I put a microphone on my friend Ed and asked him to talk about keeping bees while tearing apart one of his hives to harvest the honey.

Ed exemplifies many of the complex challenges facing people trying to build a life of cooperative relationships between humans and animals – intellectual mastery of complicated information processes, strength for difficult tasks (each honey-filled hive section weighs 70 pounds), a desire to remain ecologically responsible and sustainable, the struggle against threats from other biological systems (in this case, mites), and persistent concern over potential disaster (such as the mysterious Colony Collapse).