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Near-End Ecology

A Devil at Heart

The memory of the ruined apiary still filled Shaykh E. with grief months later. It took him five weeks to get to the hives after the storm had ended. The pockmarked single-lane road to the village in eastern Bosnia was overwhelmed. Creeks spilled out, building up roadblocks of sludge and waste. After the waters receded, whole sections of the road caved in as the asphalt was torn apart by landslide undercurrents. Once he finally made it to the village, he stood at the apiary’s foothill. A slope of the hill had cracked and welled up, furrowed like a great turkey wattle. Under the heavy showers that persisted day after day, a landslide was in the making. He turned back and waited some more. A week later, he anxiously climbed the hill. He found drenched bee boxes strewn about the sad orchard, nests empty, and frames with wax comb gone. Someone had robbed his ruined apiary.

Perhaps you can start again? I suggest, voicing my question as a condolence. Shaykh E. shakes his head doubtfully. Starting from scratch is too much of a feat for a hobbyist. Besides, his commitments to the Sufi lodge are growing, he says.

With his well-groomed beard finely peppered with gray hairs, a smart collarless shirt in an eggshell hue, and a wide, outgoing smile, Shaykh makes a strong impression at our first meeting. His demeanor indicates a former career in public media. He now runs a Sufi lodge with a contemporary flair that makes the spiritual tradition fairly undemanding on the younger urban and semi-urban crowds.

Shaykh E. attracts dervishes, men and women committed to searching for closeness to God. To search for God, one embarks on a path that begins with the greatest hurdle, which is one’s own arrogant soul, nafs, the self that inclines a human toward evil. A shaykh is a guide, a coach who discerns students’ faults and trains them to develop a beautiful character. The lodge also attracts the wider public to weekly gatherings for joint invocations of divine “Beautiful Names.” The joint chants arise like the droning of a hive: awake, eager, longing for the nectar flow. Then there is the daily flow of visitors seeking out Shaykh for consultations.

It is July 2014. I have sought out this Sufi elder and teacher (Shaykh is the honorific that carries both meanings) to learn about his beekeeping practice, only to find out that his bees had perished due to disasters that followed the cyclonic storm earlier in May.

These are troubled times, Shaykh says, with ample disorders brewing on the outside and from within. People seek him for help with life and health complaints, he explains, that are evasive to standard psychological and pharmaceutical treatments. Shaykh diagnoses metaphysical ailments. Because humans are not only made of flesh, human suffering and troublemaking also pertain to the ghayb, the “hidden,” Shaykh clarifies, tapping his chest to indicate the inner core of being.

Shaykh’s primary remedies are the Qur’an and honey, two species of Revelation, human and apian. Honey is ingested, the Qur’an is recited, and recitations over honey blend the two potencies together.

Ghayb, a loan word from Arabic meaning secret, unseen, and remote, refers to something that needs to be taken on faith. It is not simply inaccessible because it is tucked into some dark corner deep within the folds of flesh and sinew. Rather, Shaykh indicates the reality that cannot be grasped by eyes, ears, or hands but is primary and encompasses the sensuous world that subsists on it and veils us from it. God as pure existence is ghayb, while everything that subsists on divine existence at once reveals and hides its source. Ghayb also denotes intimacy, as when God says, Indeed, we have created the human and we know what his soul whispers to him and We are nearer to him than the jugular vein.¹ The implication is that ghayb is also too close to see.

This chapter revolves around two extreme weather events: the monster storm of 2014 and the 2017 drought, made more severe by a heat wave dubbed Lucifer. The storm garnered massive international attention and relief and recovery funds while the drought failed to solicit a formal governmental response. Both became landmark events in the international conversations and policy writings about regional climate futures, exemplary of the weather catastrophes that are anticipated to recur and intensify in the Balkans in the coming years. In these accounts, the effects and threats of extreme weather are described technically in terms of aggregate monetary values while demographics guide the determination of differential degrees of local populations’ vulnerability to natural hazards. These narratives aim to give a comprehensive sense of weather disasters as ultimately manageable risks to property and assets that can be averted through preparedness and climate-smart investment.

The opening story of a lost apiary, by contrast, brings us to the ground level to show how particular people and their animals fared through extreme weather and the attendant disasters that are regularly worsened by the country’s shoddy infrastructure and particularly inept and unwilling environmental governance. Local apiculture affords a particular vantage from which to critically study policy documents on climate disasters and risks precisely because it does not figure as an economically significant sector in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and because it revolves around things, places, and beings that are highly praised in terms other than monetary. Local beekeepers, a varied but often highly committed group of professionals and hobbyists, are already struggling to keep the apiaries going through the rapidly changing seasons, and extreme weather events frustrate their most resourceful management strategies.

Importantly, this chapter also takes off from that point that Shaykh E. flagged when he tapped his chest arguing that current disorders were raging within as well as around contemporary humans. An ethnographic study does not just expose niches of ecological practice that are economically marginal and consequently underappreciated in the economically focused accounts of disaster risk management.

It also yields a different understanding of the climate change disaster through stories that can hardly be accommodated by policy documents that confidently evaluate the world in trouble—its meaning and worth—and presume to know the means of redeeming it.

Weather disasters and global climate change, along with their implications for honeybees and humans, are storied among devout Bosnian Muslims with recourse to the Revelation. Natural and weather disasters are colloquially glossed as kijamet, which is a Slavic transliteration of the Qur’anic Arabic term al-qiyāmah with a more expansive, eschatological meaning of the world’s end and the trials of judgment that follow. My interlocutors’ moods were not apocalyptic in the usual sense of the religious or environmentalist expectations of the nigh end, but the disastrous weather regularly stirred the conversations toward fasād, a human-caused disorder, an arrogant mess-making that accelerates the world’s race to ruin. The storms of our times blow through the long-winded epoch known in Islamic terms as ākhīr al-zamān, the final times.

The common reference for fasād, usually translated as corruption, mischief, or evil (in Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian [BSC]: metež, korupcija), is the following verse in the Qur’an: Fasād has appeared in the land and the sea, because of what people’s hands have earned, that He may let them taste some consequences of their deeds, and that they may turn back from evil.²

The idea that natural catastrophes have become ample and manifest at present and have been earned by human deeds is the starting point for local conversations about human responsibility for the planetary crisis. Those conversations, by default, extend to contemplations about the human being as when my interlocutors ask, What is the humans’ role on Earth, and how did we, as a species, get here, to begin with? These questions serve as welcome pretexts for retelling key Qur’anic narratives, prophetic sayings, and their commentaries to make sense of the present. Telling of the near-end ecology, these stories return to the mythical beginnings to check the tendencies that drive the planet to ruin because the whole point of remembering the Qur’an is to turn back from evil, which means, as some translations of the verse above make more obvious, to return to God. At first look, local cosmological stories may sound merely fantastic or theistic and, therefore, incomparable with the sober prose of operational documents that assess the tolls of a past disaster or anticipate future risks and, moreover, irrelevant to the real and pressing challenge of grasping the implications of climate change.

Contemporary social thinkers, however, insist that the current scale and intensity of global environmental and climate crisis necessitate that we ask again: What is the human species like? What is the meaning of the human in the light of its evident capacity to drive its home planet to collapse. The answers reveal nothing short of late-modern human soul-searching.³

Policy documents written in the wake or in anticipation of extreme weather catastrophes in the Balkan region are themselves and despite themselves narratives of a near-end ecology. They take catastrophic weather as a fact of climate science and as an urgent pretext to define the key values at stake and the means of protecting them through the precarious times they anticipate. Steering away from questions of human responsibility, they project a bright future on account of a presentist cosmology.

Thinking through the fasād, Bosnian Muslim beekeepers and bee lovers regularly compare humans with honeybees and their respective relationships with the world and God. Unlike bees, humans are drawn to bonding with Shaitan, the devil, which achieves divine distance, another word for divine wrath. This is where the story gets complicated, and rather than getting ahead of myself, I will let several local storytellers untangle the fine threads of the cosmology that, with hand on chest, implicates each embodied being in responsibility for the world’s ruination, embroils our hearts’ beats with the crises blasting across the lands and the seas.

Hives in the Storm

No one knows how many hives were carried off by the floods or ruined in the aftermath of the 2014 storm. Beekeeping in BiH is a small agricultural sector in which most apiculturists are self-employed, off the records, while the small incomes they make—along with investments and losses—are rarely formally registered as such. Beekeepers, a well-networked, if diffused, professional community, estimated losses in thousands of hives. The story of Shaykh E.’s lost apiary gives an idea of the predicaments suffered by the beekeepers who were directly affected by the floods.

The cyclone that hit the country in May was extraordinary. Three months’ worth of rain fell within three days.⁴ The incoming storm gained force on its course through Bosnia’s mountains while the soil and the rivers had already been inundated by the snow thaw and heavy spring rains. The watershed in the lowlands swelled with volumes of water, timber, and stones that rushed in with the streams from the highlands.

The flooding was most catastrophic in the country’s northeast. The Bosna River, which flows northward through the country’s densely populated urban and industrial area, swept along mounds of environmental waste, casually deposited along its banks from meat, leather, steel, and cellulose factories, among others, and fed its toxic trail into the Sava, an international river that joins the Danube farther northeast in Belgrade, the Serbian capital. Other tributaries of the Sava hurled in waste and water from the rivers of eastern Bosnia, which are likewise massively polluted by the industries that run on coal and dispose of emetic loads of sludge and heavy metals to riverbeds. The Sava soared by tenfold of the average rate at which this flood-prone river reaches alarm thresholds.

Before the storm, the country’s mobile beekeepers traveled to the Sava River basin, known as Posavina, attracted, as every year before, by the prospects of nectar flow. The temperate riverine climate and expanses of black locust forest and false indigo thickets make this region the early point of departure for the annual cross-country honey hunt. The hives were parked in the fields fringed by black locust trees budding in the eye of the storm.

When the storm clouds blew past, these honey forage fronts were left far within the disaster zone. International relief experts, state agencies, and volunteers from across the country rushed to the region to help evacuate and assist the nearly one million people whose homes were submerged and whose water sources, crops, and food stocks were contaminated. In the wake of receding water, erosions and landslides followed while unexploded ordnances and land mines left over from the 1990s war were uprooted and widely replanted, randomly arming fields and trails.

Floods and landslides impeded traffic along the poorly maintained two-lane trunk roads that course through the region, while the small roads and earthen paths that beekeepers travel to seek out forage were rendered inaccessible. Hives were left in the swamped fields with the forage prospects ruined and beekeepers unable to evacuate or assist honeybees with emergency food.

That the beekeepers’ losses and predicaments were generally unrecognized was the staple complaint within the local apicultural community. An article published in a beekeeping magazine by an apiarist and biology high school professor expressed general grievances: “In all normal countries, the state ministries respond to situations like this with aid resources, while in our state they do not. Unfortunately, even [our]loud statements about the importance of bees, first of all as pollinators, were left unheard.”⁵

To secure governmental attention, beekeepers emphasized the bees’ wider pollination eco-service, couching their arguments in environmental and secular terms of the state’s formal discourse, which nonetheless failed to make an impression. Lack of financial assistance aside, the author complained about more general inconsideration shown by local levels of government toward the beekeepers and bees. A gross example was the aerial insecticide spraying conducted across the country, which targeted the mosquito populations that surged after the floods and inadvertently hurt the honeybees.

The author also made it clear that beekeepers’ concerns and losses extend beyond the storm and floods. The disaster, beekeepers commonly suggested, was an enduring event. Black locust forage was ruined, and the weather conditions remained worrisome: “We should ask ourselves: what if the rains and low temperatures persist and, God forbid, there is no chestnut, linden, or meadow flow?”⁶

The rest of the foraging season was as bleak as the author worried it might be. The weather did not go back to normal. Nor did the bad year begin with the May storm.

The year 2014 had been strange from the very beginning, beekeepers noted. Temperatures in mid-January were unseasonably high. High enough for early spring plants to bloom and offer up nectar and pollen, which in turn stimulated the “bee mothers” (queens) to lay eggs. The new brood in turn energized foragers’ field efforts, and the hives quickened with the expansive insect enthusiasm that grows community numbers, secures food supplies, and puts bees into the mood for swarming.

The hives’ spring expansion is typically supported by the saved stocks of the preceding year’s food, which are used sparingly over relatively dormant winters. They are then opened to feed the fully awakened insect appetites and fuel the tremendous effort of nurturing new bees and building wax. Ideally, the supplies would be replenished, first by the shy but steady nectar and pollen incomes from the early bloomers, then more substantially with fruit blossoms and, finally, with the windfall of strong honey flow by the late spring flora, such as black locust.

The trouble with false springs, which are unseasonably warm spells in late winter, is that they prematurely send cues to bees and their companion plants to embark on spring development whereas winter conditions are bound to set back in. And indeed, come February, temperatures dropped below freezing and honeybees withdrew into clusters, which is how the collective weathers the winters: the outer ring of bees shudders to keep the inner core warm. They take turns on the cold fronts. The prematurely expanded brood falls outside the cluster and so remains unheated. Suboptimal temperatures adversely affect the broods’ development with lasting consequences for the bees that hatch.⁷

If the nest expansion spent the hives’ honey supplies, the temperature drop locked the bees in without the fuel necessary to support the task of the cluster’s warming. Consequently, starvation became a real threat until warmer weather provided greater mobility and forage opportunities. Introducing emergency food at that point makes no difference because the clustering bees can neither reach nor process it.

Fruit trees bloomed next throughout the persistent rains in late spring, and the bees remained homebound. The black locust blossomed during the cyclone, and heavy showers persisted throughout the summer into the fall.

As one apiarist, Pašezad, puts it: “A beekeeper must buy sugar to prevent the bees from starving, and then his neighbor sees him and declares, loud enough for others to hear: ‘Nts. Nts. Nts.’ There goes the beekeeper, making ‘honey’!” This joke that Pašezad tells at apiculturists’ expense expresses deep local misgivings about the sugar in the hives.

Local beekeepers claim that honeybees overwinter poorly on exclusively sugar-based food supplies. Honey is a nutritionally rich and complex substance that besides carbohydrates contains a wide array of minerals, vitamins, enzymes, as well as traces of pollen, which itself is a rich substance. To provide the bees with essential nutrients and a prophylactic diet, local beekeepers advise preparing the bees for the winter with half or at least a third of food stores composed of “genuine honey.”

A bad year makes honey scarce and inflates suspicions about the authenticity of the honey offered for sale. Considering that honey is praised as a product of divine revelation, a nutritional supplement, a prophylactic, and a folk remedy, its purity is of high concern to Bosnian Muslims. It is a public secret that several honey-counterfeiting facilities operate in the country, while their technologies for simulating the appearance of honeybees’ honey, the beekeepers report, are notably advancing. Moreover, sugar that is fed to the bees is processed into honey, which, once harvested and short of laboratory analysis, does not betray its nonfloral origins. To the onlooking neighbors, there is hardly any difference between the emergency feeding of bees through dearth and deliberate attempts to produce sugar-based, fake honey for sale.

As another article published in BiH Beekeeper magazine suggested, the year 2014 disproved the local beekeepers’ traditional wisdom that exceptional nectar flow happens every four years, making up for one poor year and two mediocre years in the meantime. According to that count, 2014 was supposed to be a “golden year.” “Why is this happening to us? Weren’t there too many bad things already? Where is this leading to?” the author asks and ends by simply admitting: “Hard questions!”⁸

Honeybees, Humans, and Other Worlds

Hard questions were regularly raised in personal conversations about bees in the summer of 2014, while the contemplations went far, searching for the causes and meanings of the current catastrophe.

“Just look at the ecological disasters around us,” Hafiz Ahmed tells me. “What a fasād on earth we have made.” Over Turkish coffee in his office in mid-June, the tall, tranquil young man speaks in the language that casually combines concerns of ecology and the insights of the Revelation. “The global disappearance of the bees is the clear sign of the world’s undoing,” the Hafiz says.

Hafiz, which means “safekeeper,” is an honorific for the one who has memorized the Qur’an and who recites it regularly to keep the Book from being forgotten. Hafiz Ahmed is also a novice beekeeper, although his recent appointment as the main imam with the Islamic Community’s office in a northeastern Bosnian town has made him too busy for the bees.⁹ Just for the time being, he adds cheerfully. Inshallah, God willing, he will go back to beekeeping. Hafiz Ahmed recalls how difficult it was to memorize the Qur’anic chapter titled “The Bee.” While he studied it, the rhythm of its sounds struck him as particularly complex, and the calligraphy on its pages appeared to him as vigorous as a swarm.

He recites for me the verses of the “The Bee” chapter and gives a commentary: “We translate it as: ‘Your Lord revealed to the bee.’ The verb used in Arabic is ewh.ā, whose root letters make up the noun wah.y, ‘the Revelation,’ the same term which is used for the revelations received by the human prophets. The bee is given instructions on how to live and what to do. It lives by the Revelation it received while people often do not. If we followed the Revelation as wholeheartedly as the bees, there’ll be no fasād on Earth. Bees incline toward perfect harmony, toward keeping things together, within hives and outside.”

“What about other animals?” I ask.

Honeybees are special, the Hafiz says, then adds: “The way I see it, all creatures, actually, have a revelation of sorts and live by it. It’s what is meant by an ‘instinct.’ But the human is something else. It has the soul and a chance to disobey and err. This is why we need the Revelation, to discern the right from the wrong.”

Pausing to think, Ahmed says: “The honeybee is a symbol of beauty, purity, and striving in Islam. We Muslims ought to incline to be like bees.” It is easier said than done, he adjoins, observing that ecological values that are core to Islam are seldom appreciated. “Everything is, obviously, placed at human disposal. But that is why, precisely, we shouldn’t mess it with it. We see clear signs that things are off. We are altering the natural conditions under which bees and animals live, by polluting the air, the water, with our technologies we bring out new diseases . . . The human species will ruin itself. By running after profits, after whatever it is that leads them astray.”

According to Islamic sources, the human soul is a subtle reality that animates the body but occupies the metaphysical heart. The heart is that which constantly stirs and turns, from devotion to treachery, from hope to despair. The heart wavers between the nafs, the self-centered soul that aspires to be a god and tolerates no guidance, and the rūh, the spirit longing for God. Many things move the heart, which by its nature is already unstable, and receptive to influences. The heart is always weathering storms of conflicting thoughts and desires.

While descent of divine Revelation, in the sense of the Scriptures has ended with the Qur’an, the Hafiz says, a related state of inspiration is something that people experience all the time, and its nature depends on the condition of the human’s soul. “The inspiration can be ruhani or shaitani,” he adds. In other words, it can speak to and from the spirit, or it can arrive with shaitan, who whispers in the human breasts.¹⁰

“Honeybees are interesting, but they are only one of many worlds,” says Shaykh S., who has politely agreed to see me at Hafiz Ahmed’s recommendation. A son of a beekeeper, the soft-spoken, reserved, silver- bearded Sufi holds an appointment in the Islamic legal affairs office and, less publicly, occupies the post of spiritual elder or teacher. “This is why God is called the Lord of the Worlds. Worlds are different, but the God is One, which is why all the worlds, the visible and the invisible ones, are connected.”

Shaykh S. carries on: “Muslims believe in the world of angels and the jinn; those are worlds parallel to ours. We are limited to the visible reality, but all these other worlds are there, though we don’t perceive them. . . . Our own limitations are not the limitations on the reality itself. Our vision doesn’t go past our eyesight, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing else out there. Our eyes hit their limits, that’s all.”

Faith in ghayb is mandatory for Muslims, who believe in the Unseen [ghayb] and perform the prayer and give of that we have provided them.¹¹ Taking God at His word, this verse implies, presumes faith in what one cannot verify, and the faith is confirmed practically through compliance with commands and prohibitions aimed at the selfish nafs. Throughout, the Book couples faith with concrete acts—such as fasting, giving charity, weighing goods justly, keeping hope, and such, emphasizing choice: Whosoever does good, does so for his own soul’s gain, and whosoever does evil, it is to his own loss. Your Lord does not wrong His subjects.¹²

“It is not the bees who cause disorder.” Shaykh S. continues his outline of Islamic cosmology. “The human being alone can.” The jinn, too, according to the Qur’an, are prone to disorder, but the Shaykh stays focused on the human. Unlike other beings in the earthly world, the “human has the faculty of reasoning and relative freedom of choice, it can do good or make a mess. It will be held responsible,” Shaykh explains, implying an accountability that the Qur’an insists extends to the smallest details. And We shall set up the just balances for the Resurrection Day so that not one soul shall be wronged in the least: be the deed the weight of the mustard seed, we shall bring it forth. And We suffice as an Accountant.¹³

Ultimately, humans will be responsible for the world’s collapse, which Shaykh says is an event that may already be underway: “We usually imagine a single closing event—The End—but for all we know, the ending could be a slow process by which the worlds are vanishing, one by one.”

The Devil’s Prayer

“The natural order everywhere is being disrupted,” Adil reflects. Retired from his post as imam in a city mosque, Adil runs a branch of a Bosnian Muslim charity organization, Merhamet. In June 2014, the whole office was busy with humanitarian projects aiding the population affected by the floods and landslides.

“Bees are extremely important for the ecological system since they pollinate so many plants. And bees make medicine. But modern humans, who give priority to monetary values, have endangered the bees. There’s too much chemistry applied to eradicate insects, too much poison sprayed around. Mosquitos are now air-sprayed without us [the beekeepers] being forewarned. An apple tree is regularly treated with herbicides twenty to thirty times a year! That inevitably causes havoc in an ecology. A honeybee lands on the leaf and perishes. And without them, things can grow, but they don’t give a yield. The Divine laws in nature are being disrupted, whereas the Dear God orders a respect for nature. And when the bees disappear, the people too will disappear.” Adil delivers the point matter-of-factly and pauses to pour more coffee into delicate white finjans.

In the years to come, Imam Adil will become one of my mentors in beekeeping and gardening, especially once his retirement affords him full-time residency on his paternal land. My sister and I will spend time at his village apiary following him in practical tasks—grafting, swarm catching—admiring the latest ingenious apiary devices that he has invented—a bee smoker out of a recycled can that keeps the smoke steady, for one—as well as his resourcefulness—his work pants’ pockets are stuffed with an array of essential tools. We do not hide being impressed, and Adil graciously accepts the compliments with bouts of deep-throated laughter.

In the summer of 2014, Adil’s mood is more sober. Dressed simply but well in a fine woolen pullover and a tipped black beret, typical of an older generation of urban Bosnian Muslims, Adil is a storyteller animated by spurts of bright energy.

“By working, an insan [a loan word from the Arabic insān, a human] is supposed to contribute to the natural order. Whenever he fails to do so, nature responds with a slap. Someone says to himself: ‘Too many birds around here, I’ll get rid of them,’ but then locusts come or caterpillars multiply and ruin everything. So it goes, whenever humans act on their whim. And of all the beings on Earth, the human is the most accountable. The human should really act as a khalifah [Arabic for a successor, representative, or vicegerent] and contribute to the world in that role. After all, that’s what God had appointed him to do. But khalifah is devout, a man of faith and a man of faith is a good-doer. Faith without good deeds is like a tree that bears no fruits.”¹⁴

“How is the human appointed to this role?” I ask, and Imam Adil indulges my curiosity.

“God created nature—earth, skies, and so on. Everything that we know and so much in cosmos that is ghayb, unknown to us. Earth was brought about, and time passed. Then, one day, God asks the angels and the jinn, the sun and the moon, He asks the mountains: ‘Will you take up the responsibility for the earth, the khīlafah?’ Everyone politely declines, except for the human. Our kind is hasty. Since then, Adam and his progeny carry on the khīlafah on earth. Everything bids them service, for the love of God. But as a khalifah, the human is the most responsible one: to ensure that the natural laws are respected and that the balance isn’t disturbed. But you see how that goes. Pollution, disruption . . .”

“And the beekeeping? How does it relate to being khālifah or being devout?” I intercept. Instead of replying, Imam Adil startles me with a counterquestion: “Why is Shaitan [Satan] a sworn enemy to the human?” Without waiting for me to answer, he carries on with the story of human origins.

“Once Adam took up the post, God invites all the heavens’ residents to honor the human with a sajdah [prostration]. The angels are incredulous—‘You’ve appointed the species that is prone to fasād, mess-making? While we adore you so faithfully,’ they said, feeling slighted. Still, everyone complies, except Shaitan by the name of Iblīs, who was a respected jinn. So devout he was at the time, that he earned pride of place among the angels.

‘Why should I honor him whom You’ve created from lowly earth? And I am made of a smokeless flame,’ Iblīs says proudly and then points out: ‘This kind would kill his own brother! He should honor me, instead.’ He argues and argues, clever as he is, but the point he missed is that it was God’s order that he scoffed at.

‘Very well,’ God says in turn, ‘you earned yourself the Fire [Jahannam].’ Iblīs bites his lip. Then he says: ‘Have I not been a good subject of yours thus far? Do I not deserve to have a prayer heard? So, here, I implore You: defer my exile until the end of time, so I can bring to ruin all who are willing to come along with me.’ And God grants Shaitan’s wish. Then He swears: ‘But you will never sway my sincere subjects.’

And so, from then on, Shaitan will not leave humans at peace. If someone wants to do some good or perform the prostration in prayer, Shaitan strives to distract him. . . . He is busy, working to ruin the world.”

The look on my face must tell Imam Adil that I am at a loss, still waiting for the founding myth to deliver an explicitly ecological or apicultural point.

Imam Adil kindly clarifies: “Ever since, God has been sending prophets to the humans to guide them. Faith is an intrinsic part of life and of the order in nature. Everything I do, everything about my life relates to my faith (imān). I’m striving not to be swayed by Shaitan.”

A Jinn Epidemic

As Shaykh S. has said, the faith in ghayb is incumbent on practicing Muslims. Angels, jinn, and Shaitan are invoked in the Qur’an not as metaphors but as resident beings in a cosmos composed of many worlds as well as characters involved in a range of quotidian relationships with humans.

At the same time, in BiH, rationalist philosophy and scientific naturalism practically define medical, legal, and scientific realities of the modern state and exercise a powerful hold on commonsense notions of what is real and possible. Institutions and ideologies of scientific socialism waged a war on “folk superstitions,” pitting religious rites against the tenets of modern life and secular science. Bosnian Muslim Islamic tradition, given its Ottoman and Oriental history, was perceived as particularly embarrassing to socialist Yugoslav aspirations to, essentially, a Western modernity.

After Yugoslav socialism fell apart in BiH, as a political economy and a cultural project of forging secular, socialist identities that were ethnically mute, some modern Bosnian Muslims underwent religious reeducation. Since the 1990s, Islam had been returning to public life, coloring the forms of Muslim ethnic identity and political affiliation. In a quieter manner, Islam was undergoing rediscovery and a reevaluation as a private resource for thinking about the world and caring for the self.

Shaykh E., the Sufi elder who lost his apiary to the floods, is one of many experts whom people seek out with life and health issues that cannot be grasped by biomedical diagnostics or rational explanations. Patients complain that places, homes, and objects have turned threatening and unstable; their bodies and skins have been exposed to deeply disturbing influences; their feelings, words, and acts have become strange, savage, destructive, and out of character. Consultations entail taking a physical examination and a detailed health history. The ultimate test, however, is the patient’s response to the therapist’s recitation of the Qur’an. A strong, allergic reaction to the Qur’anic verses is taken as an indication of jinn-meddling influences.

Otherwise, jinn are subtle beings. Unless they interfere, they live side by side with humans and animals, as unnoticeable as the microbes that pervade our environment. The combination of j-n-n consonants in the Arabic root word connotes veiling. Jinn are hiding in plain view: think of a garden (jannah) where light plays hide-and-seek through the trees’ canopies. Think of a fetus (jinnīn) enveloped in multiple membranes beneath the skin of an expanded belly. Or think of madness (junūn) that is said to veil reason. The word’s etymology relates jinn to familiar things and so helps flesh out the ordinariness of their presence, despite their occult reputation.

Although intangible, jinn are a worldly species. Corporeal, mortal, and gendered, they hunger, drink, and couple, lust and long, err and ache. Animal-like in their carnal lives and kindred to humans by virtue of their willful souls, jinn bodies are composed of an element finer than human clay yet coarser than the light that makes up the angels.

Moreover, jinn are environmental agents. “They feed on phosphorous,” Sufi elder Shaykh Ayne tells me, providing a clue to the jinn’s worldwide range. Phosphorous is a mineral element ubiquitous on our planet. Variously bound with oxygen, it builds phosphate, an essential nutrient for all living organisms. In staple foods—meat, eggs, dairy, whole grains, and potatoes—and the fizz of soda drinks, it courses through our diets, growing and repairing tissues and cells. It builds mammalian teeth and bones. The phosphate-rich human urine joins the wider environmental phosphorus cycle that moves the element from the kidneys to the soil, rivers, and oceans. Modern agriculture and hygiene habits flush excessive amounts of phosphorus with fertilizers and detergents into waterways. In short, the jinn’s diet makes them our close companions in the biosphere while moderns conspicuously generate a food surplus of the fiery species’ essential nutrients.¹⁵

While jinn live in communities that are as multicultural and religiously plural as are human societies, their igneous nature makes the species temperamental, arrogant, “and intellectually unstable.”¹⁶ All jinn feed on phosphorous, but some thrive on energies generated through human rupture, wreckage, and waste. Jinn are affective parasites; they nourish themselves on the discharges of the nafs gone wild with toxic feelings of grief, greed, or rage.

Whereas traditionally jinn were said to reside on lonely and lowly grounds, in graveyards and garbage dumps, in sewage and rubble, late-modern industrial and consumer culture has widened the jinn range. In contemporary BiH, communal and toxic waste is deposited in neighborhoods and environmentally unregulated landfills, mixed into asphalt, industrial toxins pave the regional highways, fed into watershed and illegally incinerated, they saturate the very air.¹⁷ Floods and landslides ruin homes and gardens, disturb former frontlines, wash out entire cemeteries, and destroy livelihoods and savings. Disasters bring humans uncomfortably and irresistibly close, and the jinn negotiate the interspecies contact with ambivalence.

Shaykh E. treats the current surge in jinn disorders among his patients caused by fatal encounters between the two species. The length, frequency, and particulars of the treatment are established on a case-by-case basis.

Shaykh E., however, insists that his patients undertake a home treatment as well. If they protest that they are incompetent, Shaykh says: “I tell them: you can do it! It’s not me healing you anyhow. I cannot heal you; I personally have no such powers. God heals you. I can only plead on your behalf, but, really, this issue is between you and God—you ought to carry on with praying (trebaš učit). God doesn’t want your money, he doesn’t need any gifts, but he wants that stiff neck of yours to bow down,” Shaykh says excitedly, with a slap to his forehead.

His gesture signals a sajdah. The position of prostration with one’s forehead to the ground is a key moment in the daily ritual prayer (salat) and an utterly embodied act of surrender, which the devil refused to perform at God’s bidding. The position humiliates nafs and affords to rūh a daily audience with God from which to seek divine closeness and protection.¹⁸ More broadly, his choice of words (učiti) recommends the recitation of the Qur’an in and outside the ritual prayer. Shaykh E., in short, is reminding his patients to observe the prescribed prayers as a trusted means of mending the distance between humans and God, the vector of jinn infection.

Honey, the other product of divine revelation, is said to be the only foodstuff that the jinn and Shaitan cannot contaminate. As is the case with honey used in the contemporary pharmaceutical industry and posttraumatic care, medical-grade honey is defined by its purity: it is uncontaminated by xenobiotics and undiluted by sugar. With prayers recited over it, honey is prescribed as doubly efficacious, and Shaykh E.’s patients consume it for the length of the treatment. With his apiary ruined, Shaykh urges patients to obtain their own supplies of “genuine honey” (pravi med).

Etiology of Fasād

The jinn epidemic aside, metaphysical ailments that preoccupy devout Bosnian Muslims—and Sufis and their guides, in particular—concern more prevalent, intimate, and altogether insistent interferences. Known as disorders of the metaphysical heart or the metaphysical insān, these are dispositions and desires that string together a human heart and no one other than Shaitan.

Iblīs, whom Imam Adil’s story described as conceited and clever, enraged by the show of divine affection toward humans, is the original Shaitan, but the name now denotes many, both jinn and human, because the devil is not a species but a membership in a professional club.

Beekeeper Mustafa, an old acquaintance whom I meet at his small kiosk in town one day in the summer of 2014, tells me: “When Iblīs saw how beautiful was Adam, peace be on him, he got so jealous, so jealous! He was about to burst with envy. But then he noticed that Adam was hollow, and, overjoyed, Iblīs held his peace.”

“Hollow?” I asked.

The hour was slow, and Mustafa, waiting for customers, was passing the time while reading the Qur’an. “Yup,” he replies, “hollow. With bodily openings through which Shaitan can come in. He moves through the human body, with blood.”

The devil has always inspired a wide range of contemplations in Islamic sources. A dear friend, Zejd, a dervish groomed at the side of a luminary Bosnian Shaykh, suggests a more expansive image.

“Shaitan courses with blood,” Zejd writes to me. “It’s the virus. It’s the thought. It is what day is to night. God creates the night and couples it with the day. And of everything, we created pairs.¹⁹ God brings about an angel that inspires beautiful thoughts, from the right-hand side and God gives the left, the side of Shaitan. He makes everything in pairs and He remains single, uncoupled, peerless. This all brings us back to the beginning, since before the time.”

The human quarrel with Shaitan and Shaitan’s pact with God, Zejd implies, make up the primordial, offsetting tension within binary complementaries that underly the cosmos and the nature of humans. When Shaitan is defined as so fluid and restless—coursing, mutating—and so involved with one’s person—it circles through the veins, it whispers to the human heart—discerning its presence or doings seems like a feat. At all times, Shaitan is coupled with nafs, the soul self, and this coupling inclines the heart back and forth, from left to right, from good to evil, from day to night.

The Qur’an calls Shaitan a “manifest enemy” and warns people not to follow in Shaitan’s footsteps. That which is manifest is sometimes hardest to discern, save for its traces. Footsteps are what you follow on the trail of someone who is leading but also evading. O you who believe, do not follow the footsteps of Shaitan. And whoever follows the footsteps of Shaitan, surely, he bids to indecency and evil.²⁰ An intangible being known by its traces, Shaitan compels and seduces, reasons and advises, flatters and distracts with deceiving promises, all while flaring up feelings and dispositions that spoil the human heart.

The devil leads astray those who believe—to whom the verses are addressed—as well as whosoever follows. Because faith alone, implicitly, is not enough to tell or resist Shaitan, its insidious influence requires investigation and self-inquiry. Likewise, a belief is not the condition for the devil’s company or his appeal.

It takes an insight to tell a devil, Sufis suggest. An experienced guide helps one to get to know one’s self, God, and Shaitan, and tell them apart. This knowledge is exercised in a day-to-day effort to cultivate a virtuous heart, a heart fit for meeting God.

Working on one’s heart is, ideally, an everyday Muslim project. The Qur’an suggests as much: On the Day when neither wealth nor sons will avail save for one who comes to God with a pure heart.²¹ Purification of the heart presumes cleansing or growing of the soul: Indeed, fortunate is the one who purifies it. And, indeed, fails the one who obscures it.²²

Fulfilling ritual obligations purifies the heart. Humbleness and sincerity are prerequisites, so prostration becomes the threshold from which to begin. If the heart bows gladly, the inner journey onward to the divine vicinity begins, even before death and the world’s end usher in the day of standing before God.

Sufis who are Muslims devoted to lifelong “polishing of their hearts,” as the metaphor frequently goes, have written discourses and practical manuals on the subject of metaphysical illnesses and their treatments throughout history. One cherished reference in a close circle of readers in BiH drawn to Sufism is the book titled the Heart’s Health and Illnesses of Metaphysical Insān.

A translation and commentary of the sixteenth-century work by Imam Birgivi by a remarkable thinker, Bosnian Sufi Shaykh Mustafa Čolić, the book is a veritable diagnostic and treatment manual for sixty metaphysical ailments.

Among them is jahl, ignorance, which can be either simple and treatable with education that stirs up heart’s curiosity, or complex, as in the of case of the arrogant folk who take their single-mindedness as a license for passing judgment on the God and others in the world. Other diagnostic terms include ujub, self-satisfaction, and the closely related kibur, arrogance. Shaykh Čolić describes self-satisfaction as a case of smugly mistaking divine bestowals for one’s own virtues and gains. Arrogance is assuming greatness, which rightfully belongs to God alone. Metaphysical illnesses arise from an array of interconnected causes and exhibit overlapping symptoms—arrogance is a form of ignorance, for instance. The bottom line is that treating metaphysical illnesses requires changing a way of life because the self is inseparable from relationships to the outward world. Fixing or worrying about the world at large starts by work first on the troublesome self.

Implicitly, Shaitan is an open enemy because he is aware of his subject relationship to God. Shaitan has never denied God: Indeed, I fear God, the Lord of the Worlds, says the devil in the verses of the Qur’an.²³ He refused to obey the divine command out of jealousy and a devotion that adored his own self-regard.

Shaitan is a clear enemy also because he has openly declared his intent to lead to ruin, and his knowledge of God presumes that he knows the difference between right and wrong, bliss and ruin. He intentionally misleads humans—and the jinn—and attracts them with promises he cannot fulfill. Once all is said and done, Shaitan will say: “God surely gave you a true promise and I promised you then failed you. I had no power over you, except that I invited you and you responded. So do not blame me, but blame yourselves; I cannot help you nor can you help me. I have nothing to do with the fact that you were associating me with God. As for the evildoers, there is the painful doom.”²⁴

Fig. 4.1 Heart medicine

Contemplating the devil, Zejd writes: “If Shaitan is a manifest enemy, what, then, are the secret enemies like?” Doing fasād, the Qur’an suggests, may be deliberate, deceitful, and wrongheaded but oblivious to the harm done: When they are told “Do not make fasād on earth,” they reply “But why, we are only peace-making.”²⁵ The secret enemies make of the mess a sound reason, a remedy for setting things right.

Lucifer 2017

In August 2017, a heat wave of blistering intensity engulfed Southern Europe. Temperatures soared from 38°C to 42°C (100°F–108°F). Dubbed “Lucifer” in the international media reports, the heat wave branded the extreme weather event with an infernal reference.

Lucifer worsened the already grave effects of the summer-long drought that gripped BiH along with the wider Balkan region and Mediterranean Europe. The heat wave further evaporated moisture from the ground surface, and parched soil and withered vegetation suppressed the chances of rainfall. With high temperatures persisting into the night, there was no respite for plants, animals, or people, and the heat stress built up across species. Consequences rippled out, and the countryside bore the brunt of the heat’s burden.²⁶

Fruit and produce farmers reported from their scorched fields: pastures yielded a single harvest where three had been expected. Trees and crops never bore fruit, or they shed the fruit unripe. Dairy cattle reduced milk yield, declined suckling calves, and abstained from feeding. Water sources in villages dried. Trees wilted and wildfires spread, especially across Herzegovina, the country’s Mediterranean south. The state’s firefighting response was typically underfunded and underequipped as well as hampered by the political blackmailing that regularly takes place across the two ethnically divided and belligerent administrative entities of the Bosnian state. As the wildfires raged, the federal government initiated a proposal to revoke firefighters’ hazard pay just as occupational risks were soaring, treating the climate-related emergency with a brazen disregard.

Farmers across the country had been calling for BiH entity governments to declare a state of natural disaster since April 2017 when late frost and snowstorms damaged the crops. As the year progressed and extreme heat set in, calls for formal declarations of an emergency multiplied. All were declined.²⁷

Droughts are rather discreet weather catastrophes and, in the absence of wildfires or famines, do not broadcast as dramatic threats to lives or property. Although it was region-wide and severe, the drought was ignored by the local government. At the time, public discussions of extreme weather and global climate change were practically absent in BiH, and the drought with Lucifer in tow was described as an age-old misfortune, a rare and passing phenomenon. The government’s inattentiveness, however, was not due to climate innocence. Rather, it was born of a postwar style of governance that doggedly narrowed the scope of domestic political concerns to ethno-national electoral interests to which climate and environment seem particularly irrelevant.

Since 2005, formal assessments of the country’s risk and vulnerabilities were periodically conducted by experts from the bipartite Bosnian state. These assessments highlighted droughts and floods as the country’s major future threats. They acknowledged that precipitation regimes have changed since the turn of the millennium and that prolonged dry periods alternated with events of severe rainfall. Because of its topography and poor infrastructure, the country was described as especially flood prone.

Massive flooding in 2010 had proved the state’s river management strategies to be seriously inadequate and its cross-border coordination politically hampered, providing cautionary lessons and blueprints for subsequent governmental assessments of disaster risks.²⁸ These routine assessments, however, had few practical implications, as some of the experts consulted in their drafting had complained of.

The storm of May 2014, however, became the watershed event for official accounts of the country’s climate future. The dramatic scale of flooding precipitated a high-profile international humanitarian response, and the demands for cleanup and recovery solicited offers of foreign loans and aid funds. By engaging the attention of the international relief and development industry, catastrophic weather events swiftly made climate change effects a concern of national governance.

In the weeks after the flooding, the BiH government, with technical and financial assistance from the European Union, UN agencies, and the World Bank, conducted an assessment of recovery needs. Published in anticipation of the upcoming International Donors’ Conference, the “Recovery Needs Assessment” framed the storm as an extreme weather event associated with global climate change.²⁹ Securing a pledge of €809.2 million in recovery funds, the BiH government formally agreed to implement flood prevention and flood risk management and to invest in a climate-resilient infrastructure.

The “Assessment,” moreover, predicted catastrophic futures: “The severity of extreme events like droughts, heat waves, forest fires and flooding has intensified over the last few decades. This trend is expected to accelerate in the future as a result of climate change, leading, together with changes in land-use patterns and increased human settlements in areas that are prone to disasters to increased hydro-meteorological and climate-related risks in the coming years.”³⁰

A disastrous future notwithstanding, financial opportunities fostered by disaster management were duly recognized: “It must be taken into consideration,” the “Assessment” reads, “that the disaster can create new possibility for prosperity through job creation programmes that could help jumpstart and expand growth through the recovery process and reconstruction investment.”³¹

A focus on disaster management renders extreme weather a purely economic matter. Climate change itself is redefined not as the mounting catastrophe with unknown consequences for life on Earth but as an emergent landscape of risks and opportunities. For as long as economic losses are minimized or recompensed, the climate future can be anything. Except apocalyptic. Economy bears the language of crisis, collapse, and depression but not the tone of warnings that intimates finite values or a closed horizon of economic development.

Seek Refuge from the Devil

“The region’s future, according to the latest World Bank projections, is bright.” So begins an opinion statement by the World Bank’s director for the Western Balkans, issued in 2018. The optimistic projections derive from the indicators of economic growth, such as rates of employment, higher wages, and improved living standards.

The director’s statement continues on a cautionary note. “However, there are clouds gathering on the horizon. In parallel to this welcome growth, climate and disaster risks are also increasing, putting vulnerable communities in jeopardy.”³² The 2014 drought and the 2017 drought accompanied by the heat wave are cited as proof of “how vulnerable the region is to climate-related shocks.”³³ The director’s statement goes on to say that “weather extremes like these are fast becoming the new normal—by the end of the century, in fact, average regional temperatures could rise by as much as 4 degrees Celsius or more above pre-industrial levels. This would mean more frequent droughts, reduced agricultural production, severe water shortages, and less hydropower energy—threatening to disrupt decades of important development gains. This is simply too high a cost.”³⁴

Implementation of climate-smart policies, the World Bank further suggests, would safeguard development and help the region adapt to “whatever weather comes its way.” The climate-smart policies promoted include a range of legal, infrastructural, and financial initiatives, envisioned and underway across the Western Balkans.³⁵

A year later, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) revealed a climate change adaptation plan for the Balkans. Part of an “ambitious climate action across the world,” the plan largely amounts to managing risks with climate finance.

Opening with dire forecasts—“annual flood losses in BiH are expected to increase 5-fold by 2050 and 17-fold by 2080”—the document lays out a series of plans to develop financing frameworks and solutions, including incentivizing the private sector to take part in climate action, for instance, by making insurance companies capable of accepting flood risks.

Optimistic projections of a bright future whatever weather comes are the norm for policy documents that discuss climate change with eyes on sustaining economic development. The Third National Communication, reporting on the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and vulnerabilities to climate change, which the UNDP BiH prepared under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, gives a broader overview of the projected impacts of global warming on the country.

Included in the report are accounts of the high sensitivity of local ecosystems to the current and projected warming trends and expectations of endemic species extinction.³⁶ Nonetheless, the report reiterates the country’s commitment to achieving sustainable development and envisions a “sustainable and prosperous ‘green economy’ by 2025, with low emissions, a high quality of life for everyone, preserved natural ecosystems, sustainable natural resources management and high level of climate resilience. . . . Negative impacts of climate change will be minimized by reducing vulnerability and taking advantage of opportunities brought about by climate change.”³⁷

These policy documents are genres of near-end ecologies. Extreme weather disasters figure prominently in forecasts that nonetheless remain bright because of a particular cosmology they presume. A shallow cosmology, focused on the plenitudinous present, does not look back in history to inquire about the past conditions of capital accumulation. The carbon economy that fuels development and recklessly drives the emissions of greenhouse gases in the meantime is entirely omitted from the account and along with it, questions of consumer, national, or corporate responsibility. Unburdened by history and focused on the immanent economic values at hand, these near-end ecologies can sustain the myth of development as the timeless and everlasting goal. Humans are presumed to be a lone species, outside ecological relationships and described obliquely by the metrics of the market: income and life standard. Vulnerability to disaster is likewise a property of a thoroughly economic being.

Issued as veritable prophecies, these end ecologies are not faithless, as they believe the capacity of capital to mend the ills, avert the threats, and eternally transcend the material and finite conditions of its generation. Nor are they godless. In the words of Ibn al-‘Arabī: “There’s no one who is not beseeching for something precious to them,” nor is there anyone in dire circumstances who is not returning to God, however conceived, when all other possibilities are exhausted.³⁸ Brands of pure monotheism, the stories of weather disaster risk management devotedly invoke the one god of development by its many names: the green, the sustainable, the democratic.

The Prophet of Islam has bequeathed a prayer of protection to his community that says: I seek refuge in You from the accursed Shaitan, from his madness, his pride, and his poetry. The prayer suggests that Shaitan stalks even prophets; no one is immune to the devil’s meddling. Poetry in the Qur’an is often a reference to well-composed, compelling messages that pose as Revelation. Shaitan’s madness is his wish itself: instead of pleading for salvation or asking for forgiveness, while there is still time, he prays to bring others to ruin. He is in a rush, for he knows that every moment, the End is as close as ever. The root letters of the Arabic word for Shaitan, Zejd points out, also spell the word “neckbreaking.” The Devil’s earthly career earns him eternal fire, but the divine distance he already enjoys is the hell earned to him at present.

Apiculture through Drought

“It’s all about climate. Climate, climate, and climate. Climate!” Sead says, his bewilderment giving rise to this flustered rhyme. It is July 2017, and we are meeting at his apiary, situated on his paternal land in a village in Western Bosnia. For forty-five years, Sead has run a small apiary here with his wife’s help. A small dacha by the hives’ side makes the apiary the couple’s favorite weekend retreat. Sead’s knowledge of the local flora, its seasonal life cycles, and the ambient climate is deep, patiently built over years of observation. He says he remembers a different apicultural rhythm.

Throughout the mid-1980s, he and his wife would harvest the first batch of honey by the tenth of July—a mix of linden and meadow—then return the empty combs to the bees and drive to the Adriatic coast with their children for a family vacation. Back from the seaside, Sead would harvest another thirty kilograms of honey per hive before the end of August while also leaving the bees with plentiful honey for winter supplies.

That Sead’s records of honey harvests are so closely matched to the memories of his family’s vacationing schedule speaks to the ease with which beekeeping was once done. He remembers it as a sweet summer routine. “That was beekeeping, that was nature, that was paradise for both us and the bees! But now, a bee lives on sugar. What sustenance can it draw from sugar? Bare carbs, enough to move its wings and survive. But proteins, minerals, vitamins, everything vital is missing. So, you can add things up.”

At a time when public discourses on global warming were rarely conducted in Bosnia, Bosnian Muslim beekeepers regularly reflected on the deranged weather in the language of climate.³⁹ The implications apiarists complained about were practical and immediately discernible. At the same time, because apiculturists’ foraging year is contingent on the quality of the past summer’s forage, the bees’ wintering success, and the fact that each foraging season determines the outlooks of the year to come, the apiarists’ perspective always extends to the near past and projects ahead, to the near future.

At the turn of 2017, beekeepers across the country reported exceptionally high winter losses, which most attributed to infections by the varroa mite, which were exacerbated by the poor quality of winter food supplies. Honey had been getting progressively scarcer since 2014. In 2016, beekeepers reported honey harvests to be 20 percent of their annual average.

Then came 2017, twice as bad. The signs of spring rushed in too early, prematurely initiating the plants’ and bees’ development. As the fruit trees blossomed, a heavy snowstorm blanketed the region in late April, devastating forage and trapping the populous bee societies inside their nests to feed on precious food stores.

In June 2017, the clement weather seemed promising, but then the heat rose, ushering in a drought. Temperatures spiked above 38°C (100°F), high enough to discourage Carniolan honeybee foragers from flying. Regional trees and plants such as linden and blackberry brambles are adapted to more moderate air temperatures. Their nectar fades above 32°C (89°F). The heat wave set in when the August meadow was expected to supply the bees’ winter food stocks.

“Nothing smells, everything is so arid!” Sead says. He notes the loss of a sensuous clue that orients beekeepers to the local places and seasons, each marked by distinctive fragrances that trigger ambient moods and memories. Sead’s remark is not sentimental but biographical and ecological. Floral scents are part of lived human local histories and make up apian memories, inherited and learned by foragers who use them to navigate to and assess the offerings of plants. The missing scent is an indication of dearth, and dearth’s recurrence is a sign of a breaking bond between partner species.⁴⁰

“So the bees are hungry and beekeepers will resort to feeding them sugar,” Sead carries on.

In 2014, local beekeepers worried about feeding sugar to bees. By 2017, such emergency feeding had become routine. Artificial feeding manages the crisis, but, the local beekeepers worry, it compromises the bees’ endurance in the long run and proves beekeeping unviable.

“All in all, our beekeeping is on a downward slope, I don’t know how it will all end.” As president of the local beekeepers’ organization, Sead has a firsthand feel for the apicultural trends: “It expanded several years ago, young people were drawn into it, it was, well, promising, you could see a future in it, but now . . . You can’t sustain the bees unless you turn to your savings, if you have any.”

Contemporary biologists tend to describe honeybees as an extremely resilient species because of traits that helped this highly adaptive generalist pollinator spread and thrive across the earth’s different climates. Compared with wild pollinators, Apis mellifera, the honeybee, is presumed to be better able to withstand the projected impacts of climate change, although the insect is already deeply compromised by intensive management and the anthropogenic environments. In fact, a rare attempt to speculate about climate futures of honeybees based on the assessment of the prevailing pressures upon the species state a concern that “climate-induced stress will in future compound the various factors already endangering the species in certain regions of the world.”⁴¹ Such concern seem rather conservative especially considering the fact that there is a scarcity of experimental and field research on the subject, and that projections of pollinator futures rarely consider extreme weather events and extreme climate years.⁴²

Local beekeepers’ experiences give further reasons to doubt the confidence in honeybees’ resilience to the warming climate. Weather extremes further aggravate the mounting effects of estranged seasons and weird weather on honeybees and their partner plants, and they thwart local beekeepers’ best strategies for traveling and planting.

Human Responsibility

“How has the year been, so far?” I ask.

“Worse than ever,” Sulejman replies drily. My sister Azra and I meet this beekeeper in Western Bosnia in late July 2017. A thoughtful and versatile apiarist, Sulejman keeps his several hundred hives on the wheels for the length of the blooming season. Electronic hive scales message daily updates from the wide forage range, and he visits the field hives frequently to discern firsthand the current outlooks of the bees’ forays. He also keeps hives closer to home, on the land that he enthusiastically plants with melliferous trees and plants, including phacelia, buckwheat, and lavender, and which he manages without synthetic pesticides.

His hives are currently set up in six locations, poised for chances of honey flow at different altitudes and across a range of microclimates, from riverine to mountainous. The flow, however, has been scant from the very beginning of the year.

“And now the drought! But the entire year has been catastrophic. It has brought the bees and beekeepers to the edge,” Sulejman says, lighting up a cigarette. Azra rolls tobacco, and I see the two smokers tacitly bond over the silent pauses that smoking brings to a conversation. It is the first time we have met, and Sulejman, a thoughtful man in his late forties, gives us his sense of the times:

“The weather is becoming more extreme. Nectar and pollen losses over the year can now be total. The nectar has dried out at one thousand meters above the sea level. Plants there, too, are scorched! Imagine, then, what is it like [at the altitudes] below. Nectar is flowing somewhat in Trnopolje valley [in northwestern Bosnia] due to an abundance of small lakes and river channels. The plants look fresher there and the bees can collect at least enough for themselves. Otherwise, all’s dry. It rained two nights ago, but the soil was so parched you could not tell the difference afterward. It didn’t help the plants. It’s an exceptionally hard year.”

This apiarist tends not to speak much, so when he gets going, we do not interrupt.

Sulejman’s beekeeping enterprise is exceptionally lucrative for the local standards because of the bee venom he has been professionally collecting for export to the North American pharmaceutical market.⁴³ Thanks to the venom export, Sulejman is not commercially dependent on honey harvests, nor is he pressed to finance the apiary losses with savings, regular incomes, or retirement checks, as is commonly the case with local beekeepers. This is the predicament that Sead was highlighting in the quote above. And yet a sound and steady supply of honey and pollen to the hives is indispensable for a sustainable venom collection venture, as only strong bee societies can afford to dispense and replenish a high expenditure of venom.

Sulejman manages his hives intensively, in the sense that he is doing his utmost to keep the bees’ societies numerically strong, healthy, and fully employed throughout the nectar season. The care Sulejman shows for the bees’ health and well-being, however, seems just as intense. Over the subsequent years of our acquaintance, I learned that he uses organic pesticides, makes his own supplemental food for the hives, and has made a number of adjustments to the design of standard bee boxes to give the bees a freer range in managing the nest’s order and hygiene.⁴⁴ Given all his professional strivings, Sulejman’s description of the year as “exceptionally hard” and of “the bees and the beekeepers on the edge” implies that apiculture is viable only insofar as the local ecologies allow for the seasonal syncing of weather, plants, and bees’ cycles of growth, work, and rest.

Sulejman’s apicultural practice also rests on a deeper sense of human responsibility and ecological connectedness between the human and the honeybee species.

“The fact that humans and bees are similar, is a sign (išaret) worth reflecting on. What is not good for the bees is not good for the humans, either. Because bees, too, have received the Revelation, just like we humans have. Just look how well their communities function. And we? A bee never lives just for herself but for the community and for the generations to come. And we? We think of the community narrowly—as of those gathered in a mosque for the Friday prayer. Community is whenever we gather to talk and act! We are wasting and polluting our nature, and someone ought to be able to live after us. How many believers (mumini) are aware of it? You know, for one, that our Prophet, peace be on him, advised us to use water sparingly. Whomever cares not to waste water while taking ritual ablutions is rewarded.”

The point of departure for Sulejman’s thinking is the presumed core similarity between humans and honeybees. The divine revelation that the two species have in common is the basis for thinking critically about human ways, but the species’ affinity is also taken as an indication of their joined fates: struggling bees forebode trouble for humans, Sulejman suggests. His critique moves from humans in general to Muslims, and Bosnian Muslims, in particular: professing faith alone, Sulejman objects, is not enough to honor the gift of Revelation.

An Islamic community, according to Sulejman, is not confined to strictly ritual circumstances but is assembled on every occasion of shared words and deeds. The prophetic advice he cites is an example of how small ritual acts are steeped into responsible care for the earth and the elements that Islam inextricably connects to the rites of worship. Ritual ablution, being a prerequisite for an audience with God in daily prayers and for the handling of the Qur’an, Sulejman makes exemplary of the kind of wider ecological considerations that are expected of an ideal Muslim, the ideal embodied by the Prophet.

“Iqrā, we are told,” Sulejman says, referring to what is generally taken to be the first command that God issued to the Prophet of Islam, “The incitement to learn, to take interest in knowing is not given for nothing. For nothing around us is random, there is no such thing as an accident. The traits of soil itself, say if it’s acidic, determine which plants will grow and how well they will yield nectar. God is perfect and gives nothing but perfect arrangements in nature. And God is present on every square meter of the earth,” Sulejman finishes his thought and follows it with a long pause. He smokes in silence.

The divine command, iqrā, is translated as “read” or “recite” and, more generally, “proclaim” or “transmit.” The subsequent verses of the Qur’anic chapter that begins with the command connect the recitation of divine revelation to God’s generous teaching of the human what he knew not.⁴⁵ Qur’anic commentaries highlight knowledge as the quality that distinguishes al-insān, the human, from other species.

The wider meaning of iqrā is suggested by the translation of the Arabic original to BSC as uči, the imperative form of a verb that denotes learning, studying, and, among Bosnian Muslims, reciting the Qur’an. Sulejman’s interpretation follows the lead in a wide sweep, which goes from the Book to nature, which in Islamic thinking figures as the material form of divine revelation, where sensuous things are signs of a divine active presence. Taking interest, for the insān, entails taking responsibility.

“The fact that we have placed the bees in hives makes us, makes me responsible and accountable to God. If the bees were over there in some tree trunk, it would be none of my business but since I have chosen their dwelling place for them, I am responsible to God for everything that the box implies. Because everything will testify against us or on our behalf. But how many people think that way? This is why it is often said that Sufis aren’t living by the standards of this world, they have turned toward God, wholeheartedly. A few can understand them. Trouble is, so many people adore their own selves. They are at the mercy of their nafs. Shaitan has preoccupied them. They begin evaluating everything by means of money, run after profits.”

The Qur’an says: “You will receive what you wish for. If you desire the goods of this world, you will get them. If you desire the goods of the next world, you will get them.” What really matters, at the end of the day, is to do some good to someone.

Responsible apiculture is mindful of God’s accounting. The perfect God keeps track of every meddling with the perfect order on Earth, in which He is present. And God is enough as a witness.⁴⁶ The fasād, the mess-making, Sulejman traces to one’s self, the nafs. When a self reflects nothing but the self, occluding God’s trace breathed into the rūh, the soul’s bright counterpart, the human is an intimate with Shaitan. Intimacy whispers of desires for the goods and values of this world and the drives that wrack it. Implicitly, the drive to ruin has no other root than divine generosity, for whatever people want, the All-Merciful gives.

“You know what dervishes do in the Sufi lodges?” Sulejman asks next. “They are employed with grooming their souls and they do so by being at a service of a Shaykh. That’s how it is with me and the bees: like a dervish, I am at their service.”

Responsible beekeeping, effectively, opposes fasād. It resists Shaitan by working on the beekeeper’s soul. Responsible beekeeping may not manage to save the bees, and it does not aspire to avert the world’s collapse, but it presumes that the state of the world is inseparable from the affairs of the heart.

“We may be among the last generations of beekeepers,” he says the last time we meet in 2020.

“You think?” I ask.

“We hope not, but it may just be so.” He says it flatly, the composed man he is. Then he gets practical, advising me on how to build better bee boxes, the kind that are easy on the beekeeper’s back and whose handling does not disrupt so much the bees’ ways of dwelling.

NOTES

1.50:16.

2.30:41.

3.See, for instance, Ben Dibley, “Anthropocene: The Enigma of ‘The Geomorphic Fold,’” in Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-Human Futures, ed. Human Animal Research Network Editorial Collective (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2015), 19–32; Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (New York: Earthscan, 2015); Foster, After Sustainability.

4.In some areas, 250 to 300 liters of water poured per square meter, per day. The rainfall was the heaviest recorded ever since meteorological stations in the country started tracking precipitation rates in 1894.

5.BH Pčelar, “Pogledi u nebo i molba Svevisnjem, Sulejman Alijagic,” BH Pčelar 36, June 15–August 15, 2014.

6.Ibid.

7.Brood nest temperature is regulated in the range from 33 degrees Celsius to 36 degrees Celsius. The brood initiated in late winter is significantly smaller in size and kept by the clustering bees at 33 degrees Celsius. Development of the brood at suboptimal temperatures has a range of implications, including higher mortality inside cells, shortened longevity of adult workers, impairment of short-term learning and memory of adult workers, altered wing morphology, and disease prevalence. See Julia C. Jones et al., “The Effects of Rearing Temperature on Developmental Stability and Learning and Memory in the Honey Bee, Apis mellifera,” Journal of Comparative Physiology A 191 (December 2005): 1121–1129, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-005-0035-z; Qing Wang et al., “Low-Temperature Stress during Capped Brood Stage Increases Pupal Mortality, Misorientation and Adult Mortality in Honey Bees,” PLoS 11, no. 5 (May 2016): e0154547, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0154547; K. Tan et al., “Effects of Brood Temperature on Honey Bee Apis mellifera Wing Morphology,” Acta Zoologica Sinica 51, no. 4 (2005): 768–771.

8.BH Pčelar, “Priroda da se okrenula protiv nas ili mi protiv nje? Nista ne bi od ‘zlatne godine,’ Rajko Radivojac,” BH Pčelar 36, June 15–August 15, 2014.

9.Islamic Community, Islamska Zajednica, is an institution that formally represents Muslims of BiH as well as Muslims in the wider region, including the countries of former Yugoslavia and Hungary and the diasporic Bosnian Muslims. For a helpful summary on the Islamic Community’s organization and history, see David Henig, Remaking Bosnian Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020).

10.114:5.

11.2:3.

12.41:46.

13.21:47.

14.For a thoughtful discussion of khīlafah, human vicegerency on Earth, see Tlili, Animals in the Qur’an, 115–123. For comparison, a more conventional reading is found in Richard Foltz, “‘This She-Camel of God Is a Sign to You’: Dimensions of Animals in Islamic Tradition and Muslim Culture,” in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 149–159.

15.BiH is apparently among the few countries left in Europe where phosphate concentrations in detergents are high (up to 30 percent) and unregulated. See Center for Ecology and Energy, “Deterdženti bez fosfata—napredak za okoliš,” Projects, posted January 2012, https://ekologija.ba/2017/05/22/deterdzenti-bez-fosfata/.

16.Ibn al-‘Arabi, Mekanska Otkrovenja, 62–74.

17.Industrial and household waste management in the country is nothing short of catastrophic. Unregulated, so-called wild (divlje) landfills are found in forests and in uncultivated meadows across the country. Town landfills are maintained in environmentally unsound locations and are entirely unequipped to handle the industrial and medical waste that they regularly receive. In addition, industrial enterprises deposit waste on their compounds or by the riverbanks or incinerate it in open pits, their fires visible to the passersby from the highway. Defunct industrial zones across the country store extremely toxic waste in shallow mounds or in containers that have deteriorated over time. Moreover, kruks, the by-product of toluene diisocyanate (TDI), used in the former chlor-alkaline industrial complex, has reportedly been confused for gravel and used for local road construction. See, for instance, Armin Kendić, “Kruks, živa i hlor u industrijskoj zoni: Opasan otpad prijeti zdravlju gradjana Tuzle,” Klix, March 5, 2016, https://www.klix.ba/vijesti/bih/kruks-ziva-i-hlor-u-industrijskoj-zoni-opasan-otpad-prijeti-zdravlju-gradjana-tuzle/160304151.

18.In addition to the obligatory daily prayers, there are special-occasion and recommended forms of salat, passed down by the Prophet, which may be performed to seek divine closeness and pleasure or in special circumstances when seeking guidance, in the case of an ardent wish or a need for protection.

19.51:49.

20.24:21; also 6:42.

21.26:89.

22.91:9–10. See the brief commentary in Seyyed Hossein Nasr et al., eds., The Study Qur’an: A New Translation and Commentary (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 1520.

23.59:16.

24.14:22.

25.2:11.

26.During 2017’s summer, peak hospital admissions were reported across Europe. Especially vulnerable are the young, the elderly, outdoor workers, and those with no access to cooling devices or facilities—which includes the majority of the population in BiH. The effects of extreme temperatures are aggravated in built environments where pavement and structures can develop heat from 10°C to 37°C (50°F–100°F) higher than the air while urban “canyons” add anywhere from 3.9°C to 6.6°C (7°F–12°F) to the city heat load. Air quality is also affected since hot and sunny days tend to increase ozone levels and, in turn, to spike levels of NOx gases, which cause damage to human respiratory health and ecosystems through the formation of smog, ground-level ozone, and acid rain. See Jay Lemery and Paul Auerbach, The Enviromedics: The Impact of Climate Change on Human Health (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 23. Furthermore, persistent heat combined with drought tends to increase energy use: electricity consumption on the Adriatic coast broke all records in August when Lucifer checked in as scores of overheated inland Croats traveled to the seaside to cool off. H., “Lucifer poharao Europu: najmanje dvoje ljudi umrlo od vrućine, najteže pogođeni Balkan i Italija, na Jadranu i danas paklenih 42 stupnja,” Slobodna Dalmacija, August 4, 2017, https://slobodnadalmacija.hr/vijesti/svijet/lucifer-poharao-europu-najmanje-dvoje-ljudi-umrlo-od-vrucine-najteze-pogodeni-balkan-i-italija-na-jadranu-i-danas-paklenih-42-stupnja-500315. Extreme heat also overburdens power lines, compromises power plants that use water coolers for safe operations, and disables or hampers hydroelectric plants—Albania’s hydropower, for instance, had to shut down, forcing the country to import 80 percent of its electricity needs. Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, “Heat Waves and Climate Change,” Climate Basics, Extreme Weather, accessed October 17, 2019, https://www.c2es.org/content/heat-waves-and-climate-change/; Elizamar Ciríaco da Silva et al., “Drought and Its Consequences to Plants—From Individual to Ecosystem,” in Responses of Organisms to Water Stress, ed. Sener Akinci (London: IntechOpen, 2013), 17–47.

27.Instead, various forms of assistance and insurance payoffs were organized sporadically on the level of cantons, while the Serb Republic committed €10 million toward fall sowing subsidies and irrigation systems. Given that 50 percent of the agricultural output in BiH, estimated at a value of €300,000 million, was lost, the aid was far from enough but still appreciated. “It’s a shame that similar measures were not undertaken in the Federation” said the minister of agriculture of the Serb Republic. Udruženje poljoprivrednika u Zeničko-dobojskom Kantonu, “Apel Vladi Federacije za hitno proglašavanje stanja elementarne nepogode,” Zenicablog, August 5, 2017, https://www.zenicablog.com/apel-vladi-federacije-za-hitno-proglasavanje-stanja-elementarne-nepogode/; Rahela Čabro, “Teško ljeto za poljoprivrednike u BiH, suša uništila veliki broj usjeva,” TNT portal, August 11, 2017, https://tntportal.ba/vijesti/tesko-ljeto-za-poljoprivrednike-u-bih-susa-unistila-veliki-broj-usjeva/; BN televizija, “Nema elementarne nepogode?!,” BN televizija, August 11, 2017, https://www.rtvbn.com/3875127/nema-elementarne-nepogode. Consequences were dire for cattle farmers as well. Dairy cows produced less milk, and, worse, farm animals refused food. The heat caused cattle miscarriages, poor conception rates, and deaths; its longer-term effects are yet unknown.

28.Disastrous flooding events on the continent were recorded in 2002, 2005, 2010, and 2013. The effects of extreme precipitation are often exacerbated by flood waves or snowmelt, and regularly so by the country’s mountainous terrain and porous rock bed, which are highly susceptible to feeding flash floods. Sava River management requires cross-border coordination among the three ex-Yugoslav states on its banks, whose political relationships remain uneasy. Its management was further hindered on the Bosnian side as the rivershed infrastructure was damaged in the war and has further deteriorated since the peace due to neglect. Another assessment of vulnerabilities that followed in 2011 was meant to provide a blueprint for the national disaster protection and response plan. Conducted by a team of experts drawn from both entities of the bipartite Bosnian state (the Croat-Muslim Federation and the Serb Republic), the assessment also highlighted flood risks. Its conclusion reads: “Taking into consideration the string of extreme weather events over the last ten years as well as the future projections of climate change, we can conclude that floods present the greatest danger to the community.” Ministry of Security of Bosnia and Herzegovina, “Procjena ugroženosti Bosne i Hercegovine od prirodnih ili drugih nesreća, 2011,” Documents, Other Documents, posted March 31, 2014, http://www.msb.gov.ba/Zakoni/dokumenti/default.aspx?id=10773&langTag=bs-BA. Two years later, an update on flood prevention activities in the Federation found evidence of systemic disinvestment from the essential basin and river management infrastructure, diversion of flood prevention funds to the government’s budget, incompetence and negligence in the highly fragmented structure of watershed governance, and administrative and political hurdles to coordination within and between the two entities of the Bosnian state. Audit Office for the Institutions of the Federation BiH, “Izvještaj revizije učinka prevencija poplava u Federaciji BiH, 2013,” Performance Audit, posted January 21, 2013, https://www.vrifbih.ba/?s=Izvještaj+revizije+učinka+prevencija+poplava+u+Federaciji+BiH,+2013&post_type=.

29.The economic impact of the 2014 May storm was grave: the losses and damages, estimated at €2.04 billion, made up nearly 15 percent of the national GDP. The brunt of the losses (75 percent) was suffered by the private sector. The majority of destroyed homes, businesses, and farms and crop fields were not ensured, which means that the losses the owners suffered were unrecoverable. The “Recovery Needs Assessment” acknowledged a number of “human factors” at fault in aggravating the floods and precipitating landslides, including “uncontrolled exploitation of forests and minerals, [and] an increase in illegal and or unplanned construction.” ILO (International Labor Organization), “Bosnia and Herzegovina Floods 2014: Recovery Needs Assessment,” Report, p. 23, posted June 30, 2014, https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/employment-promotion/recovery-and-reconstruction/WCMS_397687/lang--en/index.htm. At the same time, the document was silent on the more formally political preconditions for the disaster, such as the failure of the state to maintain the watershed infrastructure, coordinate flood prevention strategies across the entity and state borders, or implement monitoring and early warning systems, along the lines that the audit report had already recommended in 2012. Put simply, anthropogenic factors were entirely depoliticized and privatized: the blame was implicitly laid on irresponsible anonymous actors while the state’s roles in watershed management and regulating construction and natural resource extraction were left unimplicated. Ibid., 64, 253.

30.Ibid., 23.

31.Ibid., 6.

32.Van Gelder, “It Is Time for Action on Climate Risk in the Balkans,” The World Bank, Opinion, posted on September 17, 2018, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/opinion/2018/09/17/it-is-time-for-action-on-climate-risk-in-the-balkans.

33.Ibid.

34.Ibid.

35.Serbia is singled out as “blazing” a path of the climate-smart development with its new legislation framed around disaster risk management and international borrowing to minimize the impacts of catastrophes and speed up recovery. Serbia had rehauled its legislation around the disaster management framework (in alignment with Sendai Framework) and secured a sixty-six-million-euro loan from the World Bank to ensure access to the recovery fund. The loan’s special feature is “Catastrophe Deferred Drawdown Option,” an instrument “designed to protect vital social investments from the fiscal impacts of natural disasters.” The World Bank is not the only institution impressed by these achievements. Citing Serbia as a model, an opposition party member in the House of Representatives, in the Parliament of the federation of BiH, in cooperation with civil sector and international agencies drafted a bill on risk reduction and disaster management. See ibid.

36.UNDP Bosnia and Herzegovina, “Third National Communication (TNC) and Second Biennial Update Report on Greenhouse Gas,” Publications, posted July 12, 2017, 105–107, https://www.ba.undp.org/content/bosnia_and_herzegovina/en/home/library/environment_energy/tre_i-nacionalni-izvjetaj-bih.html. Another UNDP assessment suggests that “average temperature increase greater than 2°C (36°F) will result in costly adaptation, and impacts that will exceed the adaptive capacity of many ecological systems (such as high mountain and lowland oak forest areas), and a high risk of large-scale irreversible effects including endemic species extinction.” UNDP Bosnia and Herzegovina, “Climate Change Adaptation and Low Emission Development Strategy for BiH, 2013,” Research & Publications, Energy and Environment, January 9, 2014, 20, https://www.ba.undp.org/content/bosnia_and_herzegovina/en/home/library/environment_energy/climate-change-adaptation-and-low-emission-development-strategy-.html.

37.UNDP Bosnia and Herzegovina, “Third National Communication,” 162.

38.Ibid., 459–460.

39.One obvious change in local news reporting on weather, since the May 2014 floods, has been the integration of extreme weather monitoring and early warning systems. In keeping with typical sign systems elsewhere, color-coding became the standard shorthand for extreme weather emergencies and implicitly stood for preparedness and resilience, but the broader contexts of global change that yellows, umbers, and reds were signaling were left out of the reportage’s code. With the exception of a few published conversations with beekeepers, climate change at the planetary level made no local or regional news during the drought. FENA, “SUŠA DRASTIČNO SMANJILA PROIZVODNJU MEDA: Tržište će da preplavi VEŠTAČKI,” Blic, August 16, 2017, https://www.blic.rs/vesti/republika-srpska/susa-drasticno-smanjila-proizvodnju-meda-trziste-ce-da-preplavi-vestacki/wjqmf6k; Al Jazeera Balkans, “Teška godina za pčelare u regionu,” Al Jazeera Balkans, July 30, 2016, http://balkans.aljazeera.net/vijesti/teska-godina-za-pcelare-u-regionu.

40.Relatively little is known about the effects of climate warming on plant physiology and the production of floral smell and nectar. Experimental and field studies showed a reduction of sugar content and nectar volume in the heat-stressed plants as well as a production of flowers without nectar (Theodora Petanidou and Erik Smets, “Does Temperature Stress Induce Nectar Secretion in Mediterranean Plants?,” New Phytologist 133, no. 3 [July 1996]: 513–518, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8137.1996.tb01919.x). Experiments involving Mediterranean plants found results varying depending on the species and on water availability (Krista Takkis et al., “Climate Change Reduces Nectar Secretion in Two Common Mediterranean Plants,” AoB Plants 7 [September 2015]: plv111, https://doi.org/10.1093/aobpla/plv111). A team of Europe-based researchers is specifically investigating floral scent alterations in heat-stressed plants and the ensuing changes in plant-pollinator interactions. See Coline Jaworski, Benoît Geslin, and Catherine Fernandez, “Climate Change: Bees Are Disoriented by Flowers’ Changing Scents,” The Conversation, June 25, 2019, https://phys.org/news/2019-06-climate-bees-disorientated-byflowers-scents.html. Petanidou and Smets, “Does Temperature Stress Induce Nectar Secretion in Mediterranean Plants?” 513–518; Ettore Pacini and Massimo Nepi, “Nectar Production and Presentation,” in Nectaries and Nectar, ed. Susan W. Nicolson, Massimo Nepi, and Ettore Pacini (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 167–214; Victoria Scaven and Nicole E. Rafferty, “Physiological Effects of Climate Warming on Flowering Plants and Insect Pollinators and Potential Consequences for Their Interactions,” Current Zoology 59, no. 3 (September 2013): 418–426.

41.Yves Le Conte and Maria Navajas, “Climate Change: Impact on Honey Bee Populations and Diseases,” Revue Scientifique et Technique 27, no. 7 (August 2008): 507, http://dx.doi.org/10.20506/rst.27.2.1819.

42.See Pablo Marquet, Janeth Lessmann, and Rebecca Shaw, “Protected-Area Management and Climate Change,” in Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere, ed. Thomas E. Lovejoy, Edward O. Wilson, and Lee Hannah (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 283–293. For an overview of issues on alterations in plant-pollinator phenologies in relation to climate change, see Joar Stein Hegland et al., “How Does Climate Warming Affect Plant-Pollinator Interactions?,” Ecology Letters 12, no. 2 (February 2009): 184–195, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2008.01269.x; Camille Parmesan, “Influences of Species, Latitudes and Methodologies on Estimates of Phenological Response to Global Warming,” Global Change Biology 13 (August 2007): 1860–1872, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2007.01404.x; and Eric Post and Michael Avery, “Phenological Dynamics in Pollinator-Plant Associations Related to Climate Change,” in Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere, ed. Thomas E. Lovejoy and Lee Hannah (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 42–55. A comprehensive overview of honeybees’ resilience and vulnerabilities and speculations on apian climate futures is offered by Yves Le Conte and Maria Navajas, “Climate Change: Impact on Honey Bee Populations and Diseases,” Revue Scientifique et technique 27, no. 7 (August 2008): 499–510, http://dx.doi.org/10.20506/rst.27.2.1819.

43.Bee venom is an expensive substance and is of special interest to the skin-care industry for its stimulative effect on collagen production. Its primary therapeutic use is for the treatment and management of arthritis, neuralgia, multiple sclerosis, and lupus. Apitoxin’s active components and pharmacological properties have been researched around the world since the 1950s. Composed of proteins, enzymes, polypeptides, minerals (sulfur among them), and neurotransmitters, including dopamine and serotonin, bee venom has been associated with anti-inflammatory effects. These effects are especially attributed to melittin, a polypeptide agent composed of twenty-six amino acids said to be far more potent than hydrocortisol. See Jack Gauldie et al., “The Peptide Components of Bee Venom,” European Journal of Biochemistry 61, no. 2 (January 1976): 369–376, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1432-1033.1976.tb10030.x; Jun Chen et al., “Melittin, the Major Pain-Producing Substance of Bee Venom,” Neuroscience Bulletin 32 (March 2016): 265–272, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12264-016-0024-y; Obioma Eze, Okwesili Nwodo, and Victor Ogugua, “Therapeutic Effect of Honey Bee Venom,” Journal of Pharmaceutical, Chemical, and Biological Sciences 4, no. 1 (March–May 2016): 48–53, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Therapeutic-Effect-of-Honey-Bee-Venom-Eze-Nwodo/4be85dc94738742f9102b2694273835d57a8ceb2; Abdul Rahim Al-Samie and Mohamed Ali, “Studies on Bee Venom and Its Medical Uses,” International Journal of Advancements in Research & Technologie 1, no. 2 (July 2012), https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a0b1/f2ed65fc1b999b657045135d563e7bfd298b.pdf?_ga=2.55221038.485531400.1581172971-2113641594.1577775850; Jojriš, Pčele i Medicina, 127–129.

44.He breeds his own honeybee queens to restock the hives every year and keeps societies employed by producing the brood to fortify or restock his foraging hives. Sulejman mistrusts commercial pollen substitutes and makes his own from the supplies of pollen he gathers from his hives throughout the spring.

45.96:6.

46.48:28.