‘It is impossible to over-estimate bees’ value to man’
Through history fears have been overcome as humans have bonded with, watched, tracked and tamed bees, with some writing poems, stories and even worshipping them, writes Thor Hanson
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 20 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. 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 organised 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 BC, 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.
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 flavoured theirs with hazelnuts and the Finns preferred the zest of lemons. In Ethiopia, people still favour a version doctored with the bitter leaves of buckthorn.
Healers of all kinds have long recognised 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 summarised in the 12th-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. As an alternative to campfires, torches, or simple lamps and rushes that reeked of fish oil and animal fat, beeswax burned with a clean, steady, pleasant-smelling light. Temples, churches, and wealthy homes glowed with it night after night for millennia.
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.
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.
In symbolism and in daily life, the value of bees to people lives rooted in their biology. The modern bee is a marvel of engineering, with wraparound ultraviolet vision; flexible, interlocking wings; and
“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”
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 17th 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.
Today, pollination remains a vital field of study, because we know it is more than simply illuminating: it is irreplaceable.
In the 21st 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. Bees helped shape the natural world where our own species evolved, and their story often comingles with our own.
The story of bees begins with biology, but it also tells us about ourselves.
● This is an edited extract from Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees by Thor Hanson (Icon books, £16.99).