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Honey’s on the Wheels

Beekeepers’ Prayers

Dawn breaks. Light filters through the forest, softened by the morning fog. Jusuf and Nijaz look over the thirty hives they off-loaded in the dead of night. Pleased with a job well done, the beekeepers turn to head out of the forest, then freeze in their steps. Well ahead of them, newly visible, is the back of a bright red sign, standing tall with dark advice. The previous night, they had stepped unknowingly beyond the land mine warnings that fringe these former frontlines. Nijaz laughs nervously. Jusuf silently prays. They walk in single file, sticking closely to the trail they cut into the shrubbery last night when, under the narrow streaks of flashlights, they walked back and forth from their beaten-up van cradling hives in their arms. Lucky fellows, they get by unharmed.

Manda awaits them with strong Turkish coffee just off the stove. For the length of the black locust flow, this elderly woman who lives nearby will be their bees’ host. Feeling raw from a sleepless night and still jittery from walking through the land mines, the men are silent, their palms wrapped around small, piping-hot coffee cups. Manda is chattering, thrilled to have them back, and like a good Bosnian host, she frets over their comfort: “More coffee? Have some cookies. Have you warmed up?”

For much of the year, Manda lives a lonely life in a Bosnian Catholic village ruined by the war. Residents fled the fighting in the 1990s, and only a few, mostly elderly people, have returned to this borderline between the two entities of the ethnically divided state of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Battle-scarred, the area known as Posavina at the basin of the Sava River is rewilding. Overtaken by native and invasive species, this is one of many, war-ravaged, neglected places across the country that turned into honeyed heavens.

Black locust trees, fast and eager growers, have spread and thickened in the mild, riverine climate. Manda keeps a watch on the trees each spring, as eagerly as beekeepers do across the country. From within the thorny branches, tiny buds explode in long, hanging clusters of curled blossoms, breezily fragrant, and transient to a fault. For roughly three weeks, heavy, bluntly sweet nectar will flow before florets darken, sag, and drop. The black locust foraging season is known to be brief and stormy, and for the length of it, Manda will enjoy the company of visiting bees and their Bosnian Muslim beekeepers. While bees are being matched to their partner plants, forage frontlines foster friendships between visiting beekeepers (Bosnian Muslims) and their hosts (Bosnian Catholic Croats and Bosnian Orthodox Serbs) in areas that are too marginal for formal interethnic reconciliation.

Scouter bees are already out investigating. Foragers will shortly follow their danced cues to the pollen and nectar. The black locust season begins, and, God willing, honey will flow.

Forage Fronts

Picture this: It is springtime, and the thickets of eastern and northeastern Bosnia are bursting out with ringlets of snow-white black locust. The thorny shrub that qualifies as an invasive has subtly reclaimed the former frontlines of the 1990s war, seeded by land mines and left fallow by residents that fled the combat violence as much as the economic underdevelopment since the peace. Mobile beekeepers from across BiH bring hives in small batches—anywhere from thirty to a few hundred—to their favorite coves.

“Honey’s on the wheels,” local beekeepers say. Summed up in the saying is a complaint about the hard times and the gist of their coping strategy. As honey is becoming scarce, mobile beekeepers travel, chasing after it. They tour the country’s edge lands as far as possible from the coal-powered industries that massively pollute the urban and suburban environments of central and northeastern Bosnia. Likewise dodging the farmlands treated by agricultural chemicals, they search out nectar-yielding seasonal forage.

The bees that come to the black locust forests are typically strong in numbers, relatively healthy, and hungry for what is effectively the first rich nectar flow in the region. They storm the blooming trees. The beekeepers hold their breath for the length of the black locust flow. Its floral-tasting honey is not just the favorite in the region; it is also praised for its medicinal properties. Its appearance is decisive for the turn of the foraging year as a whole.

Depending on the weather, a hive can gather up to ten kilograms (twenty-two pounds) of nectar a day. Compared with earlier spring bloomers, the sugar content of black locust nectar is highly concentrated, so after the excess water evaporates, the hives are still left with plenty of honey. The black locust nectar flow feeds the population of bees, expanding at the turn of the summer. In the course of three to four weeks, blooming tree crowns are also expected to supply the visiting hives with honey food stocks and surpluses for apiarists to harvest. Not least, the flow is counted on to fuel the building of new wax comb—the vital infrastructure for the bees’ reproduction and communication.

Beekeepers’ expectations for black locust honey, however, now belong to the memory of a lost climate. The black locust nectar has mostly failed to yield, in every year I spent with beekeepers in the field, from 2014 to 2017, and in each subsequent years I spent visiting and filming the forage grounds through 2021.

The circumstances of the flow and its failure are infinitely particular across the sites and vary from one year to the next, given the variability of weather and the peculiarity of microclimate niches along the forage fronts.

In some places, black locust trees barely bloom or not at all. Elsewhere, the tree crowns are sagging with blossoms, but the nectar flow is spoiled by a sudden spell of bad weather. Hail, frost, and cold showers ruin the blossoms while the bees, pent up in the hives, eat quickly through their food stocks. At times, the bloom is rich and the weather seems right, but the insects are nearly starving. Unless or until something else flows, the bees must be artificially fed with sugar syrup or patties made of pollen or pollen substitutes lest they starve, swarm, or curb the brood. Supplemental feeding is an old tactic, as honeybees’ apiary lives have always alternated between flow and dearth, but the frequent and prolonged need for artificial feeding, apiarists say, is entirely new.

At the first signs of diminishing nectar, mobile beekeepers move on. Traveling skillfully cross-country on fluid schedules, they bring their hives to the next promising spot, where nectar is on the cusp of emerging. Its forthcoming possibility dawns in auspicious signs—such as the tassels the black locust tosses out, signaling an intent to bloom—although the weather, that mercurial medium of honey’s production, can always shift. Predicting blossoming based on environmental cues is the beekeepers’ essential skill, although the phenologies—the seasonal life cycles of plants—emerging through the new habits of the weather defy conventions and best guesses.

The overall trends captured in the beekeepers’ and my field notes suggest that honeybees and beekeeping lifestyles are becoming hard to sustain, despite savvy nectar predictions and nimble itineraries along the forage fronts. And yet beekeepers’ plans and expectations for the honey seasons are not dampened in advance by the glum records that seem to suggest that climate change is dooming honey flow.

Tracking honey along the forage fronts, I found novel vagaries of nectar flow. Fast-paced changes to the honey ecologies overwhelmed local apiculturists but, being savvy professionals and devoted bee lovers, they managed. Keeping bees on the wheels throughout the summer, they invigorate clever, honey chasing strategies. In response to the unseasonal and fickle weather, they adjust their itineraries and scout familiar landscapes more intensely in search of the nooks that may nourish rare chances of strong flow.

But it is not just the skilled forecasting or the well-developed routes that keep the beekeepers going throughout the dearth. A prayerful anticipation that honey will flow, God willing, inshallah, accompanies their efforts and counters disappointments.

Fig. 2.1 On the forage fronts

I am interested in what this simple, casual invocation says about the Muslim beekeepers’ sense of sweet chances in the honey-waning world. What does it imply about God’s knowledge and divine giving?

Divine will, knowledge, and generosity are matters given their due theological and metaphysical consideration in Islamic textual sources. Nonetheless, profound meanings of such vital terms seep into day-to- day practices as they are presumed and pondered in wisdom stories, invocations, and Qur’anic references that people share. Prayers are about metaphysics getting practical not least under the conditions of dire need and deep uncertainty. More than ever, inshallah is recognized as the condition indispensable to honey hunting in the estranging atmosphere.

One could simply gloss the invocation as a case of religious utterance that says nothing more than how some believers conceive of their world. Taken in that way, invocation appears as an entirely internal affair, a mindful or emotional process that makes a difference to an individual or community experience, shaping believers’ perceptions, outlooks, and actions. Prayer, by this account, is quite different than forces that a climate biologist observes in the real world of rising carbon emissions, altering biosphere, changing regimes of precipitation, or conservation efforts.

In Islamic sources, on the contrary, invocation is recommended precisely because it works on the inside and on the outside. Because prayer is a way of participating in the world, I am curious what invocations do to the people and to landscapes swept up by the climate change. What kind of relationships between God, weather, bees, plants, and human subjects do prayers invoke, restate, and put to work?

Moving On

In two weeks, the black locust nectar has become a mere trickle. White, rubbery blooms still hold, fragrant and bright, but few honeybees visit the trees, which is a clear sign that the foraging prospects have closed. Jusuf and Nijaz give their strongest hives a tug to gauge their gain. The flow, judging by the weight, is modest. They must move on quickly before the hives’ honey stocks depreciate.

Days earlier, they surveyed the wider area and considered their options. Along the riverbanks, farther into the flatlands, indigo bush, a later bloomer, is opening up. A tough, leggy shrub that prefers wet soils but tolerates all types of loam, it sprouts purple spike-like floral clusters flashing with gold-yellow antlers. Full of pollen, flowers are irresistible to the bees. From there, they could move back inland to linden forests come June.

Later still, in July, they could travel south to seek higher altitudes. Highland meadows and forests, with their many diverse bloomers, promise a reserved but steady nectar throughout the summer and the possibility of a honeydew surge in the late fall. These nectar flow opportunities draw beekeepers and have made the mountains famous for their honeys.

Jusuf and Nijaz’s honey-hunting routes have been elaborated over the years. The overall forage map has not changed significantly, although their travels yield less each subsequent year, since I have followed these two beekeepers, from 2015 through 2021. Even with multiple possibilities sketched out in advance, the burning question of where exactly to go next can only be settled by active scouting. Plants bloom when a number of elements line up auspiciously, and they secrete nectar in the chink of a good weather spell, which is narrower than ever since the local atmosphere has become unhinged from the old customs of four seasons.

Nijaz is the one to forecast nectar flows. Over the years, he has cultivated a passion for plants: he devoutly reads horticultural manuals, studies regional plant phenologies, and has become quite a grafter. An intense man, Nijaz is a talker. A pilot who once trained with the Yugoslav Air Force before myopia disqualified him from service, he built a career as a bank manager until the insolvent bank went under in the rickety postwar financial market. Since then, when he is not with the bees on the wheels, Nijaz does odd jobs: he sells carpets or grafts fruit trees and maintains orchards for amateur horticulturists. His wife and adult children are successful professionals, while he ekes out an income in the low-wage sector. A proud man with a thick air of disappointment, he intently watches twigs and tree crowns, sifts through the ambient cues, and makes his bet on a nectar spot.

Jusuf trusts him. An easygoing man, Jusuf is more prone to appreciating the uncertainty that honey hunting entails each season. A funny man, Jusuf bears himself with an understated self-confidence. He was a special operations soldier in the 1990s war with the army of BiH. Since then, he has spent several years as an electrician in high-risk posts with military defense contractors in Afghanistan. The stories he tells. A mountaineer at heart, his posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms flare up when winter months hold him hostage in the smoggy town of Tuzla. He can lose his temper, though his wife and daughter will have none of it, so he works it off, he says, by walking the dog, planning the spring gardens, and keeping the koi fish happy.

When the nectar road opens come spring, Jusuf’s nerves calm. In the evenings, he and Nijaz wait by the hives for the foragers to return. Then they close the entrances, remove the roofs so air circulates into the nests through the wire mesh ceilings, and secure the honey supers with straps. The two will load up the bees at night and drive them to the next sweet spot—once they decide which one it will be.

Their repurposed 1980s Volkswagen van holds no more than thirty hives, so it takes three trips over three days to move all the bees. Their host Manda intently follows the hustle of packing and moving from around the corner. At the thought of them leaving, she tears up. Nijaz has whitewashed the tree seedlings he planted the previous year in her yard. They brought her prescription medicine and daily groceries and took her to town to run errands. When they sit down over meals, she tells of the long winter nights she spends alone in her room by the woodstove stoking the fire. And how she prays. A devout Catholic, her small bed rests beneath a framed image of Jesus with his heart aflame. When she dies, she worries aloud, no one will be there to bury her or care for her grave.

Nijaz promises to call over the course of the year. Besides, Manda will likely outlive the two of them, he teases. She laughs and touches up her pretty ink-blue headscarf blooming with white flowers. He is her favorite of the two.

By nightfall, Jusuf and Nijaz settle on the indigo bush and agree on the particular site. If the bush flows well, the total gain per hive might be as high as thirty kilograms (sixty-six pounds). On top of that, bees build brood and wax well on its plentiful pollen.

In May, even if the black locust has failed, the honey season will still be young and the chances fresh. Within three days, the last hives are loaded. Manda stays up late to say goodbye. The beekeepers drive away. Leaning on a cane, she walks into the house to rest.

At the end of the summer, Jusuf wraps up the year for me over the phone: a disaster. Like the black locust, the indigo bush also failed; the flowers came and went while the bees stayed indoors through cold, long-lasting rains. The linden did not fare much better in the extreme heat that followed. The two beekeepers harvested a “symbolic quantity” of honey just to have a taste.

“We’re still hoping for honeydew honey, though,” Jusuf says, “God willing.” Honeydew, or manna, as it is also known, is the sweet substance secreted by aphids or scale insects gorging on plant sap, which bees collect to make honeydew honey. It is extremely rare. God willing, nonetheless.

Grounds for Hope

The saying “God willing” invokes the very possibility of manna flowing. Manna, a type of flow that is marvelously bountiful as well as incomparably unpredictable and rare, is an appropriate flavor of an invocation that anticipates nothing if not the divine capacity for an excessive, abundant giving when formal reasons for hope are null. Rendered in the local Slavic language, Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian (BSC), “God willing” (“ako Bog da”) is a popular saying among Bosnians of all ethnic backgrounds. Its near synonym in Arabic, inshallah, is especially favored by Bosnian Muslims whose devotional practice presumes, at the very least, a basic knowledge of key Qur’anic and ritual terms.

For Jusuf and Nijaz, who are not overtly pious Muslims, invocation of God is brief and low-key, and reveals what divinity means, promises, and delivers in minimalist vernacular references.

God alone was on his mind, Jusuf tells me, the many times when he felt his life was on the line. He tells of incidents during the Bosnian War and in the course of his deployment in Afghanistan when he silently, feverishly recited all he knew from the Qur’an. Ritual practice particularly unsettles some urban men of his age whose socialist Yugoslav upbringing presumed an opposition between a secular pop culture that was the public norm and the ethnic religious tradition that could only be lingering in the modern socialist worldview. Learned at home on occasions both mundane and particularly tender—as when parents and grandparents put children to bed with Qur’anic verses, uttered for blessings, protection, and just in case death surprised the darlings while asleep—Islamic mores up until the 1990s war were a private resource and a public embarrassment.

When the genocidal war broke up not just the socialist federation and economy but also the very ideal of a secular, ethnically neutral workers’ fraternity underpinning the myth of Yugoslavia, Bosnian Muslim ethnic identity surged into realms of national and cultural politics, and with it, Islam regained a public face. In cities like Tuzla, Jusuf and Nijaz’s hometown, which remained multiethnic in composition and socialist in political orientation, Islam becoming public presented to some Muslims a challenge to negotiate between the felt and personal faith and the social, performative practice of Islam. For his part, Jusuf joins the Friday tea hour at the old wooden mosque in the neighborhood, but he misses the communal prayers that had ritually gathered the rest of his neighbors as the faith community. He speaks of this with a laugh, describing the peculiar way in which he draws close to and defies participation in a Muslim collective.

Nijaz is similarly ambivalent. His wife wears a veil, which is as overt a sign of Muslim belonging in Bosnia as anywhere else, while their children’s upbringing made Islamic rites a matter of second nature. The downturn of Nijaz’s professional fortunes and his hurt pride are key elements in the story of his uncommitted position, neither secular nor reverent, in a family of prosperous, committed Muslims.

These biographical details flesh out the broader historical and cultural context within which faith utterances arise, always contingent on and colored by personal dispositions and outlooks—the way one inclines, wishes, or wavers with one’s whole body. I am less interested in questions of piety—Muslim religiosity and its performance in a political context—than in understanding what Muslims’ sayings, praying, and doings, their practices of reading and listening, propose about the nature of reality and the present state of the world.

This is not just a matter of grasping how people speak or experience reality but of understanding how a particular form of reality is engendered and at work between people and their God, whose names, after all, include the Real or the True (al-H.aqq). This may sound like I am speaking in terms of a symbolic-material “co-constitution,” which is a favored concept in contemporary Western academia. The term suggests that meanings and matters are made through interactions of many agencies, which are imagined as equal parties “entangled” in horizontal relations. The interactions make the agents themselves through processes that are unfinished and underdetermined. What is here and now, is all there is but the eventfulness of the present in the making is imagined generously as a plenitude, an abundant immanence that could host anything, even unforeseeable futures. Even a god, provided that divine is one among many possible things, employed with “working out connections.”¹ Contingency reigns supreme.

This processual idea of the world as always becoming and, contrary to appearances, unfixed and ultimately unbound by the formal powers that be, is a way to keep up hope and inspire progressive politics when they are needed most—at present. As the planet is divided by growing economic inequality and militant, conservative, or capitalist globalization, and rapidly devastated by environmental and climate catastrophes, keeping up hope is recommended with an urgency. It is to this end that the brilliant philosopher Isabelle Stengers recommends we embark on an “adventure of thinking,” which is “an adventure of hope.”²

Stengers argues that if we anticipate what is probable, there is no hope. Probability counts on a static world and the prescripted descriptions of it, while the world itself is in the constant process of becoming, with inventiveness and creativity manifest everywhere, in human language as well as in living cells. Adventure in thinking is open to wonder at this processual nature of the world and is primed by it, on the lookout for unscripted events that shift the way things are and feel. Possibilities cannot be calculated in advance, because they present themselves to the thinking unconstrained by givens. Hope itself, for Stengers, is a significant event, the kind that has the power to sustain wonder and gratitude, which in her writings are feelings and inclinations as necessary for scholarly and scientific enterprises as they are for social mobilizing for revolution or climate change action.³

I turn to Stengers, who calls herself a “daughter to the Western tradition” because her professed commitment to that tradition comes with an aspiration to resist the prevalent idea that the West has won the right to consider itself the “thinking head of humanity” and to presume, under the banner of critical thinking, “that others just believe and that we know.”⁴

Keeping the philosopher’s self-reflective note in mind, this sister thinker reads the Eastern and Western traditions while considering the implications of Islamic metaphysics for adventurous thinking about the world and for imagining and working out possibilities for hope, sweetness, and a brighter future against the odds. To that end, I ask, What do people who believe know about the nature of reality?

In the Islamic worldview, the cosmos is constantly in the process of being made anew. The God of the Qur’an, however, is not a deity that tolerates companions. Indeed, the greatest offense, shirk, is the association of partners with God, and so the reality the Qur’an describes is an utterly divine affair. And yet divine utmost competence presumes and engenders the possibility that humans, along with everything else (but unlike anything else)—the coming and going multitude that is the cosmos—exert a range of influences and efficacies. The One works through many causes but bluntly asks that the willful subjects make no mistake about the Doer who is with and integrates all the causes.

What seems like high theory has practical implications, for it matters where one directs prayers. If you invoke them, they do not hear your supplication; and if they heard, they could not answer you,⁵ the Qur’an says about misplacing trust in anything other than God. What also matters, practically speaking, is that the prayers are solicited with a strong recommendation: Say, “What consideration would my Lord give you if it were not for your prayers?” ⁶ In other words, to say prayers is to catch God’s attention. Beekeepers’ hopes spring from faith in the reality that shows divine work through all events, such as honey flow—reality reworked at all times with an open invitation to court divine attention to one’s circumstances in the troubling world.

Inshallah, God willing, is one of the most ubiquitous, mundane statements of faith. Its meaning varies in depth, depending on the speaker and the context, but its most casual utterance says something precautionary and buoyant about the baseline assumptions of how God works in the world.

In Jusuf and Nijaz’s conversations, outcomes on the honey trail are regularly entrusted to God’s will. “God willing” acknowledges the God who knows perfectly, the One who gives with good measure and who also withholds. Invocation acknowledges in advance the possibility of failure, as it asserts God’s ultimate sovereignty over the lots drawn while it repositions humans and the weathered world as divine subjects. And God does what He wills, the Qur’an says.⁷ This is one of the formidable statements in the Qur’an that alternately describes God with qualities of nearness (tenderness or immanence) and distance (majesty or transcendence). It asserts that humans are not in control.

On a honey hunt, chances are wide open; even a windfall of manna could happen when the foraging season has drawn to a close. Hope makes sense not simply because the future is unknowable and utterly open ended but because the prayer itself is an active element in the world—tradition guarantees it—and because the source of all possibility to begin with is inclined to give goodness and to hear prayers. God’s principal name is the Merciful (al-Rah.mān), and God wills mercy. As the Qur’an puts it: God has prescribed for Himself mercy.⁸

Beekeepers’ hope bounces back through this basic assumption about divine will. On a deeper level, Islamic metaphysics premises the very possibility—the event of hopefulness arising within the mind or chest—on this divine self-prescription, because divine doing and willing encompass both the objective and the prospective, the visceral and the affective matters. In other words, feeling hopeful, like nectar flow, is a gift of divine mercy where depression and dearth could reign. Prayers actively summon hope—the Qur’an mentions a “breast expanding”—as well as nectar and clement elements.

Fig. 2.2 False indigo, a pollen riot

Disappointments

“Novice beekeepers are unlucky to be weathering another hard year,” Šefik says, thinking back to 2017. “This past year, too, was a disaster. There are beekeepers in our association who are in their eighties. They’ve spent lifetimes in apiaries and have seen nothing like this. The frost in late April destroyed everything. But unevenly so. Here, on this hill, the forage was devastated, while there, one hill over, plants recovered and nectar flowed.”

Šefik is president of the apiarists’ association in the town of Tuzla to which Jusuf and Nijaz belong. In the late fall, this senior beekeeper shared his colleagues’ impressions, which he has compiled from conversations and complaints of some hundred beekeepers of all scales.

Luck in beekeeping has always been weather-dependent and so highly contingent. Patience and perseverance paid off as the good-flow years made up for previous losses and costs. But patience is becoming another virtue, as bad years recur and the old rules of thumb no longer hold. Flow is spotty, disasters nearly total.

“Our expectations were high for black locust, they always are,” Šefik goes on, reviewing nectar forage over the year, season by season. “Then you get so sad seeing it ruined. It blooms but does not smell. You know how black locust smells?” I nod at this knowingly: the crisp early scent of a year, petrichor, drenched with possibilities.

That black locust flowed at all was a wonder considering that the late April skies unexpectedly hurled snow and frost across the region. When frostbitten, black locust trees may not flower at all. Its bloom being timed to always shifty spring weather “makes the beekeepers’ disappointment inevitable,” says the Atlas of Melliferous Plants, an authoritative guidebook to regional honey forage.⁹

These are well-known facts, confirmed by years of experience, and yet they do not “inevitably” spell out a low horizon of beekeepers’ honey anticipations. Quite on the contrary, high expectations, as Šefik makes clear, are the norm.

“It’s sweet, intoxicating, the kind of smell that fills us with joy. Then, you watch it ravaged,” Šefik adds wistfully. “Next, we look ahead, to linden, hopeful as if it were a saint coming.”

At this, he smiles. He need not say more since, by then, I’ve learned well that linden is no saint; it is reputedly the most capricious nectar secretor. A trickster, it saturates the air with heavy perfume even while the nectaries are dry. Bees visit in scores. The insect pilgrims fall to the flowers loyally and, yielding little or nothing, keep returning for the length of the bloom.

Nodding to himself, Šefik concludes his reflections:

From now on, considering weather conditions and global climate trends, we can only expect worse. We better get used to it. These are no longer exceptions, nor some extreme events, these are now the new conditions of beekeeping. A beekeeper is now in a situation where he has no gains, only expenses. It’s tragic, this weather. It’s the decisive factor. It used to be the case that apicultural technology, the type of bee box and so on, made a difference, but weather is always the bottom line—it’s God’s giving (Božije davanje). If weather is bad, technology is of no use. Still, we have to keep trying, we have to search for ways out. Perhaps one way to do it is to diversify foraging sites; so if one thing fails there is another.

In Šefik’s account, the evidence from the field and known facts about global climate change trends leave no room to doubt that apiculture is facing a catastrophic future. Because weather is a decisive factor to honey flow, extreme and unseasonal weather is already disastrous and the forecast for local beekeeping is nothing short of tragic. Even when the subject of global warming was rarely part of broader public discourse in BiH, many beekeepers’ concerns were already stated in the language of climate change effects. Some actively followed international news on climate science, climate change diplomacy, and activism while sharing personal observations of unseasonal phenomena on social media with colleagues across the wider Balkan region and networking through social media. For professionals who were especially sensitive to the environmental toll of modern industrial culture, human responsibility for ruining the climate was obvious.

Apiculturists, however, belong to a community that prides itself on vocal disagreements. As the saying goes, two beekeepers can only agree on a single point, which is that you should not stand at the hive’s entrance when opening a bee box. Understanding of climate change and its implications for local apiculture was uneven across the BiH beekeeping community, and younger beekeepers like Jusuf and Nijaz were often annoyed by what they perceived as their older colleagues’ obliviousness to the signs of new and irreversible seasonal trends.

By 2017, Jusuf and Nijaz no longer needed arguments to convince their association’s fellows, most of them their seniors in apicultural practice, that mobility was the future of beekeeping. It had become increasingly evident that stationary apiaries could no longer be expected to collect surpluses. In fact, hives on fixed locations could hardly be sustained without artificial feeding unless one extensively planted melliferous, honey-yielding crops, which, unsupported by irrigation infrastructure, were vulnerable to heat and drought damage.

In the quote above, Šefik, who was not a mobile beekeeper, admitted that the trusted apicultural techniques for improving chances of honey yields were proving inadequate and that traveling in search of diverse forage sites was the key strategy moving forward. Despite mounting signs of trouble and bleak future prospects, trying makes sense because weather, the bottom line of beekeeping, is God’s giving.

Šefik is not preoccupied with sorting out the way tragic weather is an outcome of both human-caused actions and God’s giving. He knows the basics: humans are held responsible for their actions, and highly contingent things like weather are stark reminders that everything comes through God’s giving. Among the beekeepers and bee lovers are imams and Sufis with training and curiosity needed to delve deeper into matters. Contemplation is highly recommended by the Islamic tradition as an essential part of faith (as well as a form of pleasure) while, at the same time, the focus for metaphysicians and the curios folk alike remains on doing. The whole point of Islamic metaphysics is to teach people how to live better. Deep conundrums are not meant to be solved, given the nature of metaphysical concerns; they are resolved tentatively in the course of practice—doing and praying—which always emphasizes human responsibility for the acts, conducted and intended.

Šefik’s unfinished contemplations on the divine and human agency in the making of the weather can be taken further by perusing cannonical Islamic sources. God in the Qur’an describes Himself as the Time. Some include al-dahr, the Time, among God's beautiful names. Several names describe God as eternal, while the basic tenet of Islam, that there is nothing but God—lā ilāha illā Allah—implies that the flickers of the present are parts of the everlasting reality, which is why any moment in the here and now births the possibility of encountering and getting to know God, through divine attributes, acts, and signs of presence. Moments of intensity and immersion, when we lose track of time, are events when the fleeting is eclipsed by the neverending. Moreover, the time being divine attribute, suggests that the generous God gives in time gifts that are as particular as the personal, embodied experience of time that we each have while the clocks’ hands make the standard rounds. And God gives within history, each epoch manifesting a particular relationship between the world and al-Dahr.¹⁰

The final times in the Islamic conception of history since the last Revelation is not uniformly a time of loss, crisis, ruin, and anxiety but a long-lasting period marked by intensified possibilities. A number of Prophet’s sayings describe a rushed temporality whereby a year is like a month, a month feels like a week, a week flies by like a single day, and a day goes in a flash, “like kindling of a fire.” Within time, however, there is the quickening of opportunities (to earn merit and profits, to gain understanding, and to earn wrath), a multiplication of access points to the divine as well as chances to miss them, and an overall inflation of values, fictitious and genuine. And because the final times presume the world running out of time, the bleak future moment when prayers, some hadith forecast, will no longer be accepted, the day when the sun rises from the west and the gates of repentance close forever, there is more need than ever to understand and invoke God.

Invocations rehearse what is known about God but also further one’s understanding of God, since God is what exceeds one’s conception, and divine generosity is promised but unpredictable. New circumstances raise new chances for invocation, and even if the utterances are simple and unchanged, their inflection is particular and the effort fresh, for the point all along is to engage God in a relationship that plugs the subject, God willing, into divine world making.

By 2020, itinerant beekeepers, too, admittedly struggled. Jusuf and Nijaz still offered classes on mobile beekeeping to the association’s new members free of charge, but their apiary on wheels collected barely enough to make the traveling worthwhile.

Gratitude

May 2021. Avdo, his two sons, and their helper are getting the hives ready. From a black locust forage site in the flatlands of the northwestern Bosna River basin, they will travel south. In a matter of some 300 kilometers (180 miles), the bees will traverse several climates, reaching the country’s Mediterranean region. There, on the western banks of the jade-green, ice-cold Neretva River, in the valley stretched out beneath the steep slopes of the Prenj mountain range, the bees will roam the prickly bushes of Jerusalem thorn. Their yellow flowers, flat like shirt buttons, are just opening up.

Black locust, Avdo sums up, has partly flowered, and except for a few days, it flowed poorly. The calm, fit elder in his seventies, turns his intense blue eyes to the cell phone in his palm. He scrolls through the daily updates that the field electronic scale has sent as text messages over the past fifteen days. Fitted to one of the hives, the scale records weight gains, which helps the beekeepers discern shifting nectar trends.

“Last night, the inflow amounted to four hundred ten grams [fourteen ounces].”

“Is that little?” I ask.

“Of course, it’s little! And it’s a sign that the flow is at the end. I’ll find you the days with better inflow, to compare,” Avdo suggests, searching through the texts.

The beekeepers arrived with the first batch of bees on May 13, and the scale for a few days showed an inflow of up to 10 kilograms (22 pounds) a day. Then, in a week’s time, on the twentieth, it dropped to a daily average of roughly 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds). At the end of a good flow, after the excess moisture evaporates, the hives are secured with 25–30 kilograms (55–66 pounds) of pure honey, which leaves plenty of surplus to harvest. As is, the honeybees have collected only enough to sustain themselves. Thank God, Avdo says, at least he did not have to feed them.

A few months earlier, in the Herzegovina valley where Avdo’s bees overwinter, the spring was so untypically cold and the greening so late that the bees ate through the hefty winter stocks they had gained the previous year on the late fall bloomer: the Mediterranean white winter heather. “The bees were literally famished,” Avdo says. He and his sons supplied the hives with emergency food; they gave them homemade pollen cakes.

He opens up a hive to show me how the combs look. I admire the few honey wreathes I see topping the combs, but Avdo finds them paltry: when black locust truly flows, the hives are clogged with honey from top to bottom, and the combs are quickly sealed with fresh wax, as white as snow. Through the 1990s, such flow was to be expected, but lately, it is rare. The last time it happened was in 2010, following years of dearth.

Avdo and his sons are among the greatest mobile beekeepers in the country. With some three hundred hives, the scale of their operation is impressive by local standards, as is the sheer range of their travels and the variety of honey flavors they chase. Avdo has been traveling with the bees since the early 1980s. Hailing from a family of apiarists, he began touring the honey routes of old Yugoslavia for fun. It was a welcome break from the small-town routines and his daily job in a secret weapons factory that produced ammunition for the Yugoslav Army. “We grew up thinking our father worked in a macaroni factory,” his older son, Ado, tells us, laughing. The two boys were raised on honey itineraries. During school summer breaks, travels were the whole family’s treat. The lavender-scented breeze on the blue islands in the Adriatic, grassy lakes in the central Bosnian mountain range to fish in, while bees foraged on thyme, and much more—the boys’ days were sweet. They got the bug for beekeeping on the wheels.

The younger, Elvir, is the regional representative for a Swiss dental equipment company, but his flexible work schedule allows him time for the bees. The older, Ado, turned his back on a career in the food and beverage sector of the hospitality industry in Canada to return home to a full-time vocation in beekeeping. His income is incomparably lower, he says, but he is happy.

His sons’ commitment helps keep Avdo going, although the beekeeping is becoming more difficult every year. “Everything has changed, believe me,” Avdo tells me as we wait around for the foragers to settle in so the hives can be closed for tonight’s trip. In the mellow southern accent of Herzegovina, Avdo shares his sense of the palpable changes in the familiar landscapes.

Black locust nowadays blooms roughly twenty days earlier than it used to. In 2010, the year of the most recent good harvest, the flowers opened on May 15. Lately, they bring hives as early as April 22 to meet the first bloomage. The later the tree blooms, Avdo explains, the greater the chances that it will flow uninterrupted by frost or sudden cold spells.

Except that “those rules are no more,” Avdo adds. “See this year, such as it is.” In 2021, spring was delayed across the country, and although black locust bloomed as late as it used to in the old days, the cold weather spell lasted throughout the tree’s development and bloom. The overall effects, however, Avdo finds puzzling. Frost damage on black locust trees is usually evident: you notice flowers shriveled or blackened or the incipient stem stunted where the flowers would have been. But this year, such signs are absent, and he does not know what happened. Quite simply, roughly 40 percent of the trees did not bloom at all.

Aside from earlier signs of the spring, Avdo finds that the overall duration of nectar secreting has shortened. He remembers black locust flowing for a month back in 1996. The year after the Bosnian War ended, Avdo eagerly got the bees back on the road. Mountain meadow, too, lasted a whole month. These days, “no way it lasts more than seven or ten days.” Plants’ secretion, as Avdo puts it, is now “compressed.” The forage outlooks are also far more fragmented. “Micro-locations now yield honey. Everything looks just the same but [some places] simply don’t flow. That’s that. Those are some of the changes.”

Avdo’s observations are culled from microforage locations, the smallest dots on district maps, within coves he revisits regularly across the forage fronts. But given the wide range of his forage pursuits, from the northern riverine lowlands across the central Bosnian mountains to the southern Mediterranean plains, his overall insights are regional in perspective. Moreover, Avdo’s sense of diminishing nectar has a historical depth to it, emerging from forty years of traveling with bees.

“I don’t know all that’s going on but, for sure, it has do with climate. With pesticides, with our own doings . . . Some things I don’t comprehend, but the changes are a fact. God help us,” Avdo says. “Maybe that time [of good flow] will come again . . . but the chances are small. By God, I don’t know . . . Some things I can’t comprehend. A human does everything, tries hard, but it seems of no use. Still, I’m grateful. Had they stayed over in Herzegovina [at their wintering location], I would have had to emergency feed them.”

Remorse

Avdo rarely sustains the tone of complaint for too long. While some mobile beekeepers are finding the daily accounting of hive scales too stressful to bear, Avdo has lovingly nicknamed the scale “Nura” after his small granddaughter, whose name in Arabic means “light.”¹¹ That way, incoming texts from Nura make Avdo light up, even when the records reported are disappointingly low. He responds with expressions of gratitude. In a relationship with God and the world that belongs to God—And to God belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. And ever is God, of all things, encompassing¹²—gratitude is essential for improving future prospects, but in a course of trial, turning to God begins with a tawbah.

Tawbah is a humble acknowledgment of one’s fault. “It has to do . . . with our own doings,” Avdo said. It stands for “turning away” from doing wrong and for returning to God. A hadith says that trouble does not descend from the heavens except on account of people’s wrongdoing and negligence, nor does it lift unless there is a tawbah. Islamic tradition has passed down articulate statements of tawbah as well as collective and personal rites that formally state a repentance. Communal prayers for rain in times of drought or for clear skies in times of storm, begin with a formal tawbah. The change in a weather forecast, however, is presumed to hinge on the change of human hearts.

Sufis in particular have emphasized the inner workings of tawbah. In the writings of Sufi and eleventh-century Islamic scholar al-Ghazālī, tawbah entails knowledge, a dawning realization of the harmfulness of a sinful or wrongful doing. Whatever the act and its outward implications, the harm has also been dealt inwardly in one’s relationship with God. Doing what displeases God drops a veil between a human and the divine Beloved. The distance feels like a loss and overwhelms the heart. The feeling of longing stokes up a fresh desire and intent, to win back the divine Lover, by leaving the wrong at present and resolving to do better in the future. The remorse reflects on the past, too, on the wrongful act that one has both willed and, so, is responsible for, and that one has also been allotted, because divine will, ultimately, creates the choices that belong to humans.¹³

Tawbah is said to be the gift from God to the human species, among the bestowals that Adam and H.awwā,’ the original couple, received in turn for the loss of paradise. A bestowal because the couple were first inspired to do a tawbah and then, having been forgiven by God, were given a promise that tawbah would be an aid in the course of human earthly life. “O Adam, I have entrusted you and yours with effort and striving and have entrusted you with tawbah, so whomever calls on Me, I will respond as I have responded to you, and whomever asks Me for forgiveness, I will not be stingy with it, because I am the Near, the One Who Responds. O Adam, I will raise those who perform tawbah from graves happy and smiling, and their supplication will be accepted.”¹⁴

Tawbah prefaces supplication (du‘ā’ in Arabic, dova in BSC), which is an intimate counterpart to the formal daily rites. Du'ā' means “a call” or “a cry” and denotes a plea uttered under dire circumstances, when all reasonable grounds for hope seem lost, because God is not constrained by the given odds.¹⁵ Forgiveness and rewards in the divine address related above are lavishly promised, and this bountiful divine readiness to respond is what recommends supplications, even in a casual style of soliciting God’s protection and help, as when Avdo says “God help us.” The Qur’an cites God with reassurances: And when My subjects ask you about me—truly, I am near. I answer the call of the supplicant when he calls Me. So let them respond to Me and believe in Me, that they may be led aright.¹⁶ Also: Call Me and ask Me, I will surely respond.¹⁷

The Prophet taught his community that small, daily things are also worthy of prayers—ask God even for the salt in the house or for shoelaces, when needed, is among the hadith that popular collected volumes on supplications typically cite.¹⁸ Nothing is too petty to concern God or too great to come forth from divine treasuries. Importantly, supplications are focused on the nature of divine generosity, not on one’s merits or flaws. Al-Ghazālī writes: “Don’t let what you know about yourself [your sins, your faults], prevent you from issuing a du‘ā, for God has accepted the prayer of Iblīs [the devil], the worst among His creatures.”¹⁹

A proper response to God’s gift—and the prayer itself as an open form of personal address to God counts among divine presents—is gratitude and praise. Gratitude is a show of good manners and more than a precondition for a wish to be granted. A devout Muslim knows that gratitude is due under all circumstances. When circumstances are trying, a show of gratitude proves one’s patience, which the Qur’an describes as a “beautiful” virtue.²⁰ When circumstances are fortunate, God, whose name is also the Ever Grateful (al-Shākūr), rewards gratitude with further gifts and blessings.²¹

Likewise, it is a show of good manners to not downplay the value of what one has received. If honey’s harvest is modest, offer praise to God—alh.amdulillāh—who could give anything and gives wisely, such as it is. If you crave more, go ahead and ask, but snubbing what has been received is simply rude.

Ingratitude, the Qur’an repeatedly says, is a great offense and the trait of the faithless. The root word for faithlessness, kufr, implies the act of covering up or occluding. Both the ungrateful and the infidel, kāfirūn, conceal divine presents, as Sufi Shayk Ayne, my local guide to Qur’anic exegesis, tells me.

In a sourcebook on afflictions of the heart and ailments of the metaphysical human, which Shaykh Ayne’s teacher Shaykh Mustafa Čolić has translated with a commentary from the sixteenth-century classic by Imam Birgivi, ingratitude is described as a “serious spiritual-heart illness.”²² It is the condition of taking things for granted, accepting things as one’s rightful due rather than as divine gifts. Ungrateful are those who overlook the source of all giving and doubt the inherent wisdom of the measure and limit of each bestowal, whether the presents are sweet or hurtful. As everything falls under the purview of universal divine mercy and everyone subsists on divine care and provisioning, including the unbelievers, to exist is to enjoy divine gifts, by default. Gratitude, however, prevents the displeasure of the Gift Giver, while ingratitude earns wrath and eternal distance, for surely, God does not love kāfirūn.²³

What is more, praise—in its customary form, “praise to God” or “praise to the God, the Lord [or Nurturer] of Worlds,” or rendered in local language as hvala Bogu, thank God—joins the invoker with the praise that God gives Himself as His due. As is typically the case, elements of Islamic invocations and ritual practices promise benefits that are at once intangible and tangible in the down-to-earth sense. Gratitude is meant to cultivate a disposition and build character, deepen knowledge about divine doings in the world, and, ultimately, groom a faithful heart—a heart that has attained a divine quality, since God describes Himself as grateful. “Praise is the keynote of the blissful dwellers of the Heaven,” as al-Ghazālī puts it in his discussion of patience and gratitude.²⁴ All things in the cosmos give God praise gladly, except for humans and jinn, who may miss or decline acknowledging divine blessings.

On the other hand, Avdo’s quote “God help us” intimates the gravity of the present situation as he perceives it. The honey landscapes are waning irreversibly. Spreading wide his arms, Avdo shrugs his shoulders and asks: “What can we do?” He adds: “But keep trying hard.”

Continuing to try hard entails clever scouting, swift movement, and ad hoc planning. The field hive scale’s readings are helpful but by no means comprehensive guides on their own. Avdo and his sons still have to survey the forage area actively to get a sense of the particulars about nectar decline and arising forage possibilities. Sometimes it is enough to relocate hives short distances away to catch a better flow or to wait out bad days if there is a chance that the nectar will bounce back.

Fig. 2.3 Jerusalem thorn, on a windy day

All things considered and reconnaissance done, it takes foresight to decide where to go next. At nightfall, as the men are loading up the hives into the back of the old baby-blue truck, Avdo tells me: “You know how it goes sometimes. We load up the bees, get going, and I still don’t know where to take them next.”

“Can you call someone up, ask for advice?” I wonder aloud.

Avdo laughs, his face glowing under the headband light: “All others are calling me for an advice! I decide, just like that, on the road.”

His sons deeply respect Avdo and follow his lead. They do their best to spare his back the heavy lifting, though Avdo’s energy seems to outlast everyone’s, even when the three men are hard at work while keeping fast through the holy month of Ramadan.

God Knows

In mid-June, my sister Azra and I meet Avdo again, by the hives in Herzegovina. Avdo is pleased: the bees have developed well in the last few weeks and are strong in numbers. The moderate flow of Jerusalem thorn so far is nothing to brag about, he says, but it keeps the hive reserves stable.

“What is his forecast for the rest of the Jerusalem thorn?” I ask.

“No one can tell you in advance. Who knows. Dear God alone knows. It’ll flow, God willing,” Avdo replies, firing off a laugh.

Because no one can tell the future of flow, unknowability is the baseline for nectar prospecting. The invocation of “dear God,” however, at once sharpens and softens the edge of uncertainty. The flow, like all things, rests within divine knowledge, which encompasses all things. Several lines from a well-known Qur’anic verse, known as the verse of the Throne, which Muslims around the world learn by heart, read: He knows what lies before them and what is after them and they encompass nothing of His knowledge save by His leave. His throne includes the heavens and the earth, and He never tires of preserving them.²⁵

In the writings of Ibn al-‘Arabī, a thirteenth-century Sufi and an everlasting inspiration for Muslim thinkers, the “Throne” refers to God’s knowledge, and God’s mercy encompasses everything, including God’s knowledge. God wills mercy to be the primary quality in his relationship with the world, and since mercy is all-encompassing—limitless—there is nothing in the heavens or the earth other than mercy.

The greatest show of mercy is the gift of existence itself, which is constantly replenished. Al-‘Arabī reads, in translation: “He is the One who never repeats a single thing in existence. Possible existence, that is entities, have no end. New instances are engendered every moment without repetitions and without retaining the old form and that process is everlasting in this and in the next world.”²⁶ The possibilities are unlimited, what comes through to particular beings depends on their constitution, states, and circumstances, all of which are subject to change. Given its source—mercy and knowledge—all giving is good, though the subjects may not like the taste of what they receive.

It is God who makes you laugh and makes you weep,²⁷ the Qur’an says, recommending composure and gratitude on the occasion of losses as well as gains. Trust in God’s knowledge ought to put things into perspective, so that you may not despair over what escapes you nor get overjoyed over what you have been given,²⁸ as the Qur’an cites God. Mentions of God’s knowledge, in the Qur’an and in Muslim conversations, are meant to humble with reminders of the inherent limits to human understanding and the short-sightedness of human desires. The following verses are often restated for comfort and encouragement: You may hate a thing though it is good for you and you may love a thing though it is bad for you. And Allah knows while you do not.²⁹

Avdo remembers the days when Jerusalem thorn yielded up to thirty kilograms per hive, but lately, the most they get is five kilograms per season. If they are lucky, the hives will add more honey to the black locust stocks still sitting in the combs. Each subsequent forage may add to the mix, and by the end of the summer, they hope to have enough to harvest.

On the other hand, God is known to be nothing if not generous. Faith in divine generosity is a matter of principle, which ritual practice restates daily—at the very least, through the customary invocation of God as the Compassionate, the Merciful. Copious divine giving, moreover, is a matter of fact: it is on the honey records.

“Of course, if it starts flowing well here, we’ll harvest before moving,” Avdo says with glee. Up until the last minute, the flow can surprise them. Sometimes, beekeepers come to load up the hives only to find them suddenly frantic with foragers collecting nectar. A dull, dry landscape can turn honeyed overnight.

One year, Avdo remembers vividly, something flowed here like never before. Within days, each hive gained thirty kilograms of dark, sparkling honey. They never discovered the nectar’s source. The thickets were alive with strong chirping, which convinced Avdo that it was the frosted-moth bug’s that excreted honeydew. The frosted-moth bug had not been spotted in the area previously, nor ever since. When Jerusalem thorn stops flowing, the bees will be off to the mountains of eastern and central Bosnia, searching for meadows and forest honeys.

Chasing after Summer Heather

Catching up with husband and wife Sabaheta and Nedžad is never easy. Seasoned mobile beekeepers, the couple learned the tricks of the trade from Nedžad’s parents, who toured the former Yugoslavia with a bee caravan. When the old man retired, mourning the loss of his dear wife and road companion, the couple inherited the truck and the routes. Those honey routes shrank after the breakup of Yugoslavia to only those territories within Bosnian borders. Emerging from years of siege in a central Bosnian town, the couple took the bees back on the road when the war ended. Beekeeping, however, was no longer the same.

A voracious new pest, the varroa mite, which was found to sap apian lymph and induce secondary infections, was now a widespread threat to the hives’ health. Monitoring mite infestation levels and treatments became an important, all-season routine. Local environments and climates have changed, and, in response, the couple’s trips are becoming shorter and more intense and their forage itineraries more changeable. The feat of staying on the honey’s trail with nearly three hundred hives is beginning to wear down the beekeepers as they age. Their two children grew up with the bees on the road, but the adult son and daughter do not care much for apiary affairs.

By early July, once black locust, indigo bush, and linden forage have passed in the northeastern lowlands and chestnut blooms are spent in the country’s north or west, the couple takes their bees to the Kupres highlands in the country’s southwest.

At over one thousand meters (thirty-three hundred feet) above sea level, vast valleys spread out between evergreen mountains, their slopes graced with small emerald-green lakes. With the local population steadily emigrating, once-cultivated plains are left untilled while the short growing season attracts the country’s itinerant shepherds and beekeepers to the extraordinarily diverse meadow plants.

Highland meadows typically offer a steady, long-lasting flow. Pine trees in the area are known to drip with manna, or honeydew. The couple park their hives on the land of their local hosts, a Catholic family of Bosnian Croats, Mario and Snježa. When they first met, the couple was unemployed, struggling to support their four school-age children. Within a few years, the beekeepers have trained them in apiculture, and, with a gift of several hives, the couple has built an apiary of nearly forty hives. Sabaheta also helped Snježa start a line of natural cosmetics by showing her how to cultivate and collect medicinal herbs and render them into facial creams and lip balms. Mario’s mother fondly calls Nedžad “a saint” and kisses his cheek. But the sensitive subject of their war histories is carefully broached, just like their social encounters deliberately curate their ethnic and religious differences. They barbeque together in the summers, but their plates and glasses, intentions, and bellies mark signs of significant dietary distinctions: pork and wine do not cross the table from the Catholic to the Muslim diners.

As the meadow mellows, the beekeepers start scouting the lower altitudes for the main attraction of the region: summer savory, or vrisak, as it is locally known. Growing farther south, in the more humid and temperate climate at seven hundred meters, bushes of summer savory, with perky, bladelike leaves, bloom in a flash.³⁰

Years of chasing after vrisak have given Sabaheta and Neždad a thorough feel of the valley, but this memory map cannot plot their itinerary in advance since this type of vrisak never blossoms twice in the same spot. Whether and where vrisak will flow is the question they take to the road each season. Following the trail of humidity and the shifting directions of wind and rainfall, they search out promising sites. The fugitive flower is well worth seeking since it promises a flow that can theoretically last from July to October, or at least a month, which is a lot. The couple cover considerable distance in their search on a two-lane highway, past the 1990s war remains and shells of blasted houses that have been overtaken by trees, brambles, and plants. A few homes have been fixed up by returnees, their livelihoods broadcasted by the road signs advertising sheep and goat cheese.

To find the flowers, however, Sabaheta and Neždad slowly maneuver the truck off the road and descend across sharp highland grass and much stone into the blooming fields. They cook and sleep by the off-loaded truck, sometimes in a trailer. Sabaheta’s back suffers in the field. Nedžad gets burned out. If it turns out that the vrisak on the spot is not flowing, they load up the hives and search onward. Not too long ago, they drove 2,000 kilometers (roughly 1,240 miles) up and down the same road, searching for a spot that flowed.

The last good year for vrisak was 2014. The couple remembers that the scale recorded a daily income of 5 kilograms (11 pounds) of nectar. Since then, daily yields maxed out at 0.5 kilograms (1.1 pounds). Melliferous forage, in general, is less yielding, the two beekeepers say.

“The climate has simply changed, everywhere. Sometimes everything in nature looks all right, but nothing comes about. We cannot influence that,” Sabaheta says. Nedžad is the quiet type, so she does most of the explaining. What the beekeepers can manage is their own mobility. They expand the range of their travels. Whenever possible, they spread hives across several locations within the same season. While half of their hives are in Kupres, for instance, other hives are ready to meet the meadow flow at the Vranica mountain range farther north.

Neždad monitors daily electronic hive scale reports and keeps scouting the areas of potential flow. Fellow beekeepers keep calling with inquiries and cross-country updates on what is flowing and what has dried up. These conversations range from guarded to frank, among friends. The countrywide perspective helps everyone get a better sense of the year’s trends as well as to decide how and when to make and shift plans. Still, nectar-flowing spots are professional secrets, and if the latest news is indiscriminately leaked, scouting can be spoiled by too many beekeepers on the same trail.

Say “God Willing”

With bees in a fixed location, Sabaheta says, you have to be lucky to get a harvest, and even so, forage opportunities are limited to what grows nearby. “On the wheels, you have to keep going. If you want a variety of honey types and if you want to keep the bees at all, you have to search for the flow, to come to the bees’ rescue.” Whereas in the past they would find a good spot and could camp out by the hives for much of the plants’ blooming season, nowadays, they move quickly at the first signs of nectar oscillation.

“We cannot really plan anything, nature dictates the terms. You’re looking at the sky, sorting out the signs, watching the weather, which determines everything. Then other things can happen. Sometimes, something comes down with the rain. I have seen vrisak dry up after showers. Just like back home, one year, rain fell on tomatoes and the next day they turned black. Black!”

Vrisak is a mysterious plant to begin with. “One never knows what it takes” for its flowers to well up with sweetness, Sabaheta says, for “it’s a strange plant! Strange.” Conditions may seem perfect: moderate air temperature with the right amount of rainfall, and yet the flowers may not get “activated,” as she puts it. Lately, the elements have also become weird: the winds unseen before, poisonous rains.

But neither the weird new weather nor the textbook-case atmospheric conditions for secretion ultimately determine the particular flow. The regional guide to honey hunting, now a dated sourcebook from the 1980s, describes decisive conditions for nectar flow of two species of vrisak: plenty of dew at night with morning and noon air temperatures in the range between 12°C and 32°C (54°F–90°F ), respectively. Sabaheta and Nedžad, however, know from experience that flowers can secrete against all odds. They remember a year when a dramatic bura, the wind picking up speed on its course to Bosnia from the Adriatic Sea, did not disturb the nectar flow. Another time, vrisak flowed through unseasonably low temperatures: frost-covered blooming fields attracted bees as soon as the morning air warmed. “As ever, dear God gives when you least expect it, even when conditions seem bad,” Sabaheta says.

In early August 2017, at the turn of vrisak season, I call Sabaheta for the flow forecast. “We shall see what awaits ahead,” she says. “We are all in God’s hands, and who knows what may be. We are now talking but who knows what can happen even as we hang up. The time has come that you cannot plan, not even simple things, like ‘I’ll meet a girlfriend for a coffee.’ Say ‘inshallah’ or ‘ako Bog da.’”

“You know the story about the man who said ‘I’ll buy a cow today’?” she asks me next. I do not, so she goes on to tell it.

“‘Say inshallah,’ someone advised him. ‘What for? It’s as good as done,’ he replied. ‘The money’s in my pocket, and it’s a market day: I’ll buy a cow!’ So to the market he went, found the right cow, reddish, gentle, with a promising udder, reached for the pocket and found it empty. ‘Inshallah,’ he said, ‘the money’s gone.’”

We share a laugh and on that buoyant note finish a conversation that all along rang with undertones of the beekeepers’ road fatigue and latent anxiety about what would happen next.

“God willing” in this story emphasizes caution about statements of intent. Two verses in the Qur’an advise so explicitly: And never say of anything, “Surely, I will do it tomorrow” without adding “If God wills.” ³¹ Sabaheta’s wisdom story, in fact, retells in a light tone a cautionary Qur’anic tale about owners of a garden who vowed to harvest its fruit without making an exception for God’s will. The next morning, they found the garden crops ruined.³²

Invoking God’s will redraws, on the go, the map of the cosmos in which no doer is a god: neither the honeybees nor summer savory, not the weather, not auspicious sites, not even determined beekeepers’ field techniques decide the outcomes of their singular encounters. Possibilities are endless, vagaries of weather notorious, and the current nectar trends discouraging. Saying “God willing,” however, also pleads with God, who recommends leaning on Him and who replenishes all possibilities, including the possibility of hoping and praying when formal reasons may suggest giving up effort and when frustrations may stoke doubts. A statement of confidence in God—who promises to respond to calls—renews faith, not simply as a willful belief (“blind faith,” as the saying goes) or a product of a formative experience in an object-subject encounter but as the changing receptivity of the one who is faithful.

The heart of a believer is said to be between two divine fingers, always turning between hope and fear. Invocation is meant not just to direct God’s attention to the atmosphere, to flower nectaries, and foragers’ routes and to tilt chances in one’s favor but also to enhance one’s receptivity to divine gifts, including the gifts of hope, patience, and gratitude, through honey flow or dearth, whether it is through laughter or tears.

Practical Metaphysics

Prayer in the Islamic tradition comes with a fabulous promise, but it is a curious medium insofar as it poses a metaphysical problem. Namely, it purports to move the ultimate Mover, to compel God, who, the Qur’an explicitly says, does what He wants and knows in advance what comes forth. The idea of God being swayed by something contingent—a human or anything else in the cosmos—is therefore preposterous on one level of consideration. On another level, it is limitless divine mercy that promises God’s responsiveness to the point where prayers are said to be capable of changing one’s destiny. Nothing less than that. This tension between human and divine agency, between divine imminence and transcendence is never resolved, but the bottom line is always in favor of the practice, which, tradition says, offers ready advice: do pray, since prayers will be heard, as the Qur’an says.

Metaphysicians are bent on practice. While writing on repentance and gratitude, al-Ghazālī at one point ponders the problem of human choice in doing and wrongdoing. He takes up several pages rehearsing theological arguments of all stripes, ranging from completely free human will to absolute divine predetermination to the middle grounds staked between the two positions. He thinks through causes and effects and considers forms of insight that integrate positions that seem contradictory, only to leave the question unsettled. Instead, he says, “But let us go back to our business.”³³ And his business is to recommend to the readers to practice repentance and gratitude and to elaborate on their meanings and merits. The whole business of practical metaphysics is to encourage contemplation while explaining how to better practice faith.

This is true especially in the times of trouble. The local beekeepers’ prayers are uttered from within landscapes and atmospheres that are rapidly changing and, they anticipate, are becoming inauspicious for the honeybees. Earlier springs and longer-lasting seasons due to climate change, pollination ecologists suspect, could potentially disturb plant-pollinator seasonal matchmaking and even entirely uncouple plants and their favorite insects. Most studies to date have focused precisely on this anticipated effect of climate change. There are not many studies, however, and those that do exist are limited to relatively few species of plant and insect partners. The findings so far are also inconclusive, with evidence of both mismatches and synchronous adjustments. The effects on honeybees are underinvestigated. Bosnian Muslim beekeepers offer firsthand observations on how shifts in seasons and changeable weather disjoin honeybees and the plants that used to provide them with nectar and pollen. Apiculturists are managing recurrent mismatches with artificial food, which, as the next chapter shows, is not so much a solution as a short-term strategy for managing the crisis.

Whereas climate biologists are concerned about the trend of springtime advancing in the northern hemisphere, local apiculturists anxiously point out that the climate conditions throughout the year no longer uphold the customary distinctions between the four seasons. Put simply, season as a category now barely holds. In addition, and this may be the most precious insight from the field, apiarists are reporting qualitative changes to the plants, what biologists might recognize as alterations in plant traits and physiology, alterations with consequences for floral scent, for the quantity of bloomage, as well as for the abundance and composition of nectar and pollen. Climate biologists have acknowledged a dearth of studies on this subject. Long-term observations of climate-related changes in phenologies, plant physiologies, and plant-pollinator interactions more generally are greatly needed but time-consuming and costly to undertake.³⁴ Climate biologists are certain, however, that the responses of living organisms are going to be highly idiosyncratic. The world of living difference can be expected to respond in myriad ways, which makes the future of plant-insect relations highly unpredictable.³⁵

Nectar flow is becoming fickler than ever. As troubling as this trend is, the events of honey’s waning and surprise yields accentuate the work of generosity, as a divine attribute that is unforeseeable but also pledged to those inclined to courting it.

Honey Harvest

My sister Azra and I visit Avdo and his family near the end of the honey season in 2021. The great round table on their terrace, in the shade of ripening fig trees, is spread with honeys. We are tasting the flavors of this year’s harvest. Avdo’s granddaughters Nura and Uma, ages seven and four, are also having a taste.

“This year was terrible,” Avdo says. To my sister Azra and me, who barely managed to harvest twenty jars of linden honey from twenty hives, the range of flavors displayed on the table seems impressive. There are seven jars in seven different hues, each enclosing a bouquet of aromas: black locust honey, the color of parchment; golden linden; meadow honeys in shades of umber reds; and the obsidian-dark forest honeydew. Avdo, however, shakes his head doubtfully: “This is thin. Considering the number of hives and sites visited . . .” His older son, Ado, adds: “But, alh.amdulillāh. We’ve managed to gather something.”

“Our babo (father) often says,” Ado carries on, “the way things are going—and if we live long enough we’ll know for sure—a jar of natural honey will be a miracle in ten years’ time. I don’t know what’s going on, but there’s less of it every year. May I be mistaken, oh my Lord.”

“Amin,” we join in.

NOTES

1.Adam Miller, Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 1–3. An object-oriented-philosopher Adam Miller adapts Christian epistles to develop a thingly theology.

2.Mary Zournazi and Isabelle Stengers, “A Cosmopolitics—Risk, Hope, Change,” in Hope: New Philosophies for Change, ed. Mary Zournazi (New York: Routledge, 2003), 245.

3.See also Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Open Humanities Press with Meson Press, 2015) and “Reclaiming Animism,” e-flux journal 36 (July 2012): 1–12. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61245/reclaiming-animism/; Stengers, “Wondering about Materialism,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 368–380; Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

4.Zournazi and Stengers, “Cosmopolitics,” 250. Stengers has attempted to think alongside neopagan witches, Virgin Mary pilgrims, Quakers, as well as physicists and Western philosophers. See Isabelle Stengers, “Including Nonhumans in Political Theory: Opening Pandora’s Box?” in Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, ed. Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 3–34.

5.35:14.

6.25:77.

7.14:27.

8.6:12.

9.Veroljub Umeljić, U svetu cveća i pčela: Atlas medonosnog bilja 1 (Kragujevac: Veroljub Umeljić, 2006), 199.

10.See Peter Coates, Ibn ‘Arabi and Modern Thought. The History of Taking Metaphysics Seriously (Oxford: Anqa Publishing, 2011).

11.A mobile beekeeper from central Bosnia, Mehmed thinks that scales are becoming less popular among his colleagues. He retired the field scale he owned. “These tools are too stressful,” he says, laughing. “Those who have them, stress out every day when the text [report] arrives. The rest of us stress only on those days when we visit the hives, have a look, and give them a tug. I find it easier this way. I live in hope, for three or four days and then, on the fifth day, if I’m crushed by the findings, I’ll manage to fall asleep somehow.” Mehmed hardly seems the type to stress easily. A composed man in his early fifties with a bright disposition, he is an imam by training. Since he resigned from his post at the local mosque, he has invested all his energies into the apiary. A resourceful keeper, he says flatly that he is determined to stick with the bees, no matter the losses. The precise microrecords of nectar’s oscillation, however, are unnerving. By contrast, the suspense helps nourish upbeat expectations.

12.4:126.

13.Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazālī, Ihja’ Ulūmid-dīn, Preporod Islamskih Nauka, 7, trans. Salih Čolaković (Sarajevo: Libris, 2010), 7–20.

14.Ibid., 16–17. I translated this section from al-Ghazālī’s pages, but the story of tawbah's bestowal, as is so often the case with important lessons on Islamic conduct, is a part of oral Bosnian Muslim lore. Shaykh Ayne often retold it in versions that improvised on al-Ghazālī, his favorite author, Qur’anic verses on tawbah, and stories he learned from his father, an imam, as well as from Shayk’s own Sufi elders.

15.A du‘ā’ is not necessarily unscripted. Favorite prayers are passed from the Prophet of Islam, his family and friends, other prophets, and many of God’s friends, great Sufi sages among them. They are published in collections and made into popular booklets, passed by word of mouth and social media, hand-copied or photocopied, learned by heart, or read out loud, regularly or in case of need.

16.2:186.

17.40:60.

18.See Jusuf Tavasli, Dove i njihovi fadileti (Sarajevo: Libris, 2013), 25.

19.Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazālī, Ihja’ Ulūmid-dīn, Preporod Islamskih Nauka, 2, trans. Salih Čolaković (Sarajevo: Libris, 2010), 322. On the devil’s prayer, see chapter 4 of this book.

20.12:18.

21.14:7; 3:145.

22.Mustafa Čolić, Et-Tarikatul-Muhammedijjetul-Islamijjetu, učenje i moral Allahovog Poslanika Muhammeda a.s.: Srčano zdravlje i bolesti metafizičkog insana (Visoko: Tekija Šejh Husejn baba Zukić, 2016), 473.

23.3:32; Čolić, Et-Tarikatul-Muhammedijjetul-Islamijjetu, učenje i moral Allahovog Poslanika Muhammeda a.s., 474.

24.Al-Ghazālī, Ihja’ulūmid-dīn, 7, 208.

25.Korkut, Kur’an s prijevodom, 2:255.

26.Muhyiddin Ibn al- ‘Arabī, Mekanska otkrovenja, trans. Salih Ibrišević and Ismail Ahmetagić (Sarajevo: Ibn Arebi, 2007), 458–460.

27.53:43.

28.57:23.

29.2:216.

30.There is some confusion over this plant. Vrisak and vrijesak are the same name rendered in two dialects, and Mrka sticks to the southern inflection: vrisak to distinguish it from the kindred plant growing in the northeast: Calluna vulgaris, common heather. But two types of Saturea, summer and winter savory, are more difficult to sort out, and the dialectical difference is of no help. Mrka identifies the plants they seek as summer savory, Saturea subspicata, while an authoritative guide to the melliferous flora in the region, compiled by migratory beekeeper and author Veroljub Umeljić, identifies the blue blossoms as Saturea montana, winter savory, and the white blossoms as the Mediterranean plant. Veroljub Umeljić, U svetu cveća i pčela: Atlas medonosnog bilja 1 (Kragujevac: Veroljub Umeljić, 2006), 664. White and blue blossoming vrisak alternate in the area of Mrka and Nedžad’s scouting, although the blue vrisak is by far more prevalent. In this text, I stick to vrisak.

31.18:24.

32.68:17–18.

33.Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazālī, Ihja’ Ulūmid-dīn, Preporod Islamskih Nauka, 7, trans. Salih Čolaković (Sarajevo: Libris, 2010), 21.

34.See Joar Stein Hegland, Anders Nielsen, Amparo Lazaro, Ann-Line Bjerkens, and Orjan Totland. “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. See also chapter 4, note 40.

35.See Simon G. Potts, Jacobus C. Biesmeijer, Claire Kremen, Peter Neumann, Oliver Schweiger, and William E. Kunin. “Global Pollinator Declines: Trends, Impacts and Drivers,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 25, no. 6 (February 2010): 345–353, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2010.01.007; 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), 42–54; Camille Parmesan, “Range and Abundance Changes” in Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere, ed. Thomas E. Lovejoy and Lee Hannah (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 25–38. On considerations of extreme climate weather events and more general uncertainties surrounding future biodiverisity conservation policies see of Pablo Marquet, Janeth Lessmann, and M. Rebecca Shaw, “Protected-Area Management and Climate Change,” Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere, ed. Thomas E. Lovejoy, Lee Hannah, and Edward O. Wilson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019) 283–293.