Rudolf Steiner

  • Thread starter Curly green fingers
  • Start date
Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Found a direct link about this in that other link....pseudoscience
 
'ground quartz stuffed in a cows horn' and 'no difference in beneficial outcomes'

Not really winning me over :D
 
'ground quartz stuffed in a cows horn' and 'no difference in beneficial outcomes'

Not really winning me over :D

Perhaps it's a bit like this forum?
You often have to sift through the gumpf to get to the worthwhile information.
 
Perhaps the anthroposophists should be humoured as they risk dying out, certainly round here where the Steiner School avoids vaccinations and such scientific stuff http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2013/04/steiner-schools-vaccination-and-measles-outbreaks.html

Mind you Herefordshire has its quota. Alfred Watkins of Ley Lines fame was a Herefordshire beekeeper. At last weeks' HBKA AGM a member got most upset when Wally Shaw compared some non scientific beekeeping practices to dowsing.
 
Perhaps the anthroposophists should be humoured as they risk dying out, certainly round here where the Steiner School avoids vaccinations and such scientific stuff http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2013/04/steiner-schools-vaccination-and-measles-outbreaks.html

Mind you Herefordshire has its quota. Alfred Watkins of Ley Lines fame was a Herefordshire beekeeper. At last weeks' HBKA AGM a member got most upset when Wally Shaw compared some non scientific beekeeping practices to dowsing.

I thought dowsing was a scientific method adopted by some well known beekeepers - along with the the basing of English beekeeping on mongrel bees..:sunning:
 
Hmm there's a bit of food for thought .
I'm a dieing out breed then:sos:
Any suggestion's!
 
It's junk science. See here for an example - according to Steiner, workers can't reproduce because they develop in more than one solar rotation, yet the queen is perfectly formed in one solar rotation and so can reproduce.

The really sad thing was that Steiner took sound observations and contorted them to fit his pre-conceived notions of how the world operated, instead of thinking logically about what he saw.

Clearly the fluff about sun & earth energies and queens / workers being able to lay (or not) is bunkum when you dissect female bees to look at the reproductive organs present, or indeed read any research into laying workers, queen prolificacy, or royal jelly constituents.

Think he was ahead of his time? Steiner's lectures were given in 1923. Between 1845 - 1855, Jan Dzierzon had published (in German) a number of books and articles essentially laying out the clear foundations of queen, worker, and drone reproductive biology. He realised the purpose of the spermatheca, the storage of sperm, the production of drone brood from unfertilised eggs, and so on. Dzierzon's work was rightly picked up by all the progressive beekeepers of the late 1800's - Langstroth, Cowan, Doolittle, and so on.

Yet here is Steiner, three quarters of a century after Dzierzon's detailed exposition of honeybee reproductive biology, clearly and unambiguously pinning the fertility of the queen and the infertility of the worker to sun and earth energies imparted upon them by their various developmental durations. Bunkum!

This is but one example. HM has mentioned the crystals, there are more but it's a number of years since I've picked over the topic in detail. By all means read Steiner's lectures on bees, but read it as a cautionary example of gross preconception, not as a manual of beekeeping.

:hairpull:

Worth noting that the Natural Beekeeping Trust were heavily influenced by Steiner & biodynamic principles, but would never admit it when challenged. e.g. NBT photos showing quartz crystals at the entrance of hives was coincidence, or "purely decoration", or to give the bees a step up, or some such, never an allusion to Steiner's assertions that quartz crystals and beeswax cells share the same "energies" due to their similarity of proportions. Not the sort of thing you have just hanging around in a typical bee shed or beekeeping toolbox... ;)

42a31e_796efe24fb2241859eee981941729ffb.jpg
 
Last edited:

Latest posts

Back
Top