Jude Lombardi and Mariah Guimarães Di Stasi
Honeybees are an example of nature in action. Now, how do we explain their experience? In this paper, we share our understandings about types of Honeybees, their environmental interdependence (sympoiesis) and their dynamics, while embracing the idea of arcs, their impacts, and the impact of arcs. Heinz von Foerster suggested that if there was one concept to describe cybernetics, it would be circularity. This fits nicely with the concept of arcs of impacts and the impact of arcs. One definition of arc, the curve for making a circle. Arcs make circles. As system thinkers, we reexamined our perceptions of Honeybee behaviour from a contemporary cybernetic lens that embraces circularity, dynamics, change, uncertainty, our observations, our conversations and our reflections. These deep conversations led to images that we wish to share with others. We will use these images to illustrate our transformations regarding our understandings of Honeybees, their behaviour, their sympoiesis, resilience, and introduce a unique systemic family tree.
KEYWORDS: honeybees, nature, arcs of circularities, cybernetics
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Profiles
Jude Lombardi
As a social worker, Judy worked in nursing homes with the elderly, in residential care with adolescents, and with non-violent offenders in the prison system. She then ran a private practice focusing on the needs of “emotionally disturbed” children, their families, and organisations working with them. As a behavioural consultant, along with others, she developed Behavioural Cybernetics.
In 1996, Judith earned a PhD in Human Relations and Cybernetics. Her dissertation was a contextual essay and video entitled “from what to when is (not) violence?” Her committee members included: Minnie Bruce Pratt, Herbert Brün, Bethe Hagens, Humberto Maturana, Rodney Donaldson and Lisa Werthamer. For the next decade or so, Dr. Lombardi taught a sociology that emphasised generating one's sociological imagination at a university in Baltimore. Here is more on becoming Jude.
In retirement Jude continues exploring cybernetic ways of thinking and being while continuing to create videos, write and present to those interested in and about cybernetics as it relates to social rather than dis-social relations and transformations.
Since 2013, Jude has worked with the honeybees at the Mt. Washington Arboretum, where she helps others learn about, and how to care for, honeybees and other pollinators. She recently published her first graphic novel, The Bees’ Needs.
Jude plays the snare drum in a brass band called the Barrage Band Orchestra.
Mariah Guimarães Di Stasi
Mariah Guimarães Di Stasi has a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the State University of Londrina (2013) and a Master’s degree from the Postgraduate Program in Architecture and Urbanism at IAU-USP (2019), at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo, São Carlos. From 2016 to 2019, she was part of the Nomads.usp research group. She was also part of the academic journal ‘Revista V!rus’ as a member of the editorial board and reviewer of Portuguese, English, and Spanish. She received a CAPES fellowship as a master’s researcher at the IAU and a fellowship at the Teaching Improvement Program. Mariah was also awarded the Heinz von Foerster Award at the ASC 2019 Conference in Vancouver, an international honour given by the American Society for Cybernetics, in recognition of her contributions to the conference.
This image represents our collaboration in which our circular way of thinking is hopefully evident, as a consequence of our cybernetic processes. This way of thinking entails flowing through different scales of observation– as represented by the green dotted spirals that originate at the centre. The arrows give the flow of interconnections among images and their influence in a new design for the Honeybee ancestral tree.
