They alone hold children in common: own the roofs
of their city as one: and pass their life under the might of the law.
-Virgil
People always ask about the bees, and it’s partly that they have an interest in being connected to the bees, but they also just want to know how they are doing. Why? That’s the question, and I don’t know the answer to it. I guess you’d have to study it by asking people “what do you think about bees”, etc.
Well, I think the interesting thing for people is the relationship between people and bees.
In the early days, it was about the honey. People have a sweet tooth. But I don’t think that it’s just that. If so you wouldn’t have Virgil going on about their holding things in common.
It’s interesting to study bees because you’re trying to impute motive, but you can’t ask them what they’re doing. You can disregard what people say, but at least you’ve got their interpretation. In the case of the bees, you don’t.
[they do have this dance language] You can’t understand it, but on the other hand you can watch it, you can situate it, you can see what its context is.
Well, that’s why I like this book “Honeybee Democracy” so much, because it’s written in the context of modern science; it’s not trying to impute, but at the same time it’s trying to understand the things a human being is curious about. With human beings, the desire to make sense of things is so strong! That’s why it’s so impressive, The Gettysburg Address, and that was spoken while the war was still going on, on the battlefield of that war, and what the war called forth was a very analytic address. It’s the nature of human beings to try to theorize, or make sense, what we call making sense, which is theorizing. Of course, [bees] are very accessible. Well, they’re tantalizing. There they are, you can see they’ve got their thing going. How do they know?
What interested Virgil, and probably other people, was the idea of a self-managing society, a society without tyranny. The managed societies that were then known all had tyrannies at the center of them, but not the bees. It’s very clear he saw them as a political inspiration..
I remember Peattie was very interested in utopian communities, and he did a sort of roster of what the various utopian communities were, and in a sense the bees sort of fell into that strain.
[and why do you think that you had to tell them things?] It was just that you had to inform them. You had to keep them in touch. That was clear. It was just a question of not keeping them out of the loop.
I think that [colony collapse disorder] taps a deep anxiety about the state of our tenure on the planet. The bees and colony collapse disorder become the dramatic example or enactment of what is a not unrealistic anxiety. The current and heretofore successful capitalist system was built around tremendous optimism about technology –none of this tilling the soil and so on.
Anyway, that was the way bees entered the front-page scene. People are terrified that with the loss of the ancient skills the whole system is going to pot, and we won’t be able to survive, which may or may not be an appropriate response.
“This is the little box the queen came in.”
by Julia Peattie
Lisa's Life 