeybees and desert locusts can be applied to human societies?

I mean, you just mentioned that, that we as humans in different, in different societies, we look at history, as you said, from a different perspective.

But we also, I think, at least from my perspective, I appreciate history because I think from history we're in our lessons and we understand what to do and what not to do, what applied, what worked and what didn't work. But I'm a history buff, my wife's a history buff, my kids are history buffs. We love history from a different perspective.

Not as in, that's like you said earlier, that's old history. I like the idea that we can take lessons from history, we can take opportunities from history. So long way around. A short question.

How do you think the behavior of honeybees and desert locusts can be applied to human societies? How can we take lessons from that?

David Auge
00:16:06

Well, because of both of these communities have instinctual drives for moving forward in their existence. We can learn from those instincts.

Now we don't have an instinctual desire unless someone says it's the Maslow's hierarchy of need of existence and relatedness of growth. But for the most part we don't have a community existence development that goes forward.

We can learn something from the way these communities do something. Now once again, they're instinctually driven. There is something within their DNA that says this is the way we're going to go forward.

That's where we're a little bit different.

And one of the reasons why the book I, I wrote is entitled Man's Search for Sustainability, because there is something in the, the aspect of that search that kind of gets to the idea of meaning as well. I mean, the title is very similar to Viktor Frankl.

Viktor Frankl was a, an individual who survived the Nazi concentration camps and in his survival, the Nazi concentration camps, he, he entered as a psychologist and he left as a psychologist. He had a chance to bring to the forefront some just tremendous insights about why someone would want to live and breathe to see the next day.

Are you familiar with Viktor Frankl?

Michael Herst
00:17:22

I am.

David Auge
00:17:24

Okay, well maybe for our Leonard's listeners, let me provide a little bit of insight about him.

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychologist who founded what he called logotherapy, which has been dubbed like the third B&E school of psychology. It follows Freud and Adler as.

As an effort to find that, if you want to call it the instinctual desire, that thing which inside of us wants to drive us forward to make a decision to exist. Freud, of course, has primarily the. The idea that it's a sexual drive, it's a desire to.

To gain pleasure and to work in that regard, Adler says, it's the desire to exercise power over others. But Lova therapy and what Frankl brings to the table believes that it's a desire to find purpose.

Now, Frankl was able to bring his insights to bear because of his experiences at different concentration camps there in Stadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering, Turkenheim. He lost his father at the Terezin ghetto, his brother and mother at Auschwitz, his wife at Bergen Belsen, his sister at Struts.

Stella was able to escape.

But what he was able to find through these experiences and through the work in the different hospitals that were associated with the concentration camp, that there was a drive within the individual to see the next day. He lists it as one of three things.

A desire to produce something, desire to be with someone, or the desire to find a purpose of why, in a larger frame, why we are even here and doing what we're doing. It's that searching of sustainability, knowing that it's a normal term that also has a search for meaning.

You want to sustain that which you believe has merit, has a benefit to you and society going forward. And Viktor Frankl, in man's search for meaning, kind of brings that to the forefront in, in his effort to communicate how these come together.

Now, I'm kind of taking it back.

I was not in a concentration camp, but I do have a chance to look at two communities that make decisions themselves, the insects that I've mentioned, and see what they could bring to the table.

One of the things that we talked about or we mentioned was that the honeybee is something that might be in some degree not as prominent as it was in the past, but there are some things that require man's input so that it'll stay that way. We want the honeybee to exist because it pollinates, because it provides honey, because it provides a part of our economic input.

In so doing, we make somewhat of a fragile society in the honeybee in some ways ourselves. When we start to create a certain effort where the order or the discipline or those things Are there.

There's a fragility to that community that we need to be aware of. And that's one of the things I bring forth in the book, is that that fragility is something that perhaps we could learn from.

There's a drive on the other side from what we have with, with locusts. There is the lack of fragility there. There's actually a toughness where, where, like you mentioned, they, they grow from stress.

Stress actually brings out the, the, the strength of the entire community, making the numbers increase, making their efforts to search for the center and to move forward even more elaborate and than we can handle as a national level.

One of the things that's on the table is the fact that to handle a locust swarm, it takes the United nations efforts to do so because they cross international boundaries, because they cross seas, because they find themselves in the explosion of their effort to move forward. There's something we can gain from that, knowing that that exists within society, within nature.

Michael Herst
00:21:30

No, I think it's kind of a balance. I mean, within themselves, because obviously we need growth, we need opportunity. I almost say we really need chaos from that perspective.

But chaos also. There are things that come out of chaos that allow us to grow and learn as human being and as society itself.

I know we mentioned earlier, at least at the beginning of the conversation, how do honeybees manage? How do they help us manage stress and maintain order compared to that chaos that the locust brings?

David Auge
00:22:06

There's a strong hierarchy within the hive. The hive has just one, one insect, the queen, who actually can reproduce and provide through that community, the next generation.

Through that hierarchy, you've got a bunch of sterile females, the workers, and you have drones, a very small percent, less than 1%, that particular structure and the jobs that they have to entail that they do from their, from their birth and the six weeks of life of which they, they present is a structure and an order upon which there's a, there's a growth of that community.

We can learn from that, from just how easy they're able to transition from one job to the next, how they accept without, without too much pushback, the effort to, to organize themselves and to move forward. There's. That hierarchy is something that we find as humans to be very attractive in the stabilization of any type of society.

And I find that too, also something that is one of the reasons why they put insects throughout the United States as the insect of that state or on state flags or in different type of emblems around the United States.

Michael Herst
00:23:26

Well, I think obviously we enjoy coming from any environment that I came from, both with military, my military training as well as being a police officer for as long as I was, you know, structure and hierarchy from that perspective and, and I could see how it worked and how it thrived and how you had to have that hierarchy.

You had to have your, the police officers and then you had the, the corporals and then the sergeants and then the, you know, the commanders, captains, lieutenants, commanders, captains, et cetera, et cetera.

It allowed me as an individual to have a structure within my life that I brought home as well, so that we, we had that understanding of the structure and how we as a family unit worked, which again, shows how community works as well.

I think we see that in the fact that we've got a city government, a county government, a state government and a federal government and things like this. On the opposite end of that, in mentioning earlier you mentioned about locust amplify exemplifies growth and opportunities.

On the opposite end of that, how do we learn from the locust side of it? Because obviously we've seen them with catastrophic damage across the world in what they do. How do we learn from that?

David Auge
00:24:51

Well, we learned that there is an effort in the locust to search for the center. It's one of the ways that I mentioned their search for opportunity.

The locusts will march in what appears to be a uniform fashion, but they'll also fly in a uniform fashion, always seeking the center upon which to exploit.

And that exploitation of the center allows them as a, as a mass to move forward and successfully do what they want to do, which is, of course, consume everything in the countryside and reproduce. That, though may appear detrimental to us as humans, but to them as a society, it brings things forward.

Let me bring an analogy to our own aspects of the country that we live in, the United States. Alex de Tocqueville wrote a book called Democracy in America back in the 1830s.

And in chapter five of that book, he brings to the table the fact that the stability that he sees in the small community, the townships in France and in Germany and in England have a strength of order.

He says, if you went to look at the financial records of these small towns in any of those three countries, you would find that they knew exactly what they had paid to the penny. They were orderly.

The, the police and the, the structure of the systems that were in those countries, France, Germany and, and England seemed to be able to at the time of the 1830s, repel any type of frustration or, or disorder. In contrast, he of course, he's in the United States at this time.

Alexa Tocqueville he found that the ability of any town within the United States to come to the conclusion of where all the money they collected actually went was almost impossible. He saw a chaos in the efforts of that order.

But he also saw a spirit within the township that we had here in the United States that just marveled him.

He saw an effort from the individual citizen within our country to take upon himself the opportunity of growth that didn't exist in France or in England or in Germany. That we had something that was going to take the community further down the road than what he thought could ever happen there.

And that it was the disorder, the opportunity to take advantage individually as opposed to being wait to be told what to do by some hierarchy that was going to allow America and our understanding of democracy and its exercise to be successful. Compared to what he saw in New Europe, that would be an example of the honeybee.

Once again, what he saw in Europe versus the locust, what he saw here in the United States.

Michael Herst
00:27:40

It also kind of reminds me a little bit about maybe the Roman Empire and how they expanded and grew the way they grew and kind of made their way across Europe and Attila the Hun in those kind of individuals. Can I relate that to the same principle?

David Auge
00:27:59

I don't know completely because perhaps to a certain degree de Tocqueville brought it to the surface because he saw this lack of a hierarchy. There weren't earls, there weren't dukes, there wasn't the aristocracy in place in order to be exercising authority in the United States.

For these positions, he brings to light especially the justice of the Peace.

The justice of the Peace in England was primarily a person who was a squire or an earl who had a title and was given that from, you know, father to son of the next generation. Yeah. Based upon their. Their title and their position in the United States, that didn't exist.

And because of that, there was an exercise of a Justice of the Peace. And at that time, he mentions, it's neither a judge nor a police officer, but there was a.

There was an interim position upon which that person, though only a citizen, exercised a certain amount of control over the chaos that he saw of American society that was moving forward in a. I'd say a controlled environment. But he seems. He seems to think in a positive, growing environment.

Michael Herst
00:29:10

That's interesting. I'd like to explore that. Aside from this conversation, I think I would like to explore that a little bit more myself.

I find that pretty interesting the way that that's all implemented and kind of integrates. Earlier you mentioned, and I'm trying to remember back a little bit here.

Earlier you had mentioned that like locusts, they all kind of fly in a group. Honeybees are kind of. They have a community within themselves.

I've watched the honeybees here because, like I told you, we watch them in the backyard all the time. They come back there. In fact, they even have a relationship. We've got a. We kind of have an open area where we open.

We have huge doors that go outside. You can't see my hands moving. We have huge doors that, you know, we open up and it's kind of a, you know, walk in and out. We have.

It goes right out to the back patio and everything. And, you know, we have. Those bees have a. They don't bother us, you know, because we respect them. They respect us.

For example, um, and, you know, they'll come in, they'll fly around the house a little bit, then they'll go out or they'll. We're sitting in the chair, they'll walk up, they'll fly around us, they'll check us out, then they'll go to the next tree and they don't bother us.

Where some people freak out when the bees show up kind of a deal. And we have a relationship in that regard. How do, how, how do. If, if you can help us understand this, because I find it fascinating.

How do they communicate within themselves? How do they know that? Earlier you mentioned the hierarchy with the queen and then the ste. Bees and then the worker bees and things like that.

How do they communicate? How do the locusts communicate? To know where they're going next or how they're going to go next. Is that too complicated? Did I throw too much at you?

David Auge
00:31:00

No, no. You're bringing to the table the idea of communication, which is great. There is ability.

There is an ability within the hive to transmit messages through a number of different means. One of the easiest ways that honeybees transfer information is through smell.

The queen has a pheromone that is able to be communicated about every 20 minutes.

Every single bee within the hive present there within the hive is able to know from her, her health, her spirit, and to a certain degree, the efforts at the hive is moving toward.

That's through just the odor, the pheromones that she's able to transmit that then find their way to all 20 to 50,000 bees that might be in that hive. The second one is also by color and by humming. There is a Transfer of information that they have through the sound.

I have hives both here and at work that you can approach a hive and you can almost sense through the. The humming sound that's there whether it's been a good day or not.

If it's not been a good day, that humming could pretty much tell you that's the situation. It also tells the other bees the same situation. The, the. The aggressiveness or the disorder that might be in that hive.

For example, if the queen has been crushed or rolled, when I go into my hives and I'll pick up the frames, you have to do so very, very gently in order to not kill the queen. She's slightly larger in size. She is most likely on one of those frames, and so you're inadvertently killing her.

Could prompt the need for a new queen, but also prompt a certain destabilization of that community for a short period of time. Of course, the most famous way for communication that people usually bring to the table is, is the dance.

Through the dance that the bees, these are the foragers, bring back to the hive, it will communicate the location and the distance and also the fruitfulness of a potential pollination source.

This is usually a circle or a figure 8, and then the shaking, which indicates an intensity of what they've just found, that's then seen and understood by the other bees within the hive.

Michael Herst
00:33:28

Oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah. You see me smile. That's pretty cool. I think. Come back and the bees dance and then, you know, you found a good place. I think we all do that.

Going to a restaurant, we do a dance when it's good food.

David Auge
00:33:43

Somewhat of a snoopy dance, but it's a little tiny bee size.

Michael Herst
00:33:46

That's pretty slick. So how long have you been a beekeeper?

David Auge
00:33:50

I've been a beekeeper for about five years. I started first at work. We, at the company I worked for, have an array of beehives on the, on the site.

And there was an expert there who began to teach the rest of us the basics of beekeeping. And then about three years ago, I started beekeeping at home, and I started with two, went to five. Now it's, you know, two hives again in my yard.

And I'm in the residential area. I'm not in. In a car. Countryside.

Michael Herst
00:34:22

Yeah, that's very cool. I really appreciate that. Thank you for your contribution to that as well. I know that we all hear.

You hear people talking about that if the bee community disappears, then it will be catastrophic to our environment, to our sustainability as human beings because again, that's how things are pollinated. You mentioned earlier, so forth.

Do you, do you think we're on the cuspus of an environmental catastrophe based upon global warming and the storm surges and everything that I'm sure have an effect on those communities, both bees and locusts?

David Auge
00:34:59

Well, talking about bees, I'm not a prognosticator about the longer term effects of any type of these decisions, but I do see the importance of bees and their balance somewhat abused. We take about 60% of the hives in the United States, across the continent, every single year.

They start in the almond fields of California and they'll journey all the way up into Michigan and Pennsylvania and the like.

They're transported, that is, these hives are transported, about 1.5 billion of them for the very purpose of pollination, pollinating different crops. And we have a lot of crops that require the pollination of these insects.

These efforts are successful to a degree, but not as successful as they could be if more, and let me use the word sustainable, it's a normative term, a more sustainable approach to what could be done were pursued.

There's a portion of my book where I talk about the use of native pollinators that are much more efficient at being able to pollinate plants than our, you know, APIs mellifera, which is the, the common honeybee that will be utilized and transported across the country. That balance has resulted in imbalance, if you would, and our dependence upon this transporting of these bees back and forth across the continent.

Michael Herst
00:36:33

That brings me to a question. It's kind of a, I guess a personal question, but at the same time it would benefit others as well.

So we go to the farmer's market here when, when they open and there is a beekeeping company that ends up there at this one that we go to every weekend.

And when they come, they, because it just mentioned, when you mentioned what you did it trying to trigger this, they bring a series of different honeys. Like one of them is lavender, one of them is.

And, and forgive me, I may not remember all of these, but one of them is mesquite, for example, because there's a lot of mesquite in and around here, but they've got several different, what they call flavors of honey that, that were, they say were from specific pollination of those type of plants. And that's what created that. Are you familiar with, Is that what you said earlier?

When you take them across the country line, across the state lines, can that be done or is that something that they have to specifically have bees that only go to lavender plants, for example, or only go to muskie.

David Auge
00:37:52

Well, they're going to place the. Hide the Langstroth box in an area where the majority of the plants that need pollination are the ones that would be a honey. Yeah.

That will have a unique taste.

The ones I was mentioning are not being transported across the United States to produce honey as much as they're being transported to pollinate the field. So the honey you would get from that particular type of effort would be. Wouldn't have a unique flavor. And their effort isn't to collect honey. Their.

Their effort is to. To poly plants from that perspective. But you're right.

Yeah, there's some excellent honey tasting competitions around the United States, and I think it's in Georgia.

We've had a number of contests, worldwide contests where there's honeybee efforts in Georgia that have been sometimes the most successful, as well as Michigan. Those two states for some reason seem to have unique flavors from where they're able to position the hives to collect the.

Michael Herst
00:38:56

That's pretty cool. Yeah.

I say again, that was kind of a little bit of a personal question, just because you had mentioned about moving them around and if there was any difference, and I do understand the difference now between the pollination part and the honey part, but it, it inspired me to ask that question because, you know, we bring a moment you can actually taste the difference. I mean, and then when you said about the taste testing things like in Georgia and everything, that would be really kind of cool to explore.

What a unique opportunity to visit a place like Georgia during that time period. That'd be a cool vacation, actually. Cool weekend, right?

David Auge
00:39:37

Cool.

Michael Herst
00:39:38

Yeah, cool weekend. Cool weekend. Do you think that. What kind of experiences you had since you do beekeeping? Again, this is an educational perspective.

In your experience with beekeeping, were there positives and negatives when you. When this. When you. Let me try this in English because I got 12 questions running through my head.

With your experience in beekeeping, are there positives and negatives in regard to your experience with beekeeping? If we wanted to get into something.

David Auge
00:40:13

Like that, yeah, let's talk about the positives. You're going to be exploring a community that is a little on the edgy side of things.

You know, if you want to be a gardener, if you want to find yourself out there growing zucchini or tomato plants or something like that, there's a certain. There's a certain type of bent of a person who likes to do that, a person who Wants to be a beekeeper.

And those that pursue that are a little bit more, I use the word edgy.

They're a little bit more of a risk taker because you're going to be dealing with something that produces a crop that is honey that also doesn't want you to take it from them.

So as you're going to be in that environment, there's things are possible and you're going to find yourself perhaps a little uncomfortable every now and then. So you learn that part of it. But you. But the good part is you're venturing into an avenue that has some really fascinating people to meet.

In the county I live in, in North Carolina, we have a beekeeper association and I'm part of it. There are approximately 300 individuals that a part of this committee and meet on a routine basis and do other things together.

And it's really amazing to see the interest that they have in what they do and how they do it. 300 in a county with, let's see, our county population is not that large. Maybe 150,000 is pretty remarkable.

Now, on the backhand, let's say the negative part of it. When I first brought my bees home, I brought up what's called a nuke from a local farm. And I brought it and put it in place.

I started to interact as best I could with that. And I wasn't properly, properly gowned, especially around my ankles. And I got a lot of bee stings, probably about six or seven on both ankles.

And I was slapping the bees. Found that they had to their. To their, I guess, joy, a real live one. So I was running around the backyard trying to get away from these bees.

My wife was locking the doors of the house to keep me from going back inside. The little dog we had was also dancing in every direction to stay away from me. I went back in the house.

My knee, my legs, my ankles actually swelled and I couldn't walk for a few days.

I was thinking, I'm either going to back out there with a baseball bat, ending this misery, or I'm going to learn as much as I possibly can about the insect that I can. And there are a lot of books about insects, about what people have learned about experiences, about.

About the study of the insects that just, I don't know, open up a different world to an individual starting down the road to farm and to. To look at the. The natural environment that's around them. So it was a bad thing in the fact that I was stunned and I've been stung frequently.

But A good thing in that it drove me to make a decision. Am I going to learn or am I going to give up?

Michael Herst
00:43:14

I think that that is a, that's a unique way to learn. It's almost like, you know, don't put your finger in the fire. And then you.

They put their finger in the fire, they go, okay, well, I'm not going to do that again. It's interesting. And I have heard that speaking of bee stings, your inflammation. I have rheumatoid arthritis really bad.

And I got it after some injuries and so forth.

And I had somebody recommend to me, which I have not tried yet, somebody recommended me, that apparently bee venom is supposed to reduce inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis, but I've not explored that yet. I'll have to let you know that if I ever decide to try that protocol, I'll have to let you know.

David Auge
00:43:59

That I'd like to find out if it does.

Michael Herst
00:44:03

Yeah. Considering the opposite is the swelling like you had. So I'm not sure how that would actually work, but I was tempted. I was very, very tempted.

But interesting and from Colorado, since we're homeboys back there. I know in your book you mentioned Rocky Mountain locust. What's a Rocky Mountain locust?

David Auge
00:44:29

That's a good question. The Rocky Mountain locusts are the largest locust swarm that have ever existed on planet Earth. They are now extinct.

But the Rocky Mountain locusts were brought to the attention of at least the people of the United States back in the 1860s and 70s because of its detrimental effect on the middle portion of the, of our country.

Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, those particular states had been devastated and were devastated in the 1870s and 1880s, especially when the farmers started to move in great numbers and started to be successful in that area because of that. Okay, let me give you some background about the Rocky Mountain locust we had. Well, let me give you background. The locust.

There's about 10 particular grasshoppers that can transform into a locust.

There was a guy named Boris who was a, a Russian entomologist who found that these locusts, which most people prior to 1920 believe just came out of the soil some day and decided to devastate everything in sight. He was the one who said, no, this isn't the, the case. These things just don't.

Here, out of nowhere, they appear to have some connection to a grasshopper.

That grasshopper placed into an environmentally stressful situation will find themselves transforming their color, their brain size, even the strength of their legs and their ability to operate differently Most of them will go from green at night with a small brain going to an environmental situation where they are full first, fed a great deal, and then what happens is there's a pulling back of that resource, whether it be grains or food because of drought, they congregate together and in that congregation, this grasshopper becomes a locust.

In the United states in the 1860s and 1870s, that occurred here on this continent as well as it does in Africa and Asia and Europe and the rest of the places. But it became the largest seen locust swarm ever. There was a. There was a guy named Alfred Childs who kind of put that particular effort on the map.

He was in Nebraska, a medical doctor who during the Civil War, desired to become a meteorologist. So he had the equipment to do so. While in Nebraska, he saw flying overhead the Rocky Mount locust.

And he had the instruments that could tell and also the access to. To telegraph to find out that this swarm that was moving over the head of Nebraska was 110 miles wide.

It was one mile deep, and it flew overhead in 1875 from June 15th to June 25th at a pretty good clip of about 10 to 15 miles per hour.

Michael Herst
00:47:26

That's crazy.

David Auge
00:47:28

Yeah.

A swarm of insects that masted flying in, pretty much devouring the state of Iowa over Nebraska and into Missouri and portions of Illinois and up into to Wisconsin. The effort to control that was actually a national effort at that time.

And there's monuments in a number of areas where laws are put into place that you must come out and find ways to eradicate this insect. You have to put certain areas around crops that they believe were important.

You had to burn the dying locusts or whatever collections there because they would stink and they would create disease on the drinking water in the area. Anyway, the estimated amount of locusts in that swarm that Dr. Childs reported Alfred was. It was called alfred swarm was 3.4 trillion.

3.4 trillion insects descending on that middle part of the United States and pretty pretty much destroying the crops in those states. Some of the frustration was that we didn't have any umbrella organization that said, we have people dying out there of starvation. What do we do?

We had a number of military bases and military compound because it was the end of the Civil War.

But most of those individuals spoke French or German or some language other than English and didn't have any way to reach out to say, we are dying here on these farms with nothing to eat. There's a good story I kind of include where a Dr. Ord, I'm sorry.

A General Ord was able to open up a number of those military depots in order to feed those people. Anyway, the efforts to control this locust swarm and why it's extinct right now, linked perhaps to the use of a plows.

The plow the United States that was in use went down about 9 inches in order to break the soil. While a locust, once it oviposits its eggs, usually goes down about 6 inches.

So that would kill a number of the reproduction opportunities that they had.

Second is there was a lot of planting of trees along river bodies, which are the best type of soil for the locust to be able to position its young for the next generation to move forward.

Silver and then finally, the belief is that the locusts, which started in the Rocky Mountains, primarily between Wyoming and Montana, that during the gold and the Silver Rush, that efforts to support those miners in that area resulted in people going up there and farming those pasture lands.

That's the origin many times of where the Rocky Mountain locusts would begin as they work their way across the central portion of the United States, ending up, you know, near the Mississippi River Valley. But now we know nothing about it. We have little, little to, to present that to the American population. But it was quite a devastating event.

Michael Herst
00:50:30

And yeah, that's, there's just a simple size of that. To be able to look up and see that coming and to recognize if that, I mean, it would be.

That would be like you would be in awe of what the hell was happening, basically.

David Auge
00:50:49

Little House on the Prairie, there's a good thing that, a good section where Laura Ingall Wilder writes about the impact of one of those swarms landing and just devouring everything in sight, eating the handles off of shovels and anything with salt within the leather was consumed by these insects and the entire family running into shelters trying to, you know, keep these things from. They don't hurt humans, but they would, they would devastate everything in sight.

So anything that needed to eat cows, pigs, goats, were going to soon die.

Michael Herst
00:51:22

Wow, that's just crazy. That's just great. That's wild. I'm gonna. I'll have to go back and read your book. I'm actually related to her by the way, down the line a little bit.

So I should. That should propel me to read her book, I would think.

Speaking of books, how do you hope your book can influence reader perspective on sustainability?

I think that, you know, it presents an opportunity for us to be able to learn what and how this works, in what influence that we can do to help sustain them, both sides of those insects is obviously we need both of them. How do you hope that your book will influence readers?

David Auge
00:52:12

I hope it lets them see it as a journey. I hope it lets them see sustainability as. As something once again is normative in its description. Something is more sustainable or less sustainable.

And we are all on a journey of making that decision of what we are going to sustain in that effort of moving forward. It's a bigger picture than just a destination and that's what I hope people will see.

It's a discussion hopefully separate enough so that you won't get the parochial interests, the interests of he said, she said. He'll say let's learn from something else. Let's mimic if you would.

Let's use them memetic form of understanding and bring to the table some contrasting approaches and see what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are. That's the discussion I want them to have. We don't seem to observe as we once did. We quickly go to application.

And that observation is so important to being able to see a larger picture of what we've been given.

Michael Herst
00:53:18

I agree with that. I think it's a wonderful opportunity for people. I grew up in an environment, I have a lot of friends that are Native American.

And I've been educated through some wisdom that have been passed down through generations in regard to our ability to connect with Mother Nature, sort of in humanity from that perspective. And taking the time to observe and to watch and to listen to Mother Nature.

And I say Mother Nature because I include the insects and the birds and the bees and the animals and the trees and the plants and the bushes is all part of Mother Nature. And taking those lessons in just observing and watching and listening and seeing what we can take from that to help us all survive.

Because I think it's an effort that we need to do to sustain our community, our world, our environment, our ability to continue to grow and not fade away into oblivion. Which is kind of a strong word, but you know, how do you think, what kind of steps can we as individuals take?

I know that you have some in your book, but what, what kind of steps can you give us that we can incorporate lessons of that type within ourselves? What can we practice?

David Auge
00:54:38

Well, well, let's. Let's go back to the. The steps of, of how we learn. Many people understand that you first observe something, you.

You study it to a great deal so that you can, from what you study, observe a general rule, if you would, that can be brought to the table from there you interpret what that general rule might have as an impact upon human decisions on what we're going to do and why we're going to do it and then we apply it. Then we take what we've learned there and we apply it to the efforts on the table. Observe, interpret and apply.

We want to run so quickly to the application.

We have talking heads and we'll say if we just can harness the waves of the ocean and be able to use that for the hydroelectric power needs along the coastlines, then we'll be able to solve all the problems.

We just need to go and be able to deal with the population deficit in certain portions of the world so that the next generation will have the proper, like in China, the proper number of children in order to propagate their families. We just need to. Well, those are all application aspects. Let's go back to observing. Let's go back to observe what we've been given already.

Use a memetic point of view. Let's look at the world we've been handed and learn from that and then go to the next step to interpret and then to apply.

Michael Herst
00:56:08

Those are great lessons.

I think that these are things that we should all take a moment and a pause and put the noise down, basically, you know, put the noise away for a little bit and listen and watch and listen. I think it's a good thing to do. We're running, unfortunately, we're a little bit out of time here.

So let's talk about how somebody can find your book in regard to how to get it and where it's at. And I know you have a website, so if you can say that out loud for us as well too, I'd appreciate it. Sure.

David Auge
00:56:45

The website is Davidoj books.com and you can just look up my name, David OJ on Amazon and the book is being sold there as well. So that, that's a good place to go there. If there's a glitch on the website, I apologize. I'm trying to find out what happened.

But you should be able to go to David OJ books.com and I'll make sure I can go ahead.

Michael Herst
00:57:12

No, I'm sorry. I'm going to make sure that's in the show notes as well so that people have an easy way to just click it and go right to your. Your sight.

Okay, thank you. This has been a wonderful opportunity to inspire, motivate and educate. David, thank you very much for coming on the show.

I really appreciate what you're bringing to the world.

I think we all need to take lessons from you and your your what's in your book in regard to helping us sustain ourselves and sustain the environment that we live in. So thank you for being here.

David Auge
00:57:44

Well, thank you, Mike, for allowing me to be here.

Michael Herst
00:57:47

It's been great. I will make sure that all the information to get in touch with you will be in the show notes so that they can just click and find you.

And this is one more thing before you go. So I always ask, do you have any words of wisdom before we leave?

David Auge
00:58:06

Let's see, perhaps would be on the back of the book that he who has a wife why. This is from Nietzsche. He who has a why to live for can handle almost any how.

Michael Herst
00:58:16

Those are brilliant words of wisdom. I love it. I love it. I think we should all take that into consideration. So once again, thank you for being here. I appreciate your time. All right.

David Auge
00:58:26

Thank you.

Michael Herst
00:58:27

And for everyone. And the one more thing before we go, community, thank you for being here. Thank you for being part of the community.

Be sure to share, like subscribe and all that good stuff. And one more thing before you all go, have a great day. Have a great week. And thanks for being here.

David Auge
00:58:42

Thanks for listening to this episode of One More Thing before you Go. Check out our website at beforeyougopodcast. Com.

You can find us as well as subscribe to the program and rate us on your favorite podcast listening platform.