(
Host) With election season coming to a close, commentator Stephanie
Greene, a freelance writer who lives on the family farm in Windham
County, has a great use for all those political signs.
(Greene) I insulate my beehives with old political signs.
It
may seem kind of heartless, stapling someone’s high hopes for office
onto the sides of my insect high-rises, but I think it’s oddly
appropriate – given that throughout history, scientific thought has
often been forced to conform to current political agendas, and more
importantly, to flatter those in power.
High time to turn the tables, I say.
Although
Aristotle wrote extensively about bees, and often with great accuracy,
he didn’t go in much for bees as a political metaphor. But Pliny The
Elder, of the first century AD, did, positing that a hive ran a sort of
election to select the best king, and the losers would be killed.
Well, that’s ancient Rome, for you.
Christian
writers have long idealized the beehive’s productivity and cooperation
as a symbol of selfless love. The fifth century theologian, Saint
Augustine, even believed that bees had no sex.
And for
generations, court favorites fell all over themselves likening the
productivity and order of the hive to that of whoever happened to be in
power.
Mind you, observers generally thought that the large,
elegant bee being waited upon, fed and groomed was a male. Not until
1669 did the Dutch scientist Jan Swammerdam announce that the so-called
King Bee did, in fact, have ovaries.
And a hasty political about-face was engineered.
In
the late 19th century, early Communists claimed the structure and
function of the beehive as the ideal model for a perfect society. A
system of seamless cooperation, it put the good of the many above that
of individuals. The means of production was owned by the workers.
Well, not entirely. All these metaphors get a little tricky.
Take
the drones. At this time of year, things are not going well for them.
Since their sole function in the beehive is to mate with the virgin
queen in the spring, they’ve lounged around all summer eating while
everyone else was hard at work laying in honey and pollen for the
winter. Now the drones are being kicked out of the hive by the female
workers.
With that in mind, Tickner Edwards wrote in 1908, that
the hive was ‘a perfect object-lesson of what socialism, carried out to
its last and sternest conclusions must mean… The rule that those who
cannot work, must not live, is applied with ruthless consistency’, he
said.
Edwards also took a pretty dim view of the queen. Far from
being the hive’s mastermind, or even ruler, she was described as being
stupid and docile with a beautiful body but utterly in thrall to her own
impulses and passions.
Recent beehive theorizing likens drones to the 1%, living off the work of others, producing nothing.
There are also those who say the queen’s mating flight is a promiscuous debauch by an insect floozy.
And so it goes.
I wonder what my bees would make of all this projecting. I guess they’re too busy working what’s left of the asters to notice.
They like having insulated hives, though.