Fables of the Bees: Species as an Intercultural Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Scientific and Literary Texts

Much of the analysis of the cultural meaning of the bee in early-modern England has focused on the seventeenth-century political associations and cross-associations between bees, the commonwealth, and the monarchy. As Timothy Raynor has thoroughly demonstrated, for example, the complex cultural meanings of the bee reflect not only this economic and political balance but, as a page in the "Book of Nature," the bee "contains undeniable evidence of God's laws."¹ While Raynor also documents an instability in bee-meaning to illuminate the viable economic promise beekeeping held in the seventeenth century and its symbolic importance as a potential means of increasing indigenous wealth production at a time in which the English economy needed bolstering, little attention has been paid to the construction of a bee subjectivity as a result of such ideological positions. The promise of bee-generated wealth in the seventeenth century manifested itself technologically with a flurry of new bee box inventions designed to maximize honey production for the British climate and reduce the necessity of destroying swarms. If science and spectatorship construct reality, it is possible to argue that scientific technologies such as the microscope and multi-storied and glass-fronted bee boxes collapse the relationship between scientific observation and communication into an assumption that observable behavior constitutes a form of dialogue between the observer and the observed. Indeed, as I have noted elsewhere, Joseph Warder, in his The True Amazons: or, The Monarchy of Bees (1713), claims that he has "with a Studious Delight, for nearly Twenty Years past, convers'd with these Innocent Creatures the Bees" and with this assertion naturalizes both domestication and the right of humans to mediate and control bee 'business'.² Cristopher Hollingsworth has aptly demonstrated that the ability to view a complete insect community (such as a hive) from above or from a distance permits both the illusion that we know or understand the whole and that, from this illusory observation, we can create a metaphor, a blending or a shared pattern between human and animal organization.³ Donna J. Haraway goes further to say that the subject-in-technoscience undergoes a "material refiguration [in which] the natural kind becomes a brand or trademark," and that once nature begins to produce or embody labour, the human "legally [becomes] nature's author not just its inhabitant, owner, steward."⁴ Human-generated technologies intended to contain bees and the resulting and observable bee-behaviors create an architectural stage upon which any cultural representation of bees that is played out is one which has already been human-constructed and controlled; as a result, any truth generated from it has to be suspect.

Still, the bee-subject proves resilient. In one example Raynor describes how the Wren-Wilkins storied hive (1655) fails "because the two scholars misunderstood the axiom that bees work downwards, due to an exaggerated estimate of apian rationality" (Raynor 105). Believing that the bees would "realize they were in a three-storey hive, and would start working at the top level," they enabled external entry only at the lowest level. Access to the upper levels was internal only, and this access was quickly blocked up by combs as the bees worked only in the lowest level of the hive. As Raynor explains it, the bees "failed" to conceive of the hive as a larger structure. One of the questions, then, that I'd like to raise here is: can, should and how do we recognize an animal response such as this one as evidence of animal subjecthood, instead of (apparently) dismissing it as an overexuberant human error which was subsequently and, I suppose, finally resolved in the mid-nineteenth century with Langstroth's moveable-frame beehive? Could the bee behavior played out in the Wren-Wilkins hive be read and acted upon in any other way, with an eye perhaps to recognizing the subjecthood of the bees and the possible rights that accompany such a recognition? And why should we? Why does it matter?

This avid seventeenth-century interest in the economic viability of beekeeping...