Claire Preston

Bee Claire Preston Animal series Bee Animal Series editor: Jonathan Burt Already published Crow Oyster Boria Sax Rebecca Stott Tortoise Rat Peter Young Jonathan Burt Cockroach Snake Marion Copeland Drake Stutesman Ant Bee Charlotte Sleigh Claire Preston Dog Bear Susan McHugh Robert E. Bieder Falcon Parrot Helen Macdonald Paul Carter Forthcoming Whale Crocodile Joe Roman Richard Freeman Hare Spider Simon Carnell Katja and Sergiusz Michalski Moose Duck Kevin Jackson Victoria de Rijke Fly Salmon Steven Connor Peter Coates Tiger Wolf Susie Green Garry Marvin Fox Martin Wallen Bee Claire Preston reaktion books For the Melissae Elizabeth Flowerday, Laura Gilbert, Sarah Strader, Susan Brigden, Lucinda Rumsey, Michelle Shepherd-Barron and the Bees of England Published by reaktion books ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2006 Copyright © Claire Preston 2006 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in China British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Preston, Claire Bee. – (Animal) 1. Bees I. Title 595.7’99 isbn-10: 1 86189 256 x Contents 1 The Reasons for Bees 7 2 Biological Bee 19 3 Kept Bee 31 4 Political Bee 53 5 Pious/Corrupt Bee 76 6 Utile Bee 93 7 Aesthetic Bee 100 8 Folkloric Bee 113 9 Playful Bee 129 10 Bee Movie 137 11 Retired Bee 162 Timeline 168 References 171 Bibliography 187 Associations & Websites 193 Acknowledgements 195 Photo Acknowledgements 197 Index 199 1 The Reasons for Bees The only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey . and the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.1 The proverb goes una apis, nulla apis – one bee is no bee – and so this book is misnamed. The evolutionary miracle of so-called ‘political’ insects, with their extraordinary social and biological organization, and remarkable, unique manufacturing and engi- neering abilities, is the miracle of bees together, tens of thou- sands of bees. The social sentience of all these bees seemed to the ancient world, and until quite recently, a moral sentience. And the moral life, as Thomas Hobbes wrote, is the life inter omnes; it is the life of bees. Our planet teems with bees, about 20,000 apian species in all, most of them indispensable to plant ecology. But the cultural history of bees overwhelmingly features just one of these – Apis mellifera, or the western honeybee. The honeybee, alone among animals, makes something by a kind of craft out of ele- ments external to itself. Compare the bee to the silkworm and the cow: the latter naturally produce substances from their bodies which, harvested by man, are used or converted for use into fabric and food. The meat and skins of the animals we hunt and rear for food are constituent and integral to them: they cannot live without their fur or their muscles, nor can they make anything from them. But the bee’s main product, honey, is its own finished and complete manufacture, which it fabri- cates from gathered raw materials. Unlike silk and milk, honey 7 is a behavioural artefact of the artisanal civilization of bees. In some ways honey has more in common with the serviceable talents of horses and dogs in performing tasks than it has with cheese and sausages and cloth from the bodies of cows and silkworms. The ant and the termite, the two other families of social insect, display the same high organization and special- ization, but only the honeybee’s exemplary behaviour also generates to mankind products of great use and value. The bee was technically among the first domestic animals, but, as if to retain mastery of its products, it has never been, strictly speaking, domesticated. For all their social graces, bees are essentially wild. Bees and men have been acquainted with each other during the whole of human history. The bee, a far older species than the bee-keeper, was operating in its astonishing patterns of civil behaviour before mankind had evolved anything resembling social organization. When eventually he turned into a social animal, he learned to rob wild bees, then to kill hived ones and, at last, to pilfer politely from them, almost as if the purpose of bees on earth were to teach man the ways of enlightened self- interest and how to behave fairly and reasonably. Because of its immensely long history in association with man, the bee has been more carefully observed, more celebrated, more storied and mythologized, and latterly more feared than most other animals. Some of the first pictographic human records include business with bees, as do the earliest written ones. From the first Greek poetry to the latest Hollywood horror film, the bee stands as an emblem of man’s relation to nature and to himself. The mystery and the wonder of the bee prompted the seventeenth-century scientists who used the earliest, primitive microscopes to describe and draw the bee before all other creatures. 8 One of the earliest anatomical studies of the bee using a microscope, from Francesco Stelluti, Persio tradotto (1630). Bees are everywhere. But despite their huge geographical range, their cultural territory is relatively limited. Most of the extensive mythology and symbolism of bees arose and ramified in the Judaeo-Graeco-Christian West for the simple reason that 9 Eckfeldapis electrapoides, a fossilized ancestor of the modern bee, from Germany, c. 50 million years old. the European honeybee in its various sub-species is both the most prolific producer of honey and temperamentally the most adapt- able to domestic cultivation. In those non-western parts of the world – southern Africa and the Indian sub-continent – where an old apian cultural tradition exists, it is one of bee-hunting rather than of domestication, and consequently yields less elaborate visions of apian society and behaviour than those regions where hived bees were readily and consistently observed. Apis mellifera originated in southern Asia (probably in and around Afghanistan), but there are surprisingly few Far-Eastern bee traditions to examine, possibly because the phenomenon of the sweet tooth appears to be a western and northern one, and in many Asian cultures there was relatively little demand for honey. Although the western honeybees were imported to South America in the 1530s, the Maya of Meso-America had long since domesticated the stingless bee (of the subfamily Apidae Meliponinae) and incorporated it into their myths and records; and there are no native North American legends con- cerning honeybees, which were only imported in 1621 to Virginia 10 (by the Dutch) and known to the native Americans as ‘the Englishman’s fly’. Thus, lest it appear otherwise, this book does not wilfully or carelessly exclude non-western traditions in favour of a Mediterranean, European focus. It is the bees themselves who have flourished there. In the bee’s rich history some interesting paradoxes emerge. The perception of one apian quality – selflessness – informed much ancient and early-modern bee-mythology: as the quintes- sence of civility, the bee works always for the common good, and can no more be bribed or corrupted than a flower. The bee Mayan bee icons. is Nature’s workaholic. In the post-industrial era, however, that same selflessness in the form of mass behaviour has yielded the horror of the mindless, monstrously violent, Bacchic swarm which irrationally and unpredictably attacks the defenceless individual. Bees themselves are of course in thrall to a natural imperative which is no more generous or public-spiritedly self- less than the survival instinct of any other animal; but this has been interpreted as mechanical subjection to inscrutable high- er powers. For this reason the bee has been a favourite of social satirists and political polemicists. Indeed, the ideologues of power think of bee-keeping as the appropriation of the labour of oppressed worker bees, and of bee-keeping as a form of enslavement.2 This book will follow those contradictory ideas in history, where fear of the masses competes with virtuous group undertakings, where individuality and self-determination seem threatened by the collective will. A related contradiction is the conception of the bee as, on the one hand, publicly oriented, part of a complex, highly evolved hierarchical commonwealth, and on the other, private, modest, secret, retiring, unindividuated, seeking no more than to be an anonymous and identical cog in a wonderful natural machine. Thus the bee is associated with both public and private virtues: 11 the bee stands both for the outer-directed life of social benefit as well as the ancient and attractive convention of retirement from public life. Hobbes’s dictum, that ‘the Common good differeth not from the Private’,3 that the retired individual has a civil role within the communal life of the nation, is central to the myth of the bee. That myth also promoted a slightly different form of retirement among its admirers. When Sherlock Holmes gave up detection, he went to the country, there to produce at leisure a magnum opus entitled Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen.4 George MacKenzie, praising contemplative solitude in England during the Restoration years after 1660, cited the solitary Phyliscus, ‘a great Philosopher, that for fifty years . employed himself in the observation of Bees’, that most social of animals.5 Those country persons learned in bee-lore around Concord, Massachusetts, seemed to Henry Thoreau to have garnered a kind of natural wisdom: ‘I love best the unscientific man’s knowledge; there is so much humanity in it.’6 James Fenimore Cooper’s lonely American frontiersman and honey-hunter finds pleasing civic morals in the life of bees, and remarks: ‘I often think of these things, out here in the wilderness, when I’m alone, and my thoughts are actyve [sic].’7 For each, public virtues and public behaviour are best con- sidered in retirement, in the company of bees.

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