Buzz

The Buzz About Bees

Nobody trusts an exoskeleton. The mere sight of insects and other arthropods can trigger a measurable fear reaction in the human brain. Often, synapses associated with disgust also light up. Psychologists believe these feelings are innate, an evolutionary response to something that might bite, sting, or transmit disease. But there is also a deep sense of otherness about those brittle, segmented bodies: even from a safe distance, we know that such creatures would give a sickening crunch if stepped upon. Mammals like us belong to the vertebrates, animals who all share the chaste trait of tucking their structural parts out of sight inside the body in the form of bones. Technically, putting the hard bits on the outside may be the better evolutionary strategy—arthropod species outnumber vertebrates by more than twenty to one. But the fact remains that people find exoskeletons creepy, particularly since they so often go along with faceted eyes, waving antennae, and multiple, scrabbling legs. Filmmakers understand this, which is why Ridley Scott based the terrifying monsters in Alien on insects and marine invertebrates rather than puppies, and why the scariest creature in The Lord of the Rings was not a pig-like orc or a cave troll, but Shelob, the giant spider. Even trained professionals sometimes fall prey to this squeamishness. In his book The Infested Mind, career entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood confessed to abandoning his research—and transferring to the philosophy department—after the grasshoppers he was studying suddenly overwhelmed him in a teeming swarm.

Too often, our interactions with arthropods end in a swatting motion, or even a call to the local exterminator. When we do make exceptions, they usually involve bugs that don’t really look like bugs—butterflies that dazzle us with brilliant, colorful wings; woolly-bear caterpillars trudging along cheerfully under their furry tiger stripes; or ladybird beetles, beloved for what can only be described as unmitigated cuteness. People like crickets, too, but probably because their musical chirps can be enjoyed from a distance on a summer evening, without ever having to actually see one. In economic terms, the silk moth is appreciated for its valuable fibers, and we owe the entire world production of shellac to a small Asian scale bug, but our attitude toward insects is probably best expressed by global spending on pesticides, which currently tops $65 billion a year.

In the context of this general unease, the human connection to bees stands apart. With large, protruding eyes, two pairs of membranous wings, and prominent antennae, they do not hide their otherness. Young bees writhe like maggots, and when they mature, some species can swarm by the tens of thousands, each individual capable of delivering a painful, venomous sting. They look, in short, exactly like the insects we are meant to be afraid of. Yet, throughout history, in cultures around the world, people have overcome or set aside that fear to bond with bees: watching them, tracking them, taming them, studying them, writing poems and stories about them, even worshiping them. No other group of insects has grown so close to us, none is more essential, and none is more revered.

The human fascination with bees took root deep in our prehistory, when early hominins sought out the sugary blast of honey at every opportunity. As ancient peoples migrated around the globe, they continued searching for that sweetness, robbing the honeybees as well as scores of lesser-known species. Stone Age artists captured the practice in cave paintings from Africa to Europe to Australia, depicting hunts that sometimes involved tall ladders, flaming brands, and dangerous ascents. To our ancestors, the value of honey justified effort and risk far beyond the inconvenience of a few pesky stings.

From raiding wild colonies, the transition to organized beekeeping came as a logical next step nearly everywhere people settled down to farm. Potsherds laced with beeswax have been recovered from dozens of Neolithic agricultural sites across Europe, the Near East, and North Africa, some dating back more than 8,500 years. Exactly when and where the first beekeeper hived a swarm remains unclear, but Egyptians had certainly perfected the art by the third millennium BCE, tending their bees in long clay tubes, and eventually learning to ferry them up and down the Nile in concert with seasonal crops and wildflower blooms. People kept bees long before they tamed horses, camels, ducks, or turkeys, not to mention familiar crops like apples, oats, pears, peaches, peas, cucumbers, watermelon, celery, onions, or coffee beans. Domestication occurred independently in places as far-flung as India, Indonesia, and the Yucatan Peninsula, where Mayan beekeepers had the good sense to tend “royal ladies,” a rainforest species with the agreeable trait of lacking a sting. By the time the Hittites ruled western Asia, beekeeping was enshrined in law, and anyone caught pilfering hives could expect a harsh fine of six silver shekels. The Greeks enacted honey taxes, required 300-foot-wide buffers between rival apiaries, and saw the trade become so lucrative that it inspired sophisticated counterfeiting. Herodotus described a convincingly syrupy substitute crafted from “wheat and the fruit of the tamarisk.” Over the centuries, sticky liquids boiled down from dates, figs, grapes, and various tree saps would provide cheaper alternatives, but honey remained the world’s ultimate measure of sweetness until the advent of refined sugars.

What began as an upshot of our primeval sweet tooth only grew stronger as people found other uses for the products of the hive. Mixed with water and fermented, honey soon provided the additional enticement of tasty and reliable intoxication. Scholars consider mead one of the oldest alcoholic beverages; it has been brewed and consumed in various iterations for at least 9,000 years, and perhaps far longer. Tipplers in ancient China quaffed a version laced with rice and hawthorn berries, while the Celts flavored theirs with hazelnuts and the Finns preferred the zest of lemons. In Ethiopia, people still favor a version doctored with the bitter leaves of buckthorn. But perhaps the most potent meads of all were those that arose in the rainforests of Central and South America, where the Mayans and various tribal shamans developed hallucinogenic varieties spiked with narcotic roots and bark. In fact, healers of all kinds have long recognized the benefits of bees, recommending honey, mead, waxy salves, propolis (or “bee glue,” a resinous substance collected from plant buds by some bees for use in hive construction), and even the venom from stings to treat all manner of ailments. When remedies from the ancient world were summarized in the twelfth-century Syriac volume The Book of Medicines, over 350 of its 1,000 prescriptions required bee products. The anonymous author went so far as to call honey water an essential daily tonic (when properly mixed with wine and one dram each of anise seed and crushed peppercorn).

The historian Hilda Ransome did not exaggerate when she wrote, of bees, “It is impossible to over-estimate their value to man in the past.” As if sweetness, inebriation, and healing weren’t enough, bees also provided nothing less than illumination. From prehistory through the dawn of the Industrial Age, most options for holding back the darkness involved no small amount of smoke and splutter—campfires, torches, or simple lamps and rushes that reeked of fish oil and animal fat. For all that time, only beeswax burned with a clean, steady, pleasant-smelling light. Temples, churches, and wealthy homes glowed with it night after night for millennia. Added to the many other uses for beeswax—from waterproofing to embalming to metallurgy—candle-making created an insatiable demand that often made wax the most valuable beekeeping product of all. When the Romans finalized their conquest of Corsica in the second century BCE, they spurned the island’s famous honey in favor of a tribute measured out in wax alone—an impressive 200,000 pounds of it every year. Fittingly, the scribes and officials who oversaw that levy almost certainly made their notes on yet another bee-dependent innovation: the world’s first conveniently erasable writing surface. Long before the invention of chalkboards, small tablets covered with wax could be inscribed with a stylus, easily stored or transported, and then heated, smoothed, and used again.

Bees have been with us from the start. As the source of so many commodities, some of them great luxuries, it’s no wonder these insects found their way into folktales, mythology, and even religion. Bees in legend often played the role of messengers from the gods, their gifts to us seen as glimpses of the divine. Egyptians viewed them as the tears of the sun god, Ra, while an old French tale credits bees to Christ, formed from a scattering of droplets that fell from his hands as he bathed in the Jordan River. Deities and saints from Dionysus to Valentine became patrons of bees and their keepers, while in India, bees made up the humming bowstring of Kama, the god of love. Swarms of bees often portended battles, droughts, floods, and other great events throughout the ancient world, symbolizing good luck in China, or bad luck in India and Rome. According to Cicero, a swarm of bees foretold the eloquence and wisdom of Plato by gathering and settling upon the lips of the philosopher when he was still a babe in arms. Bee-priestesses, known as melissae, Greek for “honeybees,” served in the temples of Artemis, Aphrodite, and Demeter; they played a role at Delphi as well, where the famed Oracle was sometimes called “The Delphic Bee.”

With its otherworldly sweetness, the syrupy diet of bees was also considered divine, appearing in legend nearly as often as the bees themselves. The mother of Zeus, for example, reportedly hid her infant son in a cave, where wild bees raised the young god to adulthood, passing sweet nectar and honey straight from their mouths to his. The Hindu deities Vishnu, Krishna, and Indra grew up on a similar diet and were known collectively as “the nectar-born ones,” while in Scandinavia, the baby Odin preferred his honey mixed with milk from a sacred goat. Whether found in divine sippy cups or baked into heavenly cakes, honey dominated menus from Valhalla to Mount Olympus and beyond—traditions everywhere linked the sweetness gathered by bees to the foods of the gods. For the faithful, it also featured in the prospect of a just reward. Sources as varied as the Koran, the Bible, Celtic legends, and Coptic codices all described Paradise as a place flowing with rivers of honey.

In symbolism and in daily life, the value of bees to people lies rooted in their biology. The modern bee is a marvel of engineering, with wraparound ultraviolet vision; flexible, interlocking wings; and a pair of hypersensitive antennae capable of sniffing out everything from rose blossoms to bombs to cancer. Bees evolved alongside the flowering plants, and their most remarkable traits all developed in the context of that relationship. Flowers provide bees with the ingredients for honey and wax as well as the impetus for navigation, communication, cooperation, and, in some cases, buzzing itself. In return, bees perform what is their most fundamental and essential service. Yet, oddly, it’s one that people didn’t begin to understand—let alone appreciate—until the seventeenth century.

When German botanist Rudolf Jakob Camerarius first published his observations on pollination in 1694, most scientists found the whole notion of plant sex absurd, obscene, or both. Decades later, Philip Miller’s description of bees visiting tulip flowers was still deemed too racy for his best-selling The Gardeners Dictionary. After numerous complaints, the publisher deleted it completely from the third, fourth, and fifth editions. But the idea of pollination could be tested by anyone with access to a farm, a garden, or even a flowerpot. Eventually, the dance between bees and flowers came to fascinate some of the greatest thinkers in biology, including such luminaries (and beekeepers) as Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel. Today, pollination remains a vital field of study, because we know it is more than simply illuminating: it is irreplaceable. In the twenty-first century, sweetness comes to us from refined sugars, wax is a by-product of petroleum, and we get our light with the flick of a switch. But for the propagation of nearly every crop and wild plant not serviced by the wind, our reliance upon bees remains complete. When they falter, the repercussions make headline news.

Recently, the buzz about bees has often hummed louder than the bees themselves. Die-offs in the wild and in domestic hives threaten critical pollen and flower relationships that we’ve long taken for granted. But the story of bees is much more than a tale of plight or crisis. It leads us from the age of dinosaurs through an explosion of biodiversity that Darwin called an “abominable mystery.” Bees helped shape the natural world where our own species evolved, and their story often comingles with our own. The subtitle of this book guides its content: it’s an exploration of how the very nature of bees makes them so utterly necessary. To understand them, and ultimately to help them, we should appreciate not only where bees came from and how they work, but also why they’ve become one of the only insects to inspire more fondness than fear. The story of bees begins with biology, but it also tells us about ourselves. It explains why we’ve kept them close for so long, why advertisers turn to them to hawk everything from beer to breakfast cereal, and why our finest poets prefer their flowers “bee-studded,” their lips “bee-stung,” and their glades “bee-loud.” People study bees to better understand everything from collective decision-making to addiction, architecture, and efficient public transportation. As social animals recently adapted to living in large groups, we have a lot to learn from a group of creatures who, in part at least, have been doing it successfully for millions of years.

In the past, people around the world heard the buzzing of bees as voices of the departed, a murmured conveyance from the spirit world. This belief traces back to the cultures of Egypt and Greece, among others, where tradition held that a person’s soul appeared in bee form when it left the body, briefly visible (and audible) in its journey to the hereafter. While modern listeners perceive that living vibrato more prosaically, it remains a potent force, amplified by the unconscious urgency of a long and intimate bond. But the buzz about bees does not begin with pesticides, habitat loss, and the other challenges we’ve thrust upon them. It starts with their ascendance, an ancient lesson in hunger and innovation. Nobody knows the exact sequence of events that led to the beginning of bees, but everyone can agree on at least one thing: we know what it sounded like.