Chapter 2
Honey’s on the Wheels. Beekeepers’ Prayers
‘Honey’s on the wheels’ local beekeepers say. Summed up in the saying is a complaint about hard times and the gist of their strategy for securing honey. As nectar flow is waning in the strange new weather, mobile beekeepers hunt for it. They tour the country’s edgelands, far from industrial pollution, far from pesticides, and seek out promising coves across the former frontlines of the 90s war, now rewilding. Across the country’s several climates, however, they find that honey ecologies are profoundly altering. 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. What keeps them going, aside from clever strategies, what stokes their efforts and counters disappointments are prayerful anticipation that honey will flow, God willing, insha’Allāh. The chapter presents Bosnian Muslim sense of sweet chances in the honey-waning world. Moreover, the chapter wonders about prayers: how the prayer works, what it achieves in the world, and what it presumes about relationships between humans, other species, elements, and God. Eco-eschatology counts on prayers, not just hopes.
A Pussy willow’s first bloom.
