Lessons from a Sting: Sacred Teachings of the Honeybee
What began as a simple encounter with a honeybee transformed into a journey of understanding the profound wisdom these sacred beings carry. The sting that ended this small being’s life opened my eyes to the greater purpose and beauty of their existence. In seeking to honour the spirit of this teacher, I discovered a world of extraordinary organization, purpose, and collective wisdom. Through the honeybee’s sacrifice, I learned that every interaction in nature offers an opportunity for deeper understanding, if we approach it with an open heart and willing spirit. Their intricate societies mirror ancient teachings about community, purpose, and the delicate balance of life, showing us how individual actions weave into the greater tapestry of existence.
In the intricate dance of life, honeybees emerge as profound teachers of community, purpose, and sacred relationships. Their societies offer deep insights into the power of collective living and the beauty of organized purpose, demonstrating how individual actions contribute to the greater good of all.
Matriarchal Wisdom: Leadership Lessons from the Queen Bee
The matriarchal wisdom of bee colonies provides a powerful model of leadership based on service and collective well-being. At the heart of each colony, the queen bee exemplifies leadership through nurturing and sustaining community life. This matriarchal structure reflects ancient wisdom about power dynamics that prioritize community survival and well-being over individual gain. Through their sophisticated organization, bees demonstrate how true power emerges from service to community and the maintenance of balance in all things.
Seven Sacred Ways of the Bee: Indigenous Teachings in Nature’s Design
The bee community’s behavior beautifully reflects the Seven Grandfather Teachings central to Indigenous wisdom. Their display of Wisdom (Nbwaakaawin) manifests in sophisticated communication and decision-making systems that ensure colony survival. Love (Zaagi’idiwin) flows through their collective care for each member of the community, while Respect (Mnaadendimowin) shows in their clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Bravery (Aakode’ewin) emerges in their fearless protection of the colony, and Honesty (Gwekwaadiziwin) appears in their direct and clear communication systems. Humility (Dbaadendiziwin) shines through their selfless service to the collective good, while Truth (Debwewin) resonates in their authentic purpose and action.
Sacred Relations: Learning Nature’s Balance from the Honeybee
The sacred relationship bees maintain with their environment offers crucial lessons for humanity. Their role as pollinators demonstrates the importance of reciprocal relationships in nature, where each action serves multiple purposes in maintaining ecological balance. Through their seasonal awareness and adaptation, bees teach us about living in harmony with natural cycles and managing resources sustainably. Their intimate connection with flowering plants reminds us of the delicate interconnections that sustain all life.
Architects of Unity: The Honeybee’s Blueprint for Collective Living
The organizational structure of bee communities provides a blueprint for collective living. Their sophisticated communication systems, shared responsibilities, and unified purpose demonstrate how individuals can work together for common goals. The way they distribute resources, protect their community, and adapt to changing conditions offers insights into building resilient societies that can face contemporary challenges.
Sacred Responsibility: Honouring Our Relations with the Honeybee
To honour these sacred teachers, as humanity, we must take practical action to ensure their survival. Creating pollinator gardens, avoiding harmful pesticides, and supporting local beekeepers represent tangible ways to protect these essential beings. By providing appropriate habitats and water sources, we acknowledge their importance and contribute to their well-being. Learning about bee ecology and sharing this knowledge helps build broader understanding and appreciation of their crucial role in ecological systems.
Our sacred responsibilities to honeybees extend beyond practical support to spiritual acknowledgment of their role as teachers and sustainers of life. By learning from their example of collective living and purposeful action, we can better understand how to create harmonious communities that serve all members. Their teachings about balance, cooperation, and environmental stewardship offer guidance for addressing contemporary challenges while maintaining connection to ancient wisdom.
Sacred Purpose: The Honeybee’s Message to Humanity
The honeybee reminds us that every being has a sacred purpose in the web of life. Their example shows us how individual actions, when aligned with collective well-being, create strong and resilient communities. By honouring their wisdom and protecting their existence, we acknowledge our own place in the interconnected tapestry of life and our responsibility to maintain these sacred relationships for future generations.
Blog by Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
(Image Credit: Andrey Larionov, Unsplash)
The post Sacred Lessons from the Honeybee: A Story of Purpose, Community, and Interconnection appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Sacred Lessons from the Honeybee: A Story of Purpose, Community, and Interconnection
When carbon dioxide (CO2) is released from a factory or power plant, the gas can be captured and permanently stored underground, preventing it from driving climate change.
This is the idea underpinning carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is at the heart of many nations’ net-zero plans.
Influential organisations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), describe CCS as “critical” for cutting emissions from key sectors – and for helping to avoid dangerous global warming.
In particular, capturing CO2 is seen as one of the only viable options for decarbonising some of the world’s highest-emitting industries, such as cement production.
The UK, for example, has committed to investing as much as £21.7bn over the coming decades in its nascent CCS industry, as part of the nation’s net-zero strategy.
Yet, in the UK and elsewhere, there has been a backlash against plans for CCS.
Citing high costs, ties to the fossil-fuel industry and a “history of poor performance”, critics describe CCS as a “dangerous distraction” or a “false climate solution”.
Time and again, the outlook for the roll-out of CCS has been scaled back, as the technology has failed to deliver as quickly as expected – and as policy support has wavered.
Furthermore, critics state that the technology remains “unproven” on the scale required to make a meaningful impact on global emissions.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explores the role CCS is expected to play in achieving net-zero, its record to date and the reasons it has been criticised, using the UK as an example.
What is CCS?
CCS involves capturing CO2 emissions released from a large source, such as a gas power plant or a cement factory.
The CO2 is separated from the facility’s exhaust stream, generally using a chemical solvent, before being compressed into a liquid and transported via pipeline or vehicle. The CO2 is then stored by injecting it into underground reservoirs, such as depleted oil fields or saline aquifers.
The term “CCUS” is sometimes also used, referring to the “utilisation” of CO2 to make products, including fertilisers, fuels or building materials. Such uses do not necessarily lead to permanent emissions cuts, as the CO2 can end up later being released back into the atmosphere.
(“CCS” is used in this Q&A, unless quoting another organisation that specifically refers to “CCUS”.)
The infographic below shows the stages of capturing CO2 and transporting it to be either stored or used in other applications.
Carbon capture technology was originally rolled out at US and Canadian oil wells in the early 1970s as a way to achieve “enhanced oil recovery”. This involves injecting captured CO2 into depleted wells – a process that stores CO2, but also helps to extract more oil.
This remains, by far, the most significant end use for captured CO2 worldwide, with around three-quarters of it used for this purpose.
Moreover, most of the CO2 currently captured is a by-product of gas purification – the process by which fossil fuels such as methane are separated from other, unwanted substances. Selling this CO2 can make such gas projects more economically viable.
Therefore, as shown in the chart below, which is based on International Energy Agency (IEA) data, the majority of CO2 that is both captured and used today helps the fossil-fuel industry to extract and sell more oil and gas.
CCS was first proposed as a way to deal with CO2 emissions in a 1976 academic article, which imagined injecting the captured gas into the ocean.
It is only since the early 2000s that CCS has gained traction as a proposed climate solution, with a 2005 “special report” by the IPCC exploring the topic. At that time, the authors note there were just three small-scale projects trying to capture and permanently store CO2.
Installing CCS at factories or power plants and permanently storing the CO2 would mean that, in theory, such facilities could continue using fossil fuels without contributing to climate change.
Such applications are often mentioned alongside two related technologies, both of which could be used to “suck” CO2 out of the atmosphere and, thus, deliver “negative emissions”.
One is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Crops absorb CO2 as they grow and BECCS involves a power plant burning these crops, then storing the resulting CO2.
The other technology is direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).
These technologies are classed as “CO2 removal”, as they involve absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere using plants or machines and then storing it permanently.
By contrast, CCS installed at a factory is considered a way to avoid CO2 emitted by that specific facility from entering the atmosphere. This Q&A focuses on such applications, which account for the vast majority of existing and planned CCS.
How much CCS capacity has been built so far?
As of February 2026, there were a total of 75 operational CCS projects around the world. As noted above, almost all of them are at fossil-fuel extraction and processing sites, according to the IEA’s database.
Together, these projects capture 62.5m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) each year. This is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Ecuador.
(This compares with the 22 CCS projects, promising to capture 40MtCO2 annually, that were operational or under construction as of 2014.)
As the chart below shows, the amount of CO2 currently being captured and stored is a tiny fraction of the total emissions from fossil-fuel use.
In a 2020 report, the IEA explained that the “story of CCUS has largely been one of unmet expectations: its potential to mitigate climate change has been recognised for decades, but deployment has been slow”.
A wave of interest in CCS in the 2000s, largely from countries in Europe and North America, focused on enabling coal power plants to continue operating with lower emissions.
This interest largely petered out, as plummeting renewable energy costs weakened the case for coal plants with CCS. Today, there are only seven operating CCS-coal plants worldwide – five in China, one in the US and one in Canada.
Yet the Paris Agreement in 2015 – and the national net-zero targets that followed – highlighted the need for deep emissions cuts in sectors that previously expected to continue emitting for decades. This, once again, has fuelled interest in the use of CCS.
In recent years, there has also been growing interest in producing low-carbon “blue” hydrogen from gas with CCS.
Hydrogen is widely seen as key for decarbonising certain sectors – particularly in industry – but analyses suggest that it may be difficult to make sufficient “green” hydrogen using renewable power on the timescales required.
As the map below shows, most CCS capacity is based in the US and Canada, with other major fossil-fuel producers such as Norway, Brazil and the Gulf states also contributing.
A surge of projects have entered the global CCS pipeline in recent years. According to the IEA, 93.7MtCO2 of capture or storage capacity is under construction as of February 2026 and another 1,279.6MtCO2 is in the “planning” stages.
“Planned” projects include any initiative at early concept, feasibility or engineering study stages and the industry has a long history of projects being cancelled or delayed.
Nevertheless, this pipeline of projects could lead to a large expansion of facilities dedicated to permanent CO2 storage that does not involve extracting more oil.
The planned projects – if they are realised – would also include significant growth in sectors where CCS is virtually non-existent, such as steel, hydrogen and cement production, as shown in the chart below.
What role is CCS expected to play in reaching net-zero?
It will be impossible to stop dangerous climate change unless the world reaches net-zero emissions, according to the IPCC. The amount of global warming – and whether the Paris Agreement temperature target can be met – depends on when net-zero is reached.
Many global pathways that have been set out for achieving net-zero, including a majority of the IPCC-assessed pathways where global warming is limited to 1.5C, rely on the use of CCS at fossil-fuel plants and industrial sites.
“These models have been quite instrumental in bringing CCS back onto the agenda,” Lina Lefstad, an ecological economist at Lund University, tells Carbon Brief.
Influential organisations relying on CCS in their net-zero scenarios range from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) through to the oil company Shell. The IEA has stated that net-zero would be “virtually impossible” without CCS.
These scenarios often include 10s to 100s of times more CCS capacity being built in the coming decades. The IEA includes 1.7GtCO2 being captured by 2035 in its net-zero scenario – nearly 30 times more than is captured today.
(Some of the much higher numbers in scenarios assessed by the IPCC have been dismissed by experts as implausible, especially given the slow rollout of CCS to date.)
When considering CCS for both emissions cuts and removals, Dr Jennifer Roberts, a researcher at the University of Strathclyde and deputy director at the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Centre (UKCCSRC), tells Carbon Brief the situation is clear:
“From an IPCC climate modelling perspective…reaching net-zero without CCS is far more expensive, disruptive and potentially out of reach.”
This does not mean that it would be impossible to reach net-zero without using CCS. However, net-zero scenarios that use little or no CCS rely on dramatic changes elsewhere, such as much lower global energy demand.
Net-zero scenarios often include a crucial role for CCS in “hard-to-abate” sectors, referring to activities that lack available, low-cost options to fully decarbonise. In particular, CCS is widely seen as vital for decarbonising parts of heavy industry.
The IPCC sixth assessment report (AR6) summary for policymakers calls CCS a “critical mitigation option” for some sectors, including cement and chemicals. The technical summary of the AR6 Working Group III report says that “CCS will be required to mitigate remaining CO2” in industrial sectors.
The IEA describes CCS as “virtually the only technology” that can significantly cut cement emissions, which account for around 7% of the global total. (Much of this CO2 comes from chemical processes, meaning it would still be released if the industry was electrified.)
Yet, the understanding of “hard-to-abate” emissions is changing, as alternatives to CCS become cheaper and increasingly available. As a result, CCS has become a less attractive option in some sectors, as well as being seen as less vital in some others.
Carbon Brief analysis shows that the IEA has reduced its outlook for CCS in the power sector by a third, compared to its expectations in 2021, as the chart below shows.
This reflects both slow progress in deploying CCS and rapid cost reductions in renewables, which make running gas or coal power plants less attractive.
(Even prior to this adjustment, the IEA’s net-zero scenario was already at the lower end of CCS use, compared to those assessed by the IPCC.)
This declining role for CCS in the power sector would mean its use is more concentrated in industry.
Industrial sectors – particularly cement, steel and chemicals – account for 60% of the CO2 captured in 2050 under the IEA’s net-zero scenario, as shown in the figure below. The remaining 40% is roughly split between electricity generation and blue hydrogen production.
Climate NGOs Bellona and E3G have stressed that with “limited public funding, infrastructure constraints and political attention, prioritisation is essential” for CCS. Their “CCS ladder” places CCS in cement and lime production at the top – with the highest “climate value” – while power CCS has “low and decreasing value”.
Despite this, the focus of the CCS sector so far has not been in heavy industry, which represents less than 10% of announced capacity.