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By Root 1336 0

in the building. The line manifesting the electrical response of the yogurt immediately went flat. I tried to fabricate anger, thinking of clearcuts and the politicians who legislate them, thinking about abused children and their abusers. Still flat. Either fabricated emotions don't count (as Cleve had suggested), or it's a sham, or something else was terribly wrong. Perhaps the yogurt was not interested in me. Losing interest myself, I began to wander the lab. My eyes fell on a calendar, which on closer inspection I saw was actually an advertisement for a shipping company. I felt a surge of anger at the ubiquity of advertising. Then I realized—a spontaneous emotion! I dashed to the chart, and saw a sudden spike corresponding to the moment I'd felt the anger. Then more flatline. And more flatline. And more. Again I began to wander the lab, and again I saw something that triggered an emotion. This was a poster showing a map of the human genome. I thought of the Human Genome Diversity Project, a monumental study hated by many indigenous peoples and their allies for its genocidal implications (Backster is not affiliated with or particularly a fan of the program; I later found he simply likes the poster). Another surge of anger, another dash to the chart, and another spike in the graph, from instants before I started to move.

Finally Cleve came back. Even the scientist in me was happy. I had previously experienced this attunement in the field, felt it with coyotes, dogs, trees, stars. And now I had seen it in the laboratory.

Death and Awakening

"In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, For the straight way was lost." Dante Alighieri

MY BEES DIED FOR the first time in the spring of 1985.

Beekeeping in California promises not only cash, but danger. One of the reasons Glen and I pushed so hard when we moved bees is that growers generally want them in as soon as the bloom gets underway, but no sooner, because they want to apply insecticides until the last moment. They want the bees out when the petals drop, for the same reason. You never know precisely when blossoms are going to pop: rain may delay, or a nice day hasten, the flowers opening. Nor do you know when the petals will fall: a hot wind can rob the trees of flowers in just a couple of hours. Then you can bet growers will be spraying chemicals the next day. Even with this constant movement on the part of beekeepers, about 50,000 beehives—nearly ten percent of the total present—are killed each year in California by pesticides.

Oranges are one of the most dangerous crops. Even during the bloom, when growers are prohibited from applying insecticides except in the case of (routine) emergencies, every morning I found abnormally large piles of dead bees in front of each hive, and hundreds of walking wounded: disoriented bees dragging hind legs as if paralyzed, wings fluttering spasmodically.

Each day I called the county extension office to find when the ban on pesticides would be lifted, and one Thursday they announced it would end at dawn on Saturday morning. I immediately called a trucking broker to hire a flatbed semi to haul the bees to northeastern Nevada, where I had arranged sites on pastures of alfalfa and clover to keep the bees through the summer. The first broker I called didn't handle flatbeds, nor did the second. The third said he would check around for me and find something. I called him back late in the afternoon, and he said there were none to be found. He would, however, be able to rent me a refrigerated van.

I later learned that I was gullible, and intentionally deceived. Flatbeds were everywhere; I had merely called the wrong three brokers. The final one, not willing to send me on as had the others, merely lied. Though I didn't know all that at the time, I did know that on rare occasions beekeepers hire refrigerated vans to move their bees, refrigeration being crucial to keep the hives from overheating during the long drive in close confinement. Because my hives were on pallets for ease of loading, I insisted