Beekeeping?!: an anti-capitalist escape fantasy
Daydreaming of bees, tall grass, blue skies, and endless sunshine instead of our cold hard capitalist reality
The narrative I was sold: go to college, major in something generic enough to land a corporate job, graduate with honors, obtain said corporate job, work hard, be likable, earn promotions, climb the corporate ladder, acquire wealth, which will undoubtedly lead to a happy and prosperous life.
I was spoon-fed this over and over in my youth—by my parents, teachers, and other adults in my life. You want this, they said in robotic voice unison. This is how the world works.
And now, as a 29-year-old with that good ole corporate job1 I was programmed to want, I have to wonder if any of them truly believed it—or if that’s just what they were told.
I got my first Big Girl Job when I was 22, one month after I graduated from college. I was fresh-faced and eager for my life to begin, albeit anxious about making a good impression and starting my career off strong.
I spent that first summer out of college staring at a computer screen in a windowless office, learning what it meant to be an adult. I wanted to create things and write for a living, but I quickly discovered the brutal reality of working in our society—it’s all about money. The blog articles and social media posts I was writing were all tied to click thru rates and SEO strategies, which would (theoretically) lead to more sales and more money for the biz. In the corporate world, anything created is created for the sake of money, not art.
Years later, that now seems obvious. But as a young person who’d spent four years marinating in my liberal arts degree, this realization left me profoundly disappointed. I started not to care about anything I wrote or made for work; it wasn’t what I wanted to be creating, or for the reasons I wanted to be creating.
I spent time combing the internet for other jobs, thinking I could escape that one, but they were all the same. It was all about money, it was all pointless.
Enter: Beekeeping
I was lounging on the couch one evening after work in a state of existential dread when I first came across a beekeeper on Instagram.
She was bathed in sunlight, surrounded by friendly buzzing honeybees. One landed on her bare finger (!!!), and she brought it closer to the camera for us to see. Her pristine white bee suit cast her as an angel of nature, a caretaker of small creatures, an astronaut discovering the thrill of tiny life on a distant planet—because her world surely did not look like mine.
My days were spent under fluorescent office lights, gnawing my fingernails off over what to post on my company’s Instagram. Coming home to my dingy apartment to stare at my phone on the cat-scratched couch I took from my parents’ basement. Mustering up the energy to throw chicken breasts and broccoli in the oven for dinner. Sleeping with earplugs in because my upstairs neighbor stomps and the person next door plays music all night.
She spent hers waking up with the sun, brewing coffee by an open window, looking out at her property, across fields and trees swaying in a gentle breeze. Lulling her bees to sleep with a smoker filled with pine needles. Opening up their hives each day to check on the queens and make sure they had what they needed. That baby bees were being born and honey was being made and capped for the winter ahead.
It’s easy to romanticize a life that isn’t yours, especially the pieces of it someone chooses to show on social media. But when your life is not what you want and your time doesn’t feel like your own, gravitating toward someone who loudly loves their life provides a cruel kind of comfort. Yeah, it makes you more unhappy with your own situation, but it also gives you hope that you, too, could love life someday. If you just had what they have, maybe.
Life for that beekeeper was buttery soft, her days filled with fresh air and open space and nature. I wanted that. I wanted it more than anything.
But… how??
I poured myself into researching beekeeping. Beyond wanting a whole different lifestyle than what I was doing, those little bugs were really cool.2
I was convinced that I had to find a way to make beekeeping my career, so that I could achieve the life I wanted and pay my bills. I could own a farm on a little bit of land, maybe get chickens and grow a vegetable garden. And of course, a field of beehives. I could sell my honey and produce at farmers markets and make candles and soap from beeswax. Every aspect of my life would be grounded in nature and connect me to the Earth. It would be so simple, so sweet.
As you can probably imagine, beekeeping isn’t the most lucrative business unless you own a huge apiary where bees are kept to pollinate almond tree farms in California. Acres and acres of trees mass producing a crop for millions to purchase and consume at the highest dollar amount they can get for it. The bees were just one part of that billion dollar industry, just another way for business owners to put profit over all else and exploit our natural world to do it.
Disappointment hit me again—capitalism had its hold on the bees, too! Was nothing exempt from its authoritarian grip on our lives?!
And—no. That’s the problem.
In reality, many beekeepers are hobbyist beekeepers who spend more money on beekeeping necessities than they make selling honey or bee products. Most need another source of income to keep their hobby afloat. I had to adjust my expectations with this new information in mind—I would probably always need a job job.
I can’t say that I’ve “come to terms” with capitalism or its plight on society since I was 22—but working in an office job got easier the longer I did it, especially when I started working for nonprofits. It felt like my work mattered more; at least my work wasn’t all just to line some rich CEO’s pockets.
And even though beekeeping wasn’t my escape from the bloodthirsty billionaires who run our world, it’s become a fantasy and a goal. When times are tough, I have a happy place I go to in my mind: a field of wildflowers bustling with jolly little bees buzzing about, mountains in the distance. Things like health insurance don’t matter out there.
In real life, I kept researching and learning as much about bees as I could. I read books and catalogues, watched Youtube videos, and even enrolled in a 6-week-long Intro to Beekeeping course. And now I’m officially a certified beekeeper!!!
I’m just waiting for the day I can actually get my own bees, cuz you know, I live in an apartment in the city.
Sometimes I consider what I was told as a child, about how my career and making the most money possible is how I would find joy, value, worthiness. A part of me wants to travel back in time and look those people in the eyes and ask: Um, have you been outside? (cuz maybe they need to touch some literal grass).
I know there will come a day in the future when I close my laptop at the end of my day job and open the window to let in the fresh air. I’ll look out at the little piece of land I own, at the trees swaying the breeze and my cluster of beehives at the edge of the woods. I’ll go outside to enjoy the last few hours of sunshine, and a tiny bee will land on my bare arm in greeting.
It’s a fantasy I want badly enough to make it happen. And while beekeeping might never become my entire life, I think it’ll make it feel whole.
It is, actually, a nonprofit, and I do genuinely believe in the mission of the organization and my role in it. But still. Office job yada yada yada you get it.
I’ll make a separate post about some of my favorite things about bees, I promise. I want more people to love them as much as I do.
Someday all the bees !!!