Bees, Science, and Sex in The Literature of The Long Nineteenth Century

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE
Bees, Science, and Sex

in the Literature of the Long
Nineteenth Century
Edited by
Alexis Harley
Christopher Harrington
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Auburn, ME, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing
an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of
human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences
that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology
and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-
disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the sepa-
ration of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political
stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and
understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of
the ‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often
thought of as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species;
animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of com-
munication of a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy
this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by
rethinking representations of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas
animals are conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor
(and as signs of specifically human concerns), this series significantly
extends the new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the
engagement of such figuration with the material lives of animals. It exam-
ines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with
animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of
literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history.
We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from
the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline's key
thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses on lit-
erary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of
the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to
fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera)
with which English studies now engages.
Series Board:
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)
Alexis Harley • Christopher Harrington
Editors
Bees, Science, and Sex

in the Literature of the
Long Nineteenth
Century
Editors
Alexis Harley Christopher Harrington
La Trobe University La Trobe University
Bundoora, VIC, Australia Bundoora, VIC, Australia
ISSN 2634-6338 ISSN 2634-6346 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
ISBN 978-3-031-39569-7 ISBN 978-3-031-39570-3 (eBook)
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To Amegilla cingulata
Acknowledgements
This book was completed with the generous assistance of the Eva
Crane Trust.
vii
Praise for Bees, Science, and Sex in the Literature
of the Long Nineteenth Century
“For centuries, humans have invested enormous weight in the symbol of the hon-
eybee. The authors of the meticulously researched Bees, Science, and Sex in the
Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century show how the symbol changes radically
in the literature and culture of the nineteenth-century, as emerging technologies
and new biological discoveries clash with long-held agrarian and poetic
traditions.”
—Tammy Horn Potter, author of Bees in America:
How the Honeybee Shaped a Nation
Contents
1 Stealing
Sweetness: Science, Sex and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Bee 1
Christopher Harrington and Alexis Harley
2 Modern
Science, Moral Lessons and Honey Bees in
Nineteenth-Century Natural History 21
Diane M. Rodgers
3 Symbiosis
or Slaughterhouse? Honeyed Analogy in
Erasmus Darwin 41
Adam Komisaruk
4 The
Social Insect and the Fashionable Newspaper:
Reading Bee Poems in the World and the Morning Post 61
Claire Knowles
5 John
Keats’s Honeybees: Sound, Passion, Medicine,
and Natural Prophecy 77
Hermione de Almeida
6 “The
Bees Seem Alive and Make a Great Buzzing”:
Unsettling Homes in South-West Western Australia 91
Jessica White
xi
xii Contents
7 “The
Ideas Are in the Air”: From Drone Bees to Honey
Women, Cultural Paradox in the Democratic Rhetoric of
British Chartism and Colonial Australian Suffragism111
8 Housewives
and Old Wives: Sex and Superstition in
English Beekeeping133
Adam Ebert
9 Bees
in Nineteenth-Century Lore and Law151
Katy Barnett
10 Thomas
Hardy’s Bees, Sex, Domestication and Wildness169
Alexis Harley
11 “Through
the Agency of Bees”: Charles Darwin, John
Lubbock, and the Secret Lives of Plants and People187
Jonathan Smith
Further Reading209
Index227
Notes on Contributors
Katy Barnett is a professor at Melbourne Law School and the co-author,

with Professor Jeremy Gans, of Guilty Pigs: The Weird and Wonderful
History of Animal Law (2022). In addition to her qualifications in Law,
she also holds a Bachelor of Arts, with majors in English Literature,
History, and Medieval Studies. Her fields of research include commercial
remedies, trusts law, animal law, and legal history.
Hermione de Almeida is the co-author of Indian Renaissance: British
Romantic Art and the Prospect of India (2006; 2016), winner of the
Historians of British Art 2007 Book Prize. She is also the author of
Romantic Medicine and John Keats (1991) and Byron and Joyce Through
Homer: ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Ulysses’ (1981). She has edited essay collections
on John Keats (1990), Romantic science (2004), and Romantic culture
(Nature, Politics, and the Arts, 2015). She is co-editor of Charles D’Oyly’s
Lost Satire of British India (2021). She holds her doctorate degree from
Columbia University and is a fellow of the American Council of Learned
Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National
Humanities Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
Adam Ebert is an Independent Scholar and beekeeper with Ebert Honey
LLC (Mount Vernon, Iowa). He publishes on the history of beekeeping.
Alexis Harley lectures in literary studies at La Trobe University, Australia.
She is the author of Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the Natural History
of the Self. She has kept honeybees for over a decade.
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Christopher Harrington teaches literary studies at Victoria University

in Melbourne. He has published numerous articles on the representation
of bees and insects in literature.
Claire Knowles is a senior lecturer at La Trobe University. She is the
author of Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780–1860: The Legacy
of Charlotte Smith and the editor, with Ingrid Horrocks, of Charlotte
Smith: Major Poetic Works. She has published widely on the female poets
of the Romantic period and is finishing a book on women, Della Cruscan
Poetry, and the fashionable newspaper in the eighteenth century.
Adam Komisaruk is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the
Department of English, West Virginia University. He is the author of
Sexual Privatism in British Romantic Writing: A Public of One (2019) and
the editor, with Allison Dushane, of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden
(2 vols., 2017).
Diane M. Rodgers is a professor at Northern Illinois University and the
author of Debugging the Link Between Social Theory and Social Insects.
Some of her other publications on insects can be found in the History of
the Human Sciences, Minerva, Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology,
Origin(s) of Design in Nature, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of
Psychology.
Jonathan Smith is William E. Stirton Professor of English at the
University of Michigan-Dearborn. He is the author of Charles Darwin
and Victorian Visual Culture and has written widely about the intersec-
tions of literature, science, and culture in the Victorian period.
Jessica White is the author of the novels A Curious Intimacy and
Entitlement and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud, which
won the Michael Crouch award for debut biography and was shortlisted
for four national awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
Her research centers around Australian literature in the fields of life writ-
ing, environmental humanities, climate fiction, and disability studies. She
is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of
South Australia, where she is writing an ecobiography of nineteenth-
century botanist Georgiana Molloy, Western Australia’s first female
scientist.
CHAPTER 1
Stealing Sweetness: Science, Sex

and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Bee
Christopher Harrington and Alexis Harley
But ah! What sweetness steals upon the sense

From yonder field, whose blossom’d beans dispense
Arabia’s fragrance! sweet the soothing sound
Of countless bees, that buz, and murmur round.1
In 1806, John Evans, a Welsh physician employed to manage an Infirmary

in Shrewsbury in provincial England, published the first volume of an epic
poem devoted to a hero of minute stature: the European honeybee, Apis
mellifera. Evans’ poem, The Bees: A Poem, in Four Books (1806–1813) has
been described as “the most ambitious and learned poem on honeybees in
the English language”, but it is fair to say the poem was forgotten shortly
after its publication and has since disappeared from the literary register.2 It
consists of 1260 heavily footnoted heroic couplets, opens with an
C. Harrington • A. Harley (*)

La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2024
A. Harley, C. Harrington (eds.), Bees, Science, and Sex
in the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39570-3_1
2 C. HARRINGTON AND A. HARLEY
invocation to the Roman poet Virgil, whose poetical treatise on beekeep-

ing had directed ideas about beekeeping up until the sixteenth century,
and is followed by a playful rebuke to Britain for failing to produce a com-
parable national poetry worthy of the honeybee. How could England’s
“sylvan Muse / Still to the BEES their well-earn’d meed refuse”,3 Evans
asks, before conceding that perhaps William Shakespeare (in Henry V) and
James Thomson (in “Autumn”) have in fact done a fair job of bringing the
sylvan Muse to the topic of honeybees. But Evans’ complaint is not only
that bees have been underrepresented in Britain’s poetry: as he opines in
his Preface, in “this birth-place of free Enquiry, and of the immortal
BACON, scarce one scientific work has been devoted to the service of
these valuable insects”.4 By contrast, “the Bees of other nations have been
able to boast their zealous, and patient, investigators in MARALDI,
SWAMMERDAM, REAUMUR, and HUBER, and a poetical panegyrist
in the elegant VANIERE”.5
Evans’ complaint illustrates the fact that in 1806, it was possible for a
well-educated honeybee enthusiast to cast an eye around and claim to find
not much in the way of a “scientific” apicultural literature—indeed, to list
on one hand the bee scientists of the European Enlightenment. Evans had
of course not plumbed the depths of European, or even British, entomol-
ogy. He could have noted close to fifty manuals and treatises on honeybees
published in the eighteenth century alone, including Joseph Warder’s The
True Amazons (1712), John Thorley’s Melisselogia (1744), or Thomas
Wildman’s A Treatise on the Management of Bees (1768). The various
microscopic studies and scientific monographs published in Britain on
honeybee taxonomy, sexual reproduction, the physiology of wax secretion
and the mathematics of cell construction would indicate that the science
of honeybees was in the ascent in the late eighteenth century. But even so,
Evans’ indictment of British bee science would not have looked absurd to
many early nineteenth-century readers. A century later, it would have
seemed absurd in the extreme. Over the course of the nineteenth century,
popular knowledge about European honeybees came to dominate modern
understandings of invertebrate life, its intellection, and its economic value
to industrial society. The seemingly recondite investigations of eighteenth-
century entomologists into the technicalities of honeybee reproduction
had been synthesised and developed to transform understandings of bees
and their ecological role. Innumerable local, national and global beekeep-
ing organisations were established. Hive management technologies, and
hive designs themselves, had diversified at a giddying rate;6 knowledge
now fundamental to beekeeping, from the existence of “bee space” to the
establishment of pollination ecology, had been developed and propagated,
1 STEALING SWEETNESS: SCIENCE, SEX AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY… 3
and European honeybees, long conscripted into the European imperial

project, had completed the task of colonising every bee-habitable conti-
nent on earth, often to the cost of native pollinators. This last points to the
second historical curiosity behind Evans’ complaint, the imbrication of
apiculture with nationalism, a dynamic of course fostered by analogies
between the hive and the nation state. This dynamic, too, evolved over the
course of the nineteenth century, both as democratisation altered the con-
stitutions of nations and as the idea of the empire competed with and
complemented the idea of the nation.
At the same time, the sylvan Muse found honeybees in the most unex-
pected of ways and places, as figures of both industry and indolence, com-
pliance and sedition, domesticity and migration, wildness and order,
sexuality and chastity. Honeybees were of course not newcomers to
European literatures (Cristopher Hollingsworth’s Poetics of the Hive: Insect
Metaphor in Literature [2005] offers an excellent extended history of this
literary relationship). As Rani Saadi Liebert puts it, a “synaesthetic attribu-
tion of sweetness to poetry” that “pervades Greek poetics” meant that
European poetry has been coloured by apian imagery since its inception.7
The bee’s literary pedigree is reprised in Jonathan Swift’s Battel of the
Books, published in 1704, a short satire that represents the dispute between
“the antients” and “the moderns”. Modern vernacular literature is cham-
pioned by a self-important, irascible spider presiding over a heap of fly
carcasses in the corner of the library. He is engaged in “a lazy contempla-
tion of four inches round”, in which, “by an overweening pride, feeding,
and engendering on itself”, he “turns all into excrement and venom, pro-
ducing nothing at all but flybane and a cobweb”.8 The bee, meanwhile, an
incarnation of Greek and Roman writing, “by a universal range, with long
search, much study, true judgment, and distinction of things, brings home
honey and wax”.9 Swift’s Aesop sums up the case for the Antients: “instead
of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with hony and
wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are
sweetness and light”. 10 Swift’s association of culture with the bee, bor-
rowed from some of the ancient authors his bee represents, is borrowed in
turn in the nineteenth century by guardians of literature-as-institution,
including Alfred Tennyson11 and Matthew Arnold. The first essay of
Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) is titled, in direct allusion to the
Hellenic apian tradition, “Sweetness and Light”. Sweetness and light (or
beauty and intellect) are the key attributes of culture (Hellenic culture, as
Arnold argues in a later chapter).12 Together, he argues, sweetness and
light constitute a vital corrective to the disenchantments of the “mechani-

cal character” of modern life.13
It is some indication of the diverse quality of honeybee symbolism that
while bees were associated with the poetic culture that supposedly held
industrialism at bay, they were simultaneously deployed to celebrate the
very moral dehumanisation deplored by intellectuals wealthy enough not
to have to experience the “mechanical character” of modern life. Indeed,
if “Sweetness and Light” constituted the beau ideal of Victorian culture,
then the ideology seemingly advocated in Bernard Mandeville’s
“Grumbling Hive” (1705), in which the “private vices” of self-interested
bees produce “public benefit”, created a grim reality for the majority of
Britain’s working caste and colonial subalterns, left to the mercy of the
market. Mandeville’s infamous thesis that evil is an integral component to
economic complexity would have a lasting impact upon nineteenth-
century liberal thought. His fabulist use of honeybees to represent social
class, division of labour and to discourse openly about the necessity of
social exploitation combined with the traditional conflation of apiculture
and industrial productivity to render honeybees foundational to privileged
discussions about the nature of labour and inequality. One problem, for
example, Charles Darwin set out to resolve in The Origin of Species (1859)
concerned the genesis of physiological and sexual dimorphism in working
caste insects, and analogies with the industrial and servant classes that
swarmed around him recur in his explanation.14 Sir John Lubbock, liberal
banker and Darwinian apostle, would conduct experiments showing that
bees were inherently selfish, either incapable or unwilling to communicate
with each other about nearby food resources, prone to “theft”, and “thor-
oughly callous” when they encountered the suffering of fellow bees.15
Lubbock “doubted whether bees are in the least fond of one another” and
while inductive tabulation led him to conclude that bees preferred blue
flowers over red flowers he also noted having seen bees engaging in infan-
ticidal cannibalism.16 The honeybee’s vital role in nineteenth-century liter-
ary conversations about sweetness and light—an idiom Terry Eagleton
links in On Evil (2010) to the establishment of the private sphere wherein
bourgeois sensibilities can be performed without holding any relation to
the public sphere—coincided with Victorian social and biological dis-
courses concerned with the public sphere and its regulated exploitation. As
Charlotte Sleigh notes in Six Legs Better (2007), by the beginning of the
twentieth century entomological metaphors about the social body often
had a decidedly dark edge.17
Transformations of the eighteenth-century literary tropes of “sweetness

and light” and the “grumbling hive” were just two of the ways in which
bees would go on to serve nineteenth-century culture. As the chapters of
this collection show, honeybees moved across, between, within and
beneath nineteenth-century environments, architectures and literatures.
The chapters here demonstrate both the persistence of apian literary tradi-
tions dating back to classical, medieval and Renaissance literatures, and the
emergence of new apian literary figures, complicated by developments in
entomology, ecology, apiculture, politics and the forms and media of liter-
ary production itself. In Chap. 2 of this collection, Diane M. Rodgers
shows the ways scientific studies of honeybees and religious and instructive
literature generated mutually informative analogies across the duration of
the nineteenth century. In Chap. 3, Adam Komisaruk reads Erasmus
Darwin’s resistance to emergent pollination ecology in the light of
Lucretian poetics and contemporary representations of all nature as a vio-
lent slaughterhouse paradoxically predicated on a common origin. In
Chap. 4, Claire Knowles examines a series of playful Della Cruscan bee
poems published in fashionable West End newspapers, illustrating the way
the sweetness associated with bees became embittered by the French
Revolution and the politics and aesthetics of emotion that it inspired.
Chapter 5 focuses on the recurrent appearance of honeybees in the poetry
of John Keats. Here, Hermione de Almeida shows how Keats was able to
depart from a more traditional poetic engagement with honeybees thanks
to the detailed pharmacological knowledge about honey and venom he
acquired while studying medicine. Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9 focus on the
movement of honeybees across the duration of the long nineteenth cen-
tury, encompassing themes related to the colonial introduction of bees
and the gendering of beekeeping, along with the legal, political and reli-
gious texts and contexts in which bees appeared. In Chap. 6, Jessica White
reconstructs the narrative of Georgiana Molloy’s migration to colonial
Australia with her own hive of honeybees, and she describes the ecological
and ecocritical ramifications of introducing bees into biodiversity hot
spots. In Chap. 7, Christopher Harrington presents a comparative analysis
of the divergent rhetorical uses of honeybee sexuality in early Victorian
Chartism and colonial Australian suffragism. Adam Ebert, in Chap. 8,
explores the masculinisation of beekeeping as a profession in the nine-
teenth century, foregrounding how this process was linked to the confla-
tion of feminine beekeeping with medieval bee lore and superstition. In
Chap. 9, Katy Barnett continues the project of tracing how honeybees are
figured over the course of the long nineteenth century, focusing on legal
understandings of honeybees that were shaped by cultural ideas about
wildness and domesticity. In the final two chapters of this collection, Alexis
Harley and Jonathan Smith engage bees within the context of Darwinian
ideas relating to control, cross-breeding and queer ecology, foreground-
ing bees’ prevalence in discourses concerned with sexuality as well as draw-
ing attention to the dangers of a focus on one unitary species in literary
discussions about invertebrate life.
The chapters in this necessarily diverse collection all centre on the literal
and literary location of honeybees. Nineteenth-century apiculturalists
writing about bees note their preponderance in other literatures: Edward
Bevan, for instance, describing worker bees in 1851 observes that to these
“the poets and moralists have applied the term the busy bee, the industri-
ous bee, the provident bee, the skilful bee”.18 Alfred Neighbour, in turn,
prefaces The Apiary by defending his extensive quotation from literary
sources as he goes about describing bees and beekeeping practice: “Some
persons may consider we have used too many poetical quotations in a
book dealing wholly with matters of fact”, Neighbour notes: “We trust,
however, that an examination of the extracts will at once remove that feel-
ing of objection”.19 Diane M. Rodgers argues in Chap. 2 of this volume
that there were feedback loops between natural historians’ and social com-
mentators’ representations of bees. Likewise, we see in the literature of the
long nineteenth-century mutually informative transactions between
poetic, literary and apicultural or entomological treatments of bees, par-
ticularly of bees as illustrative of ideal forms of social organisation and in
idealised social roles. Given the ubiquity of meditations on society in
nineteenth-century literature, it is no surprise that honeybees are similarly
ubiquitous.
One of the key attractions of the honeybee for writers engaging with
questions of social organisation and social change in the nineteenth cen-
tury was the designation of honeybees as social insects (a term, inciden-
tally, that seems to be first used in English in the second volume of William
Kirby’s and William Spence’s An Introduction to Entomology (1817)).20
While understandings of social relations and political structures obviously
colour the figurative language used in earlier accounts of the hive, con-
cerns about social organisation in the so-called “age of transition” of the
nineteenth century preoccupied members of Western cultures in new ways
and led to the emergence not only of the idea of the “social insect” but of
socialism, sociology and the social problem novel. Over recent centuries,
the hive has been understood as a family (as in the writing of Jan
Swammerdam), as a realm headed by a king—and later queen21—and as a
nation and a colony. In the nineteenth century, many of these figures per-
sist as facets of a larger enquiry into social organisation. The hive, with its
division of labour, domestic economy, its “queen”, “workers” and
“drones”, offers writers a range of political, moralising, illustrative uses in
their meditation on society. Rodgers explores the exchange of tropes of
hive and human society between socially didactic literature and writing
about bees across the breadth of the nineteenth century: this exchange,
Rodgers shows, enables social theorists and commentators to naturalise
and thus authorise their views. In his focus on the politicisation of drone
bees, Christopher Harrington considers the paradoxical way in which
working-class men sought to analogise themselves to working-class bees,
ignoring yet also utilising popular ideas about the sexual biology of hon-
eybees in order to naturalise claims for democratic reform. The prepon-
derance of bee imagery in Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels, as we see in
Chap. 10, enables Hardy to represent realistically the imbrication of
human and animal lives in a fictionalised version of the rural community of
his Dorset childhood. But by alluding to the hive bee, which in key scenes
of the novels is shown to live both with humans and just outside the limits
of domestication, Hardy is able to worry at what it means for the hive-
analogous structure that is England’s early nineteenth-century rural soci-
ety to be subject to both natural and artificial pressures.
The frequency with which honeybees were put to figurative and sym-
bolic uses in the long nineteenth century may have been in large part a
consequence of the convenient correspondence between the honeybee
superorganism and forms of social organisation. But this correspondence
was far from the only reason for nineteenth-century melissamorphism, or
the figurative treatment of non-bees as bees. Even as the industrialisation
and globalisation of food and energy production made honeybees less
important to Western humans as a source of (literal) sweetness and light,
with the result that honey and beeswax came to be thought of increasingly
in nostalgic, poetic or aesthetic rather than economic terms, at the same
time, honeybees became more central than ever to industrial food produc-
tion and the globalisation of Western agroeconomy.
In the nineteenth century, honeybees start to become recognised as
pollinators, a role that in our own era, an era of both abundant plant-
derived sugar and massive almond and oilseed crops dependent on porta-
ble pollinators, has significantly more economic value than all the wax,
honey, propolis and royal jelly that honeybees might produce in their
hives.22 The history of a rapidly evolving understanding of bees’ (and more
generally insects’) role in plant pollination is explored in more depth in the
chapters by Adam Komisaruk and Jonathan Smith. Adam Komisaruk’s
discussion of Erasmus Darwin’s “The Loves of the Plants”, a study of
plant reproduction in rhyme, and John Evans’ rhyming riposte to Darwin,
in the form of the epic, The Bees, with which we open this chapter too,
shows both how little and how much was known about the role of insects
in the fertilisation of plants as the nineteenth century opened. Jonathan
Smith’s discussion of the fertile correspondence between Erasmus
Darwin’s grandson, Charles, and John Lubbock, on the other hand, dem-
onstrates how far pollination biology had come in just two generations.
Insects, it was now understood, were essential to the pollination of huge
swathes of economically significant (and of course ecologically significant)
plants. In the twentieth century, honeybees were to become crucial to
Western economies not because they were the only plant pollinators, or
even necessarily the best plant pollinators, but because they were the most
readily transported pollinators. Agriculture could only increase in scale
and specialisation, in line with other shifts in industrial production, because
honeybees could be confined in a hive and transported by human agents
to the next crop as it came into bloom. Indeed, in much of the industri-
alised world the preponderant hive design still resembles that patented in
1852 by US American apiarist Lorenzo Langstroth. If the human societies
that bees were made to allegorise changed under industrialisation with the
creation of an exploited urban human workforce, then the actual lives of
bees changed under this regimen too, and they were to be no less, though
of course differently, exploited, even as beekeepers congratulated them-
selves on their adoption of more “humane” methods.
“Humanity” was a key term in nineteenth-century liberal ameliorative
discourse, and it manifests in beekeeping as in other appeals for animal
welfare.23 Knowles’ discussion of Robert Southey in Chap. 4 reminds us
how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sentiment about the
maltreatment of bees in honey harvesting had become a mechanism for
liberal writers to perform sensibility. This sentiment is recollected and per-
haps parodied, or at least brought to earth, in Thomas Hardy’s Under the
Greenwood Tree (1872), when Fancy describes the fumigation of the hive
as “rather a cruel thing to do”;24 her father, who at this moment is dismiss-
ing a dozen bee-stings as “not much”, engages sympathetically with the
bees’ plight even as he robs them: “The proper way to take honey, so that
the bees be neither starved nor murdered, is not so much an amusing as a

puzzling matter”.25 While the fictional beekeepers of Hardy’s Wessex were
not to know it, addressing this puzzling matter had become an explicit
motive for nineteenth-century hive designers. Thomas Nutt had designed
his “collateral hive” from his home in Wisbech, in order, as he puts it in
the subtitle to his Humanity to Honeybees, that “the lives of bees may be
preserved” (as they emphatically were not during harvests from the tradi-
tional skep hive) “and an abundance of honey of superior quality may be
obtained”.26 There seems to be little sense here that the notionally pri-
mary motive—kindness to animals—is in tension with the more efficient
instrumentalisation of bee labour that such hives would allow. Nutt’s Hive
is “humane” because it enables beekeepers to rob their bees without
destroying the workforce that could produce next year’s honey. Much of
the rhetoric around honeybees in our own era shows that the instrumen-
talisation of honeybees can still subsist alongside sentimentalising, roman-
ticising, aestheticising apian traditions. The exacerbation of what came to
be known as Colony Collapse Disorder early in the twenty-first century
has led to widely publicised claims to sympathy on the honeybee’s behalf.
Honeybees are (rightly) figured variously as the victims of the insecticides
and forage-depletion of modern massive monoculture cropping, the para-
sites and diseases whose transmission is accelerated by mass-scale migra-
tory beekeeping. The primary reason why we are called to care, however,
is that we depend on the industrial plant monocultures that depend on
honeybees as portable pollinators. Pollination is the hinge that holds
together the instrumentalisation and the romanticisation of bees, their
busy movement from flower to flower allowing the writer to naturalise and
idealise labour in terms of pastoral nostalgia.
Komisaruk’s and Smith’s chapters attest to an enduring post-Linnaean
interest in the sexuality of flowering plants. But, until the late eighteenth
century, plants’ “flying panders”, as Smith describes bees, were not known
to have sex at all. The act of sexual union between a queen bee and drone
bee in the wild would not be witnessed, at least by a scientifically authori-
tative eye, until the nineteenth century. In a footnote to Book 1 of The
Bees, John Evans refers to what he calls the “doctrine of equivocal genera-
tion”,27 the view that bees somehow circumvent the mechanisms of most
animal reproduction. In a precocious foray into the history of science,
Evans notes that this view manifests in sources as varied as the biblical
book of Judges, where bees seem to come from the carcass of a lion, and
in Virgil’s claim in the Georgics that bees originate in the carcass of an ox.
“If the Ancients adopted such whimsical hypotheses”, Evans continues:
some of the Moderns have not been less fanciful and eccentric. Alexander de
Montfort expressly says, “the king is formed from a juice, which the bees
extract from flowers; and the ordinary bees are sometimes produced from
honey, sometimes from gum”. And even so late as the year 1720, a French
author seriously affected to prove, “by reasons and observations, that the
crude wax, which the bees bring home on their legs, becomes vivified in the
hive; and, as the maggots of certain flies (it is his own comparison) spring
from putrid flesh, so the maggots, which are to become bees, take their birth
from this wax, which the warmth of the hive hath corrupted. The author
tells his story as if he himself had been an eye-witness of it”.28
As Evans’ quotations above suggest, the eighteenth century had witnessed

an explosion of interest in and theories about honeybee sexuality. Before
this period, it was well known but not always accepted by beekeepers and
naturalists that queen bees were female, drone bees were male, and worker
bees were female. The process of embryogenesis, along with the sexual
determination of the caste system, had not yet been worked out, and
working bee’s ovaries were yet to be dissected. While Jan Swammerdam
had proposed in the seventeenth century that some kind of sexual event
most likely took place in the dark recesses of the hive by way of the disper-
sion of sperm vapour clouds (aura seminalis) and R.A.F. Réaumur and
Hélène Dumoustier placed queens and drones in small observational hives
in the eighteenth century, viewing what appeared to be a disturbing kind
of sexual activity, these early observations were inconclusive and highly
conjectural.29 Even the circle of naturalists gathered around François
Huber in the 1790s, who are credited with having discovered that sexual
union in honeybees must take place on the wing, did not view the sexual
event but were led to this conclusion by way of experimental inferences
that demonstrated that newly born queen bees constricted from flying
become infertile while those granted liberty quickly take flight and become
fertile. It was in the middle of the nineteenth century that the Silesian
beekeeper Jan (Johannes) Dzierzon commenced experiments into sexual
determination in honeybees which repeatedly demonstrated that drone
bees develop from unfertilised eggs, and that queen bees need to be fertil-
ised by drone bees in order to produce working bees.30 The validity of
Dzierzon’s research was independently confirmed by the physiologist Karl
F.E. von Siebold whose analysis of the drone bee’s penis showed flight to
be essential to sexual performance in drones because the air pumped into
the drone’s body via his wings provided the pressure requisite for him to
eject his penis.31 Inspired by these new discoveries apiarists from across
Europe and North America began to construct large artificial sex-domes,
tethering queen bees to silken threads in order to view and control the
sexual union between queen and drone, so that by the commencement
of the American Bee Journal in 1861, Lorenzo Langstroth could not only
report to the editor on multiple sightings of sexual activity in honeybees
but describe the sound that the drone bee’s penis makes when it explodes
during copulation.32
While John Evans had heard no such sound, he did have the advantage
of Huber’s knowledge that bees engage in actual sexual intercourse in the
open air (not the hive). It is remarkable, then, that in his verse he seems
attached to some of the superseded theories about bee reproduction that
he queries in his preface, including that of bees’ “inviolable chastity”. In
this, Evans seems unable to reconcile the realities of bee sex (such as they
are known to him) with the reverential epic he seeks to write. The tension
between Evans’ knowledge on the subject of honeybee anatomy, informed
by recent literature and what the language of his poem suggests about
honeybee sexuality, indicates some of the complexities for nineteenth-
century cultures as up-to-the-minute scientific knowledge collides with
the representational traditions of a much-freighted interspecies relation-
ship. It results in such oddities as Evans’ seeming to desexualise the queen
as she sails out on her first nuptial flight. Her body is described not as, say,
a bride’s, but as a reigning warrior’s:
Long is her tapering form, and fring’d with gold

The glossy black, which stains each scaly fold;
With gold her cuirass gleams, and round her thighs
The golden greaves in swelling circles rise;
Full arm’d, the Monarch soars on sounding wing,
But mildly sheathes her formidable sting. (Book 1, ll. 403–8, p. 32)
Evans continues in this vein, comparing the queen bee to the fourteenth-
century Edward of Woodstock, or the Black Prince, one of the most cel-
ebrated military tacticians of English history:
Thus, in the bloom of youth, and glory, shone

On Cressy’s field great Edward’s gallant son,
The SABLE WARRIOR, dazzling to behold,

His jet-black arms emboss’d with burnish’d gold;
A snow-white plume wav’d o’er his radiant crest,
Britannia’s lion grac’d her hero’s breast. (ll. 409–13)
This comparison, Virgilian in form if not content, hints at Evans’ aspira-

tions for the poem as national epic: as we learn in the poem’s introduction,
Evans imagines The Bees to be addressing a specifically British gap in world
bee literature, and the allegory between the society of the hive and the
history of an English aristocratic regime are entirely to the point for him.
But it is also remarkable that while his notes acknowledge the fallacy of
those who believed bees to be asexual, his verse obscures the sexuality of
the queen (or would for most readers). There is a far more conventional
eroticism in Evans’ representation of the interactions between worker bees
and flowers: the crowfoot, for instance pours “her luscious stores/
Through each full-nectar’d gland; and grants the Bee/ Of all her sweets a
strict monopoly”.33
The establishment and dissemination of correct knowledge about the
sexual behaviour of honeybees would become foundational to the devel-
opment of early to mid-nineteenth-century bee-breeding regimes, and
they would entail the interrelated process of racialising honeybees. While
Carl Linnaeus classified the Western honeybee in his System of Nature
(1758) as one single unified binomial species in line with contemporary
belief in the static nature of the Creation, nineteenth-century zoologists
like Carl Eduard Adolph Gerstaecker would attempt to describe the geo-
graphical distribution of the species, its possible point of genesis, and
examine the divergent physiological characteristics exhibited by honeybees
across different climatic regions.34 The gradual subspeciation of honeybees
into various races supported the broader development of trinomial nomen-
clature in zoology as well as the introduction of a new racial discourse into
apiculture. Many beekeepers now came to see themselves as bee-breeders
responsible for the racial characteristics, or “purity”, of their bees.35 Race,
although initially inclusive of behavioural, psychological, and perhaps even
spiritual qualities, quickly came to centre on colour, size and physical
expression. Race, as the bee-breeder Frederick William Vogel attempted to
clarify in a paper read before a convention of German beekeepers in 1869,
“embraces a certain amount of corporeal marking, among which are size
and color. When the bees of an extensive region, or even a limited district,
are found to be distinguished by the quality and quantity of their
pubescence, or the tint of their dorsal bands from the common type of
honeybees we are warranted in distinguishing them as a distinct variety or
race”.36 A knowledge about the “racial” characteristic of Italian, Egyptian,
English and German bees now became important to the new “apistical
science” of bee-breeding, which was tethered to ideas about racial purity
and racial progress but also racial degeneration and racial “mongrelism”.
The intersection of agronomical breeding with scientific taxonomy sup-
ported the emergence of entirely new scientific fields like genetics as well
as eugenics, and it is worthwhile briefly noting that Gregor Mendel’s pio-
neering studies into the heredity of peas also coincided with his attempts
to breed new varieties of honeybees.37 What is perhaps less recognised
about the racialisation of honeybees is that it would become important to
the global dispersal of the species in the nineteenth century. Knowledge
about the suitability of a specific variety of bee to a specific climate increased
(or was hoped to increase) the survivability of those species when intro-
duced into colonial environments. While the Old English or German
black honeybee was first introduced into North America in the early sev-
enteenth century, where it quickly became feral and moved across the
interior faster than the colonists themselves, the introduction of the same
variety of bee into South America and Oceania in the early nineteenth
century was initially not so successful.38 As Jessica White’s discussion of
Georgiana Molloy and beekeeping in Western Australia (see Chap. 5)
illustrates, many early colonies of honeybees transported to Australia died
at sea or failed to thrive once introduced into their new climate and ecol-
ogy. From the 1850s and 1860s onwards, however, new races of honey-
bees like the Italian honeybee (Apis mellifera ligustica) began to emerge
for sale on international bee markets where they were promoted by emerg-
ing acclimatisation societies as being suitable for introduction into new
colonial environments. By the 1880s colonial beekeepers like Isaac
Hopkins were boasting that they were importing Italian bees, Swiss Alpine
bees, Syrian bees, Palestinian bees, Cyprian bees and Carniolan bees.39
The speed with which these new races of honeybees began to circulate
around the globe in the second half of the nineteenth century draws atten-
tion to beekeeping’s metamorphosis into a powerful industry capable of
communicating about and moving bees across international borders with
ease. As Katy Barnett’s analysis of nineteenth-century bee laws indicates
(see Chap. 9), legal cases involving hazardous honeybees, or disputes over
honeybee ownership, were presided over by judges whose rulings were
more frequently dictated by subjective inclinations and cultural
presuppositions about the utility of bees than any contemporary under-

standing of the advancements in bee-breeding or concerns for the ecologi-
cal ramification of introducing honeybees into alien environments. No
laws yet existed to control the potential overspill of honeybees into the
wild, and introducing different varieties of honeybees into new colonial
environments became the prerogative of beekeepers at least some of whom
must have been motivated primarily by money. The dispersal of the Italian
honeybee, for example, was facilitated by George Neighbour & Son’s
translation from German into English of a short monograph on the bee’s
economic value, which the family business published in 1860 in a book
designed to advertise their bees, beehives and beekeeping products.40 By
the 1870s and 1880s, the Neighbours were importing different types of
honeybees from specialist American bee-breeders who were, themselves,
sending honeybees from California to South East Asia and Oceania. In the
colonial Australian novel Kirkham’s Find (1897), discussed by Christopher
Harrington chiefly in relation to the context of beekeeping and women’s
suffrage, the beekeeper Phoebe Marsden’s ability to communicate with
national and international apiculturists ensures the success of her indepen-
dent bee business, and it draws our attention to the existence of a global
community of beekeepers by the end of the century, a fact also evinced by
the creation of Apimondia, the first putatively global beekeeping organisa-
tion, in 1895.41
Charles Darwin notes in later editions of The Origin of Species that “the
imported hive-bee” in Australia appears to be “exterminating the small,
stingless native bee”, but such observations were far outweighed by the
perceived economic benefits introduced species would bring to colonial
agronomy.42 Darwin’s claim about the potential extinction of native bees
was epistemologically driven rather than oriented towards establishing any
type of conservation sensibility. His brief allusion to the potential mass
extinction of the Trigona genus in Australia appears as factual evidence in
a chapter about the inevitability of species’ extinction due to interspecies
competition. It formed the continuation of a self-perpetuating trope in
Victorian natural history in which social insects were put to work as a
means of envisioning the project of imperialism itself. The “Nest Room”
in the British Museum from which Darwin gained detailed information
about social insects emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century and
brought together the dwellings constructed by domestic and colonial
insects to concretise a popular way of seeing social structure through
insect infrastructure.43 Social development was plotted along a
civilisational spectrum that moved upwards from “lower” insects, com-

pared by Kirby and Spence to those “wretched inhabitants of Van Diemen’s
Land”, to “higher” insects representative of “the more advanced races”.44
Most scholars familiar with this imperialist discourse credit its appearance
to Henry Smeathman’s juxtaposition of imperial termites alongside the
native inhabitants of West Africa he encountered while travelling through
Britain’s slave colonies in the eighteenth century, but by the time we arrive
at the creation of the Nest Room and Darwin’s ideas about the extermina-
tion of native bees, slavery was being replaced by settler colonies open to
the idea that the native biota surrounding them would be wiped out by
more economically beneficial insects like the western honeybee.45
In this way, our ideas about western honeybees can be said to have not
only colonised the physical environment but the very concept of “bee”
and “insect”. By the end of the nineteenth century, the honeybee’s utility
to industrial society had established an anthropocentric evaluative metric
that dictated how bees were to be written and spoken about. Bees, such
as carder, mining, and mason bees, which promised in the eighteenth cen-
tury but had failed by the nineteenth century to serve any clear economic
and bionic imperatives, were swept to the margins of both literary and sci-
entific attention, and bees who deviated from the concerns of agronomy
were not exempt from being labelled pest species by early economic ento-
mologists. If, therefore, the nineteenth century constituted the period in
which Western honeybees first began to hold the global significance they
hold today, the nineteenth century might also constitute an important
location from which to understand the philosophical roots behind con-
temporary declines of insect and bee biodiversity. John Ruskin’s inter-
est, for example, in “rose bees”, “poppy bees”, “mason bees”, “carpenter
bees”, “wool-gathering bees”, along with many other bees, coincided
with his critique of the moral, aesthetic, and epistemological limitations
of an emergent form of post-Darwinian entomological materialism.46 In
Fors Clavigera (1875), Ruskin proposes a variety of philosophical ques-
tions about bees that contemporary entomologists appear to have lost the
ability to answer not so much because they lack the scientific training to
do so, but because answering such questions simply serves no economic
function.47 Traditional analogies between solitary bees and the epony-
mous labour they once performed were also starting to make no analogical
sense to Ruskin, because mechanisation had rendered such labour extinct,
and the ascent of deterministic knowledge about insects raised aesthetic
questions about the cultural representation of bees.48 For Ruskin, the
anthropocentric evaluation of bees and other insects in terms of their

anatomy, industry, and scientific utility raised ethical questions about our
ability to cohabit with insects and non-human life more generally. There
must, Ruskin hoped, be “some better method of teaching natural his-
tory”, of knowing “how to look” at insects without killing them.49
The nineteenth century was, therefore, not simply an important period
in the history of bees, honeybees, and beekeeping, but arguably the most
important period in the history of our relationship to honeybees and
insects. This is because it was the period in which honeybees, “these valu-
able insects” as John Evans described them in his preface to The Bees, came
to reinscribe the Western conceptual understanding about what it means
to be a “bee” and an “insect”. Many of the debates that occur today about
declines in invertebrate biodiversity, along with discussions about the
environmental and ethical problems created by the industrialisation of
beekeeping, can be traced back to the modernisation of apiculture in the
nineteenth century ascribed to insect life. The chapters in this book explore
and expose the discursive mechanisms by which honeybees achieved this
ascent, and they indicate the need for an equivalently minute attention to
be paid to other insects.
Notes
1. John Evans, The Bees: A Poem in Four Books, With Notes Moral, Political
and Philosophical (Shrewsbury: J. and W. Eddowes, 1806), 37, Book 1, ll.
458–462.
2. Eva Crane, British Bee Books: A Bibliography 1500–1976 (London:
International Bee Research Association, 1979), 103.
3. Evans, The Bees: A Poem in Four Books, 5, Book 1, ll.33–34.
4. Evans, ix.
5. Evans, ix.
6. See Gene Kritsky, The Quest for the Perfect Hive: A History of Innovation in
Bee Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), especially chapters
7, 8 and 10.
7. Rani Saadi Liebert, “Apian Imagery and the Critique of Poetic Sweetness
in Plato’s Republic”, Transactions of the American Philological Association,
140, no. 1 (2010): 97–115, at 97.
8. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub: Written for the Universal Improvement of
Mankind. To which is added, an account of the Battel of the Books Between the
Antient and Modern Books in St. James’ Library (London: 1711), 238.
9. Swift, 238.
10. Swift, 241.
11. Jane Wright explores how Tennyson cements the association between bees
and the aesthetic, as, for instance, in The Princess, when “the murmuring of
innumerable bees” concludes a catalogue of sensory beauties and repro-
duces this beauty in the reader’s ear. See Jane Wright, “Tennyson’s Bees”,
Tennyson Research Bulletin 10, no. 4 (2015): 321–339.
12. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Friendship’s Garland (New
York: Macmillan & Co., 1883), 131.
13. Arnold, p. 12.
14. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or
the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 4th edn.
(London: John Murray, 1866), 248–291.
15. John Lubbock, Ants, Bees, and Wasps (London: Kegan Paul, 1906), 286.
16. Lubbock, 288.
17. Charlotte Sleigh, Six Legs Better: A Cultural History of Myrmecology
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007), 17.
18. Edward Bevan, Hints on the History and Management of the Honey Bee,
Being the Substance of Two Lectures Read Before the Members of the Hereford
Literary, Philosophical and Antiquarian Institution in the Winter of
1850–51 (Hereford: Times Office, 1851), 9.
19. Alfred Neighbour, The Apiary: Or Bees, Beehives and Bee Culture (London:
Kent & Co., 1865), ix.
20. In volume 2 of An Introduction to Entomology: Or, the Elements of the
Natural History of Insects: with Plates, William Kirby and William Spence
compare “imperfect societies” and “perfect societies” of insects, the latter
of which, “exhibit the semblance of a nearer approach, both in their prin-
ciple and its results to the societies of man himself” (5th edn., London:
Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1828), 26.
21. Joseph Warder, in The True Amazons: or, The Monarchy of Bees (1713), sug-
gests that the queen-bee’s absolute sovereignty in the hive “pleads very
much with me, that Monarchy is founded in nature, and is approved by the
great Ruler of Princes”. Similar efforts to naturalise monarchy by referring
to honeybee organisation recur through the long eighteenth-century, for
instance in John Thorley, Melisselogia, or the Female Monarchy: Being an
Enquiry into the Nature, Order and Government of Bees (1744) where the
queen-bee is a “stately, beautiful, most noble and glorious insect”. See also
Jonathan Woolfson, ”The Renaissance of Bees”, Renaissance Studies 24,
no. 2 (2010): 281–300.
22. The American Beekeeping Federation estimates that managed honey-
bees annually contribute US$20 billion to the value of USAmerican crop
production (see https://www.abfnet.org/page/PollinatorFacts). The
American National Honey Board estimates around 150 million pounds of
honey are extracted from managed hives annually and USAmerican honey
is currently valued at around $2 a pound (https://honey.com/honey-

industry/market-overview/us-honey-production-and-trade). Both sites
accessed 20 December 2022.
23. See, for instance, Thomas Young, An Essay on Humanity to Animals
(London: 1789).
24. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree (Berlin: A. Asher & Co Unter
den Linden, 1873), 189.
25. Hardy, 190.
26. Thomas Nutt, Humanity to Honeybees: or, Practical Directions for the
Management of Honeybees Upon an Improved and Humane Plan (Wisbech:
H & J Leach, 1832), 1.
27. Evans, 64.
28. Evans, 64.
29. Jan Swammerdam, The Book of Nature, translated by Thomas Flloyd
(London: C.G Seyffert, 1758), 160–205; R.A.F. Réaumur, Memoires to
Serve As a History of Insects (Paris: Royal Printers), 5: 461–512.
30. Jan Dzierzon, Theory and Practice of the Modern Bee-friend (Nordlingen:
1848–1852), passim.
31. Carl Theodor Ernst von Siebold, On True Parthenogenesis in Moths and
Bees; a contribution to the history of reproduction in animals translated by
William Dallas (London: John Van Voorst), 53.
32. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, “Copulation of a Queen and Drone Actually
Seen”, American Bee Journal 1 no.3 (1861): 66; G.W. Demaree
“Fertilization in Confinement”, American Bee Journal 17, no.1 (1881): 1;
S.A. Shuck, “Mating of a Queen Bee”, American Bee Journal 18, no. 50
(1881): 789. The drone’s inseminating penis apparently sounds like
roasted popcorn (Langstroth) or the snapping of forget-me-not seed pods
(Shuck).
33. Evans, 33, Book 1, ll. 430–32.
34. Carl Eduard Adolph Gerstaeker, “On The Geographical Distribution and
Varieties of the Honey-Bee, with Remarks upon the Exotic Honeybees of
the Old World”, The Annals and Magazine of Natural History, Zoology,
Botany, and Geology 11, no.3 (1863): 270–283.
35. For an account of spread of Apis mellifera ligustica in the nineteenth-
century see Eva Crane, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting
(New York: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 369–372.
36. Frederick William Vogel, “The Principles of Bee-Breeding, Translated
from the German by Samuel Wagner”, The Annals of Bee Culture, for 1870
(Louisville: Duncan, 1870), 2–3.
37. Gregor Mendel’s bee-breeding experiments are detailed by O. Vecerek,
“Johann Gregor Mendel as a Beekeeper” Bee World 46 no.3 (1965):
86–96. For a discussion of Nachtsheim, see Ute Deichmann, “Hans
Nachtsheim, A Human Geneticist Under National Socialism, and the

Question of Freedom of Science” in The Practices of Human Genetics
edited by Michael Fortun and Everett Mendelsohn (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1999), 143–153.
38. See Tammy Horn, Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation
(Lexington: The University of Kentucky, 2005), 41–101.
39. A key text in this process was Isaac Hopkins, The Illustrated Australasian
Bee Manual: a complete and modern guide to modern bee culture in the
southern hemisphere (Gordon & Gotch: Wellington, 1911), 3.
40. H.C. Hermann’s The Italian Alp-Bee or the Gold Mine of Husbandry, trans-
lated by Alfred Neighbour (London: Published by Neighbor and
Sons, 1860).
41. Eva Crane, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, 354–377.
the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 4th edn.
(London: John Murray, 1866), 87.
43. The Nest Room was the first room in the Northern Zoological Gallery in
the British Museum and curated by the entomologist Frederick Smith.
44. William Kirby and William Spence, An Introduction to Entomology
(London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown,1822–1826), 1: 436;
John Lubbock, Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A record of the observations on the
habits of social insects (London: Kegan Paul), 92.
45. For termites, see Deirdre Coleman, Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher:
Natural History, Slavery, and Empire in the late Eighteenth Century
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018) and Romantic Colonization
and British Anti-slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
46. John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: letters to the workmen and Labourers of Great
Britain (George Allen: Kent, 1875), 54–109.
47. Some of these questions included, do bees get toothaches and do rose bees
see the colour red in their subterranean scarlet nests. While scholars like
Jeanette Samyn have read these same sections of Fors Clavigera in order to
draw attention to Ruskin’s association of insect intelligence with instinct in
order to separate it from human consciousness, his greater argument seems
to centre on the reductive nature of entomology, particularly the ento-
mologist’s use of determinism, anatomy, and taxonomy to demystify
nature. See Samyn, “Cruel Consciousness”, Nineteenth-Century
Literature 71, no.1 (2016): 89–114.
48. Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, 72. Ruskin refers to the naturalist Gilbert White’s
comparison of Anthidium manicatum’s removal of trichomes from plants
to the work of hoop-shavers. Hoop shavers once made the hazel, chestnut,
and oak hoops that held casks and barrels together, but by the end of the
nineteenth century such crafts existed in marginal locations.
49. Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, 75.
CHAPTER 2
Modern Science, Moral Lessons

and Honey Bees in Nineteenth-Century
Natural History
Diane M. Rodgers
In 1847, a series published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian

Knowledge, Lessons Derived from the Animal World, chose the honey bee,
or “hive bee,” to demonstrate the principles of economy because “In all
ages Bees have claimed the admiration of mankind as patterns of industry,
economy, cheerfulness and ingenuity.”1 Combining natural history with
moral instruction, Lessons Derived from the Animal World shows that the
honey bee had become a symbol of modern social order congenial to both
nineteenth-century religious and scientific discourses. The honey bee col-
ony was viewed as a model for a social order that depended on consensus
and hierarchy, also supplying nineteenth-century literature with an exam-
ple of modern industry, and often presented to deliver a moral lesson for
humans. As the narrative in Lessons Derived from the Animal World
D. M. Rodgers (*)
Department of Sociology, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39570-3_2
22 D. M. RODGERS
continues: “every member [of the hive] has its appointed duties, to be car-
ried on for the general benefit of the community. And if it can be shown
that the bee is an illustrious example of this comprehensive economy, a
knowledge of its history may be an incentive to us in the practice of this
admirable virtue.”2 This moral social order was depicted through analo-
gies between honey bee and human societies in the natural history texts of
the nineteenth century. Ideas of the natural world were formed through a
social lens and then applied to human society, thereby naturalizing social
categories.
Despite the increasingly secular and modern approach to science
becoming dominant, these natural history texts generally assumed a reli-
gious worldview that included a Creator responsible for the natural order
that was meant to guide human social structure. In this chapter, I outline
how the honey bee and the hive supplied the wherewithal for what Carl
Berger has described as “the natural history of an ordered, ranked, super-
vised, and beneficent creation” that “supported the fabric of Victorian
society.”3 I draw from various sources of nineteenth-century Western
texts, presented in a non-linear approach that reveals an overarching pat-
tern in the literature. Furthermore, dissemination of these ideas on
Victorian social order became aided by the popularization of natural his-
tory throughout this period. Publishers, both secular and religious, were
comfortable promoting the moral claims combined with modern scientific
information that was found in natural history texts. Similarly, the practical
and modern beekeeping literature contained this mixture of morality and
religion along with practical instructions. Another significant thread of
natural history literature was directed toward children, educating them on
the latest entomological knowledge but also imparting moral lessons.
Within all these texts, the honey bee came to symbolize both the observa-
tions and claims of modern science and the moral concerns of the nine-
teenth century.
Victorian Honey bee Social Order

The honey bee analog included a lexicon that corresponded to human
social roles such as queen, worker, scout, guard, nursemaid and under-
taker. The role of the queen, in a century that began—for British subjects,
at least—with significant threats to monarchy and came to be dominated
by the figure of Queen Victoria, especially serves to illustrate this connec-
tion between beehive and social order. Entomological descriptions of a
2 MODERN SCIENCE, MORAL LESSONS AND HONEY BEES… 23
monarchy under a queen’s leadership not only reflected a nineteenth-cen-

tury human political context but also scientific acceptance of a queen as
the ruler of the hive. A common conception of subordination to authority
exists in descriptions of the hive written even amidst the instability of the
Regency and the Napoleonic Wars. Huish, writing in 1815, for instance,
claimed that “Every society is a monarchy governed by a Queen, subordi-
nate to whom are several hundred drones, and a multitude of labourers,
according to the size of the colony.”4 By the middle of the century,
J. H. Cross would write this celebratory account of the benevolent
queen bee:
The attention of the bees to their queen is very remarkable; the workers turn
their heads towards her like so many courtiers in the presence of royalty, as
she moves about the hive with slow and dignified step. Where she goes they
clear the way and form a circle round her as a sort of body-guard. When she
rests from her labours they approach with respect, lick her face, offer honey,
and render every mark of devotion.5
Description of bees extended beyond a simple division of labor, encom-

passing interpretations of swarming behavior presented by authors as anal-
ogous to the empire building of Great Britain. The hierarchical model
included criteria of the primitive and the civilized in a way that corre-
sponded to the power structure of colonialism.6 In particular, swarming
behavior became a standard literary description of expanding new terri-
tory and the dethroning of an old queen with a new queen, complete with
vivid rivalry and battles.
Despite the central theme of a queen bee, not all accounts of hives sup-
ported the idea of a monarchy, even with the term “queen” intact. Tension
over the queen nomenclature and social analogy in scientific discourse had
emerged in many prominent bee experts’ accounts, arguably informed by
their political convictions. Some entomologists considered her only the
mother of the hive.7 Despite the debates on the queen’s role, the queen
analogy was still largely in place in the scientific literature of the nineteenth
century. Entire chapters were devoted to the role of the queen, including
her so-called “marriage flight,” the mating behavior of the queen and the
male drones of the hive. The scientific facts of this ritual were typically
mixed with a great deal of anthropomorphism that reflected gender norms
of the time.8
24 D. M. RODGERS
Ideas of social order in the literature on honey bees tended to be pre-

dominantly hierarchical; however, counter-narratives were also developed.
As Roger Cooter points out: “If the advantage of disseminating scientific
over other forms of knowledge is the ease with which it can legitimate
specific social and political interests under the guise of value-neutrality, the
obvious danger is that others will undermine those interests by directing
the same body of knowledge to radically different ends.”9 Scientific
descriptions of the honey bee were also used to justify non-hierarchical
social structures, with analogies to human socialism or communism.
Entomologist Anna Botsford Comstock claimed that “bees are perfect
socialists. They have non-competitive labor, united capital, communal
habitations and unity of interests.”10 Her Handbook of Nature Study writ-
ten in 1911 is still in print. A professor of nature study at Cornell University,
she was also married to entomologist John Henry Comstock, illustrating
his books and co-authoring with him.11 The blend of scientific expertise
and a drive to popularize the study of nature is exemplified in the work of
the Comstocks. The naturalized social order told through literary and
popular scientific analogies gained credibility and became viewed as more
than simply nature stories.
Expertise and Popularization

Nineteenth-century writing about honey bees reflected both literary
expressions of social order but also scientific information of the day. Much
of the popular literature on bees included work written by entomologists
or naturalists. Popularizing of scientific information through use of narra-
tive relying on metaphor provided a way to disseminate ideas of social
order embedded in the entomological understanding of bees. Many of
these metaphorical narratives, at times even fictionalized works, were
viewed as credible sources of entomological knowledge. A review of
Maurice Maeterlinck’s book The Life of the Bee (1901), appearing in a
beekeeper journal, The Bee-Keeper’s Record, commented on the book’s
“beautiful poetical imagery.” Maeterlinck was seen as an expert, familiar
with the range of bee literature and ably connecting the societies of bees
and humans. The reviewer highly praised Maeterlinck: “Thoroughly con-
versant with standard works of France, Germany and English speaking
countries the author sets before us a book that to bee keepers is little short
of a revelation. The analogies drawn between the life of the bees and that
of man are sometimes almost startling!”12
Entomological texts included a mixture of scientific experiments,

accounts of bee physiology and behavior, passages from famous naturalists
and entomologists, poetry and literary references concerning insects,
detailed scientific figures and fanciful drawings. For instance, the Reverend
Langstroth, the entomologist credited with the movable wooden frame
beehive, begins his book with a drawing of this modern beehive, and then
figures of the worker, queen and drone. Above those three figures the
author quotes Shakespeare: “So work the Honey Bees. Creatures that by
a rule in Nature, teach The Art of order to a peopled kingdom.”13 A high
level of scientific detail was present in most popular entomological works
of the nineteenth century alongside references to literature and religious
sentiments. One interesting example can be found in the work of Sir John
Lubbock, a prominent Victorian entomologist, discussed further in
Jonathan Smith’s chapter in this book. Lubbock insisted on modern scien-
tific practices and experimentation; his frequently cited books are filled
with his observation notes. Although devoted to scientific methods, as
Patton (2013) points out, Lubbock sought a “marriage of rationalism and
religion.”14 Lubbock even warned that the pendulum may have swung too
far and that science of the day may “underrate the sacredness of animal
life, and treat them too much like mere machines.”15 In an essay on Science
in The Pleasures of Life, Lubbock explains:
I have elsewhere endeavored to show the purifying and ennobling influence

of science upon religion; how it has assisted, if indeed it may not claim the
main share, in sweeping away the dark superstitions, the degrading belief in
sorcery and witchcraft, and the cruel, however well-intentioned, intolerance
which embittered the Christian world almost from the very days of the
Apostles themselves. In this she has surely performed no mean service to
religion itself. As Canon Fremantle has well and justly said, men of science,
and not the clergy only, are ministers of religion.16
As Smith outlines in Chap. 11, Lubbock was a close friend and colleague
of Darwin and adherent to his ideas of evolution, he also framed his scien-
tific work, including popular works, to moral ends of social progress for
humankind.17 As Clark (2014) explains of his views: “Lubbock, and the
circle of Darwinian supporters with whom he associated, continued to
concern themselves with an amalgam of science, politics and religious
beliefs throughout the 1860s.”18 Specifically, Lubbock’s popularizing
26 D. M. RODGERS
works continued to do this past 1860, until closer to the end of the nine-
teenth century.
There was no shortage of entomological texts aspiring to a similar mar-
riage, attaching moral or religious messages to the technical descriptions
of bee behavior. J. O. Westwood’s The Entomologist’s Text Book (1838)
promises a “concise introduction to the Elements of Entomology brought
down to the present state of the science.”19 And yet the book is also an
example of an entomologist who, though committed to scientific accuracy
and popularization, credited a Creator with the formation of the insects
described. The book popularized the content of more technical articles
previously published by the author, in order to impart “to the subject a
greater degree of interest, than though bare description and technicalities
had been given; but, which was of far higher importance,” to prove “that
in all the various formations exhibited by these tribes of animals, an All-
wise Creator had bestowed those various structures for the performance,
in the most satisfactory manner, of their different functions.20 Introducing
general readers to entomology in the nineteenth century required the
credibility of experts and dissemination of knowledge but also still allow-
ing for the incorporation of religious ideology. This combination of scien-
tific and religious messaging was made available through a wide variety of
outlets for entomological literature other than published books: afford-
able pamphlets, periodicals, and journals were also flourishing.
Publishers
Many publishers offered encouragement to writers who combined science
with religious or moral messages. Publishers were among the multiple fac-
tors responsible for the proliferation of entomological literature on bees.
Aileen Fyfe’s examination of the popular and affordable “penny periodi-
cals” reveals “positions adopted by middle-class publishers and writers,
and illustrates the sort of material that was available to working-class read-
ers attempting to create their own positions on science and religion.”21
Interest in natural history was useful to reinforce existing ideas on social
structure while providing new scientific facts through an overall lens of
social order. Narratives interspersed with moral exemplars of bees did not
detract from the simultaneous popularization of the latest scientific infor-
mation on bees. As Fyfe states more generally:
Publishers with explicit religious credentials continued to publish popular

works on the sciences right up till the end of the century, and their works
competed in the marketplace with the secular versions. Although much has
been made of a mid-Victorian crisis of faith, perhaps triggered by the sci-
ences, this seems to have been a feature of a certain class of intellectuals, and
not an accurate description of the majority of society (especially middle-class
society), which retained a religious faith long after most expert men of
science.22
Some Christian publishers were sponsored by specific denominations or

religious societies. For instance, the Presbyterian Board of Publication
began publishing in the 1800s because of their “belief in the importance
of good religious literature to Presbyterians and Christians everywhere.”23
This publisher’s catalogs and advertisements list many books on nature
and insects. Despite their explicit purpose to promote Presbyterian doc-
trine,24 they also purported to present the latest scientific facts. The blurb
for a book, Rambles among Insects, by Rev. Samuel Findley, claims that
“Whilst popularizing his theme so as to interest the young, he has sought
scientific accuracy in every statement, and for this purpose has had his
work carefully examined by an eminent entomologist. Lessons of thrift,
courage, forethought and piety are ingeniously drawn from the habits of
insects and applied with pertinency.”25 The extent of outreach for some of
this literature was connected to the educational system of the time. Two
main religious societies sponsored private education in the first part of the
nineteenth century.26 As Sockwell describes one of these, “The Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) was the central group responsi-
ble for preparing the readers for the Anglican National Society schools.”27
The book series with which this chapter began, Lessons Derived from the
Animal World, was listed in an advertisement by the publisher along with
their other books on nature and insects, as “published under the direction
of the committee of general literature and education, appointed by the
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.”28
The unnamed author of this book proclaims that “The idea of selecting
from the Animal World Lessons for the regulation of our own conduct,
might naturally occur to any one who has watched the habits and instincts
of beasts, birds and insects.”29 According to the author, one of these les-
sons in particular derives from the “humble labours of insects.” The con-
nection between nature, science and religion is encapsulated in the first
part of a sentence concerning the approach of the book, “Natural History,
28 D. M. RODGERS
as a science, is the history of the works of the Almighty.”30 Despite this

clear admixture of science and religion, the author makes an even more
significant distinction in the preface:
In the following pages the valuable qualities of animals are described in strict
conformity with the facts recorded by our best naturalists, and a lesson is
sought to be drawn from each example, illustrative of the beauty and worth
of those dispositions and habits which are constantly practised by inferior
beings, while they are too often neglected by those who bear the name, and
profess to share the hopes, of Christians.31
The Religious Tract Society (RTS) was formed in 1799 as an interdenomi-

national, evangelical Protestant organization meant to publish and distrib-
ute tracts and books. They were committed to disseminating a large
number of texts to a working-class audience. “For the Religious Tract
Society (RTS), cheapness and quality were paramount.”32 The Religious
Tract Society produced books on bees such as The Busy Bee, Two Busy Bees,
The Hive and its Wonders. This last book was promoted in their catalog as
“profusely illustrated, scientifically accurate, as well as lively and anecdoti-
cal [sic].” Among the additional blurbs of support, Evangelical Magazine
claimed, “This is a most instructive and interesting book to put into the
hands of the young.”33
Another publication by the Religious Tract Society, titled The Honey-
Bee: Its Nature, Homes and Products, purported to not only educate on the
scientific facts of honey bees but to encourage beekeeping, and not only
for men but also for women and older children. The book is quite detailed
with the promised scientific text and illustrations and with citations from
Réaumur, Huber and Lubbock on their experiments and observations of
bees. The religious ideology is subtle throughout the book, often as con-
cluding statements on an otherwise strictly secular treatment of bees in
each chapter. In a heavily scientific chapter on honey, the author con-
cludes, “we can but bow in reverence before the all-comprehensive Divine
wisdom and goodness, which have endowed creatures so small with pow-
ers so surprising—which have made them subservient to human needs or
comfort, and which have enabled the bees to work even to better advan-
tage under the tutelage of man, than when left to their natural habits and
surroundings.”34
One of the recurrent messages combining the modern scientific infor-
mation on bees with religious beliefs became the distinct approach to
evolution. A chapter in the above book by the Religious Tract Society

presents very detailed physiological material and ends with, “Nor, as it
seems to us, is it possible to believe that any force of evolution, unguided
by a distinctly controlling and Divine creative power, could ever have elab-
orated organs so precisely what might have been expected to result from
the exercise of infinite wisdom and manifest purpose.”35 Honey bee physi-
ology is seen as evidence that supports the rejection of any evolutionary
theory that denied divine interference and posits natural selection. As the
passage continues: “To those, at least, who rejoice to believe in a personal
God, who find an atheistic cosmos the most unthinkable of notions; who
see a thousand mysteries inexplicable on any theory of unintelligent ‘natu-
ral selection,’ the study of the honey-bee provides reason for, and evokes
the sentiment of, sublime adoration of an infinite First Cause, i.e. the
Deity.”36
Aside from religious societies, professional societies also were interested
in popularizing scientific findings of the day. “By the 1890s all three [top
naturalist journals in the UK] were monthlies, and all had strong connec-
tions with the various natural history societies … Many of the contributors
to the late nineteenth-century natural history magazines, and the majority
of their editors and proprietors, were drawn from the same community of
entomologists. For these readers the journals played an important role in
uniting a distributed network of like-minded naturalists.”37 Secular pub-
lishers were not averse to publishing moral lessons or crossing boundaries
between science and religion to push useful honey bee analogies of social
order. The A.I. Root Beekeeping company was a publisher of pamphlets
and books, some of which are still in print today such as: The ABC of Bee
Culture, The Life of the Bee and Gleanings in Bee Culture. A publisher’s
note for an A. I. Root book, A Clergyman and His Bees by “Clericus,” is
instructive:
So many clergymen have written us expressing one way or another their love
for bee culture, and showing the value of this branch of nature study for
them, as will be seen by the pages of this book, that to present the matter
more clearly, we have asked our clerical friends to prepare this little work.38
The author “Clericus” exclaims, “A Clergyman and his bees! What a com-
bination! and yet how perfectly natural! For who would be better able to
appreciate the phenomena of bee life than one whose life has accustomed
itself to observation?”39 “Clericus” affirms that the hive provides a guide
30 D. M. RODGERS
for human social order: “from them are learned many lessons of industry,
usefulness, and devotion to life-work from which many illustrations from
the pulpit can be drawn.”40 It is clear that there was no lack of popular
scientific information available for a general audience in the nineteenth
century.41 Publishers both helped create and respond to the public’s inter-
est in natural history during this time period and thereby also reinforcing
the Victorian social order.
Modern Beekeeping Literature

In his preface to The Hive and the Honey-Bee, the Rev. Langstroth prom-
ises the latest scientific advance in modern beekeeping and credits God in
this endeavor: “The Creator may be seen in all the works of his hands; but
in few more directly than in the wise economy of the Honey-Bee.” After
citing a poem that ends with the line, “Man might learn truth and virtue
from the BEE!,” Langstroth addresses clergymen to encourage them to
take up beekeeping:
The attention of Clergymen is particularly solicited to the study of this

branch of Natural History. An intimate acquaintance with the wonders of
the Bee-Hive, while it would benefit them in various ways, might lead them
to draw their illustrations, more from natural objects and the world around
them, and in this way to adapt them better to the comprehension and sym-
pathies of their hearers.42
Although beekeeping appears to be a strictly practical endeavor, some of

the books on modern beekeeping mixed instruction in beekeeping with
religious or moral lessons. How was beekeeping considered “modern”
despite this holdover to more traditional religious beliefs? As Kritsky
details, early straw skeps required killing or harming bees in the hive to
gain honey.43 They also did not allow any access to the inside of the hive.
Innovations by way of movable wooden frame hives began to modernize
the domesticated beehive, the most famous of these by Reverend
Langstroth, in whose life and work the mixture of modern science and
traditional religious beliefs remained side by side. As Tammy Horn (2005)
asserts of Langstroth, “his belief in divinity, his sincere love for bees and
his fellow neighbors, and his ingenuity brought him enduring fame and
respect during his lifetime.”44 Langstroth’s first description of “the mod-
ern moveable-frame hive” was in October 30, 1851. Ebert (2009) writes,
“Langstroth capitalized on centuries of science and sentiment centered in

the British Isles. A Congregationalist minister, he viewed the highly-
ordered nature of honeybee society as a morally-instructive model for
people. Further, the unfathomable complexity of honeybee interactions
seemed to prove divine creation.” In Ebert’s analysis, “This moral-
religious mindset partially explains his personal attraction to
beekeeping.”45
Analogies of social order reached an audience of amateur beekeepers
through popular manuals on beekeeping, public demonstrations and word
of mouth. According to Ebert (2009), the modernizing of the beehives by
Langstroth served as part of a reform effort, one that would also carry
with it a moral lesson for the poor and working class. He claims of
Langstroth: “Another part of his thinking revolved around the concept of
rural welfare. The honey and wax from a more productive hive offered
additional income for the rural poor.”46 The Rev. Jenyns, addressing “Bee-
Keeping in Its Educational Aspect” (1885), also expresses this common
idea of reform for the poor:
Those of us who have been much amongst the poor know well the humanis-
ing and elevating influence of flowers in cottage homes … And I am sure
what can be said of them can be said still more emphatically of bee-keeping
as an intellectual and pleasure-giving pursuit, to say nothing of the moral
lessons to be learnt from the diligence, care, labour and economy seen in the
hive … I hope I am right in taking these words, as not only referring to a
means by which those in such humble positions can make a little more
money, and add to their store and comforts, but as also referring to the
higher education which bee-keeping gives them—the bettering of their con-
dition by the bringing out of the intellectual powers; by giving them a pur-
suit which will inform and improve the mind; and which will better their
condition by making them better in heart and life.47
As Ebert points out, despite growing literacy, cottagers were not always
able to read; however, local bee societies held exhibits of modern beekeep-
ing as a way to disseminate the ideas found in these scientific bee books
and journals.48 The increasingly accessible books, journals and societies, as
well as public exhibitions all took on the agenda to incorporate or debunk
traditional lore about beekeeping and encourage modern methods.
Despite challenges, they were mostly successful by the end of the nine-
teenth century.49
32 D. M. RODGERS
One beekeeping book on the modern management of the hive, written

by Thomas Nutt, is seen by J. F. M. Clark as an extension of the social
order of the day. “At a time when intellectuals, radicals and governing
elites struggled to redefine social and economic relationships in an emer-
gent, modern industrial society, Humanity to Honey-Bees sought to wed
the management of non-human nature to technological innovation.”50
Clark finds a connection to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon design of social
control in Nutt’s hive box design, discussed further by Barnett in Chap. 9
of this volume. But one can also argue that Nutt explicitly creates a legiti-
mating loop between the natural and social order in the text of his bee-
keeping book. Nutt begins the book with an account of a dialogue between
himself and a “learned Lord” concerning bee society and Nutt’s system to
manage them:
Nutt. The Bees certainly act with more regularity than ourselves,
my Lord.
Lord. Yes—the hive is a school to which numbers of people ought to be
sent. Prudence, industry, and benevolence, public spiritedness
and diligence, economy, neatness, and temperance, are all visible
among the Bees; or rather, let us say, they read us lectures upon
these several subjects.
Nutt. As long as men are not influenced by the grace of God, they are
certainly the most unjust and corrupt of all creatures.51
Books on bees were reviewed and advertised in bee journals, alongside

articles on practical aspects of beekeeping. The importance of this dissemi-
nation of ideas was described in an essay written by the editors of the
British Bee Journal in 1901:
the real march forward in this country, so far as bee-keeping is concerned,

began with the birth of the British Bee Journal in May 1873. In saying this,
we neither ignore nor attempt to minimise the enormous value of the work
done by Langstroth in perfecting the moveable frame which now renders
the hive an open-book to the bee-keeper but the establishment among us of
a journal entirely devoted to bees and the interchange of thought among
keepers, created a bond of union among the devotees of our craft, and led
bee-men to talk of each other for the first time as ‘brother bee-keepers.’
Little more than fifty years ago bees were rarely referred to in the Press and
books about them were practically beyond the reach of the bulk of those
who kept bees.52
Some editors of these journals and magazines were authors of bee books,
such as Thomas William Cowan, who wrote The British Bee-Keeper’s Guide
Book (1881) and other books on bees and who also edited the British Bee
Journal. The bee journals provided practical advice for beekeepers, bee
association news and advertising for bee equipment, and letters, but often
included poetry, short stories, excerpts from books, reviews and advertise-
ments for books.53 With the advance of “bee culture,” a host of bee jour-
nals emerged, often connected to beekeepers’ associations. The American
Bee Journal, British Bee Journal, North American Bee Journal, New
Zealand and Australian Bee Journal, Canadian Bee Journal, Irish Bee
Journal, and The American Bee Keeper are some examples of the wide-
spread growth of bee journals. The popularization of beekeeping focused
on practical benefit and moral lessons accessible to a wide range of people
of all classes and age range.
Children’s Literature on Bees: Scientific

and Entertaining
Children’s literature was another avenue for disseminating knowledge on

lessons of the hive. Tammy Horn compares contemporary children’s lit-
erature on bees to that of the nineteenth century. She claims in the nine-
teenth century there were two different styles of bee books for children,
either scientifically correct or fanciful without biological information, and
not a balance between the two approaches. Horn states there was a “major
shift in approach from nineteenth-century children’s literature, which
tended to be moralistic and portray bees as industrious, efficient, and
capable of stinging if one made mistakes.”54 However, arguably much of
the nineteenth-century children’s literature on the bee did merge scientific
information with moralizing and this was used to gain credibility and to
naturalize social lessons. Authors and publishers wanted these books to be
correct, entertaining and accessible to a younger audience. Children’s lit-
erature on bees often included encouragement and direction toward bee-
keeping, making practical, scientific information necessary. Entomological
writings were quoted extensively, paired with detailed drawings and
descriptions of physiology/anatomy, some later texts even using
34 D. M. RODGERS
photographs. Bees Shown to Children, written by Ellison Hawks, a member

of the British Bee Keepers’ Association, offered a chapter on “The
Microscope,” with a picture of the instrument and a “photo-micrograph”
of the eye of a bee.55
It is also the case that many of these books were moralizing in tone;
some had every intention of providing religious lessons along with scien-
tific ones. However, ideas of social order were embedded in the scientific
information itself. Analogies were used in the scientific literature as well,
so a children’s book that described the hive of the honeybee with queen,
workers and “lazy bees” or male drones was not veering from the basic
structure and nomenclature of entomological accounts. Presenting behav-
iors along hierarchical lines was also within scientific parameters. As an
example, Flyers and Crawlers, a book published by the Presbyterian Board
Publication, is written in a style that portrays a nanny teaching her charges
nature study. The nanny responds to a question by one of the children to
her earlier comment about “lazy people and lazy bees”:
“Yes,” replied Miss Harson; “the drones are very lazy—so much so that a
slow, idle person is often called ‘a perfect drone.’ You must know that bees
are divided into three classes—queen bees, working, or busy bees, and
drones. The queen is larger than any of her subjects, and has smaller wings,
for she seldom leaves the hive; she is the mother of the colony, and is fed and
waited upon by her devoted subjects. ‘A well-peopled hive consists of one
queen, several hundred males, or drones, and many thousand workers, the
latter all imperfect females, though bearing no resemblance, either in size or
habits, to the pampered individual who nominally fills the throne, and actu-
ally fills the hive by supplying its abundant population.’”56
After the nanny proceeds in explaining the creation of a queen in a hive,

one of the children states: “How strange it does seem … that such little
things as bees, which are not even animals, should know enough to make
a queen.” The nanny then responds: “It is wonderful—indeed, it is amaz-
ing. The only way we can account for it is by saying that their great Creator
teaches them what they need to know and do to fill their place in creation.
It was a long time before the many wonderful things which we now know
to be true about bees were believed at all.”57
Authors were very open about using bees as superior exemplars. In A
Book about Bees: Their History, Habits, and Instincts, Together with the First
Principles of Modern Bee-keeping for Young Readers, the Rev. F. G. Jenyns
implores the readers to “follow the example of the bee, and while you do
not interfere with others in their work, don’t let them stop you. Always
remember that your task or duty, whatever it is, is of the first impor-
tance.”58 The introduction of this book by Baroness Burdett-Coutts, pres-
ident of the British Bee-keepers Association, speaks to the purpose of both
scientific and religious education:
I trust your interesting little book may be a pioneer in this direction, and
give an impulse to Reading lessons calculated to give to children informa-
tion of an accurate and interesting kind, bearing, in some measure, on their
daily life, and strengthening their powers of observation on things familiar
to their eyes and hands … May our children by such means be led to appre-
ciate the order and variety impressed throughout His Creation; and so not
only learn to labour usefully; but to derive that peaceable pleasure which
instruction such as this affords, to sweeten and lighten the occupations of
daily life.59
This book emphasizes the work ethic for working-class children who,
through following the lesson of the bees, could become “contented work-
ers,” who are fine with the “same work every day” and strive to “wear out
rather than rust out.”60 Children’s literature popularized science, religion
and social order in an attempt to create moral lessons for children through-
out the nineteenth century.
Images of social order became embedded into the scientific literature
on honey bees during the nineteenth century. Religious beliefs and literary
narratives were both present in modern scientific accounts. Many of the
advances in understanding the bee through modern science appeared side
by side with religious proclamations of a Creator or other moral lessons in
widely read natural history texts. Far from mere morality tales of nature
written only by non-scientists, these texts largely represented the science
of honey bees and beekeeping of the day, as it intersected with more tra-
ditional religious thought. This was not a contradiction, as many of the
entomologists, naturalists and modern beekeepers held the view that reli-
gion and science were compatible and that nature provided moral lessons
adhering to a divine order.
The naturalization of nineteenth-century hierarchical social order was
also reinforced by these references to divine order. Analogies between the
roles in the hive and human society were part of the scientific discourse
and lent themselves to more literary expressions for a popular audience.
36 D. M. RODGERS
The dissemination of these ideas could be found in books of natural his-

tory and entomology, bee journals and children’s literature of the nine-
teenth century. Secular and religious societies played a role in publishing
and promoting these texts. Acceptance of the social order depicted, or of
the modern scientific understanding of the bee and beekeeping was not
immediate or absolute. However, the interest in natural history through-
out the nineteenth century helped promote the ideas, making them palat-
able, especially with the bee as carrier of the message. The honey bee could
be both sacred and modern simultaneously in nineteenth-century litera-
ture, providing a perfect model for the Victorian social order.
Notes
1. Anonymous, Lessons Derived from The Animal World, vol. 2 (London:
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1847), 3.
2. Anon., 4.
3. Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1983), 50.
4. Robert Huish, A Treatise on the Nature, Economy and Practical
Management of Bees (London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1815), 13.
5. J. H. Cross, The Hive and its Wonders (London: Religious Tract Society
1853, 3rd edn.), 63.
6. Diane M. Rodgers, Debugging the Link Between Social Theory and Social
Insects (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 29–32.
Also see Jessica White’s “The Bees Seem Alive and Make a Great Buzzing:
Unsettling Homes in South-West Western Australia,” Chap. 5 of this vol-
ume, for more on analogies of the bee colony and colonialism.
7. Jeffrey Merrick, Order and Disorder Under the Ancien Régime (Newcastle,
UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
8. Rodgers, Debugging the Link, 45–53; Jeffrey Merrick, “The gender poli-
tics of the beehive in Early Modern Europe,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century
Culture vol. 18 (1989): 7–37.
9. Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and
the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 201.
10. Anna Botsford Comstock, Handbook of Nature Study (Comstock
Publishing Company, 1911), 445.
11. Anna Botsford Comstock, The Comstocks of Cornell: John Henry Comstock
and Anna Botsford Comstock (New York: Comstock Pub. Associates, 1953).
12. W. Broughton Carr, “The Life of the Bee: A Notable Bee Book,” The Bee-
Keeper’s Record 19, no. 137 (1901): 83. However, Maeterlinck has also
been recognized for potentially plagiarizing Eugène N. Marais’s work

(Rodgers, Debugging the Link, 7); Lisa Margonelli, Underbug: An Obsessive
Tale of Termites and Technology. (NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2018), 24, 252.
13. L. L. Langstroth, The Hive and the Honey-Bee: A Bee-Keeper’s Manual
(Northampton: Hopkins, Bridgman & Co, 1853), i–ii.
14. Mark Patton, Science, Politics and Business in the Work of Sir John Lubbock:
A Man of Universal Mind (Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing,
2013), 47.
15. Sir John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature, and the Wonders of the World We
Live In (New York: Macmillan and Co.1892), 41.
16. Sir John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life (New York D. Appleton and
Company, [1854] 1887), 161–162.
17. J.F.M. Clark, “John Lubbock, Science and the Liberal Intellectual,” Notes
& Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science. 68
(2014): 65–87.
18. Clark, 73
19. Clark, iv.
20. J. O. Westwood, The Entomologist’s Text Book; An Introduction to the
Natural History, Structure, Physiology, and Classification of Insects includ-
ing the Crustacea and Arachnida (London: W.M. S. Orr and Co, 1838), iii.
21. Aileen Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing
in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 10.
22. Aileen Fyfe, 2012. “Victorian Science and Religion.” last modified January
17, 2012. At http://www.victorianweb.org/science/
science&religion.html
23. Anna Jane Moyer, “The Making of Many Books: 125 Years of Presbyterian
Publishing: 1838–1963,” Journal of Presbyterian History 41, no. 3 (1963):
123–140.
24. Rev. Willard M. Rice, History of the Presbyterian Board of Publication and
Sabbath-School Work (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication and
Sabbath-School Work, 1888).
25. Presbyterian Board of Publications, Publications of the Presbyterian Board
of Publications with Alphabetical Index. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board
of Publications, 1880), 358.
26. W. D. Sockwell, Popularizing Classical Economics: Henry Brougham and
William Ellis. (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
27. Sockwell, 112.
28. The Ecclesiastical Gazette, or, Monthly Register of the Affairs of the Church of
England (London: Charles Cox publisher, 1851), 152.
29. Anonymous. Lessons Derived, vol. 1, v.
30. Anon.
38 D. M. RODGERS
31. Anon., vi.

32. Fyfe, Science and Salvation, 141.
33. The Religious Tract Society. The Seventy-Eighth Annual Report of the
Religious Tract Society. (London: Religious Tract Society, 1877), 29.
34. W. H. Harris, The Honey-Bee: Its Nature, Homes, and Products (London:
The Religious Tract Society, 1884), 79.
35. Harris, 108.
36. Harris, 243.
37. James Mussell, “Bug-Hunting Editors: Competing Interpretations of
Nature in Late Nineteenth-Century Natural History Periodicals,” in (Re)
Creating Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Amanda Mordavsky
Caleb (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 81.
38. Clericus A Clergyman and His Bees (Medina, Ohio: A. I. Root
Company), n.p.
39. Clericus, 5.
40. Clericus, 10.
41. The extent of publishers’ influence on the dissemination of literature on
bees in the nineteenth century is too large a topic to be fully covered in this
essay. For more detailed treatments of this see: Bernard Lightman,
Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), James A. Secord, Visions of
Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 2014), and Jonathan Topham, “Scientific Publishing
and the Reading of Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain: A
Historiographical Survey and Guide to Sources,” Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science 31 (2000): 559–612.
42. Langstroth, The Hive and the Honey-Bee: A Bee-Keeper’s Manual, iv.
43. Gene Kritsky, The Quest for the Perfect Hive: A History of Innovation in Bee
Culture. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
44. Gene Kritsky, The Quest for the Perfect Hive: A History of Innovation in Bee
Culture. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
45. Adam Wayne Ebert, Hive Society: The Popularization of Science and
Beekeeping in the British Isles, 1609–1913 (PhD dissertation, Department of
Agricultural History and Rural Studies, Iowa State University, 2009), 1.
46. Ebert,1.
47. Charles F. G. Jenyns, “Bee-Keeping in Its Educational Aspect,” British Bee
Journal vol. 13, no.175 (1885): 250.
48. Ebert, Hive Society, 148.
49. Ebert, 229.
50. Clark, Bugs and the Victorians, 69.
51. Thomas Nutt, Humanity to Honey-Bees (Wisbech, UK: H. and J. Leach
1832), 11.
52. Thomas Nutt, Humanity to Honey-Bees (Wisbech, UK: H. and J. Leach

1832), 11.
53. For a general account of periodicals like these, see Matthew Hale, Making
Entomologists: How Periodicals Shaped Scientific Communities in Nineteenth-
Century Britain. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022).
54. Horn, Bees in America, 218.
55. Ellison Hawks, Bees Shown to the Children (London: T. C. &
E. C. Jack, 1912).
56. Ella Rodman Church, Flyers and Crawlers or Talks About Insects
(Philadephia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1884), 256.
57. Church, 258.
58. Charles F. G. Jenyns, A Book about Bees: Their History, Habits, and Instincts,
Together with the First Principles of Modern Bee-keeping for Young Readers
(Wells Gardner, Darton & Company, 1888), 10.
59. Jenyns, xi.
60. Jenyns, 13–19.
CHAPTER 3
Symbiosis or Slaughterhouse? Honeyed

Analogy in Erasmus Darwin
Adam Komisaruk
In a famous passage of De rerum natura, Lucretius explains:
Doctors who try to give children foul-tasting wormwood first coat the rim
of the cup with the sweet juice of golden honey; their intention is that the
children, unwary at their tender age, will be tricked into applying their lips
to the cup and at the same time will drain the bitter draught of worm-
wood—victims of beguilement, but not of betrayal, since by this means they
recover strength and health. I have a similar intention now: since this phi-
losophy of ours often appears somewhat off-putting to those who have not
experienced it, and most people recoil back from it, I have preferred to
expound it to you in harmonious Pierian poetry and, so to speak, coat it
with the sweet honey of the Muses.1
Lucretius’s analogy—poetry as the spoonful of Pierian honey that makes

the bitter medicine of Epicurean philosophy go down—was one that
A. Komisaruk (*)
Department of English, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39570-3_3
42 A. KOMISARUK
Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, knew well. He read De rerum

natura in the original, though it had been available in English since
Thomas Creech’s translation of 1682. Lucretian influences on Darwin’s
epic about natural history, The Botanic Garden (1792), have been well
documented.2 This multimodal work consists of two book-length poems,
each in four cantos of nearly flawless heroic couplets, plus an extensive
prose apparatus holding forth on subjects from monsoons to music the-
ory. Darwin’s “Advertisement” to his project makes an argument, analo-
gous to Lucretius’s, concerning analogy itself: namely, that the “looser
analogies” of the poetry sweeten the passage to the “stricter ones” of the
philosophical notes.3 By “looser analogies”, Darwin principally means the
central conceit of the Botanic Garden: the representation, adapted from
Linnaeus’s taxonomic system, of floral reproductive mechanisms in terms
of human courtship.4 For instance, since honeysuckle (Lonicera caprifo-
lium) sports five stamens and one pistil, it is allegorized as “Fair Lonicera”
pursued by “Five rural Swains”.5 The “stricter” analogies are the very real
ways in which structural resemblances within the natural world bespeak a
common origin and a divine order: as he would put it in his later Zoonomia
(1794–1796), “one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been
the cause of all organic life”.6
Darwin’s entire method is exemplified in a discourse—adumbrated in
The Botanic Garden but reaffirmed in Zoonomia, his agricultural treatise
Phytologia (1800) and his brief epic The Temple of Nature (1803)—that
happens to deal with actual honey.7 Darwin recognizes this not only as
what both bees and flowers eat, but as supporting an analogy between how
bees and flowers eat as they mature, and in turn vindicating the unity of
creation that is the ultimate analogy. Honey is thus the most lubricious of
all substances, sliding smoothly but stickily between the vegetable and the
animal, the poetical and the prosaic, the literal and the figurative, the fan-
ciful and the ratiocinative. Where Darwin’s natural philosophy is abuzz,
honey is usually to be gathered.
In this chapter, I will treat honey as a contested site where the nature of
Darwin’s analogies—their structure, their originality and ultimately their
contradictions—is more broadly revealed. Darwin’s understanding of the
honey cycle differs critically from that of his successors and even some of
his contemporaries in a crucial way: he saw the relationship of bees to
flowers as a matter of thievery rather than collaboration, with pollination
taking place in spite of this relationship rather than by virtue of it. This
difference arises, paradoxically, from the analogic zeal with which Darwin
3 SYMBIOSIS OR SLAUGHTERHOUSE? HONEYED ANALOGY IN ERASMUS… 43
strives to reconcile God’s creatures to one another, somewhat at the

expense of difference itself. That is, as he asserts more broadly in the
Temple, it is precisely because the world is all of a kind that it has turned
into “one great Slaughter-house” of rivalry, a vision owing to his observa-
tions as much of the political climate as of the bees he kept himself in the
late 1790s.8 Drawing on some of his own detractors as well as recent
scholars of nineteenth-century analogy, I will suggest that the two tenden-
cies in Darwin’s thinking—one unificatory and the other diversificatory,
or what his grandson called “lumping” and “splitting”, respectively9—
mark his reflections not only on organic life but on his own creative
endeavor.
The Loves of the Plants, Part II of The Botanic Garden, was published
first in 1789; it was paired with Part I, The Economy of Vegetation, in 1792
(the title page reads 1791). In Darwin’s title to the latter, “economy”
means “physiology”. Of the thirty-nine “philosophical notes” appended
to the poem, the final six are devoted to a detailed exposition of the vari-
ous organ systems of plants, each of them on a close analogy with animals:
“Vegetable Circulation”, “Vegetable Respiration”, “Vegetable
Impregnation” and so forth. How Darwin understands these systems as
interlocking may be summarized as follows. Plants absorb moisture from
the soil (like the solid food of animals) through vessels in their roots (like
the lacteals of animals) as well as in their leaves and bark (like the rest of
the lymphatics). This fluid is forced in a spiral of annular contractions (like
peristalsis) to the footstalks of the leaves, where the vessels converge (as
they would at the heart, to which the plant has no equivalent). A new
network of vessels (like the pulmonary arteries) then distributes the sap
across the leaves (like lungs); once exposed to the air on the upper surface
of the leaves, the sap becomes “vegetable blood” properly speaking, with
a milky appearance (as oxygenated blood changes its color). It is returned
in channels (like pulmonary veins) along the lower surface of the leaves,
back to the footstalks; other arteries (like the aorta) then transmit the
blood throughout the bark and the rest of the plant. Meanwhile, the
flower operates a separate pulmonary system. In the petals, the blood is
conveyed along arteries, enriched by the light and air and returned along
veins. Glands attached to the corol, the inner whorl made of petals, then
separate the blood into essential secretions including the “prolific dust” or
pollen, the “honey” or nectar and the wax. Honey is secreted from the
oxygenated vegetable blood in the nectary or honey-gland, where it is
further exposed to the air; it is then reabsorbed as food. The prolific dust
44 A. KOMISARUK
(like semen) is released when the anthers of the stamen burst; it fecundates
the seeds (like eggs) that have been forming in the ovarium of the pistil.
The embryo is nourished by “umbilical vessels” (as by a placenta) until it
becomes a bud, then acquires leaves and petals of its own. The wax coats
the prolific dust, protecting it from moisture and thus preventing it from
bursting prematurely.
According to Darwin, bees injure flowers in collecting these vital mate-
rials. Nature has not eradicated the competition but has compensated for
it. Cacalia suaveolens (sweet-scented Indian plantain) produces a super-
abundance of nectar, “that thence a part may be spared to the depredation
of insects”.10 Silene (catchfly) and Cucubalus (campion) ensnare their
would-be plunderers with a viscous exudate; Dionaea muscipula (flytrap),
with toothed leaves that fold up when touched; Dypsacus (teasel), with
strategically placed water basins.11 In the aforementioned Lonicera capri-
folium (honeysuckle), “the petal terminates in a long tube like a cornuco-
piae … and the honey is produced at the bottom of it”; in Aconitum
(monkshood), “the nectaries stand upright like two horns covered with a
hood, which abounds with such acrid matter that no insects penetrate
it”.12 Structures in certain species of Ophyris (orchis) and Delphinium
(bee-larkspur) deter insect predators by impersonating them and so “hav-
ing the appearance of being pre-occupied”; the flowers of Epidendrum flos
aeris resemble spiders.13
It is not surprising that Darwin should see an adversarial relationship
where a symbiotic one looks obvious to us in hindsight. For one, it sorts
well with the vision, elaborated in his posthumously published Temple of
Nature, of a world born of love and everywhere at strife. Violence walks
abroad; no creature is spared, but sooner or later is undone by a rival or by
its own excesses:
Yes! smiling Flora drives her armed car

Through the thick ranks of vegetable war;
Herb, shrub, and tree, with strong emotions rise
For light and air, and battle in the skies;
Whose roots diverging with opposing toil
Contend below for moisture and for soil … .
Air, earth, and ocean, to astonish’d day
One scene of blood, one mighty tomb display!
From Hunger’s arms the shafts of Death are hurl’d,
And one great Slaughter-house the warring world!14
In the long run, these successive erasures contribute to a greater homeo-

stasis. If “war, and pestilence, disease, and dearth, / Sweep the superflu-
ous myriads from the earth”, they keep overpopulation in check; if
“festering carnage loads the waves or fields”, we can rest assured that
“Emerging matter from the grave returns”.15 Like the phoenix, the moun-
tains that crumble into the sea will rise from it on the “wrecks of animal or
herb” just as they did before.16 Meanwhile, however, it is our lot to share
the slaughterhouse with one another. The rivalry of bee and flower instan-
tiates this cosmology in its tiny way. If unprevented, hives are even known
to plunder one another to the point of annihilation.17
Nor was Darwin’s understanding wholly inconsistent with contempo-
rary science.18 Like most revolutions, the knowledge of floral pollination
proceeded by fits and starts. The role of insects in the process was not
widely appreciated until the early nineteenth century. The thirteenth
Declamation of pseudo-Quintilian described a poor man who sued a rich
man for poisoning the poor man’s bees, which the rich man claimed were
injuring his flowers; both Giulio Pontedera (1720) and Linnaeus (1749)
responded that the rich man more likely injured his own flowers by depriv-
ing them of an agent necessary to their reproduction. Philip Miller (1721)
and Arthur Dobbs (1749–1750) also suspected that the insect–plant rela-
tionship was symbiotic rather than predatory, and Joseph Gottlieb
Kölreuter (1761–1766) demonstrated it systematically.19 Thomas Andrew
Knight (1799) would observe that the position of the pollen “within the
blossom, is generally well adapted to place it on the bodies of insects; and
the villous coat of the numerous family of bees, is not less well calculated
to carry it”.20 It was Christian Konrad Sprengel (1787), however, who
provided the signal insight that floral defense mechanisms protected the
nectaries from the elements without rendering them completely inacces-
sible to insects; and that, moreover, the flowers directed insects to their
hidden (or, in some cases, absent) nectaries by means of attractive marks
or “honey-guides”.21
Sprengel’s conclusion did not gain immediate acceptance, and the lan-
guage of the opposition was telling. Goethe felt that it “affords no expla-
nation at all. It only ascribes human reasoning to nature and supposes that
this greatest mother produces living creatures in the same way as we man-
ufacture muskets, cast bullets and make gunpowder with a view to firing a
shot”.22 For J.L.G. Meinecke (1809), Sprengel’s “teleological explana-
tions” exemplified the “poetic” tendencies of contemporary botanists—
notably including Goethe himself—which had their place but should not
46 A. KOMISARUK
be confused with the “prosaic necessity of nature”.23 “If consistently inter-

preted”, “picturesque stuff” of this sort led inexorably to a conflation of
discrete organisms, making “the butterfly appear but like a flower let
loose, and the flower but as a chained butterfly”.24
The debate about pollination, then, was a debate about the status of the
figurative—whether the natural world was better captured by a poetical or
prosaic science, whether an analogy between the human and nonhuman
had real explanatory power or merely furnished a picturesque diversion. In
this case, however, the picturesque conceptions afforded explanations that
in a short while would become accepted as just such a prosaic reality.
Flowers did induce insects to perform actions conducive to their pollina-
tion, and in that respect exhibited something of the intentionality of the
insects themselves; moreover, nature as a system ordered the relationship
between flower and insect so as to produce this favorable end, and in that
respect exhibited something approaching the rationality of the human
creatures that its population included.
Developments in the theory of pollination illustrate how “the so-called
literary features of analogy”, as Devin Griffiths puts it, “allow us to recog-
nize patterns that we do not yet understand” and so bring us “into contact
with the world”.25 For Griffiths, the most productive kind of analogy does
not involve the “formal” imposition of knowledge already completely pos-
sessed upon knowledge incompletely possessed so that the former may
enhance the latter; rather, it generates a “harmonic” relationship between
two incompletely possessed knowledges so that each may enhance the
other.26 As he puts it:
On the traditional account of analogy, one might say [Charles] Darwin

“mapped” features of domestic selection onto a natural process, using
domestic breeding as a model for what happens in nature. But … Darwin’s
contemporaries did not believe that domestic selection could produce new
species, only new breeds … . Darwin had to argue against contemporary
wisdom regarding both natural and domestic species: insisting that domestic
selection could produce new species and that natural selection does so in
nature. This was an insight he gleaned by testing each half of the analogy
against the other, teasing out further features of both.27
Erasmus Darwin anticipates something of his grandson’s method, arguing

that the audacity of poetical comparisons may complement the endeavors
of more philosophical disciplines. What the imagination illuminates,
reason may pursue to the utmost limits of demonstration; the imagination

may then move the horizon of possibility further, and so on ad infinitum.
Darwin concludes: “Extravagant theories … in those parts of philosophy,
where our knowledge is yet imperfect, are not without their use; as they
encourage the execution of laborious experiments, or the investigation of
ingenious deductions, to confirm or refute them. And since natural objects
are allied to each other by many affinities, every kind of theoretic distribu-
tion of them adds to our knowledge by developing some of their
analogies”.28
For the elder Darwin, analogies get at an aspect not merely of episte-
mology but ontology. As he states most concisely in his Preface to
Zoonomia, “The great Creator of all things has infinitely diversified the
works of his hands, but has at the same time stamped a certain similitude
on the features of nature, that demonstrates to us, that the whole is one
family of one parent”.29 In this great chain of being, “the individuals of the
vegetable world may be considered as inferior or less perfect animals”.30
They not only breathe, eat, excrete and reproduce: they have volition,31
they have sensation, they experience pleasure and displeasure, and they
love; it is even likely that they “possess ideas of … the properties of the
external world, and of their own existence”.32 The very “anthers and stig-
mas … are separate beings, endued with the passion and power of repro-
duction, with lungs of their own”.33 In fact,
A naturalist, who had studied this subject, thought it not impossible that the
first insects were the anthers and stigmas of flowers, which had by some
means loosened themselves from their parent plant, like the male flowers of
vallisneria, and that other insects in process of time had been formed from
these, some acquiring wings, others fins, and others claws, from their cease-
less efforts to procure food or to secure themselves from injury. He con-
tends, that none of these changes are more incomprehensible than the
transformation of caterpillars into butterflies.34
The identity of vegetable and animal is real; if it is a contrivance, then God

and not Darwin himself is the poetical author. This relationship is what the
term “analogy” signified in the eighteenth century; not until the mid-
nineteenth did it develop its association with “an outmoded and specula-
tive strategy of reasoning”.35 Indeed, in present-day parlance, what Darwin
posits is not an analogy at all (an incidental resemblance between organ-
isms with independent ancestries, as the wing of a bat and the wing of a
48 A. KOMISARUK
bird) but a homology (a structural and functional resemblance between

organisms that share a common ancestry, as the wing of a bat and the arm
of a human).
It must be remembered, however, that when it came to floral reproduc-
tion, Darwin’s analogical thinking put him in the rearward of contempo-
rary science and not in the van. That is, although he believed exactly what
Sprengel was accused of believing (that an insect was simply a flower “let
loose”, and a flower a “chained” insect), he reached the opposite conclu-
sion (that the relationship between flowers and insects was adversarial
rather than symbiotic). In fact, the former position seems to have led to
the latter: if flowers already were bees, and vice-versa, then flowers did not
need bees, and if anything competed against them for finite resources. “As
vegetables are an inferior order of animals fixed to the soil; and as the
locomotive animals prey upon them, or upon each other”, explains Darwin
in a key footnote to the Temple of Nature, “the world may indeed be said
to be one great slaughter-house”.36 The very scope of his poetical imagi-
nation may have attached Darwin to a vision of an autonomous vegetal
economy that was rapidly becoming outmoded.
This paradox may be briefly illustrated. In one recurring theme, for
which he adopts an uncharacteristically contentious rather than concilia-
tory tone,37 Darwin insists that the importance of nectar to the flower has
been misunderstood. It does not “lubricate the vegetable uterus”, as
Pontedera claimed, nor does it nourish the embryo, as seems to be the
prevailing opinion.38 Rather, it must serve as food for the pistils and sta-
mens, enabling them to perform their reproductive office; its extra oxy-
genation increases their “amatorial sensibility” as ordinary sugar does
not.39 The evidence is threefold: first, “the nectary is found equally general
in male flowers as in female ones”; second, “the young embryon or seed
grows before the petals and nectary are expanded, and after they fall off;
and, thirdly … the nectary so soon falls off after the fecundation of the
pistillum”.40 Darwin finds, however, an even stronger fourth argument
that the nectar benefits the mature rather than the immature flower: the
parallel to the lifecycle of insects. According to John Hunter, maggots are
fed primarily with “bee-bread”, the substance that the workers collect on
their legs as raw pollen or “farina” and knead into a paste in the cells of the
hive.41 The food to which they graduate when they reach the age of repro-
duction is none other than honey. Darwin thus conceives an elaborate,
recursive analogy in which honey serves as both tenor and vehicle, a literal
link between vegetable and animal (flowers feed bees) that facilitates a
Fig. 3.1 Honey as analogical linchpin
figurative link (flowers feed as bees do) and, in turn, supports a higher,
literal truth (bees are flowers) (Fig. 3.1).
It is difficult to know whether Darwin reasons deductively or induc-
tively; that is, whether his conviction of the unity of species precedes or
succeeds his observation of structural analogies among them.42
Nevertheless, his imagination seems to awaken much more when he writes
in a “lumping” than in a “splitting” vein. What he does not see is that the
relationship he posits is asymmetric: if bees are flowers, and if bees feed
just as flowers feed, and if the food for adult bees is honey just as the food
for adult flowers is honey, it does not necessarily follow that flowers are
bees, and flowers reproduce just as bees reproduce, and flowers reproduce
autonomously (i.e., without facilitation) just as bees reproduce autono-
mously. Without the recognition that bees need flowers (for nutrition)
differently than flowers need bees (for reproduction), transaction looks
like theft. The slaughterhouse is the complement of the great chain of
being, not its contrary.
The most sustained and direct attack on Darwin came from one John
Evans, M.D., a fellow of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh. Evans’s
The Bees,43 published in installments between 1806 and 1813, and dis-
cussed in the introduction to the present volume, consists of three cantos
(four were promised) of competent heroic couplets and philosophical
notes in the manner of The Botanic Garden. Early on, it claims that
Darwin’s idea of a continuum of the species may be attractive to the poeti-
cal imagination but falls short of the natural philosopher’s standard
of truth.
Well might the Bard, on fancy’s frolic wing,

Bid from fresh flowers enascent myriads spring,
Raise general ferment in the slaughter’d steer,
50 A. KOMISARUK
And people thence his insect-teeming year … .

But shall the Sage, in serious-seeming mood,
Draw from such alien source the living brood?
Go, fond believer, and thy hours beguile
With men fast form’d amid the ooze of Nile … .
Whether within the womb, or silk-lin’d cell,
At Nature’s call life’s quick’ning pulses swell,
Still from one kindred fount her streams descend,
And thence shall flow till Time and Nature end.44
Speculative botanists like Darwin had just as soon join Aristotle in imagin-
ing that bees could spring from the carcasses of cattle: both the discredited
ancient paradigm and the fashionable modern one allow that a species may
have an origin extrinsic to itself.45 Indeed, it may be doubted whether the
doctrine of spontaneous (called “equivocal”) generation was something
that even Virgil “really believed … or only introduced as the vehicle of
poetic imagery”, until the likes of Buffon and Darwin revived it in ear-
nest.46 The greatest innovations in cross-breeding—including, by the
famous analogy, those in animal husbandry—produce their new varietals
“from a kindred stock, and not from any alien, or adventitious source”.47
Even nature in its immensity cannot conjure animal out of vegetable life.
The fact that tadpoles mature into frogs and caterpillars into butterflies
provides no analogy by which floral stigmas and anthers might become
insects, whatever Darwin might claim; for the former instantiate “a mere
circle of changes”, not an “improvement in reproduction. If such an
improvement be really advancing in both kingdoms of nature, and the
male flowers of Vallisneria have for ages detached themselves from the
plant, to seek their favorite females, what should they not have become by
this time? We had almost said, perfect Botanists”.48
Sarcasm notwithstanding, Evans objects particularly to the flattening of
the nonhuman and human that is the terminus ad quem of Darwin’s ana-
logical reasoning. Darwin had facetiously described himself as reversing
the Ovidian metamorphosis, turning plants into people instead of people
into plants; Evans points out that he takes this prosopopoeia all too liter-
ally.49 Darwin distinguished between “irritability”, or the tendency of
peripheral fibers to contract in response to stimuli (what would later be
called a reflex), and “sensibility”, or the ability of a central sensorium to
register these irritations as pleasure and pain, but attributed both faculties
to all living things regardless of species. He inferred in turn that the
avoidance of pain and pursuit of pleasure were driven universally by the

“sensation of love”, an elective affinity that rose to the level of mind.
Unpersuaded, Evans insists that to “irritability … only can the vegetable
principle be rationally referred”, that a “selective and willing sensibility …
seems [the] peculiar privilege” of animals, and that the capacity for love
per se constitutes the threshold between human animals and man.50 The
anther of a barberry shrub, for example, will release its pollen with “indif-
ference as to the kind of stimulus applied”, whether a bee or some other
instrument; its activities, therefore, can have no connection with “percep-
tion, volition and enjoyment”, much less with any domestic affections.51
As François Huber (1792) observed, worker bees may sometimes con-
tinue guarding their queen through her sterility and death, but such dili-
gences are rather attributable to “some agreeable sensation communicated”
by the latter to the former than to any “method, affection, or foresight”.52
If bees were capable of learning from tradition and improving their society
from experience, as Darwin claimed in Zoonnomia, then they have little to
show for it, with a honeycomb design that has stood unchanged for
centuries.
The curmudgeonly Evans may be a lesser thinker than Darwin, but it
would be a mistake to characterize him as an absolutist. He seeks to chart
a middle course between those who, “tenacious of the dignity of man,
would withhold the powers of mind, or intellect, even from the ‘half-
reasoning elephant’”; and those “others, who would willingly extend
them to the very ‘hyssop that springeth out of the well’”.53 He ponders,
for instance, the possible role of electrical attraction in botanical fertiliza-
tion—a theory “more consistent with the rank they hold in creation than
either the mere ‘mechanic impulses,’ to which some would confine their
operations, or the ‘amatorial sensibility,’ assigned to them by others, and
which Nature hath apparently denied to the lowest orders even of her
superior kingdom”.54 As for the other supposed powers of nonhuman
mind, we must surely grant a “co-existence of reason and instinct” in each
creature “apportioned to its wants”.55 We ourselves are irrationally “gov-
erned by [our] instincts” from time to time; “Nor deem, vain boaster, that
reserv’d for thee / Hangs all the ripening fruit on reason’s tree. / Even
these, the tiniest tenants of thy care, / Claim of that reason their
apportion’d share”.56 The point, however, is to celebrate the proportion
of faculties that gives to man and bee each a distinctive form of genius,
rather than impose a single formula that insults them both:
52 A. KOMISARUK
Shall then proud Sophists, arrogant and vain,

Spurn all these wonders of the honey’d reign,
And bid alike one mindless influence own
The social Bee, and crystallizing stone?
Each link, they trace in animation’s round,
Dashes their poison’d chalice to the ground.
If, in the Insect, Reason’s twilight ray
Sheds on the darkling mind a doubtful day,
Plain is the steady light her Instincts yield,
To point the road o’er life’s unvaried field;
If few those Instincts, to the destin’d goal,
With surer course, their straiten’d currents roll … .
Far different Man, to higher fates assign’d,
Unfolds, with tardier step, his Proteus mind.57
This discrimination among species, respecting both where they overlap

and where they diverge, informs latter-day critics of Darwin as well. What
Griffiths calls harmonic analogy participates in a productively “flat view”
of a “flat world”: the flattening of epistemology allows a dynamic interplay
between figure and referent that gives priority to neither; the flattening of
disciplinarity, between literature and science; the flattening of ontology,
between life form and life form; the flattening of theology, between the
nonhuman and the human.58 Flatness, however, is emphatically not same-
ness; to level hierarchies is not to abolish individuation but, on the con-
trary, to intensify it. Darwin may be insufficiently flat; that is, for all his
exhibition of the panoply of organic life, his unitary project may come at
the expense of difference. Catherine Packham says that his “scientific
method of ‘rational analogy’ ” between animal and vegetable “falls foul of
the key weakness identified in analogical reasoning by contemporary com-
mentators: the ‘delusion’ of a judgment seduced by the pleasurable con-
nections which the mind delights in hunting after”.59 Robert Mitchell
points out that Darwin wrote in an age when the “sense of fundamental
similarity of plants and animals began to fracture” and the “uncanniness of
plant life become more and more evident”.60 Rather than avail himself of
this botanical otherness, however, he simply “contained plant love within
the frame of animal (and more specifically human) relationships”, while
reproducing all the “traditional, gendered images of passivity and activity”
endemic to the latter.61 If anything, Mitchell seems to wish that Darwin
had made his analogies more harmonic, “allowing plant love to alter our
own conception of what love can and might be”, even exploring love
“between humans and plants”.62
It was Charles Darwin, notes Gillian Beer, whose “evolutionary ideas
insist[ed] on variability and variety, on the value of slight differences
between specific examples in the natural world. It is through such differ-
ences that evolution is enabled. This delight in the specific example rather
than the standard type complicates thinking about analogy and, even
more, perfection”.63 The latter had to be understood not even as an
asymptotic ideal—a “platonic absolute” to be, if not attained, at least
aspired to—but as “a tentative, temporary condition”, the “frail and tem-
porary being of ‘being in the world’ ”.64 Analogy, accordingly, “makes
room for dis-analogy”; though it may bespeak common origins, it always
has “leftover elements that allow for change and new thinking. Precisely
its imperfection, the limited coherence between terms, sets the mind rac-
ing” and does justice to the diversification of individual organisms.65
Erasmus Darwin’s own position on the unity of the species, however,
may not be so lacking in nuance as it appears. Though a thoroughly ana-
logical thinker, Darwin does not treat all analogies as analogous to one
another. To quote more fully his famous Advertisement to The Botanic
Garden: “The general design of the following sheets is to inlist Imagination
under the banner of Science, and to lead her votaries from the looser
analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones,
which form the ratiocination of philosophy”.66 With this distinction,
again, Darwin is usually taken to be driving a wedge between the main
text and the apparatus of his own work, per his assertion elsewhere that
“Science is best delivered in Prose, as its mode of reasoning is from stricter
analogies than metaphors or similies” [sic].67 Even the Zoonomia Preface,
which posits all God’s creations as “the family of one parent” and their
“similitude” as subtending “all rational analogy”, includes a qualification:
analogy, “so long as it is concerned in comparing the essential properties
of bodies, leads us to many and important discoveries; but when with
licentious activity it links together objects, otherwise discordant, by some
fanciful similitude, it many indeed collect ornaments for wit and poetry,
but philosophy and truth recoil from its combinations”.68 Darwin explains,
in fact, that an indiscipline in analogy has produced a crisis in public health,
to which the taxonomic system of Zoonomia itself represents his curative.
“To think is to theorize”, and yet contemporary physicians suffer from the
“want of a theory, deduced from such strict analogy” as the similitude
among all God’s creatures affords; as a result, medicine “is daily practiced
54 A. KOMISARUK
to the destruction of thousands”, who meanwhile fall victim to “the per-

petual advertisements of pretended nostrums” and the “boastful effron-
tery” of the “crafty empyric”—of the too-poetical practitioner, one
might say.69
Darwin’s discrimination among analogies—on one side, the “strict”
and “rational”, on the other, the “loose”, “licentious” and “fanciful”—
does not necessarily imply hierarchy. The “poetical” analogy may not rise
to the “philosophical” precision that medicine demands, but if it did it
would cease to be poetical. Its strength comes from transforming rather
than reduplicating an actually existing resemblance. The most “agreeable
characteristic” of Homeric similes is that “they do not quadrate, or go
upon all fours”.70 Anna Seward concurred that a simile may be “the more
sublime, or beautiful, for not quadrating exactly”, even though she found
that The Botanic Garden went too far: Homer’s figures “do not often
touch the object with which they are compared, at all points, yet they are
never so utterly without connexion with it, as several which may be found
in this poem”.71
Does Darwin mean that flowers are bees are people? The answer is both
yes and no. His poetical vision of their relationship became part of the
prolific dust that, borne on the back of contemporary thinkers, would
fertilize scientific understanding in latter days. The beneficiaries included
his grandson, who—confirming Evans’s observation that the flower is
“perfect[ly] indifferen[t] as to the kind of stimulus applied”—“would play
the part of the insect, mimicking its behavior in order to fertilize … orchids
himself”.72 At the same time, no two terms in these analogies are perfectly
commensurable. Griffiths says that the younger Darwin’s discussion of
pollination “discriminates between what the bee ‘intends’ and what it
accomplishes ‘unintentionally.’ But he carefully avoids the complementary
question—what does the flower mean to do? … Darwin’s larger answer is
[that] it is ‘nature’ or ‘natural selection’ that acts upon these organisms.
But this answer only defers the problem” of analogizing the nonhuman to
the human.73 Erasmus Darwin does not disseminate as Charles does, let
alone the way a bee does, even in its peculiar style of inadvertency: with the
eventual acceptance of a symbiotic relation between bees and flowers that
he did not apprehend, Erasmus’s unitary vision of the species was vindi-
cated in a way he did not quite mean.
We recall from Lucretius that honey is food for children, making the
medicinal wormwood easier to swallow. In adults, Darwin explains, it has
other uses—as an “expectorant”, as a “mild cathartic”, as a plaster (when
mixed with twenty parts carpenter’s glue).74 The opposite is true, how-
ever, of flowers and even bees, whose diet is carbohydrate-rich only later
in life and protein-rich at the beginning. The strict analogy between the
human and nonhuman, which Darwin’s doctrine of the unity of the spe-
cies would lead us to expect, thus breaks down or at least becomes stickier
where honey is concerned. Only as a metaphor does it hold, with the
sweetness of poetry disguising the bitterness of philosophy for the pre-
sumably adult reader; the figurative and literal must themselves be de-
analogized. Across these distances, Darwin’s work beckons, to the
fascination and perplexity of posterity. The scholarly entry into this perplex
is a relatively recent development, the present volume a most productive
instance. May its unitary project preserve the alterities that Darwin, at his
best, cracks open.
Notes
1. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 1.937–48; repeats at 4.11–23.
2. See especially Martin Priestman, The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened
Spaces, Romantic Times (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). Noel Jackson
shows how Darwin’s attempt at philosophical poetry in the Lucretian vein
led contemporaries to attack The Botanic Garden not only as a pale imita-
tion but as “a dangerously radical text”; Noel Jackson, “Rhyme and
Reason: Erasmus Darwin’s Romanticism”, Modern Language Quarterly
70, no. 2 (2009): 175.
3. Erasmus Darwin, The Economy of Vegetation, The Botanic Garden, vol.1,
ed. Adam Komisaruk and Allison Dushane (New York: Routledge, 2017),
40. Throughout, my references to Darwin’s works cite poetry by canto
and line numbers, prose by page numbers.
4. As Rosalind Powell points out, Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature was
itself “a form of analogizing”; “Linnaeus, Analogy and Taxonomy:
Botanical Naming and Categorization in Erasmus Darwin and Charlotte
Smith”, Philological Quarterly 95, vol. 1 (2016), 102.
5. Erasmus Darwin, The Loves of the Plants, The Botanic Garden, vol. 2, ed.
Adam Komisaruk and Allison Dushane (New York: Routledge, 2017),
1.211, 1.217.
6. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, vol. 1 (London:
J. Johnson, 1794–1796), 507.
7. Throughout, I use “honey” and “nectar” interchangeably, as Darwin
appears to do. They are now understood as distinct substances: nectar is
secreted by the plant; it becomes honey when the bees remove it to the
56 A. KOMISARUK
hive, spread it over the wax to facilitate evaporation, and add the enzyme
invertase.
8. Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society (London:
J. Johnson, 1803), 4.66.
9. Charles Darwin, letter to J.D. Hooker, 1 August 1857, in The
Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 6, ed. Frederick Burkhardt et al.
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 438.
10. Darwin, Economy, 4.2n.
11. Darwin, Loves, 1.131n.
14. Darwin, Temple, 4.41–46, 4.63–66.
15. Darwin, Temple, 4.373–74, 4.393, 4.399.
16. Darwin, Temple, 4.442.
17. Facing such warfare in his own garden, Darwin first tried improvising an
obstacle course to the hive, then relocated the hive altogether, to render it
inaccessible to invaders. Erasmus Darwin, Phytologia: or The Philosophy of
Agriculture and Gardening (London: J. Johnson, 1800), 366; Temple,
4.39–40 and n.
18. For a scrupulous narrative of Darwin’s place in this developing field, see
Alexandra Hankinson, “Flora’s Go-betweens: Nectar, Insects and Flowers
in the Romantic Natural History of Pollination”, Romanticism 25, no. 1
(2019): 3–21. While I cover some of the same territory, I am more inter-
ested in what it tells us about Darwin’s relationship to figurative language.
19. Jacob Lorch, “The Discovery of Nectar and Nectaries and Its Relation to
View on Flowers and Insects”, Isis 69, no. 4 (1978): 522–24; Michael
Proctor, Peter Yeo, and Andrew Lack, The Natural History of Pollination
(Portland, OR: Timber Press, 1996), 14–17.
20. Thomas Andrew Knight, “An Account of Some Experiments on the
Fecundation of Vegetables”, Philosophical Transactions 89 (1799): 202.
21. Lorch, 525–26; Proctor, Yeo, and Lack, 15, 17–19.
22. J.W. von Goethe, letter to A.J.G.K. Batsch, 26 February 1794, in Letters
from Goethe, trans. M. von Herzfeld and C.A.M. Sym (New York: Thomas
Nelson and Sons, 1957), 224.
23. J.L.G. Meinecke, quoted in Lorch, 526–27.
24. Meinecke, quoted in Lorch, 527.
25. Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the
Darwins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 30.
26. Griffiths, 18.
27. Griffiths, 34–35.
28. Darwin, Economy, 41.
29. Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, 1; emphasis in original.
30. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, 102.

31. Of all the vital functions, Darwin’s definition of the will may be the most
complicated. Zoonomia classifies as “voluntary” any motion caused by
“desire” or “aversion”, “whether we have the power of restraining that
action, or not”; Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, 420. Sneezing and vomiting,
for instance, are voluntary because they rid the body of irritants; epileptic
seizures are involuntary because they are unconnected to the pursuit of
pleasure or avoidance of pain; Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, 424. In The Loves
of the Plants, he asserts that “The Will presides not in the bower of Sleep”,
then proceeds to illustrate the opposite: nightmares occur when a fully
engaged sensorium strives to exercise the muscles but, the perceptual
organs being closed to external stimuli, the muscles refuse to obey; Darwin,
Loves, 3.73 and n. If this concept of volition means that flowers are bees are
humans, then the human is vegetablized just as surely as the vegetable is
anthropomorphized.
32. Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, 107.
33. Darwin, Economy, Additional Notes 39, 268.
34. Darwin, Temple, 2.302n. The “naturalist” has not been identified.
35. Griffiths, 31.
36. Darwin, Temple, 4.66n; emphasis added.
37. For all his conceptual brilliance and polymathic achievement, Darwin’s
contributions to science as such are debatable—he was not a particularly
sedulous experimentalist, published few papers in the Philosophical
Transactions, appears to have regarded his medical practice as his labora-
tory and Zoonomia as his magnum opus, and except as an occasional curi-
osity is cited far less often by historians of science than of literature. His
disputation of specific scientific cruxes is all the more worthy of attention
for its infrequency.
39. Darwin, Phytologia, 56.
41. John Hunter, “Observations on Bees”, Philosophical Transactions 82
(1792): 156–58.
42. Dahlia Porter makes a strong case for Darwin as an inductivist. One of her
chief concerns is the ambivalent relationship, recapitulated in the form of
the annotated poem, between empirical science and imaginative literature
as inductive strategies. My suspicion is that Darwin’s compositional pro-
cess, whatever the readerly experience, works at least partly as ex post facto
theodicy. Dahlia Porter, Science, Form and the Problem of Induction in
British Romanticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018),
chapter 2.
58 A. KOMISARUK
43. John Evans, The Bees: A Poem (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and
Orme, 1806).
44. Evans, 1.279–94.
45. Claire Preston, Bee (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 86–89.
46. Evans, 1.63.
47. Evans, 1.65.
48. Evans, 1.64.
49. “Whereas P. Ovidius Naso, a great Necromancer in the famous Court of
Augustus Cæsar, did by art poetic transmute Men, Women, and even
Gods and Goddesses, into Trees and Flowers; I have undertaken by similar
art to restore some of them to their original animality, after having remained
prisoners so long in their respective vegetable mansions”; Darwin, Loves, 6.
50. Evans, 3.101.
51. Evans, 3.101.
52. François Huber, quoted in Evans, 2.89–90.
53. Evans, 1.77, quoting Pope’s Essay on Man and 1 Kings 4:33 respectively.
54. Evans, 3.103.
55. Evans, 1.78.
56. Evans, 1.78, 3.195–98.
57. Evans, 1.559–90.
58. Griffiths, 255. Griffiths may see the ultimate stakes of his project as histori-
cist; that is, as a rethinking of “priority” itself. As his movement “between
the Darwins” suggests, and as his examples of non-hierarchical analogy
dramatize, his interest seems to lie with positing a “comparative histori-
cism” that “plays different plots against each other, pluralizing them”;
Griffiths, 15. Erasmus Darwin anticipated this perspective but stopped
short of adopting it. Even as political and scientific revolutions shook his
faith in “an engrained system of transcendent order”, he remained wedded
to an “epic of universal development”—a linear narrative arising jointly
from a “‘church historicism’, which sifted analogies between biblical
prophecy and secular events; a Whig-progressive synthesis that understood
the restoration as part of a continuous narrative of constitutional develop-
ment; and the ‘stadial history’ of the Scottish Enlightenment, which ana-
lyzed the universal stages of social and economic development that
characterize modern and ancient society”; Griffiths, 23, 73, 12.
59. Catherine Packham, “The Science and Poetry of Animation: Personification,
Analogy, and Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants”, Romanticism 10, no.
2 (2004): 202.
60. Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and
Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 193.
61. Mitchell, 267n35, 268n46.
62. Mitchell, 267n35, 268n46.
63. Gillian Beer, “Plants, Analogies, and Perfection: Loose and Strict
Analogies”, in Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution, ed. Joel Faflak
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 29.
64. Beer, 37.
65. Beer, 39.
66. Darwin, Economy, 40.
67. Darwin, Loves, 41.
68. Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, 1.
69. Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 1, 1–2.
70. Darwin, Loves, 62.3.
71. Anna Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin (London: J. Johnson,
1804), 328.
72. Griffiths, 244.
73. Griffiths, 213.
74. Darwin, Zoonomia, vol. 2, 708, 734.
CHAPTER 4
The Social Insect and the Fashionable

Newspaper: Reading Bee Poems in the World
and the Morning Post
Claire Knowles
Fashionable West End newspapers such as the Oracle, the Morning Post
and the World became important vehicles for the publication of original
poetry in the final decades of the eighteenth century. The late eighteenth-
century newspaper was an inherently sociable literary space; it was a place
where social relationships (most often between imaginary personae, but
also between “real-life” people) were both encouraged and nurtured. This
sociability is reflected in the enormous popularity in the papers of the
deeply theatrical and playful poetry of the Della Cruscans, a group of
poets named after “Della Crusca,” the pen-name of radical poet, Robert
Merry (1755–1798). The serialized romance of Della Crusca and “Anna
Matilda” (the playwright and poet, Hannah Cowley [1743–1809]), pub-
lished first in the World and later in the Oracle, instantiated a fad for
C. Knowles (*)

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39570-3_4
62 C. KNOWLES
pseudonymous and, to use Daniel Robinson’s term, “ludic” poetry that

changed the shape of the literary field during this time.1 But despite the
great popularity of the type of heteroerotic epistolary exchange popular-
ized by Della Crusca and Anna Matilda, the poetry published in the news-
papers was also remarkable for its heterogeneity. Witty epigrams, Odes,
both serious and humorous, prologues and epilogues from the most pop-
ular plays being performed in the West End, and political doggerel (to
name just a few modes) proliferated alongside Della Cruscan and Della
Cruscan-inspired offerings in the pages of the fashionable newspaper.
Deirdre Coleman and others have suggested that a widespread fascina-
tion with the sciences of botany and entomology at the end of the eigh-
teenth century is reflected in the “substantial and fascinating body of
writing about insects and insect societies”2 that emerged during this
period. Implicit in much of this writing is an interest in the metaphorical
and allegorical richness to be found in the comparison of worlds of the
social insects—bees, ants, and wasps, in particular—with the human world.
Given the contemporary fascination with the natural sciences, and the
great diversity of poetry published in the papers, it is not particularly sur-
prising to see poems on insects appearing in the pages of the fashionable
newspapers. Ashley Cross, for example, notes that “insects were constantly
in papers, in poems, like the ‘Ode to Summer’ on cicadas in the World (3
October 1789), or as ways to satirize behavior, like that of the effeminate
men of fashion in the advertisement for the Memoirs of the New Insect (18
November 1787).”3 As the smallest animals in the popular imagination,
whose complex lives were now viewable to humans through inventions
such as the glass hive,4 the world of insects appears to have allowed for a
miniaturization of human society. The honeybee, in particular, seems also
to have offered a set of ready metaphors for the communicative, sociable
work of eighteenth-century periodicals, as a series of short-lived eighteenth-
century journals named after the insect might indicate. The Bee
(1733–1735) was followed by The Bee, Reviv’d (1750), which was in turn
followed by The Bee, or Literary Intelligencer (1791–1794). The steady,
sociable, “buzz” of the honeybee is replicated in the steady, sociable flow
of gossip and news presented to the reader in publications such as these.
In this chapter, I read a number of bee poems published in the World
and the Morning Post against the backdrop of Della Cruscanism and its
subsequent decline in popularity in the latter part of the 1790s. In the
mercenary world of the late eighteenth-century newspaper, political alle-
giances could be bought and sold, and the two papers discussed in this
4 THE SOCIAL INSECT AND THE FASHIONABLE NEWSPAPER: READING BEE… 63
chapter are from opposite ends of the political spectrum—the pro-govern-

ment World was on the payroll of the Treasury, while the Post was an
Opposition-supported paper. I suggest here that a series of three bee
poems published in the World for 1790 reflect an investment in viewing
the bee as a benevolent, helpful and above all a social insect—the bee func-
tions in these poems as a light-hearted trope connecting a small group of
pseudonymous poets in the pages of the fashionable Tory paper. The bee
is explicitly positioned as a figure of social mediation in these poems; it
buzzes between a lover, his mistress and an interested admirer, and is
deployed to different effects by all three characters. As such, it exemplifies
the playful and sociable poetics of Della Cruscanism. But as we will see,
this playful use of the bee stands in strong contrast to a number of bee
poems published in the Morning Post, an overtly radical newspaper, in the
years immediately after France declared war on Britain in 1793. I suggest
in the final part of this chapter that Robert Southey’s two bee poems,
published anonymously in the Post in 1798 and 1799, reveal an increasing
interest in viewing the bee not as a social creature, but as a metaphor for
the plight of the exploited working classes in Britain. By the mid-nineteenth
century, the working poor had become firmly associated with the figure of
the working bee, a creature whose labour was championed. Southey’s
poems participate wholeheartedly in the deployment of the bee as a poten-
tial agent of radical social reform, and as such, they foreshadow some of
the radical, political uses to which the bee was metaphorically put over the
course of the nineteenth century.
The Sociable and Elegant Bee in the World

Ashley Cross notes that “eighteenth-century meanings of ‘ephemera’
explicitly equated insects and non-book printed materials.”5 Critics of the
Della Cruscan poets such as William Gifford, the Tory author of the noto-
rious anti-Della Cruscan text The Baviad (1791), position newspaper
poetry as being both short-lived and beneath notice; as “insect-like.” For
example, in an excoriating footnote to his discussion of the poetry of one
Della Cruscan poet, “Edwin” (Thomas Vaughan), Gifford writes: “we
come now to a character of high respect, the profound Mr. T. Vaughan,
who, under the alluring signature of Edwin, favours us from time to time
with a melancholy poem on the death of a bug, the flight of an earwig, the
miscarriage of a cock-chaffer, or some other event of equal importance.”6
In a book that gets so many key facts about the Della Cruscan poets
64 C. KNOWLES
wrong, it should not be surprising that Gifford’s characterization of

Edwin’s poetry is factually incorrect. Thomas Vaughan doesn’t appear to
have ever written a poem about insects. But to Gifford, there is no better
way of attesting to the insignificance of Edwin’s poetry than associating it
with the insect or with sympathy for the insect’s plight. As Cross argues,
according to critics like Gifford, the “insects associated with emergent
mass media—Grub Street hacks and that Della Cruscan ‘swarm of insect
poets’—were vile.”7
But it is important to point out that the European honeybee, as the
social insect at that period deemed most beneficial to human kind through
their production of both wax and honey, seems to have been cast in a
rather different literary light to less obviously beneficial insects such as
earwigs, cock-chaffers, flies and ants. Honeybees have always been
regarded as useful and hardworking insects, and while their lives may be
fleeting by human standards, the structures and stores that they leave
behind endure across the (bee) generations. Moreover, for much of
European human history, since at least as early as Virgil’s Georgics IV (c.
29 BCE), the beehive itself has provided a particularly useful metaphor for
labor in an idealized society: “a world in which different people were allot-
ted different tasks and no one envied the position of anyone else.”8 It
seems that as a result of their impressive commitment to industry and their
benefit to humankind, bees have become difficult to represent in anything
other than sympathetic and admiring terms. Certainly, when they appear
in late eighteenth-century texts, bees tend to be depicted as useful, indus-
trious and socially minded creatures.
The bee is celebrated as one of the most elegant and “civilized” of the
insects in Charlotte Smith’s children’s book, Conversations Introducing
Poetry, Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History, for the Use of Young Persons
(1804). In this book, “Mrs. Talbot,” a figure clearly standing in for the
author herself, “instructs her children George and Emily simultaneously in
natural lore and poetic forms and usage.”9 The children wander through
their garden with their mother, “collecting, naming and contextualiz-
ing”10 various entomological and botanical specimens in poetry. Insects
are a particular favorite, and Mrs. Talbot’s introduction to the honeybee
makes clear its superiority over similar social insects:
There are many other sorts of bees, you know; and there are other insects,
such as wasps and hornets, that resemble them in living in societies, making
very ingeniously the nests where they raise their young; but in elegance of
taste, and delicacy of manners, these are very inferior. They live on fruit,
meat, and even on other insects.11
In this calculation, bees, who quite explicitly do not eat “other insects,”
and drink the refined nectar of flowers rather than the fruit and meat that
other insects feast upon, become a metaphor for the “civilized” Briton.
They are elevated above “very inferior” insects such as wasps and hornets
as a result of their “elegance of taste, and delicacy of manners.” Bees are
the perfect house guests, and in “Invocation to the Bee,” the poem that
follows this discussion, the insects are promised protection in the cold
winter months in the family’s “straw-built hive”:
Yet fear not when the tempests come,

And drive thee to thy waxen home,
That I shall then most treacherously
For thy honey murder thee.
Ah no! throughout the winter drear
I’ll feed thee, that another year
Thou may’st renew thy industry
Among the flowers, thou little busy bee.
It is difficult to imagine an insect more welcome to grace the middle-class

garden than Charlotte Smith’s “little busy bee.”
It is this well-mannered and well-socialized version of the bee that pro-
vides the focal point for three bee poems, by characteristically pseudony-
mous Della Cruscan poets, “Oroonoko,” “Imoinda” and “Henry,”
published in the World in August 1790. As the pseudonyms under which
these poems are published suggest, this rather unusual set of poems
appears to have been inspired by Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko (1688) or
by one of its many eighteenth-century stage adaptations. The poems refer,
albeit rather obliquely, to a moment early in the novel where Imoinda,
Prince Oroonoko’s beautiful betrothed, is jealously taken into the harem
of Oroonoko’s grandfather, the King of Coramantien. Imoinda, being
deeply in love with Oroonoko, refuses to consummate her relationship
with the old king: when he touches her she can “only sigh and weep there
and think of Oroonoko, and oftentimes could not forbear speaking of
him, though her life were by custom forfeited by owning her passion.”12
Meanwhile, Oroonoko, trapped outside of the harem and unaware that
66 C. KNOWLES
Imoinda remains faithful to him, “felt all the agonies of love, and suffered
under a torment the most painful in the world.”13 Oroonoko and Imoinda
are, of course, eventually reunited in the novel, but only once they have
both become slaves in Surinam. Although their ending is not happy—
Oroonoko kills a pregnant Imoinda and then himself in order to avoid the
horrors of slavery—their love endures.
The first poem in the World’s short sequence of bee poems is Oroonoko’s
“To a Bee,” published on August 5 1790. In this poem, Oroonoko asks a
“SWEET, gentle BEE, through nature flying” to send a message to his
lover should she14 come across her in her travels:
Should you behold the maid I love,

Steal to her breast, and, fondly sighing,
Taste what I cannot—dare not—prove.
Catch, in the flutt’ring of thy pinion,
Sighs which are breath’d for her alone;
Say, that, preferring her dominion,
Love on my heart has fix’d his throne.
The bee becomes a substitute for Oroonoko—she is Oroonoko’s emis-

sary—and is imagined as tasting bodily delights of which the young man
can only dream. In the second stanza of the poem, the bee is asked more
explicitly to interfere on Oroonoko’s behalf: should the bee find that
Imoinda smiles “on the flatt’ring circle round” she is told to “break by thy
noise what must undo me; / Stifle each sentence falsehood made.” The
bee is asked to intrude upon human affairs in order to intercede on the
lovesick Oroonoko’s behalf. But if this more gentle form of intercession
does not yield the desired result, the bee is exhorted in the poem’s final
stanza to fight off those who may seek to steal Imoinda from her right-
ful lover:
Still, if ensnar’d by giddy fashion,

Spite of thy care and buzzing wing,
Strangers encroach upon my passion,
Perch on her lip, and whet thy sting;
Guard if thou cans’t, the balmy treasure,
Which to those lips the Loves impart:
Punish each wretch with vengeful pleasure;
Teach him to trespass on my heart.
In keeping with the common early eighteenth-century notion of bees as

moral exemplars, representing “all the ‘principle’ virtues in a state of abso-
lute ‘perfection,’”15 the bee of this poem is asked to dispense punishment
to those who might dare to steal away Imoinda from her lover. Unlike
Smith’s bee, which is helpful to humans through the production of wax
and honey, Oroonoko’s bee is asked to interfere more explicitly in human
affairs. She is asked to have a stake in human relations, and to interpose on
the side of what is morally “right.”
Imoinda’s reply “To the Bee,” published a month later on August 9
1790, takes issue with the bee’s interference in human social relations. To
Imoinda who, like her namesake in Behn’s novel, has remained faithful to
her lover, any bee that has time to meddle in human affairs, betrays its
essential bee nature. “Go, idle Bee!” she declares, “th’ungen’rous talk
resign, / ‘Rise on thy wings,’ and speed thee far away.” The bee is exhorted
to return to her “jealous Master” and
Tell him, what deep regret that heart must prove;

Tell him in death, the only balm is found,
When with unerring skill, the hand we love,
By cold suspicion dares inflict the wound.
Imoinda suggests throughout the poem that if Oronooko had really

trusted his beloved, if he had understood that “the heart, where Love has
‘fix’d his throne’ ” can never “be chill’d by absence, or ungen’rous fears,”
he would never have sent the bee as a messenger to spy on her behavior.
The bee is thus chastised for even considering Oroonoko’s plea that it do
his bidding.
The final poem in the sequence, Henry’s “To the Bee,” is published a
couple of weeks after Imoinda’s poem, on August 21, and it represents an
attempt to calm the exchange between the two lovers, and to soothe the
poor bee who has been so thoroughly rebuked by Imoinda in her poem.
Henry’s poem begins with a call to “PEACE, friendly BEE! I greet thee
with a tear” and then bids the bee to go on her way—“Go!—speed thee,
with the balm breeze.” Acting, it seems, as Oroonoko’s friend, Henry asks
the bee to tell Imoinda that Oroonoko was possessed by “the idle god of
jealous Love” when he asked the insect to do his bidding, and that “to him,
some PITY sure is due, / Whose bosom heaves with many a fearful sigh.”
In other words, Henry uses the bee to plead Oroonoko’s case for him. He
then suggests that if the bee should find Imoinda weeping over her sad
68 C. KNOWLES
fate, she should “repeat her lively strain, / ‘The eye that’s true, sheds no
repining tears.’” In doing so, he deploys Imoinda’s own words against
her, chastising her for her emotion, before finally asking the bee to gather
the color, nectar and scent of a variety of flowers and plants (the “rose,”
the “Tube-rose,” the “dew drop” and “scented Shrubs and Lime-trees”) as
a “Delicious fragrance for my favourite BEE.”
All three of the bee poems published in the World figure the bee as a
creature not simply of use to humans through its production of material
goods, or as a “pattern for human industry, since they are awake early and
stay constantly busy throughout the day, collecting honey … and bringing
it back to be stored in their perfectly constructed wax houses,”16 but as an
insect able to transcend its sphere in order to become a social mediator
between speakers located in very different spaces. While this is, perhaps, an
unusual representation of the bee, it is a representation that is entirely in
keeping with the modus operandi of Della Cruscan poetry itself. The type
of poetry associated with Oroonoko, Imoinda and Henry in the pages of
the World is characteristically light-hearted, conversational and self-
consciously inter-textual. In this case, each bee poem in the World refer-
ences the one that was published before it—Oroonoko’s “gentle bee”
becomes Imoinda’s “idle bee” and Henry’s “friendly bee”—and Imoinda’s
and Henry’s poems quote directly from the earlier bee poems. Each of the
poems also stages a highly theatrical dialogue between the various actors
in the scene in which the bee becomes a mediating figure. We have already
seen the way in which Henry’s poem deploys a quote from Imoinda’s own
poem against her, and Imoinda does much the same thing in her poem,
sarcastically remarking that the bee should “Mark, if ‘the flattering Circle’
gives delight” to the downtrodden narrator of the poem. This ongoing,
deeply intertextual and, at times, rather erotic dialogue between human
and bee, and between human and human, represents the essence of what
I have elsewhere termed the “newspaper poetics” of Della Cruscanism.17
The bee is positioned as a disinterested actor in a series of poems that work
to maintain the social relationship between Oronooko and Imoinda and,
to a lesser extent, Henry.
“Poor lab’ring insect!”: Reading Southey’s Bee

Poems in the Morning Post
While insects appear frequently in the newspaper poetry of this period,
bees are less often represented in the poetry published in papers like the
World, the Oracle and the Morning Post, and the social, literary and politi-
cal climate had changed significantly by the time that we see bee poems
appearing once more in the pages of London’s daily newspapers.18 In par-
ticular, the advent of war with France in 1793 had a distinct impact on the
type of poetry published in the newspapers. The playful, heterosocial the-
atrics of the Della Cruscans, a poetry supported by similarly light-hearted
Tory papers such as the World and the Oracle, slowly fell out of fashion
over the course of the 1790s, and both the World and the Oracle had
ceased production in their original iterations by 1794.19 Poetry was, of
course, still published in the newspapers after this point, but the key vehi-
cles for poetic production switched over to the rather more serious and
overtly political opposition papers, the Morning Chronicle and the Morning
Post. Both of these newspapers were celebrated for the quality of their
coverage of events in France, and the depth of their reporting of parlia-
mentary business. But neither paper had the same grasp on the habits and
preoccupations of the London ton as their fashionable Tory counterparts
had once had. The poetry published in the Post and the Chronicle tended
to be of a high quality, but it also tended to be less playful, erotic, and self-
referential than that previously published in the World and the Oracle.
And given that the politics endorsed by these papers was almost always
radical in nature, the poetry published in these two papers also tended to
be vociferous in its criticism of Prime Minister William Pitt and his
war effort.
As events in France began to go horribly wrong in the build-up to the
declaration of war with England in 1793 (perhaps most obviously during
the horrifying September massacres of 1792), the bee becomes deployed
in literature to much more obviously political ends than in Charlotte
Smith’s children’s book, or the poems from the World that I just dis-
cussed. For example, in Mary Alcock’s poem, “The Hive of Bees: A Fable,
Written in December 1792,”20 a beehive which “had long enjoy’d con-
tentment, peace and love” rises up to thwart a Revolutionary uprising
originating from a discontented portion of the hive who (like the French
Revolutionaries) “plann’d the downfall of their queen and state.” These
70 C. KNOWLES
bees have decided that their role in the community is akin to slavery. They
declare:
Let all be equal, and these lordly drones

Be set to work to shape these ugly cones:
’Tis slavery I swear—no more will I
Lag home with honey in my bag and thigh,
Much sooner will I dart my sting and die.
The malcontents declare war on the hive in order to “seize, seize the
honey, and lay waste the comb!,” but they are, in the end, thwarted by
“loyal bees” who unite “To save their state, and arm them for the fight, /
True to their sovereign, who with gentle sway / So mildly rul’d, ’twas
freedom to obey.” This clearly English beehive, so resistant to the forces
of discontent that have led to revolution in France, manages to “guard
their monarch, property, and hive” against the bees who would rise up to
challenge the status quo and demand more reward for less work. Alcock’s
poem demonstrates how easy it is to co-opt the bee into political service—
in this case, bee society represents all that is valued about English society
including a benevolent monarchy and loyalty to the realm. Interestingly
enough, the ease of the bee’s co-option in to political service was soon to
be demonstrated in the fact that even as the honeybee symbolizes English
virtue in this poem, France’s soon-to-be emperor Napoleon himself
appropriated honeybees as a symbol of his reign, with the bee embroi-
dered into his coronation robe, etched into his glassware, and attached in
gilt to his snuffbox.
In the hands of radical writers, and against Alcock’s fundamentally
counter-revolutionary deployment of the bee—and indeed against a long
tradition of naturalizing monarchy through analogy with the hive (a tradi-
tion reaching back in England at least as far as Charles Butler’s The
Feminine Monarchie of 1609)—the bee embarked on a new career as an
emblem for radical social reform. In this final part of my chapter, I look at
two bee poems published by a radical young Robert Southey in the pages
of the Morning Post in the final years of the 1790s. The Post had begun life
back in 1772 as a Government paper. It had moved over to the Opposition
in the late 1780s, and by 1795, when Daniel Stuart brought the paper
from Richard Tattersall, its politics had become decidedly Jacobin. It is
Stuart who can be credited with improving the quality of the Post’s poetry
department. Improvements to the paper began when it absorbed the
World in 1794, but these were solidified under Stuart’s able editorship,
and within two years of taking over the running of the paper, Stuart had
“raised his paper’s daily circulation from 350–1000.”21 By the final years
of the 1790s, the Post boasted a number of accomplished radical-leaning
poets on its payroll, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson,
and Robert Southey, who was offered a guinea a week to supply poetry to
the paper in 1797.22 Southey needed the money, and so he took up the
post of chief poetic contributor to the paper. As a result, he became
“responsible for amusing the paper’s readership with a variety of short
poems … using various pseudonyms and forms.”23
Although he later recanted from his youthful radicalism to become
England’s Poet Laureate and a confirmed Tory, Southey was a strong sup-
porter of the revolution throughout the 1790s. His commitment to the
radical cause during this period can be gauged by a letter written to his
brother Thomas on July 9 1797, in which he notes:
I have no expectation of peace—nor do I desire one of Mr Pitts making. If

he makes peace & keeps his place the freedom of England is sunk below all
hope … I do not understand why your imprisonment should make you less
wise than formerly. look at the situation you are in—look at the wickedness
of the ranks above you, & the vice & wretchedness of those below you, &
then ask if that system can be good which creates such misery.24
Thomas was in the British Navy, which still relied heavily on impressment,
or the taking of men into service by compulsion, in order to maintain its
strength at sea. For radicals like Southey, the practice of impressment—
tantamount to imprisonment—was merely one of a number of injustices
perpetuated by the British government. In the 26 toasts proposed at the
December 1789 dinner held by the radical Society for Constitutional
Information, “May our sailors be volunteers and not slaves” was proposed
alongside “A Speedy abolition of the slave trade” and “The Liberty of the
Press, a bulwark of liberty.”25
The poet’s “Sonnet. The Bee,” published in the Morning Post on
January 31 1798, reflects Southey’s revolutionary views on the place of
the working classes in the current British political system. The bee is
pressed into political service in Southey’s two poems, but rather than serv-
ing the conservative agenda promoted in “The Hive of Bees,” the bee
operates in both of these poems as a metaphor for the exploitation of the
peasant class under the present political system. In his book The British
72 C. KNOWLES
Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789–99, Stuart Andrews notes
that “Southey’s poems of social protest, like those of Burns, Coleridge and
Wordsworth, were also an attack on Pitt’s war, in the sense that the suffer-
ings of the poor were exacerbated by the prolonging of hostilities with
France.”26 This poem can clearly be read in this mold. It begins by paint-
ing a picture of the bee as an exploited laborer: “POOR lab’ring insect!
suck the honey’d flow’r, / Cull all the fragrance of the blossom’d plain, /
Hoard up thy treasures for the wintry hour; /Vain is thy caution, and thy
labour vain.” After the bee has been busy storing up its plentiful Winter
food source, “Thy master’s hand will rob the gather’d store” before killing
the bee “for the spoil.” The final sestet of the poem renders the bee more
explicitly a metaphor for the oppressed working classes, who labour only
for the benefit of those in power:
Yet must the Peasant share thy hapless fate,

Opprest, like thee, must learn to suffer wrong;
Like thine, his wealth is robb’d by sov’reign state,
To pamper Princes and their servile throng,
For high oppression takes his Summer store,
And leaves him, late in life, to beg from door to door.
The bee is explicitly presented as a metaphor for the English worker,

who labours hard in order to support himself and his family, but ends up
having any wealth that he manages to build up “robb’d by sov’reign state”
(probably to pay for a war he has no interest in), leaving him a pauper.
The increasing use of the bee as a metaphor for the exploitation of the
working classes as the eighteenth century draws to a close reflects a grow-
ing consciousness of class struggle in the conservative climate of wartime
Britain. This particular poem also registers in its sympathy for the bees’
plight the importance of the late eighteenth-century discourse of sensibil-
ity in changing the way that middle-class Britons, in particular, approached
animal husbandry and the notion of the “rights” of animals to live lives
free from human-induced cruelty. Tobias Meneley, for example, argues
that in the 1780s and 1790s, large numbers of progressive writers “began
arguing from sentimental principles the hitherto inconceivable point that
nonhumans have a claim to membership in the community of political
justice.”27 Southey’s analogy between the laboring poor and the honeybee
in this poem only works if the reader recognizes the injustice of a system
in which the honeybee, denied any real access to power through its
physical tininess, is robbed of his honey, which in the late eighteenth cen-
tury was typically achieved in ways that destroyed the entire nest of the bee
before the onset of Winter.
Sarah Trimmer’s children’s book, Fabulous Histories. Designed for the
instruction of children, respecting their treatment of animals (1786), is per-
haps one of the key examples of an entire genre of books encouraged by
the growing influence of the discourse of sensibility in the last two decades
of the eighteenth century. Driven by the idea that sympathy for suffering
can exist across species lines, the aim of books such as Trimmer’s was to
civilize human behavior by advocating for more humane animal-husbandry
practices. In the book, a Mrs. Benson and her young family (the children
of which are meant to stand in for the young reader of the book) are given
a tour of a Mrs. Wilson’s idyllic farm. The delightful Mrs. Wilson exempli-
fies all that is enlightened in her attitude toward her livestock. She does
what she can to render her animals happy and healthy, and even admits
that she is too kind-hearted herself to kill a chicken, but that “it is an easy
matter to find people capable of doing it.”28 Mrs. Wilson’s thoughts on
bee-keeping mirror a growing understanding of the cruelty of more tradi-
tional means of obtaining honey in the final decades of the eighteenth
century. Mrs. Wilson keeps a new-fangled glass hive for her bees, and she
expounds on its advantages at length to Mrs. Benson:
Why, Madam, said the good woman, few will be at the expence of them; and
indeed my neighbours laugh at me, and call me very whimsical and extrava-
gant for indulging myself with them; but I find my account in keeping bees
thus, even upon a principle of œconomy; for as I do not destroy them, I have
greater numbers to work for me, and more honey every year than the last,
notwithstanding I feed my bees in the winter.29
The productivity encouraged by Mrs. Wilson’s hive saves her from having
to kill her bees before Winter, either through destroying the hive, or
through starvation. The lesson inculcated to little Frederik Benson
through Mrs. Wilson’s example is clear—“bees are, in their natural dispo-
sitions, very harmless creatures,”30—and as such they are deserving of
human empathy.
In Southey’s later bee poem, “To a Bee,” published in the Post on
October 10, 1799, a group of anthropomorphized bees are exhorted to
be less “harmless” in response to those who would rob them for their own
74 C. KNOWLES
gain. The poem begins innocuously enough, with the narrator noting on
his early morning walk:
THOU wert out betimes, thou busy, busy bee

As abroad I took my early way,
Before the cow from her rest’ng place
Had risen up and left her trace
On the meadow, with dew so grey,
I saw thee, thou, busy, busy bee.
The narrator goes on to observe that even as the bee was the first creature
he noticed working on his walk, it was also the last to cease work for the
day: “Thou wert working late, thou busy, busy bee, / After the fall of the
Cestus flow’r, / I hear thee last, as I saw thee first, / When the Primrose-
tree blossom was ready to burst.” But the tone of the poem takes a turn in
the second last stanza, when the narrator accuses the bee of being a
“miser”: “Thy youth in heaping and hoarding is spent, / What thy age will
never enjoy. / I will not copy thee, thou miserly Bee!” Fair enough, I sup-
pose, for a young man to want to be able to enjoy the fruits of his own
labour. But the true horror of Southey’s poem is reserved for its final
stanza, in which the narrator derides the bee for its ignorance of its own
exploitation under the current system:
Thou art a fool, thou busy, busy Bee!

Thus for another to toil;
Thy master waits till thy work is done,
Till the latest flow’rs of ivy are gone,
And then he will seize the spoil,
He will murder thee, thou poor little Bee!
The implication of this poem is, it seems, that the bee should rise up, like
the oppressed sans-culottes of neighboring France, and demand an end to
its exploitation at the hands of its human “masters.” Despite its bucolic
setting, then, it is difficult to imagine this poem’s message sitting well with
England’s conservative establishment who very much feared the importa-
tion of such revolutionary sentiment on to home soil.
What is perhaps most notable about the representation of the bee in all
of the newspaper poems that I have discussed in this chapter is that it
overtly reflects the political orientation of the paper in which each poem is
published. Once France declares war with Britain in 1793, bees shift from
being represented as social mediators in a lighthearted, and playful Della

Cruscan scene in the Government-backed World, to being represented as
exploited workers, toiling endlessly within a system that is designed explic-
itly for their masters’ benefit in pages of the Jacobin Post. Each paper’s
poetical bees thus represent, in microcosm, the preoccupations of the
paper in which they are brought to life. Bees may be associated with indus-
try throughout the 1780s and 1790s, but in none of these poems are they
able to escape the ideological work of their masters.
Notes
1. See Daniel Robinson, “Della Crusca, Anna Matilda, and Ludic Sensibility,”
The Wordsworth Circle 42, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 170–174.
2. Deirdre Coleman, “Entertaining Entomology: Insects and Insect
Performers in the Eighteenth Century” Eighteenth-Century Life 30, no. 3
(Summer 2006): 107.
3. Ashley Cross, “To ‘buzz lamenting doings in the air’: Romantic Flies,
Insect Poets, and Authorial Sensibility,” European Romantic Review 25,
no.3 (2014): 339.
4. A “Description of Mr. Thorsley’s New Invented Glass Bee-Hives,” in The
Oxford Magazine: or, Universal Museum 8–9 (1772), 49 notes the advan-
tages of this new type of hive to the human observer: “As this receptacle is
wholly transparent, the curious observer may entertain himself with view-
ing the whole progress of their works.”
5. Cross, 339.
6. William Gifford, The Baviad and Maeviad (London: J. Wright, 1797), 55.
7. Cross, 339.
8. Bee Wilson, The Hive: The Story of the Honey Bee and Us (London: John
Murray, 2004), 24.
9. Stuart Curran,ed., The Poems of Charlotte Smith (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), 178.
10. Elizabeth A. Dolan, Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature of the Romantic
Era (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 120.
11. Charlotte Smith, Conversations Introducing Poetry (London: 1804), 34.
12. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, ed. Paul Salzman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 11.
13. Ibid.
14. Worker bees are, of course, always female, and Oroonoko appears to
understand this when he refers to the bee in such feminized terms.
15. Wilson, The Hive, 93. Wilson attributes this perception of the bee to
French beekeeper Jean-Baptiste Simon, in his Le Gouvernement admirable,
ou La république des abeilles (Paris: 1740).
76 C. KNOWLES
16. Erica Mae Olbright, “Made without Hands: The Representation of Labor
in Early Modern Silkworm and Beekeeping Manuals” in Insect Poetics, ed.
Eric C. Brown (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
2006), 227.
17. See, for example, my article “Della Cruscanism and Newspaper Poetics:
Reading the Letters of Simkin and Simon in the World,” Studies in
Romanticism 57, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 581–600.
18. The argument of this essay is based on a survey of all available poetry pub-
lished in three key newspapers—the World, the Oracle, the Morning Post,
and the Morning Chronicle—over the period 1787–1800.
19. In 1794, the Oracle merged with the Public Advertiser to form the Oracle
and Public Advertiser. The merger was announced in the Oracle for 28
February 1794, and the newspaper appeared under its new title the very
next day. The World ceased publication on June 30 1794 and merged with
the Morning Post.
20. Mary Alcock, Poems, by the Late Mrs. Mary Alcock (London, 1799), 25–30.
Of course, the timing of the supposed writing of this poem is telling—it
was written just after the notorious September massacres of 1792 in which
over a thousand French prisoners were killed at the hands of the
sans-culottes.
21. Andrews, 125.
22. W. A. Speck, Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006), 71.
23. Daniel Robinson, “The Poets ‘Perplext’: Southey and Robinson at Work
on the Morning Post,” The Wordsworth Circle 41, no.1 (Winter 2011),: 5.
24. Robert Southey to Thomas Southey (brother), 9 July, 1797, “Romantic
Circles, Electronic Editions,” The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part
One, August 13, 2019, https://romantic-circles.org/editions/southey_
letters/Part_One/HTML/letterEEd.26.231.html.
25. Gentleman’s Magazine, December 1789 reprinted in Stuart Andrews, The
British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789–99 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2000), 11.
26. Ibid., 87-8.
27. Tobias Menely, “Zoöphilpsychosis: Why Animals are What’s Wrong with
Sentimentality,” Symploke 15, nos.1/2 (2007): 252.
28. Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous Histories. Designed for the instruction of children,
respecting their treatment of animals (London: T. Longman, and G.G.J. and
J. Robinson, 1786), 148.
29. Trimmer, 153.
30. Trimmer, 154.
CHAPTER 5
John Keats’s Honeybees: Sound, Passion,

Medicine, and Natural Prophecy
Hermione de Almeida
Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers,

Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers
Conventional notions on the sounds, movements, and products of

honeybees find little place in John Keats’s poetry. As the poet often treated
by the Victorians as the most Romantic of the poets of the revolutionary
era that preceded them—and indeed as the poet who evokes the presence
or sound or honey of bees in all of his major poems—Keats, nevertheless,
avoids traditional reference to the insects and their colonies as examples of
nature at its most sweet and busily benign. The poet also eschews reigning
eighteenth-century theories of the economy of bees: as tidy communities
that work together for the greater good of the hive and its propagations;
on the single-minded maternal fecundity of queen bees; on the tireless
quality of the worker bees laboring in a “whole mass [of] a Paradise” to
produce a communal “gift” of honey to gratify human desires.1 For Keats,
from his earliest verse onward, the sound or implicit presence of
H. de Almeida (*)
The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK, USA

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39570-3_5
78 H. DE ALMEIDA
honeybees is directly and symbolically connected with the presence of

organic life in a living, breathing, active universe,2 something first described
in his early verse as “A little noiseless noise among the leaves,” and then as
part of a “poetry of the earth [that] is never dead.”3 The life symbolized
by this “noiseless noise” of honeybees is neither clear nor simple for the
poet: it is complex, ambiguous, and fraught with meaning concerning the
natural world and the fragile nature of existence; it is or can be an equivo-
cating agency between positive and negative energies; it is also tied inex-
tricably and personally with the poet’s belief that true poetry in tune with
the natural world was a potent medicine for the human mind.
Late in 1817, after six years of study and experience as a physician and
surgeon in London, Keats decided to become a poet instead. His choice
between the two seemingly antithetical disciplines was deliberate. It also
had as its first source his schoolboy reading in anthologies of Greco-
Roman myths, especially on the myth of Apollo as the god of medicine,
prophecy, and poetry, and on the Greek pharmakon as simultaneously
healing potion, venomous poison, and incantatory prophecy. Recorded
myths mattered immensely to Keats. Like animal imprinting, myths were
records of human passage and the loss of generations; more importantly,
they presaged the extinction of human culture and memory. Much as the
physician worked to sooth and heal the human body, Keats resolved to be,
as he said in The Fall of Hyperion, “a poet … sage; / A humanist, physician
to all men.” Keats’s generation was the first to learn from their contempo-
rary scientists and geologists that the changing evolution of life forms was
a fact, that a periodic and total extinction of some life forms occurred, and
that the catastrophic extinction of all life was inevitable.4 Keats hoped that
his poetry would comfort and, perhaps, heal the human mind in the con-
text of these scientific truths. The presence of bees in Keats’s poetry,
hence, is almost always a symbolic evocation of a living and changing envi-
ronment and a fragile universe. The sounds of bees buzzing can be reas-
suring, querulous, angry, or mysterious, depending on the narrative
context of each poem. The absence of bees, or of their sounds, is always
ominous and strangely prophetic of events to come. This chapter begins
with a survey of Keats’s influences and his knowledge of contemporary
Romantic medicine and folkloric medical lore. It is followed by a section
on the potions of love and death in Keats’s narrative poems of 1818–1819:
Isabella; or the Pot of Basil, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Lamia. A second sec-
tion of the chapter addresses the epic fragments Hyperion and The Fall of
5 JOHN KEATS’S HONEYBEES: SOUND, PASSION, MEDICINE, AND NATURAL… 79
Hyperion (1818–1819) and To Autumn (1819) on the subjects that link

them—extinction in mythic and earthly time, and the irreversible end of
all human memory.
I
Keats was a licensed apothecary and general physician who studied medi-
cine in London and then practiced clinical medicine and surgery at Guy’s
Hospital. Charles Brown, Keats’s lifelong friend, said Keats was a focused
student, “indefatigable in his application to anatomy, medicine, and natu-
ral history.”5 Hardly the dreamy and unworldly poet characterized by early
readers, Keats was always conscious of what he had learned from the health
sciences: he was a physician to, and prescribed medications for, himself
and his friends; he also considered becoming a ship’s surgeon on an
Indiaman to support himself and his brothers. His special interest in natu-
ral history as a youth meshed with what he came to learn of botanical and
biological life in his medical training. He acquired full knowledge of the
British and European pharmacopoeias, of known local botanical and bio-
logical substances, geological chemicals, and seemingly invisible infecting
agents—as well as newly known substances and venoms experienced by
travelers in Britain’s colonies. Many of these substances were known for
their potential to be at once curative and toxic for the human body. As a
prescribing physician and operating Dresser at Guy’s Hospital, Keats func-
tioned with first-hand knowledge of the potencies of corrosive treatments
and medications. As a poet in later years, Keats never forgot the powerful
agency of the potion or salve—of what the Greeks called the pharmakon
that had power at once healing and corrosive when influencing the human
physical and nervous systems.
The “little sweet doth kill much bitterness.” The medieval notion of
sweetness added to mask the bitter taste of medical concoctions, in the
context of Romantic medicine and early nineteenth-century clinical prac-
tice, assumed a far more ambiguous meaning as to what constituted sweet-
ness and bitterness in medical applications. Classes that Keats took at the
Chelsea Physic Garden in London provided knowledge of curative nec-
tars, poisonous flowers, and bitter berries laden with pharmaceutical ener-
gies. The Guy’s Hospital botanical conservatory cultivated healing plants
and herbs for the specific use by the Hospital doctors; it also held speci-
mens (alive and in jars) of stinging insects and poisonous snakes for the
80 H. DE ALMEIDA
visual instruction of apprentice physicians. This knowledge of “natural”

venoms and “morbid” inflections was taught and evoked from handbooks
summarizing theories of toxicology (Orfila et al.), of comparative zoology
(Blumenbach et al.), and especially of Hahnmann’s homeopathic theory
of minute dosage, similia similibus curantur, whereby a poisonous sub-
stance that produced certain disease symptoms in the healthy body could
be used to cure that very disease in those afflicted by it.6 At the Chelsea
Physic Garden and in Guy’s conservatory Keats acquired a broad knowl-
edge of the connections between nature and the nature of illnesses, of
“marsh miasma” (spread by insects) or “morbid fevers” occasioned by
fetid or venomous natures, of unseen infecting agents—and of the signifi-
cance of biodiversity and the roles that minute creatures like bees or biting
gnats could play not just in the fertilization of larger botanical life but also
in the medical treatment of human and other biological life.
Shortly after he left Guy’s Hospital in 1817, Keats decided to write
poetry full-time with the aspiration of becoming, as he describes the poet
in The Fall of Hyperion, a “Physician to all Men.” This decision was tied to
an urgent and humanitarian wish, born of his witness of intense suffering
in the hospital wards and in his family, to heal or alleviate the mind in the
context of unremitting physical and psychic pain. His choice of poetry as
a medium for healing the human mind was a logical choice given his early
fascination in school at Enfield with the myth of Apollo, the god of poetry,
music, medicine, and prophecy. This myth was supplemented in his mind
with the legends of other figures in Greek and Roman mythology associ-
ated with the arts of medicine and poetry: Hermes the chthonic messen-
ger god, who transports the caduceus he has stolen from the young Apollo
between the worlds of Olympus and the Underworld, and who is known
for his priapic instincts; and Venus, the goddess associated with love and,
especially, unbridled passion, whose very name carries associations of the
word “venom” and its meaning of poisonous juice or injected potion. As
his poetry evolves, Keats combines his complicated knowledge of his con-
temporaneous medicine with an even more complicated evocation of
ancient “medical” mythology on false magic and true medicine. The ever-
compounding presence and meaning of honeybees in Keats’s poetry dis-
cussed here is exemplary of this layering of myth, natural history, medical
science, and poetic intent. When possible, this chapter will invoke reigning
theories in nineteenth-century science on the nature, and nurture, of bees
and the cultivation of honey. It will also briefly note implicit extensions of
Romantic ideas and concerns on social behavior, adaptation, biodiversity,
and preservation of species, in twenty-first-century research on the signifi-

cance of bees to life on our planet.
Keats’s evocation of bees in his poetry can be traced back to a time well
before his medical training on the pharmacy of organic curative and poi-
sonous substances, to his reading at Enfield School on the natural history
of bees and the legends of bees and their interaction with mythic societies.
In Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary, for example, he read of the mountain
in Attica famous for its bees and their honey, named Hymettus, after
Hermes, the god whose powers included magic and false medicine. He
also read of Aristaeus, the son of Apollo and Cyrene, who had inherited
the power of divination, and who had been fed on Attica bee nectar while
an infant in Libya. When the gods punished Aristaeus for pursuing
Orpheus’s wife, Eurydice, though a field of serpents that would sting and
killed her, they did so by destroying all the Attic bees in his Greek king-
dom.7 In Homer’s Hymn to Hermes mythic ambrosia, the gods’ food, is
specifically identified as nectar collected by Attic bees that are in turn asso-
ciated with the sightless prophet Tiresias and his “fore-seeing” powers of
divination and prophecy. In variant myths like these, and in British folklore
adaptations of them in chapbooks and moral tales (such as the “reading”
of bee symbols in disturbing dreams, or the whispered “telling to the
bees” of secret personal events or village plans), we can find early pattern
of the bee-centered mythic elements that the physician Keats would invoke
in his poetry.8
“Even bees, the little almsmen of spring-bowers, / Know there is rich-
est juice in poison-flowers,” Keats notes in Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil
(stanza 13). This warning of ambiguous potency in the juice gathered by
bees from poisonous blooms sets the stage of toxic doom for a macabre
tale,9 taken from Boccaccio, about two star-crossed lovers, Isabella and
Lorenzo, whose passionate affair ends in death and the bleak denial of liv-
ing joy. Isabella is the only daughter of a wealthy, landed Italian family;
Lorenzo is a servant in the family mining business. Her two brothers, on
learning of their sister’s transgression, kidnap and murder Lorenzo and
quietly bury him in the forest. “Honeyless days” and the absence of bees
in the family lands mark the time when the lovers are separated. Isabella
pines without knowledge of her lover’s fate. Then, she has a nightmare
“vision” of Lorenzo that comes upon her “like a fierce potion, drunk by
chance”: the ghost of Lorenzo, like Banquo’s ghost in Hamlet, but in the
form of Lorenzo’s decomposing body, appears to tell her where he lies in
the forest—far from the “little sounds of life” of “glossy bees,” and
82 H. DE ALMEIDA
hearing only the angry buzz of what he imagines might be bees (or wasps)
sounding repeated “knells” of his death (stanzas 34–39). Isabella seeks
out the shallow grave, cuts off her lover’s head and takes it back to her
room where she places it in “a garden pot” and plants “Sweet Basil” over
it (stanza 54). The basil plant grows indoors, lush, green, and fragrant,
sustained by her tears—a green memory, perhaps, of undying passion—
but Isabella herself wastes away and dies when her brothers steal and
destroy her basil plant. The brothers disappear from Florence like a swarm
of “smoke from Hinnom’s vale” (stanzas 33, 60) and the family, with its
mines abandoned and its land left fallow, goes extinct.
In two later narrative poems, The Eve of St. Agnes and Lamia, Keats
returns to the subject of love passion and honeyed potion, derived from
the “richest juice” of “poison-flowers” and serpent venom—all part of the
compounding meaning of the medical pharmakon as, at once, elixir, anti-
dote, curative potions, and deadly nerve poison. In the first of these two
poems (which are both also focused on star-crossed lovers, as in Isabella),
the would-be lovers Madeline and Porphyro belong to families that have
been at war for generations. Dreams experienced by girls on the eve of St.
Agnes are supposed to be “the sweetest of the year,” according to the
medieval legend of the saint, because they can reveal the identity of the
person an individual girl will marry. Madeline, following the rituals of the
superstition, has been cloistered and fasting in the hope of inducing a
dream of Porphyro. In the meantime, Porphyro has come from across the
moor to perhaps see Madeline without being seen by her “hyena foemen”
relatives; “buzz’d whispers” of warning sound in his anxious ears, and he
is told by Madeline’s nurse that her “blood-thirsty race” is everywhere
(stanzas 9–11). His “stratagem” for winning Madeline—which comes to
his flushed and “busy brain” “like a full-blown rose” ripe with nectar—is
to become part of her dream that night. To assist his plan, Porphyro pre-
pares a love potion that is composed of candied tropical fruits, mulled with
spiced tinctures and “lucent syrops” drawn from flowers and exotic bee
nectars (stanzas 16–31). At the appropriate moment, as Keats puts it too
delicately, Porphyro joins Madeline in her chaste bed and promises “I will
not rob thy nest” even as he does: “Into her dream he melted as the rose
/ Blendeth its odour with the violet” (stanzas 36–38). It is a “Solution
sweet,” perhaps, but it is also a promise broken, and one with a forebod-
ing outcome. Madeline wakes up, St. Agnes’s moon sets, a storm rises,
and the lovers (with Madeline still unwed) flee into the sleet and snow
outside.
The always priapic god Hermes, bent on “amorous theft,” leaves

Olympus in search of a nymph and her “secret bed” on the island of Crete,
we are told in Lamia. He searches in vain, and finds instead a beautiful
“rainbow-sided” lamia: a mixed-species creature formed of a serpent’s
body and a woman’s face and mouth who tells him that she used her
magic to make the nymph he covets invisible to satyrs’ eyes. She has a
boon to ask of him. Soon, Hermes and Lamia come to an agreement as
fellow procurers: she will render the nymph visible only to him; he, in
return, will use his powers to give her “smooth-lipp’d” serpent shape a
woman’s “beauteous form,” so that she might captivate a young man she
has seen in Corinth. Lamia’s calculated pleadings to Hermes are voiced
“as through bubbling honey, for Love’s sake.” Soon, with a wave of
Hermes’s caduceus, Lamia transforms into a beautiful young woman; she
is placed “About a young bird’s flutter from a wood,” the better to wait
and waylay her love interest, a philosophy student named Lycius. Hermes’s
nymph, now visible but not by her own choice, feels the god’s “warmth …
And, like new flowers at morning song of bees, / Bloom’d, and gave up
her honey to the lees” (I, 65–145). Hermes and his nymph, being immor-
tal, live carelessly ever after, and there are no repercussions. But that can-
not be said for Lamia and Lycius: they will be star-crossed lovers but their
predicament is not that of social class disjunction (as it is in Isabella) or
families at war (as it is in The Eve of St. Agnes); it is, rather, in the ambigu-
ous nature of their natures—theirs is the union of mixed species, and of
immortal being with mortal human.
Nothing is easy or simple in the encounters at crossroads of birds, bees,
snakes, and other mortals: their “aching Pleasure[s] … [are evanescent] /
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips,” Keats warns in his “Ode on
Melancholy” (iii. 21–24). Lycius is happy in the magical “purple-lined
palace of sweet sin” that Lamia has erected for them. Then, Lycius feels “a
buzzing in his head” that leaves “a thought” of the outside “noisy world
[that he has] almost forsworn”—and we are told that “but a moment’s
thought is passion’s passing bell,” a death knell for the lovers’ happiness
(II, 28–39). Lycius’s “thought” embodies a human wish: he wants to
show off his lover to his friends and have them confirm that the “beaute-
ous form” of Lamia is, in fact, a beautiful woman. Lamia is “stung” by
Lycius’s demand for a wedding feast to which he might invite all of
Corinth, but she agrees. The “herd” of “dreadful guests” arrive “with
busy brain” to gaze with “common eyes these secret bowers”—and, pre-
sumably, poison them with the stains of mortality (II, 149–50). Lycius’s
84 H. DE ALMEIDA
teacher Apollonius, the one person Lamia did not want in her secret pal-
ace, arrives as “the uninvited guest” to “force himself” upon the lovers’
idyll: as rational philosopher he casts a “hungry spell” on the palace and its
beautiful creator—he sickens the myrtle and other flowers decorating her
“secret bower,” stares with probing, “juggling,” “demon eyes” at Lycius’s
“bride’s face,” and declares her to be “A Serpent” (II, 255–305). Neither
Lycius nor Lamia can maintain their respective in Apollonius’s conform-
ing, corrosive rationality. Lamia vanishes, perhaps to the shape of another
species, and Lycius’s friends bury the lifeless body he has become.
II
In Keats’s fragmentary epic on the myth of the Titans’s fall from living
power10 and their replacement by the generation of Apollo, the soon to be
god of music, poetry, medicine, and prophecy, the poet-protagonist drinks
from “a cool vessel of transparent juice, / Sipp’d by the wander’d bee.”
This “full draught,” at once “elixir fine” and “domineering potion,” is a
fraught vehicle of knowledge, past and future, of the extinction of mytho-
logical and natural worlds. It is also a mortal version, or dose, of the
“blithe wine / Or bright elixir peerless” that Apollo receives just after he
is given his symbolic golden lyre as replacement for the caduceus that
Hermes has once stolen from him. But, where Apollo receives the “knowl-
edge enormous” of the god that he has just become from his “bright
elixir,” the poet of The Fall of Hyperion receives only a powerless knowl-
edge of something that has already happened in deep time. Amid a lifeless
world of fossilized shapes and geological formations representing the
“faulture of decrepit things,” the poet sees into the fading mind located
behind the “bright blanch’d” face of the titan Mnemosyne, goddess of
memory. His vision is a brief glimpse of the Titans’s fall into extinction—a
vision at once foreboding and prophetic of what will transpire in an
increasingly lifeless mortal world (Fall of Hyp., 42–43, 65–67, 245–48;
Hyp., III, 111–120).
The epic opens with a description of the place where the fallen and
dispossessed Titans lie immobile: “a vale / Far sunken from the healthy
breath of morn, / Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,” a place
without light and movement, with no “morning song of bees,” no move-
ment of insects, “No stir of air was there, / Not so much life as on a
[windless] summer’s day … But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.”
Hyperion, the only Titan still alive and functional (because Apollo, his
replacement, has not yet been transformed into a god), visits his fellow
Titans’s “lair” and sees it for what it is—a lifeless geological space deep
within the earth’s core. He addresses his fellows as they lie partly buried in
striated rock formations and “voiceless” dark streams as “Lank-ear’d
Phantoms of black-weeded pools … thrice horrible and cold … mist[s] …
from a scummy marsh” bounded by superannuated rocks and deep faults.
“[H]orrors portioned to a giant nerve” make Hyperion ache for his fellow
Titans—and shudder at what will soon be his own fate and the final extinc-
tion of his race (Hyp., I, 1–11, 175, 230, 255–58).
The potion of transparent juice “sipp’d by the wander’d bee” and the
accompanying “feast of summer fruits” which the poet consumes before
his retrospecting vision of futurity in the Fall of Hyperion requires closer
consideration. In an isolated clearing in the forest, the poet comes upon
the rose-scented site of the gods’ recent, and recently abandoned, picnic:
I saw an arbour with a drooping roof

Of trellis vines, and bells, and larger blooms,
Like floral censers swinging light in air;
Before its wreathed doorway, on a mound
Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits,
Which, nearer seen, seem’d refuse of a meal
By angel tasted or our mother Eve;
For empty shells were scattered on the grass,
And grape stalks but half bare, and remnants more,
Sweet smelling, whose pure kinds I could not know.
Still was more plenty than the fabled horn
Thrice emptied could pour forth, at banqueting
For Proserpine return’d to her own fields,
Where the white heifers low. And appetite
More yearning than on earth I ever felt
Growing within, I ate deliciously;
And, after not long, thirsted, for thereby
Stood a cool vessel of transparent juice,
Sipp’d by the wander’d bee, the which I took,
And, pledging all the mortals of the world,
And all the dead whose names are in our lips,
Drank. That full draught is parent of my theme.
(Fall of Hyp. I, 25–46)
86 H. DE ALMEIDA
The gods’ picnic of “summer fruits”: and ambrosial “elixir fine” more
powerful than “Asian poppy” or “poison gender’d in close monkish cell”
is, in fact, the “refuse of a meal,” leavings of partly stripped “grape-stalks,”
“remnants” and “bare” “fragrant husks and berries crush’d,” all aban-
doned but, nevertheless, a “domineering potion” to be found by a lost,
wandering human (Fall of Hyp., I, 47–54). We are reminded first, of the
ambiguous feast or potion of exotic fruits and honeyed sweets that
Porphyro prepares for Madeline before seducing her in The Eve of St.
Agnes; or, perhaps, of the magical wedding feast that Lamia serves Lycius’s
Corinthian friends; or, even behind these, of Proserpine and Eurydice and
the Mount Hymettus bees of Attica.
The natural history and life of bees described in early nineteenth-
century scientific treatises, and summarized in dictionaries and encyclope-
dias contemporary with Keats, certainly contributed to the poet’s
evocations of bees as multi-layered symbols in his poetry. We read in
sources like these that the “insect state” or community of the beehive,
made up of “solitary” and “social” worker-bee types, was practical and
wasted nothing; all efforts were focused on generating special “rich”
honey for the queen bee and queen bee larvae; and of the feeding the
larvae of workers in patterns that would ensure hive survival though win-
ter months. Cultivators of the period observed that bees worked harder in
late summer and had shorter life spans; rogue worker bees in late autumn
could turn cannibalistic or “cuckoo parasites” and selfishly conserve honey
stores and fully formed larvae; near the onset of winter, worker bees would
pointedly deny food to less fully formed larvae and banish young male
bees from the hive; with the first serious frost after an Indian summer lar-
vae could be affected by a fungus that sickened and burst their bodies,
leaving the hive “clammy” and covered in a sticky white residue; and that
those few bees that survived a hard freeze in winter would lose their bear-
ings and turn solitary, wandering far afield from known honey-gathering
routes in search of any available moisture.11 Twenty-first-century research
focused on the molecular mix of the kinds of food fed to bee larvae—royal
jelly secreted by nurse bees for developing queens, regular pollen, and
honey for workers—would seem to confirm some aspects of these early
nineteenth-century notions on the variability of bee life-cycles and ambig-
uous purpose of honey. Other research by contemporary scientists on the
ability of bees to recognize numbers, colors, and shapes from aerial views
of wildflowers in a field (or a researcher’s diagram) and on bees’ ability to
focus on the multiplicity of these floral patterns when foraging;12 on the
evolutionary transition from social to solitary living in bees—or on the

loss, driven perhaps by climate change, of the density of sensory antennae
hairs or “sensilla” in bees that prompts their disoriented, isolating move-
ments13—would seem to give even greater validity to the kind of knowl-
edge behind Keats’s evocation of the insects in his late poetry.
Keats’s last completed poem, “To Autumn,” was written in the context
of his certain knowledge of his own impending death from tuberculosis.
Read, initially, as a three-stanza celebration of the “Season of mist and
mellow fruitfulness”—of the ripe products of autumn, the sights of fulfill-
ment of autumn, and the quiet “songs” of autumn—the poem under-
mines its presumed subject from the start. This can be seen even in the
opening stanza, on the purported bounty or cornucopia of autumn. The
season of “mists and mellow fruitfulness” is described as also a “Close
bosom-friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring with him how to load and
bless / With fruit the vines … And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; /
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel; to
set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they
think warm days will never cease, / For Summer has o’er brimm’d their
clammy cells” (italics added). “Ripeness is all” Keats says in echo of King
Lear’s lament at the “too-soon” death of Cordelia—except at the times
when ripeness is not “all,” and when the “too soon” truncating end does
not justify its process.14 The autumn season in Keats’s poem has fruited
too long in an Indian summer and, in conspiracy with over-matured sun,
has nurtured “later flowers for the bees” in a cruel trick that makes them
think the “warm days” will never end. But the poet knows that the fruits
of a long autumn do not compensate for what follows: the beehive is over-
brimmed with honey—and the first frost of winter has already left “clammy
cells” clogged with exploded larvae and fungal residue. Any bees that
hatch from the congealed mass, or find their way back to the hive, will be
fated to wander in search of moisture—and then freeze—in an imminent
wasteland: winter. Keats, in Italy to escape another British winter, and fully
aware that he would not live to write another poem, or complete his mis-
sion as a poet-physician, protested his imminent fate as “too soon,”
“pluck’d” well before maturation, and without any compensating sense of
fullness. As he said to his friend Joseph Severn, “There is a great difference
between going off in warm blood like Romeo, and making one’s exit like
a frog in a frost.”15 He had studied and would soon experience what could
and did happen in nature to living entities like the bees in a British autumn.
88 H. DE ALMEIDA
The season of autumn in Keats’s last poem, much like the potent rem-
nants and “leavings” of the immortals’ picnic in The Fall of Hyperion,
becomes a warning of consummation and ending in nature, a summation
of the minimal, last life still surviving: the season’s least sights like the “last
oozings” of the “cider-press,” a “swath” of poppies spared by the harvest-
ing “scythe,” aged figures asleep or slowly crossing a brook, “barred
clouds” that enclose and imprison as they “bloom the soft-dying day”;
and the season’s least, and ominous, sounds—a “wailful choir” of ephem-
eral gnats, the “loud bleat” of full-grown lambs ready for slaughter,
“Hedge-crickets” singing as if there is no tomorrow, and the chilling
“twitter” of swallows gathering to leave a soon-to-be barren land for sun-
nier, more fruitful climes. The “too busy” bees of Keats’s autumn, more
pointedly to our concerns here, do not choose to be too busy or disori-
ented wanderers in a bleak environment. Like the “wander’d bee” of The
Fall of Hyperion, they are emblematic objects that have been made to
wander in a landscape once fertile (and seemingly blessed by the gods) but
now inhospitable. They function at minimal level in a past that is immi-
nently their own, and their condition, in a reversal of the folk myth of
“telling” secrets to the bees, tells the poet of the impending dissolution of
his physical and psychic life. Keats’s bees may also speak to us—“telling”
in prescient evocation of an increasingly unpoetic, wasting Earth.
Philosophers, artists, scientists, and poets of the Romantic era placed
primary value on the observed interconnection of all life forms on earth.
They marveled at the wondrous diversity in nature; they asserted the vital
necessity of organic and psychic congress and conservation; and they share
with our age the concerns for ecological preservation to maintain the
diversity and continuity of a living but vulnerable earth.16 John Muir, the
self-styled conservationist and logical heir to Romantic values for the
earth, visited California’s Central Valley in 1868 and named it “the best of
all bee-lands of the world” with “One smooth, continuous bed of honey-
bloom, so marvellously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the
other, a distance of more than four hundred miles, your feet would press
more than a hundred flowers at every step.” An almond grove now replaces
these bees’ flower field, with trees that produce a bounty of almond blos-
soms and nectar for the bees—but only for three weeks, before the ground
must be cleared in anticipation of mechanical harvesting. Area bees must
travel elsewhere to feed for the rest of the year. John Keats’s early counsel
that we must conserve the poetry of earth, made by way of the natural
prophecy of bees, stands.
Notes
1. See Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (London: Bathurst et al.
[1714] 1795).
2. See H. W. Piper, The Active Universe (London: University of London,
Athlone Press, 1962).
3. John Keats, “I Stood Tiptoe,” and “On the Grasshopper and Cricket,” in
The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1978), 11. All subsequent quotations from the poetry will refer to
this edition and appear in the text cited by line or stanza.
4. See Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 135–97. See also my
essay, “Prophetic Extinction and the Misbegotten Dream in Keats” in The
Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on John Keats, eds. Ronald Sharp
and Robert Ryan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999),
pp. 165–183; and my essay, “Romantic Evolution: Fresh Perfection and
Ebbing Process in Keats” in Critical Essays on John Keats (Boston: G. K. Hall,
1990), pp. 279–92.
5. Charles Brown, “Lecture to the Plymouth Institution, 1836” in The Life of
John Keats, eds. Dorothy Hyde Bodurtha and Willard Bissell Pope
(London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 41.
6. M. J. B. Orfila, A General System of Toxicology: or, A Treatise on Poisons,
trans. by Joseph G. Mancrede (Philadelphia: M. Carey & Son, 1817). See
also J. F. Blumenbach, Institutions of Physiology (London: Bensley and
Sons, 1817) and S. Hahnemann’s Organon der rationellen Heilkunde nach
homöopathischen Gesetzen [The Organon of the Healing Art]
(Dresden: 1810).
7. See J. Lempriere, entries “Hymettus” and “Aristaeus,” in Bibliotheca
Classica, or, A Classical Dictionary, 1lth edn. (London: T. Cadell and
W. David, 1820).
8. A. S. Roud, The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland
(London: Penguin Books, 2006), 128.
9. See discussion on the pharmakon and poisons in de Almeida, Romantic
Medicine and John Keats,135–197.
10. Keats’s epic on the Titans survives as two fragments: the first, Hyperion,
carries a narrative up to the transformation of Apollo, before Hyperion
joins his fellow Titans in a geological and existential darkness. The Fall of
Hyperion: A Dream is told in retrospection by way of the poet’s vision of
the Titans inevitable extinction. My discussion treats the fragments as one
complex, and references them in the text as Hyp. and Fall of Hyp.
11. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn. (1910): 625–38—an extended entry
on the knowledge and cultivation of bees in the nineteenth century.
90 H. DE ALMEIDA
12. Scarlett R. Howard, Andrea G. Dyer, et al., “Numerical Ordering of Zero

in Honeybees,” Science June (2018): 1124–26.
13. Pooja Makhiljani, “Bee Antennae Offer Links between the Evolution of
Social Behavior and Communication,” Princeton University, accessed
February 2023, http://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/06/20/.
14. Tim Flannery, “Hive Mentalities,” The New York Review of Books, 12
December 2018. Hive “mentalities” and expectations with regard to sea-
sons reiterate the deadly consequences of disrupted weather patterns, espe-
cially those following the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815. See
Nikki Hessell, “Keats and the Politics of Climate Change, 1816 and
Beyond,” in Romantic Climates: Literature and Science in an Age of
Catastrophe, eds. Anne Collett and Olivia Murphy (Basingstoke and
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 59–74. See also Michael Malay,
“John Keats and the Sound of Autumn,” in The Palgrave Handbook of
Animals and Literature (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2021), 291–305.
15. The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1958), II: 281.
16. See Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation
Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Pantheon
Books, 2008).
CHAPTER 6
“The Bees Seem Alive and Make a Great

Buzzing”: Unsettling Homes in
South-West Western Australia
Jessica White
A Sweet Spot
The South Western Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR) stretches for
roughly 300,000 square kilometres across the south-western corner of
Western Australia. It is bordered by the Indian and Southern Oceans,
while, to the north and east of the area, the land is arid. This has made the
region like an island, ‘a relatively wet continental refuge’ as described by
botanists Steven Hopper and Paul Gioia, who devised the acronym.1 The
SWAFR landscape is old and weathered, persisting for millions of years
because it has not been disrupted by earthquakes or volcanoes. Without
disturbance or replenishment through geographical upheaval, the soil has
become poor in nutrients, and this has given rise to an incredible diversity
J. White (*)
University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39570-3_6
92 J. WHITE
of plant forms.2 To survive, they have developed sophisticated methods for

reproduction. As their seeds do not travel far, for example, the plants have
adapted to small pockets of soil. If they are blown to another patch of soil,
their survival is unlikely as they will be in competition with other plants
which are adapted to that patch.3 Pollination is, therefore, critical for
fertilisation.
While the SWAFR supports a range of pollinators, including honeyeat-
ers, the honey possum, and insects such as flies, bees and wasps, there is
still relatively little information on the pollination of many common plant
families in this area, particularly among insect-pollinated species.4 It is sur-
mised that most of the pollination carried out in the SWAFR is generalist,
meaning that pollinators are happy to take nectar or pollen from wherever
they can find it. However, there have been few quantitative studies to sup-
port this and research into this area has generally been lacking.5 This has
serious implications, as knowledge about the ecology of pollination may
help to predict or avoid the detrimental effects of degradation of the envi-
ronment caused by human interference.6 Seventy percent of the vegeta-
tion in the SWAFR has been removed, largely for the purposes of
agriculture and urbanisation, and the resulting fragmentation of habitat
has raised questions about the threat to plants in a warming world, par-
ticularly given that a reduction in their population sizes will also reduce
the availability of pollinators.7
In 1830, Georgiana Molloy (1805–1841) and her husband arrived on
the shores of Augusta in south-west Western Australia as part of the British
impetus to colonise Western Australia before the French, who had showed
scientific interest in the area (as well as colonial ambitions in the wider
Pacific). Georgiana, as a colonist, cultivated British plants in her garden to
provide for her family, while her husband cleared trees for cultivation.
Along with British fauna such as sheep, pigs, goats and horses, Georgiana
attempted to bring honey bees (Apis mellifera) with her from Britain,
most likely for the production of honey and wax. However, it was the
native bee, not the honey bee, which proved critical to her life in Western
Australia. Seven years after her arrival, Georgiana began collecting native
seeds and specimens for a horticulturalist in England, Captain James
Mangles (1786–1867), an event which transformed her relationship to
her environment.
By illuminating the connections between bees, flora and selves, this
chapter shows how dependent Molloy became upon her ecosystem and
how, at the same time, European invasion contributed to the dispossession
6 “THE BEES SEEM ALIVE AND MAKE A GREAT BUZZING”: UNSETTLING… 93
of First Nations peoples and the demise of native bees. It concludes with a
discussion of how metaphors of bees in Australia literature, particularly
about climate change, are based upon the behaviour and hives of the
European honey bee, rather than the Australian native bee. In doing so, it
raises questions about a lack of attentiveness to native bees in Australian
science and culture which has persisted since colonisation.
Invasion Ecology
The invasion of Australia was prompted by Britain’s imperial expansion, in
particular the need to re-home their burgeoning prison population at a
time of social disturbance, and to establish a trade and naval base in the
South Pacific.8 In 1770, Lieutenant James Cook landed on the east coast
of Australia following his documentation of the Transit of Venus in Tahiti.
The expedition’s botanist, Joseph Banks, was so enthralled by the botani-
cal novelties he encountered and collected that Cook renamed the bay,
from the provisionally known ‘Stingray Bay’, to ‘Botany Bay’.9
Native bees played an important role in the environment which drew
Banks’ attention. As scientist Terry Houston notes, ‘Australia’s large bee
fauna is vitally important in providing pollination services to a large per-
centage of Australia’s flora species and, thus, in the maintenance of natural
ecosystems. Many plants are pollinated mainly by native bees and some
only by native bees’.10 For example, Lambertia formosa, one of the species
illustrated in Banks’ Florilegium, a multi-volume of illustrated plants col-
lected on Banks’ voyage, is pollinated by the native, blue-banded bee,
Amegilla cingulata.
On his celebrated return to England, Joseph Banks became the young-
est president of the Royal Society, and was invited by the King to be hon-
orary director of the Royal Gardens at Kew, a position which he held for
forty years until his death.11 His specimens were housed in the British
Museum and drew the interest of entomologists. Danish entomologist
Johann Christian Fabricius published the first account of Australian bees
in 1775, but the first species in his book was one he referred to as a wasp,
Vespa concinna, after failing to register that it was in fact a native bee that
mimics a wasp, Hyleoides concinna.12 Such misidentification heralds the
lack of attention to native bees more generally since colonisation.
Following Banks’ recommendation, a penal colony was established at
Port Jackson (later Sydney Cove) in 1788. Banks was also preoccupied
with the colony’s agricultural improvement in its first few decades, and
94 J. WHITE
‘under his direction the First Fleet brought with it a wide range of crops
and fruits to cultivate, with the aim of rendering the colony independent
and ultimately a source of profit to the British Empire’.13 The French were
also interested in Australia’s flora and fauna. In 1800, Nicolas Baudin,
captain of Le Géographe, set off from France, accompanied by Le
Naturaliste. The voyage began with twenty-three men of science, includ-
ing botanists, zoologists, astronomers and geographers selected by the
National Institute, and reached Cape Leeuwin in south-west Western
Australia in 1801. Over the next few decades, the French returned to
Western Australia. Louis de Freycinet, who had been on board Baudin’s
expedition, arrived on the west coast in September 1817. Louis-Isidore
Duperry, a hydrographer on Freycinet’s expedition, sailed from Toulon
for the South Pacific in August 1822. He intended to ‘examine the nature
of the soil at Swan River and King George Sound and to see whether this
part of New Holland is suitable for a colony’, but the winds blew him away
from Swan River and he was unable to examine the soil.14 On 7 October
1826, Jules Sebastien-César Dumont d’Urville landed his anchor in King
George Sound and remained there for a fortnight.15
The French presence threatened the British and approximately a month
later, on 9 November 1826, Major Lockyear, leading a detachment of
soldiers and a party of convicts, set off for King George Sound (now
Albany). They arrived on 25 December 1826 and, on 21 January 1827,
Lockyer took possession of the western third of Australia for the British
crown. What enthralled the botanists—ecosystems that supported unique
flora—became a drawcard for colonists, with devastating results.
A Voyage of Death
In 1829, two years after Lockyear’s annexation, the Swan River Colony
was established at what are now the cities of Perth and Fremantle. Stirling’s
reports of the environment were so enthusiastic that they captured the
attention of British people interested in immigration. A study of native
cypress trunk rings indicates the 1820s was the wettest period in the
south-west since the 1660s, and it is possible that rain created an abun-
dance of vegetation, contributing to Stirling’s positive perception of the
area.16 One of the people swayed by Stirling’s reports was John Molloy,
who in October 1829 set sail for the colony with his new wife, Georgiana.
Georgiana Kennedy was born near Carlisle in England in 1805, the
same year her father began to build Crosby Lodge, a large Georgian
building. When she was 15, her father was killed by a fall from his horse.
The family moved to Rugby for the sons’ education, but due to friction
with her mother, Georgiana preferred to spend her time with her friends
the Dunlops near Glasgow. There, Georgiana strengthened her friendship
with John Molloy, a soldier who had fought against Napoleon. After
becoming a captain in 1824 and finding further promotion elusive, he
proposed to Georgiana in 1829. Georgiana, at 24, knew her options were
narrowing. She agreed to Molloy’s proposal, even though it meant leaving
her family and friends and travelling to the fledgling colony of Swan River
in south-west Western Australia.
Alfred Crosby, in Ecological Imperialism, suggests that while colonisa-
tion was prompted by ‘population explosion and a resulting shortage of
cultivable land, national rivalries, persecution of minorities’, the underly-
ing factors were ‘perhaps best described as biogeographical’.17 That draw-
card of what he terms the ‘Neo-Europes’, Australia, New Zealand, Canada,
the United States, Argentina and Uruguay, were their temperate climates
and a lack of competition from European flora and fauna. These biogeo-
graphical factors were such that ‘a reasonable man might be persuaded to
invest capital and even the lives of his family in Neo-European adven-
tures’, a description that could well apply to John Molloy.18
Colonisation was effected not only through individual immigration but
through a ‘grunting, lowing, neighing, crowing, chirping, snarling, buzz-
ing, self-replicating and world-altering avalanche’.19 The ‘buzzing’ in this
avalanche belonged to the honey bee. It is generally accepted that the
honey bee was introduced into New South Wales from England by Captain
Wallace of the Isabella in 1822, although Barrett cites an earlier attempt
by Reverend Samuel Marsden who brought two hives to Sydney from Rio
de Janeiro in 1810. They likely did not survive because, as the Reverend
wrote in a letter of 4 May 1810, he landed the hives safely but ‘many of
them are dead since. I have had so much to attend to since we landed that
I really forget [sic] them and left them in the Governor’s garden, where I
fear the heavy rains have injured them’.20 These honey bees were brought
over to supply the colonists with honey.21
As the ship was loaded with stock, and John Molloy’s stallion and mare,
the Molloys stayed at Brockhurst near Gosport. In mid-September
Georgiana, accompanied by Captain Francis Byrne, John Molloy’s fellow
rifleman who was also emigrating to Australia, and his wife, went for a
walk ‘to search for bees’. On 17 October 1829, the Molloys visited
Gosport, then ordered some bees for the journey. The next day, Georgiana
96 J. WHITE
wrote in her diary, ‘The bees came’.22 She described their nest as residing
in ‘a wooden box perforated with holes and a little glass door that lets me
see them at work’.23
Two years before, in 1827, Edward Bevan published The Honey Bee: Its
natural history, physiology, and management, and recommended a bee box
made of wood, preferably red cedar, ‘the fragrance of which is regarded by
some as agreeable to the bees’24 and because it resisted heat and its smell
repelled moths. The box, which contained bars from which the combs
hung, was designed to replace earlier hives made of straw, known as ‘skeps’.
To collect honey, both the bees and skeps were burned, which raised con-
cerns about bee welfare.25 Bevan recommended offering, at the back of
each box, ‘a pane of glass fixed in a small rabbet which may be carved with
a half inch door, hung with wire hinges and fastened with a button’.26 This
description is consistent with the ‘little glass door’ that Georgiana
described, although her letters do not include additional information to
confirm that the box is modelled after Bevan’s. Molloy’s hive indicates
that she had the means to purchase newer forms of bee husbandry, and
that the Molloys were significantly invested in transporting a British eco-
system to Australia.
The Warrior left Portsmouth on 23 October 1829. When it reached St.
Jago in the Canary Islands in November, Georgiana observed on 23 of
that month, ‘The bees seem alive and make a great buzzing’.27 On 1
December 1829 she wrote in her diary that she ‘opened the bees’.28 John
Molloy’s diary states that on the same day he took the bees up on the deck
and ‘cleaned out the hive’, whereupon he ‘found a great number dead’.29
The next day Georgiana checked them again and wrote in her diary ‘Some
bees not out after dinner’.30 On the 12 January 1830, the ship anchored
in Table Bay in the Cape of Good Hope. In a letter to her mother written
on the day of their arrival, Georgiana noted ‘several Bees are dead but I
don’t regret this, as it gives the others more air, I hope to get them out
safe’.31 However, when they left the Cape a few weeks later, disaster struck
the bees: ‘the Moths got at them and killed the whole hive’.32
This apiarian episode was replicated among the stock and passengers.
John Molloy’s mare aborted her foal; a child of a fellow passenger died
four days after his birth, his ‘interior organs not being perfect from exhaus-
tion’; shearing sheep and lambs on board ‘died daily’; the Molloys lost all
their pigs between England and the Cape; Georgiana’s raspberry, goose-
berry and currant slips at first flowered in the heat, then died from it. ‘The
poor animals’, Georgiana wrote, ‘had scarcely enough to live on’ and she
too ‘really was nearly starved and every day from the Cape to Swan River,
had only Salt Pork and Rice, the mutton was diseased that Mr Semphill
the Charterer bought at Cape Town’.33
When they finally arrived at Swan River, the Molloys found the settle-
ment process in chaos. Together with a handful of other emigrants, they
elected to sail south to the new town of Augusta, the third British outpost
in the colony named after the sixth son of King George III. Although she
was heavily pregnant, Georgiana refused to be separated from her husband
and insisted that she travel south with him.
At Augusta, the Molloy’s losses continued in the most unbearable way.
Two weeks after they arrived at Augusta, on 24 May 1830, Georgiana ‘was
confined when thinking nothing of the kind. I suffered 12 hours and had
no medical man near me there being none within some hundred miles,
when at a loss what to tell my female servant I referred to the Encyclopedia’.34
The child was tall and delicate with ‘beautiful fingers & nails’,35 but
Georgiana’s poor nutrition on the ship impacted on the baby, and her
daughter lived only two weeks.
To alleviate her grief, Georgiana ‘went out and planted bulbs’,36 an
activity that foreshadows how flora—and bees—were to prove instrumen-
tal to her physical and psychological survival. The loss of child and stock
also foreshadow Molloy’s implication in the demise of ecosystems that
support native bees.
Human/Other-Than-Human Colonies
The Molloys were cogs in the vast enterprise of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century colonisation by countries such as Britain, France, Spain and
Portugal. The word ‘colony’ comes from the late Latin word colonia
meaning ‘settlement, farm’, from colonus meaning ‘settler, farmer’ and
from colere, meaning to ‘cultivate’. These three Latin words indicate how
crucially growing particular plants—largely, but not exclusively, those that
provided food—formed the basis for invading another country. As the
authors of Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire write, ‘Colonial
ideologies of improvement stressed the appropriation of lands from local
residents and the transformation of imperial environments into sources of
economic and moral value’.37 For the British at Augusta, this meant first
clearing the land and making it arable. Georgiana recounts that the British
cleared land ‘immediately near the beach’ of ‘palm grass plants and tim-
ber’. Due to the time it took to grow crops, and the lack of knowledge of
98 J. WHITE
the area’s ecosystems, the colonists became hungry. Molloy’s garden was
an important means of supplying the nutrition her family needed. That she
was evidently relying on bees to help create her garden is indicated by the
heading on one of the pages of her diary: ‘bee garden’. This is followed by
a list of plants which includes basil, heath and honeywort—plants that
produce a great deal of nectar. Although it is not clear if Molloy was versed
in the (then relatively new) science of pollination, this list indicates that
she recognised that there was an important relationship between bees
and plants.
With the assistance of Staples, her gardener, Molloy laid out a flower
and vegetable garden. After six months, it was yielding daily vegetables
and salads for dinner and this, Molloy boasted, ‘is more than anyone can
say, not even the Governor’.38 She wrote to her friend Frances Birkett that
‘we supply our neighbours with vegetables continuously’.39 A year after
her arrival, Georgiana had ‘a garden of nearly 2 acres … it is said to be the
best garden in SW Australia excepting none, we supply our neighbours
with vegetables continuously and have every sort of British herb & root
such as Cabbage carrot onion etc. Pear Apple & Peach to the orange tree
& vine, Tobacco, Tamarind & different Cape trees’.40 It was not, however,
the honey bee which was pollinating these plants.
George Johnson brought out a hive of bees to the Swan River Colony
on board the Tranby, arriving in February 1830, but it is not recorded if
his bees survived. Four years later, Mary Bussell and her mother Frances
Bussell sailed to join their brothers and sons, who were neighbours to the
Molloys at Augusta and, later, the Vasse (now Busselton). However Mary’s
bees also died en route.41 One of the first confirmed arrivals of honey bees
in Western Australia was that of a hive taken from Hobart to King George
Sound in 1834, raised from what some thought to be the original stock of
honey bees brought to Australia by Dr. Wilson.42 Sixteen swarms were
produced from this hive and were sent to ‘adjoining colonies’. Meanwhile,
back in Tasmania they became ‘wild in great numbers, spreading them-
selves rapidly through all the forests, even to the summit of the Western
Mountains’.43
As European honey bees did not appear to be at Augusta at the time
Molloy and Staples established the garden, native pollinators, either birds,
bees, possums, wasps or beetles, would have been at work. Native bees, as
one family of these pollinators, were thus integral to the Molloy family’s
survival, particularly as food was short in the colony. The total number of
native bee species in Australia is yet to be established, but it may be as high
as two thousand species. As of 2018, the Australian Faunal Directory

listed 1546 species, and 800 of these species are in Western Australia.44
These bees as classified into 58 general in 5 families: Colletidae,
Stenotrididae, Halictidae, Megachilidae and Apidae. The first two families
are restricted to Australia, and the remaining three occur worldwide.
Native bees are small and can be mistaken for flies. Their honey, as Thomas
Mitchell found courtesy of his guide Yuranigh on their journey through
Queensland, ‘in appearance and taste much resembled fine gingerbread.
The honey itself was slightly acid, but clear and fine flavoured’.45
Molloy makes no mention of native bees in her extant letters and dia-
ries, although she did observe other insects when collecting, noting in a
letter to Mangles that many of the seedpods she collected were ‘universally
inhabited by insects’.46 While her awareness of the relationship between
bees and plants is evident in her list for her ‘bee garden’, she did not seem
to contemplate a similar relationship between native bees and flowers in
her new country. Such ignorance is incongruous given how critically
important these tiny insects would become to her well-being.
Bees and Selves

Following the devastating start at Augusta, Molloy went on to raise a fam-
ily with her husband. She bore another two daughters and a son, and
prepared to move with her family north to the Vasse, near Geographe Bay.
In 1836, when Molloy’s son was nineteen months old, he fell into a well
and drowned. This prompted what she described as a ‘dangerous illness’,47
most likely a nervous breakdown.
Just prior to this event, Molloy had received a box of seeds and a letter
from Captain James Mangles. Born in 1786, Mangles was the nephew of
the director of the British East India Company and the principal of F. &
C.F. Mangles, which sent at least one convict ship to Sydney in 1800.48 He
was an adventurous man who was at sea for fifteen years, reaching the
position of officer by the time he left the navy in 1815.49 A year later, he
travelled to Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor and published a book on his trav-
els. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1825, and in 1830 he
was co-founder and one of the first fellows and members of council of the
Royal Geographical Society. He had connections with John Lindley, the
first professor of botany at University College, London; with the Loddiges
nurserymen of Hackney; and with Joseph Paxton, gardener at Chatsworth
and designer of the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition. Mangles
100 J. WHITE
was also friends with James Stirling, a fellow naval officer. He introduced
Stirling to his cousin Ellen, and Stirling married Ellen when she came of
age. In 1831, Mangles sailed to Perth to visit his friend and his cousin, and
during this sojourn he made contacts with collectors such as George
Fletcher Moore and James Drummond, requesting them to collect speci-
mens and seeds. Through Ellen Stirling, he also later made contact
with Molloy.
In the gardens of her family home at Crosby Lodge back in Cumbria,
as was expected of a girl training to become a lady, Molloy had learned her
first lessons about plants and gardening. Like other decorative arts such as
writing, painting and flower arranging, botany was perceived to be a
worthwhile pursuit for women, particularly as it combined leisure and
learning. It encouraged women to go outdoors, ‘collecting plants, creat-
ing herbaria, learning some botanical Latin, reading handbooks about
Linnaean systematics, taking lessons in botanical illustration, using micro-
scopes to study plant physiology, and writing introductory botany books’.50
Molloy had expected to collect specimens in Australia, for in a later letter
to Mangles she referred to a hortus siccus (literally, ‘dried garden’, consist-
ing of a book or sheets of paper into which dried specimens were fastened)
which she had brought with her, ‘imagining [she] should have a superflu-
ity of time to use it’.51 She also brought out botanical books, mentioning
in her diary that she ‘Went on deck and sat a long Time Reading Botany’.52
When she arrived in Australia, however, she found her time circumscribed
and it was only following the death of her son that, needing a respite for
her grief, she took to her collecting project with vigour.53
When Molloy started collecting for Mangles, her perception of her sur-
roundings began to shift. In a letter to her sister written two-and-a-half
years after her arrival, Molloy railed against the ‘unbounded limits’ of the
bush around her: ‘This is certainly a beautiful place—but were it not for
domestic charms the eye of the emigrant would soon weary of the
unbounded limits of thickly clothed dark green forests where nothing can
be described to feast the imagination’.54 As she began to collect flowers,
Molloy focussed upon them intently and came to adore them, and her
collecting ripened into an obsession. Her correspondence to Mangles
became peppered with accounts of devotion. In a letter begun in June
1840, she wrote, ‘scarcely a day passes I am not thinking what I can do or
how in any way I could promote your cause.’55 Earlier that year, she
gushed, ‘I never met with any one who so perfectly called forth and could
sympathise with me in my prevailing passion for Flowers.’56 Molloy’s
reverence was not only for Mangles, however, but also for herself. On 22
June 1840 she wrote, ‘when I sally forth either on foot or Horseback, I
feel quite elastic in mind and Step; I feel I am quite at my own work, the
real cause that enticed me out to Swan River.’ The efflorescence in Molloy’s
well-being as she collected flowers reminds us how intimately human lives
are connected with native bees in Australia, and not just in terms of sugar
and sustenance. In Molloy’s case, the bees helped generate a diverse eco-
system that appealed to her sense of aesthetics. However, First Nations
peoples in Australia have engaged with native bees for generations through
art, culture and their cosmic worldview.
First Nations peoples have been using native bees’ wax for pictographs
for thousands of years; radiocarbon dating reveals that the oldest beeswax
art in the Northern Territory and the Kimberly region of Western Australia
was made 4000 years ago.57 First Nations peoples also made models of
animals from the wax of stingless bees.58 Anthropologist Natasha Fijn
notes that while stingless bees endemic to Australia have not been domes-
ticated, they have been co-habiting with humans in the domus, or home,
for thousands of years. This is not ‘home’ in the sense of a house, but in
the sense of home as a universal concept for both humans and other-than-
humans. The Yolngu people of north-eastern Arnhem Land, for whom
sugarbag bees are kin, the domus is wänga, a home which is ‘looked after
by multiple beings, including ancestors, other-than-human animals
(totemic beings) and extended family through custodianship, or steward-
ship’. 59 Yumitjin Wunungmirra, a Yirralka ranger, is linked to ‘through
kinship ties, particularly through his mother’s lineage, and … is connected
with the bees in relation to the land’.60 Such complex relationships with
native bees contrast with Molloy’s, which dwelled upon their by-product—
the flowers they pollinated—rather than the bees themselves.
The lack of attention to native bees continues today. In April 2022, the
Royal Australian Mint released a $2 collectors’ coin to celebrate 200 years
since the introduction of the European honeybee. The coin misses ‘an
important opportunity to showcase Australia’s native pollinators, some of
which are threatened with extinction’.61 Instead it highlights, as the
Australian Honey Bee Industry Council (which approached the mint)
states, ‘a very important pollinator that makes an enormous contribution
to the Australian economy,62 indicating that the attention given to the
European honeybee is derived from its capital.
Native bees, by contrast, do not produce honey in large quantities, and
beekeepers who produce native honey commercially can only harvest less
102 J. WHITE
than a kilogram per year. Although the honey is delicious, it cannot be

extracted easily as the bees mix honey with pollen in separate, closed
cells.63 Native bees also have a smaller range than honeybees. Tetragonula
carbonaria has a foraging range of up to 712 metres (its typical range is
333 metres), while Apis mellifera has a maximum range of more than nine
kilometres, which means that T. carbonaria cannot contribute as much to
pollination.64
Albert Gale complained about native bees’ lack of economic potential
as early as 1912, in his tome on beekeeping, Australian Bee Lore and Bee
Culture:
It is a singular fact that, although both in the American continent and our
own, indigenous honey producing flora abounds; the most diligent search
by the entomologist and other naturalists, on the discovery of these new
lands, was not rewarded by the discovery of any social honey-bee having a
commercial value.65
Strikingly, this lack of attention to native bees is not confined to econom-

ics. Recently, researchers who attempted to perform a meta-analysis to
review the evidence on the effects of honeybee competition on native bees
were stymied by a limited number of publications, including those that
provided quantifiable outcomes.66
Nor is this disregard limited to science; it is also reflected in Australia’s
literature. While readers wanting to learn about native bees can turn to
First Nations text such as Nola Turner-Jensen and David Lefflers’ chil-
dren’s book The Sugarbag, in which one brother teachers another about
hunting ngarruu, settler still draws predominantly upon the honey bee for
symbolic capital.
Transference
A metaphor is ‘a figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or
phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous
to, that which is literally applicable’.67 It comes from the ancient Greek
metaphorá, meaning transfer. When honey bees were transferred to
Australia, they were also transferred to the nation’s literature. Kylie
Tennant’s The Honey Flow (1956), for example, is the story of a young
woman who drives around the country with her late grandfather’s
beehives and truck, muscling herself into a male-dominated apiarian

world. Her use of hives indicates that she traded honey from non-
native bees.
Given episodes of colony collapse in recent decades, bees have also fea-
tured as a motif for climate change. James Bradley’s Clade (2015), an
intergenerational climate fiction novel, features a migrant beekeeper and
his hives to symbolise humans’ interconnection with their world, and the
severance of these connections in a world of colony collapse and climatic
disaster. Mirroring the theme of connection between generations, as well
as to ecosystems, Amir, a beekeeper and illegal immigrant, muses to a
woman who approaches him, ‘The first time [the bees] landed on me,
enveloped me, it was as if I was no longer simply me but part of them, as
if they connected me to something that went beyond myself’.68
However, over 90 percent of bee species are solitary69 and in Australia,
approximately half of all native bee species belong to Colletidae, a large
family of solitary bees.70 In Western Australia, the only highly social native
bees are tiny ‘sugarbag’ bees, which are stingless. No larger than bush flies,
they live in colonies of hundreds in tree or rock hollows. Although they
co-operate to build nests, forage for food and tend to their broods, their
communication is less efficient than that of the European honey bee.71
That Australian writers continue to use motifs relating largely to the
European honey bee, with its relatively strong social structures, rather
than the more solitary species native to Australia, suggests that Australian
writers still look to Europe for apian themes and structural inspiration.
They also unwittingly replicate the threat to native bees.
Mirielle Juchau’s The World Without Us uses the image of the hive to
mirror family connection and collapse. As in Clade, the characters’ trauma
is intergenerational. Evangeline and her bee-keeping husband Stefan lose
their child to leukemia. Evangeline stops painting and wanders the coun-
tryside with an umbrella while Tess, one of her daughters, becomes mute
with grief, and Stefan takes to drink. Evangeline’s grief is layered onto an
older sadness occasioned by the breakdown of the Hive, a commune in
which she was raised. As reviewer Sally Evans notes, ‘the unsettling of
[Evangeline’s] domestic and psychological stability is intertwined with the
disappearance of her husband Stefan’s honey bee colonies and the con-
stant spectre of coal seam gas fracking within the pristine valley wilderness.
The threat of colony collapse is present at every level of the story’.72
Throughout the novel, the bees symbolise humans’ attempts to keep
functioning when there are internal stressors such as loss and grief, and
104 J. WHITE
external stressors such as fracking, which divides the community. By trans-

ferring the nonhuman to the realm of the human, the novel shows readers
how difficult it is for anything to survive when too much strain is placed
upon it. Perhaps if readers can see how a human ecosystem can fall apart,
they might also see how the ecological richness of a native hive could also
be impacted, particularly by their own actions. Perhaps they might con-
sider a world without ‘us’, the twinning of bees and humans.
While this is another story which draws on the motif of the honey bee,
towards the end of the novel, it shifts into a metaphorical register which
emblematises contemporary bee ecosystems in Australia. When Tess finds
a native hive in a cavern, she ‘sees what’s hanging from the ceiling and
jutting like lichen in thick, creamy layers. They protrude from the wall and
fan from the corners. They garland the roof beams. Great waxy chande-
liers lit with yellow bees’.73 The adjectives which Juchau uses—garland,
creamy, chandeliers—denote wealth and luxury. However, these bees are a
feral colony of an invasive introduced species, which likely pose a threat to
native bees. While research has been unable to determine significant effects
of honeybees on native bees, almost twice as many negative than positive
associations have been reported.74 Juchau’s adjectives might indicate a
luxurious existence for the feral bees, but this cannot be extended to
native bees.
Not all non-First Nations authors recount such ecological oversights.
In David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993), one of the most ‘criti-
cally discussed narrative events in the novel’ is when Janet, a Scottish emi-
grant in Australia, is swarmed by bees and finds herself transformed. 75 The
hives, which belong to her friend Mrs. Hutchence, were made by the
Aboriginal boy Gemmy, ‘and since he knew about these things, [he] had
once or twice gone into the bush and found swarms of the little stingless
native bees she kept along with her imported ones’.76 It is unclear if the
native bees are part of the swarm that encloses Janet, but this inclusion
gestures towards a recognition of the importance of these bees as markers
for an awareness of the Australian environment and its traditional
custodians.
Unsettling Homes
The SWAFR now has more threatened species than most countries of the
world.77 Scientists have advocated for protection of this area by designat-
ing it a biodiversity hotspot:, a region which features a high percentage of
plant life found nowhere else on earth and which faces exceptional levels
of extinction.78 In 2000, their efforts were rewarded and the SWAFR was
formally recognised as a biodiversity hotspot, one of thirty-five worldwide
and one of two in Australia. Perhaps a similar designation (beyond coins)
could draw attention to native bees whose habitat, as noted by passionate
observers since the last century, is also under threat.
Victorian schoolteacher and naturalist Tarlton Rayment, writing in
1935 in A Cluster of Bees, describes his lifelong hunt for a swarm of native
bees, describing them in delectable terms. Out riding with a friend in
Gippsland, he encountered ‘three tiny combs the size of the palm of one’s
hand … The entire cluster of bees, if shaken from their miniature combs,
would have just about filled a teacup’.79 Others in the area, aware of
Rayment’s obsession with native bees, sent him descriptions of their obser-
vations, and these reveal the destruction of native bees and their habitat.
One Mr. Cope, a ‘South Australian distiller of eucalyptus oil … says that
the little colonies were fairly plentiful in the early days, and favoured the
“mallee” country, but died out as settlement progressed’.80 Robert
Chisholm, Mayor of the City of Sandringham, selected land in the area
now known as Rochester. He found numerous colonies of bees in the
‘park-like’ area with trees of grey-box (Eucalyptus hemiphloia), however
‘thousands [of colonies] were destroyed during the clearing operations’.81
Meanwhile a Mr. E. Garrett, ‘a pioneer in Australian apiculture’, assured
Rayment that ‘in the pioneering days of the foothills of the Alps the tiny
colonies were not at all a rare sight in the spring, though the great forest
is practically unchanged’.82 Some native bees such as Euryglossina perpu-
silla rely on Banskia attenuata for their nest construction, but this vegeta-
tion is threatened by land clearance for housing.83
Unlike these observers, Georgiana Molloy did not appear to be aware
of native bees, despite being enamoured of their flora and conscious of a
relationship between English bees and flowers, a bias which has continued
(despite the abovementioned bee aficionados) among writers, scientists
and the Royal Australian Mint. When climate change and the extinction
crises are gravely threatening ecosystems, such ignorance is remiss. The
legacy of European invaders such as Molloy and Apis mellifera is clear: it
is a threat to native bees’ homes, which in turns constitutes a threat to the
humans and nonhumans that depend upon it. As ethnographer Deborah
Bird Rose writes in Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of
Landscape and Wilderness, ‘The interdependence of all life within country
constitutes a hard but essential lesson—those who destroy their country
106 J. WHITE
ultimately destroy themselves.’84 As readers, writers and thinkers, it

behoves us to attend to our tiny native bees, to recognise how much life
depends upon them, and to agitate for the protection of their homes.
Notes
1. Stephen D. Hopper and Paul Gioia, “The Southwest Australian Floristic
Region: Evolution and Conservation of a Global Hot Spot of Biodiversity,”
Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics 35 (2004): 623.
2. Hopper and Gioia, “The Southwest Australian Floristic Region”: 628.
3. Thomas Wilson, Stepping off: Rewilding and Belonging in the South–West
(Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2017), 41.
4. Ryan D. Phillips, Stephen D. Hopper, and Kingsley W. Dixon, “Pollination
Ecology and the Possible Impacts of Environmental Change in the
Southwest Australian Biodiversity Hotspot”, Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society B 365. 1539 (2010), 518.
5. Phillips, Hopper and Dixon, “Pollination Ecology”: 518.
8. D. M. Schreuder, “Empire: Australia and ‘Greater Britain’, 1788–1901”,
in The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart
Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 512.
9. Stephen D. Hopper, “From Botany Bay to Breathing Planet: An Australian
Perspective on Plant Diversity and Global Sustainability,” Pacific
Conservation Biology 19, no. 3–4 (2013): 357.
10. Terry Houston, A Guide to Native Bees of Australia (Clayton South:
CSIRO Publishing), 21.
11. Hopper, “From Botany Bay to Breathing Planet,” 359.
12. Houston, A Guide, 79.
13. John Gascoigne and Sara Maroske, “Colonial Science and Technology,” in
The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart
Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 442.
14. Cited in Colin Dyer, The French Explorers and Sydney 1788–1831 (St Lucia:
University of Queensland Press, 2009), ix–x.
15. Dyer, The French Explorers, xii.
16. Wilson, Stepping Off, 75–76.
17. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015), 5.
18. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 5.
19. Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 194.
20. Cited in Peter Barrett, The Immigrant Bees: 1788–1898. Vol. V.: A Final
Postcript on the Introduction of European Honey Bees into Australia and
New Zealand (Caloundra: Peter Barrett, 2016), 35.
21. ‘Honey Bee’. Australian Museum. Last accessed 11 February 2023,
https://australian.museum/learn/animals/insects/honey-bee/
22. Diary of Georgiana Molloy, 18th October 1829, 2877A/1, JS Battye
Library.
23. Letter from Georgiana Molloy to Frances Birkett, 15th April 1831, DKEN
3/28/9, Carlisle Archive Centre.
24. Edward Bevan, The Honey Bee; its natural history, physiology, and manage-
ment (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1827), 83.
25. Adam W. Ebert, ‘Hive Society: The Popularization of Science and
Beekeeping in the British Isles, 1609–1913’ (ProQuest Dissertations
Publishing, 2009), 36–39.
26. Bevan, The Honey Bee, 83.
27. Diary of Georgiana Molloy, 23rd November 1829, 2877A/1, JS Battye
Library.
28. Diary of Georgiana Molloy, 1st December 1829, 2877A/1, JS Battye
Library.
29. Diary of John Molloy, 1st December 1829, 5211A/1, JS Battye Library.
30. Diary of Georgiana Molloy, 2nd December 1829, 2877A/1, JS Battye
Library.
31. Letter from Georgiana Molloy to Elizabeth Kennedy, 12th January 1830,
DKEN 3/28/9, Carlisle Archive Centre.
3/28/9, Carlisle Archive Centre. Molloy was unlikely to have known that
the moths, which were likely the Greater wax moth or Lesser wax moth,
would not have killed the hive. Rather, they would have taken advantage of
the ailing hive and caused damage to the combs.
37. James, Beattie, Edward D. Melillo, and Emily O’Gorman. Eco-cultural
Networks and the British Empire New Views on Environmental History
(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 9.
108 J. WHITE
41. Barrett, The Immigrant Bees, 186.
42. Barrett, The Immigrant Bees, 188.
43. Cited in Barrett, The Immigrant Bees,13.
45. Thomas L. Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical
Australia: In Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria
(London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848), 321.
46. Letter from Georgiana Molloy to James Mangles, undated (supplemental
to letter of 25th January 1838), ACC 479A, Battye Library.
47. Letter from Georgiana Molloy to James Mangles, [no day] September
1838, ACC 479A, Battye Library.
48. Joseph Somes was the principal of another convict ship, the Hive, which
ran aground on a beach south of Jervis Bay in 1835. Soames was director
of the New Zealand Shipping company, of which two ships—the Clifford
and London—carried bees to New Zealand via George Neighbour, who
was friends with Thomas Nutt who, like Bevan, attempted to move on
from the straw hives in the interests of preserving bees. See https://natlib.
govt.nz/records/22880989?search%5Bi%5D%5Bname_authority_id
%5D=-81617&search%5Bpath%5D=items
49. William Lines, An All Consuming Passion: Origins, Modernity, and the
Australian Life of Georgiana Molloy (St Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin,
1994), 219.
50. Ann Shtier, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science Flora’s Daughters and
Botany in England, 1760–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996), 36.
51. Letter from Georgiana Molloy to James Mangles, 25th January 1838,
ACC 479A.
52. Diary of Georgiana Molloy, 6th November 1829, 2877A/1, JS Battye
Library.
53. Jessica White, “‘Since my Dear Boy’s Death’: Botany, grief and gender in
the Australian bush,” JASAL 13, no 2 (2013): https://openjournals.
library.sydney.edu.au/JASAL/article/view/9869
54. Letter from Georgiana Molloy to Elizabeth Besley, 9th November 1832,
501A/1, Battye Library
55. Letter from Georgiana Molloy to James Mangles, [no day] June 1840,
ACC 479A.
56. Letter from Georgiana Molloy to James Mangles, 31st January 1840,
ACC 479A.
57. Kellie Clayton, ‘Evidence for the eighteenth- century export of native
stingless bee’s wax from northern Australia by visiting Southeast Asian
mariners’, The Cross-Pollinator 28 (2022): 3–8.
58. Eva Crane, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (London:
Duckworth, 1999), 526–527.
59. Natasha Fijn and Marcus Baynes-Rock, ‘A Social Ecology of Stingless
Bees.’ Human Ecology 46 (2018): 207–216.
60. Natasha Fijn and Marcus Baynes-Rock, ‘A Social Ecology’, 210.
61. Eliza Middleton, Caitlin Forster and Don Driscoll, ‘A new $2 coin features
the introduced honeybee. Is this really the species we should celebrate?’
The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/a-new-2-coin-features-
the-i ntroduced-h oneybee-i s-t his-r eally-t he-s pecies-w e-s hould-
celebrate-181089
62. Middleton, Forster and Driscoll, ‘A new $2 coin’, n.p.
64. Jordan P. Smith, Tim A. Heard, Madeleine Beekman, and Ros Gloag.
“Flight Range of the Australian Stingless Bee Tetragonula carbonaria
(Hymenoptera: Apidae)”, Austral Entomology 56, no. 1 (2017): 50–53.
65. Albert Gale, Australian Bee Lore and Bee Culture: Including the Influence
of Bees on Crops and the Colour of Flowers and Its Influence on Bee Life
(Sydney: William Brooks, 1912), 1.
66. Kit S. Prendergast, Kinglsey W. Dixon, and Philip W. Bateman, “The
Evidence for and Against Competition Between the European Honeybee
and Australian Native Bees,” Pacific Conservation Biology (2022):
A-U. https://doi.org/10.1071/PC21064.
67. “metaphor, n.”, OED Online (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, December 2022), www.oed.com/view/Entry/117328.
68. James Bradley, Clade (Scoresby: Penguin Group Australia), 2015: 129
69. Dollin, et al., Australian Native Bees, 17.
70. Dollin, et al., Australian Native Bees, 25
71. Houston, A Guide to Native Bees of Australia, 6.
72. Sally Evans, ‘Unsettlement: Psychoecology and absence in Mireille
Juchau’s The World Without Us [Book review]’, Southerly 75, no. 2 (2015):
260–264.
73. Mireille, Juchau, The World without Us (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 161.
74. Prendergast, Dixon and Batemen, “The Evidence for and Against
Competition”, Pacific Conservation Biology (2022): 1–21.
75. Clare Archer-Lean, “David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon as a
Reconsideration of Pastoral Idealisation”, Journal of the Association for the
Study of Australian Literature: JASAL 14, no. 2 (2014): 1–12.
76. David, Malouf, Remembering Babylon (North Sydney, N.S.W.: Vintage
Classics, 2009), 127.
110 J. WHITE
77. Hopper and Gioia, ‘The Southwest Australian Floristic Region’, 640.
78. Norman Myers, Russell A. Mittermeier, Cristina G. Mittermeier, Gustavo
A. B. Da Fonseca, and Jennifer Kent, “Biodiversity Hotspots for
Conservation Priorities,” Nature 403, no. 6772 (2000): 853.
79. Tarlton Rayment, A Cluster of Bees: Sixty Essays on the Life-histories of
Australian Bees (Sydney: Endeavour Press, 1935), 557–558.
80. Rayment, A Cluster of Bees, 560.
81. Rayment, A Cluster of Bees, 559–560.
82. Rayment, A Cluster of Bees, 560.
83. Kit S. Prendergast, ‘Euryglossina (Euryglossina) perpusilla (Hymenoptera:
Colletidae: Euryglossinae) nesting in pre-formed cavities in Bankisa atten-
uata (Proteaceae)’, Journal of Mellitology 81 (2018): 1–5.
84. Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of
Landscape and Wilderness (Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission,
1996), 10.
CHAPTER 7
“The Ideas Are in the Air”: From Drone

Bees to Honey Women, Cultural Paradox
in the Democratic Rhetoric of British
Chartism and Colonial Australian Suffragism
In August 1837, the pseudonymous “Timothy Wasp Esq” created the

etching “The Queen Bee in Her Hive!!!” to commemorate for the liter-
ate, semi-literate and illiterate of London’s Cheapside Queen Victoria’s
recent ascent to the throne. Wasp’s cartoon employs the internal structure
of a traditional skep beehive to present the viewer with a hierarchical image
of the division of labour and distribution of wealth in early Victorian soci-
ety. The newly crowned “Queen” and her royal “drones” are snugly posi-
tioned at the top of the hive, “sucking away” in their spacious cells, while
at the bottom of the hive a much more populous swarm of “humming,”
“humble” and “common working bees” subsist in industrial smoke clouds
C. Harrington (*)

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39570-3_7
112 C. HARRINGTON
and toil in constricted cells. Wasp, who can be spied hanging from a pole
bearing a quotation from Bernard Mandeville’s “The Grumbling Hive”
(1705), appears to be something of an entomologist, because our car-
toonist astutely notes that the working bees differ in resemblance from the
queen and drones in their almost “incessant labour.” And from the centre
of the hive a banner unfurls to display an inscription from the Comte de
Buffon’s Natural History. Referring to the drones of the hive, it states that
“while their presence is thus necessary to the QEEN [sic] they are suffered
to enjoy all the sweets of life & love—but when they become useless in the
HIVE—the common bees often declare a war of extermination against
them.” Part natural history, part Mandevillian socio-political commentary,
“The Queen Bee in Her Hive!!!” illustrates how changes in scientific
knowledge and their popularisation can have corollary cultural conse-
quences. In Wasp’s cartoon, the biological polymorphism of the European
honeybee intersects with the inequalities of industrial society, and the dis-
coveries of modern entomology emerge to warn of a dangerous social
pathology within bee society which possesses the potential to move into
human society.1
Wasp’s cartoon illustrates a fascinating meeting point between Gillian
Beer’s maxim that scientific material loses its boundaries when it enters
culture and Annabel Patterson’s suggestion that animals often paradoxi-
cally appear in political histories to speak on behalf of those without the
power to speak for themselves.2 But the main reason why I begin this
chapter with “The Queen Bee in Her Hive” is because it graphically typi-
fies a popular early Victorian way of seeing, thinking and arguing about
political inequality in industrial society by appealing to the natural history
of honeybees. In the first half of this chapter, I argue that this way of see-
ing the world was most aggressively pronounced in early to mid-
nineteenth-century working-class political radicalism and the democratic
movement known as Chartism. An analysis of the speeches, letters, poems
and articles composed by early radicals like William Cobbett and Henry
Hunt, along with later Chartists like Feargus O’Connor and Peter
McDouall, indicates that scientific developments in the natural history and
comparative zoology of drone bees underwent popularisation and politici-
sation during this period. While drone bees were used by working-class
populists to establish a democratic solution to the existence of political
and economic inequality, the figurative location of honeybees in move-
ments rich in both poetic symbolism and appeals to natural law made
7 “THE IDEAS ARE IN THE AIR”: FROM DRONE BEES TO HONEY WOMEN… 113
them ambiguous enough to communicate to the convergent ideologemes

drawn into the phenomenon of Chartism.
The second half of this chapter seeks to respond to the paradoxical use
of male drone bees by male Chartists to naturalise a set of political reforms
that explicitly excluded women from enfranchisement. Here, I read colo-
nial Australian representations of New Women as beekeepers as arguments
supportive of women’s suffragism in the late 1890s. If cultural paradoxes
might be said to work by transforming social contradictions into mytholo-
gies that succeed by rendering themselves invisible, then Mary Gaunt’s
and Ada Cambridge’s transformation of beekeeping into a romantic activ-
ity with democratic connotations was equal to Chartism in eschewing an
apparent affinity between feminist labour and the asexuality of female
working bees. In Kirkham’s Find (1897) and “A Sweet Day” (1897),
Gaunt and Cambridge construct two heroic “honey women” whose abil-
ity to control honeybees and thereby produce, market and export their
own honey is used to romanticise the ideology of an emergent colonial
Australian democracy inclusive of economically productive white women.
But both romances strategically work to deescalate patriarchal concerns
that women’s enfranchisement would render the feminine body undesir-
able by pairing the autonomy women achieve through the labour of bee-
keeping with their increased sex appeal and commitment to the romantic
codes of heteronormativity.
This is not to contend that nineteenth-century suffrage movements
avoided using bees to denaturalise the patriarchal organisation of social
hierarchy in human society. As Diane Rodgers has shown elsewhere, the
drone bee’s futility beyond sexuality constituted a central topos in the
lectures and essays of pioneering suffragettes like Lydia Becker.3 While
drone bees were associated in the classical period with effeminacy, waste,
theft, and social despoliation, they came to constitute a significant prob-
lem to human and honeybee analogies when early histologists first discov-
ered the drone-bee’s testicles and penis. In The Book of Nature (1734), Jan
Swammerdam launches the modern argument that it was “erroneous,” as
his translator puts it, to call the male bee a drone owing to his possession
of a penis.4 Manhood, in this respect, gave him an equal place alongside
“the queen herself, the female parent.”5 “To this might be added,” con-
tinued Swammerdam, “that the drone is more tractable and mild in dispo-
sition” compared to the other bees, as he employs his “whole time” not in
indolence, but in what Swammerdam aptly described as “the labour of
love.”6 Following Swammerdam, the early eighteenth-century beekeeper
114 C. HARRINGTON
Joseph Warder redubbed the drone bee in The True Amazons (1712)
“noble creature” which “I shall no longer call the drone.”7 And across the
English Channel, Francophone naturalists appear to have also begun using
the term “fake-drone,” or faux-Bourdon, when discussing the male bee.8
The sexing of the drone bee established a vulnerability, prompting male
naturalists and male beekeepers to reposition him in ways more compati-
ble with contemporary assumptions about male superiority.
The continued use of the term “drone” after the revelations of
seventeenth-century histology can, however, be connected to the patholo-
gisation the drone bee underwent in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century natural history. During this period, a widening interest in insect
anatomy, spurred on by the popularity of Linnaean taxonomy, and further
compounded by the emergence of comparative zoology in France, fore-
grounded the relationship between insect physiology and behavioural
ability. Chief among the physiological structures of interest was the cor-
bicula or pollen-basket possessed by working bees. The corbicula is a
spoon-like cavity situated between the tibiae and basitarsus of the hind
legs of worker bees. It works with the auricle and rastellum as a type of
press that provides workers with the means of transporting pollen from
flowers to hive while flying. The complexity of these baskets was described
by R. A. F. Réaumur in book 5 of his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des
insectes (1740), Gilles August Bazin in his Natural History of Bees (1744),
Thomas Wildman in his Treatise on the Management of Bees (1770), was
drawn by the microscopist Christine Jurine in book 2 of François Huber’s
New Observations on Bees, and was discussed by William Kirby in his
Monographia apum Angliæ (1802).9 While drone bees possess larger eyes,
wings and longer antennae than working bees, they lack the articulated
anatomy that constitutes the pollen basket.10 The drone’s lack of a cor-
bicula, when combined with an awareness of the drone bee’s other ana-
tomical deficiencies (diminutive mandibles, reduced sucker, smaller brain,
and absence of a sting), seemed to indicate that he served no purpose
beyond sex.
The new awareness of the drone’s physiological deficiencies coincided
with the development of modern techniques of observing the social
behaviour performed by working bees within the hive. The construction
of rationalised beehives from the Enlightenment onwards began to spot-
light what came to be seen as an organised social massacre performed by
the working bees. In France, Réaumur and Hélène Dumoustier utilised
specially designed glass observational hives to observe how the ordinary
bees “declare a cruel war on the drones,” noting that “for three to four
days” they engage in a “terrible killing.”11 Sympathetic to the drone’s
plight, Réaumur enlisted the help of a French military engineer and
invented ingenious trap doors designed to grant the drone a means of
escaping the hive during times of working caste discontent.12 Such inven-
tiveness also stirred the imagination of the Genevan naturalist François
Huber who constructed a glass platform to be placed at the very bottom
of the hive, and under which one could lie and observe what happened at
the very base of the beehive. Huber, working with his wife Marie and
research assistant Burnes, “saw the workers actually massacre the males …
The glass table was covered with bees full of animation, which flew upon
the drones as they came from the bottom of the hive; [they] seized them
by the antennae, the limbs, and the wings, and after having dragged them
about, or, so to speak, after quartering them, they killed them by repeated
stings directed between the rings of the belly. The moment that this for-
midable weapon reached them was the last of their existence; they stretched
their wings and expired.”13
Huber’s New Observations appeared in English in the aftermath of the
French Revolution, and this event brought a dramatic new context to the
termination of the drone bee’s life. In the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the physiological and sociological implications of Enlightenment
entomology, like that of Réaumur and Huber, converged with the tradi-
tional use of honeybees as a means of promoting industrial discipline by
essentialising labour identity, and this created a logical problem for popu-
larising naturalists in Britain. A desire arose to focus on physiological
structures like the corbicula, which essentialised class, but this required
naturalists to simultaneously distance readers from the extermination of
drone bees in order not to also be seen as essentialising revolutionary
natures. The second illustration in James Duncan’s “pennies not pounds”
Natural History of Bees (1840) is an illustration of the worker bee’s cor-
bicula.14 While Duncan presents a diluted version of Huber’s drone mas-
sacre, he frames it in Malthusian terms as a “preventative check” to a
“superabundant population”.15 In James Rennie’s Insect Miscellanies
(1831), a work of rational recreation directed at a working-class audience,
Huber’s account of drone massacres comes with the cautious note that
such a phenomenon “appears to be so very an unnatural proceeding” and
that if it were not for the “authority” of Huber “we should almost reject
it as chimerical.”16 The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge did
not bother to mention the seasonal killing of drones in their pocket-sized
116 C. HARRINGTON
Insect Manufactures (1847), but its anonymous author did make sure to
publish an elaborate illustration of the corbicula, as it added to the text’s
focus on providing the poorest of naturalists with another image of indus-
try in nature for them to replicate in the manufactory.17 In gendered works
of natural history like Priscilla Wakefield’s An Introduction to the Natural
History and Classification of Insects (1816), Acheta Domestica’s Episodes
In Insect Life (1849) and Margaret Gatty’s Parables of Nature (1855), the
drone bee’s extermination is ignored in favour of a conceit about the
errors of working-class disobedience, with a sinister old witch bee who
incites the bees to rebel, and drones who are playfully teased and pinched
out of the hive by the worker bees.18
Some beekeepers and naturalists did, however, seek to establish a posi-
tive zoological link between humans and bees in a manner that gestured
towards the potentially radical implications of contemporary natural his-
tory. In Robert Huish’s pugnacious and often erroneous Treatise on Bees,
which was first published in 1815 but reissued during the height of
Chartism, an economic connection is established between drone anatomy,
contemporary notions of luxury and indolence, and the necessity of exter-
minating creatures seen as being incapable of working. The drone bee is
introduced by Huish to the reader as the spectacle of “the extraordinary
phenomenon in nature, of a creature arrived at full maturity, and unable to
produce the necessary means of its subsistence. The drones have no trian-
gular cavities on their legs in which to collect farina [pollen]; in fact, they
appear by nature to be exempted from all kinds of labour, she having
refused to them the proper instruments requisite for it; their life appears
to be one of luxury and amusement.”19 “Appears” and “refused” are key
terms in this passage, as Huish will continue on in his Treatise to detail the
terminus of the drone bee’s life and propose that humans should actively
participate in drone massacres. Huish contends that the “state of agitation
and inquietude in which the bees are placed at the time of the massacre of
drones, obstructs them greatly in their daily labour, and consequentially, a
great quantity of honey is lost which would have been amassed during that
period. We are therefore of the opinion that the bees should be assisted in
this undertaking, by the apiarian watching at the entrance of the hive, and
with a small spatula, killing every drone which appears.”20
Huish’s advocacy for drone extermination can be situated within a
broader socio-political context because he was also the author of The
History of the Private and Political Life of the Late Henry Hunt (1836) and
the editor of the Memoires of the Late William Cobbett (1836). Both
Huish’s Life of Hunt and Memoires of Cobbett illustrate the rhetorical

movement drone bees underwent in the radical political climate of early
nineteenth-century Britain. In the Life of Hunt, the Tory politician William
Pitt the Younger and his allies are frequently described as the “drones” of
“the hive,” creatures living “at the expense and by the labour of the people
at large.”21 Pittite repression of suffrage movements during the French
Revolution was particularly nefarious, but so too was the introduction of
taxation policies that many viewed as targeting the poor. Such legislation
must have been created by a “non-producing set of drones, and who, like
those insects, are of no other use in the hive of society, than to propagate
their species.”22 If these drones “were extinct altogether,” remarked
Huish, it “would be one of the greatest blessings.”23 In contrast, the
Memoires of Cobbett frame Cobbett’s rise to political popularity by com-
paring him to a type of manly Queen bee loved by the workers and despised
by the drones. Cruising with his daughter in a buggy to make a dash at
election in 1820, Cobbett is swarmed by the local villagers pouring out
from their homes “like bees swarming from the hive,” in order “to meet
the great man.”24 And Huish ends the story of Cobbett’s life romantically,
with Ebenezer Eliot’s “Elegy on William Cobbett” (1836), which features
a cluster of sweet “bees murmuring near” the “wild flowers” that adorn
Cobbett’s grave.25
Huish’s introduction of drones into his histories of Cobbett and Hunt
might be mistaken as rhetorical flourish, but these drones are a reflection
of contemporary political rhetoric. In Hunt’s and Cobbett’s respective
journalism, letters and published speeches, the popular image of the politi-
cal beehive monopolised by those “slothful though crafty drones” swal-
lowing up “the honey collected by the industrious bees” became a visual
tool they used to communicate with the working poor about the necessity
for socio-political reform.26 In Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register
(1802–1836), the reintroduction of paper money in the 1820s is attacked
by Cobbett in an open letter “To Labouring Classes” (1823) as conveying
“the earnings of labour away from the laborious to the idle,” that is, “from
the bees to the drones.”27 The same analogy is deployed by Cobbett in his
open letter “To the King” (1827), in his article on the “Corn Laws”
(1834) and in “The Remedy” (1831) an elaborate “fable of the bees” is
told in which the indolent drones have now become too lazy to steal the
honey themselves, and now employ “an army of wasps to do it for them.”28
This generic conflict between bees and drones is refined by Cobbett in
Rural Rides (1832) to describe specific social institutions condemned by
118 C. HARRINGTON
Cobbett for their exclusionary indolent ignorance about the poverty that
sustains their existence. Gazing down on Oxford University, for example,
Cobbett reports that “upon beholding the masses of buildings” devoted
“to what they call ‘learning’ I could not help reflecting on the drones that
they contain and the wasps they send forth! … Stand forth, ye big-wigged,
ye glorious feeding doctors! Stand forth, ye rich of that church whose poor
have given them a hundred thousand pounds a year, not of your riches, but
out of the taxes, raised, in part, from the salt of the labouring man!”29
Cobbett’s apicultural metaphor linking higher education to the embryo-
genesis of social pestilence works effectively to educate the working poor
by positing that the higher education system of Oxford is benefitting from
their own economic oppression.
Popular apiculture gifted Cobbett and other radical populists with a
powerful means of visualising social inequality by grounding it in nature,
but it is important to further recognise that the emergence of the drone
bee in the nineteenth-century political discourse constituted a defensive
response to traditional invective designed by a born-aristocracy to silence
communal voices. The speeches of Henry Hunt foreground how appeals
to natural law and natural history were frequently used by radicals as figu-
rative reprisals crafted not to instigate violence but to defend the symboli-
cally downtrodden in a figurative struggle that frequently centred on the
politics of classification. In Hunt’s “Speech to the radicals of Bolton”
(1819), which was composed from prison after the Peterloo Massacre, the
‘DRONE’ emerges as a defensive response to Edmund Burke’s “swinish
multitude,” and it is positioned within a hierarchically driven taxonomical
discourse (“the lower orders”) designed to collapse the conceptual bound-
aries separating social class from biotic classification to serve those pos-
sessed of entitlement:
I must call upon you, my friends of Bolton, to teach me how to make

amends for your individual kindness and devotion. Say the word, and I will
risk my life to serve you! The splendid specimens of your industry and tal-
ent, which you have presented to me, shall be publicly exhibited as a monu-
ment to the useful character of radical ingenuity, and as a mark of infamy to
those slothful DRONES who have impudently dared to brand you the
degrading epithet of “swinish multitude” (of the pensioned Burk), the
“lower orders” of the descendant of a scotch pedlar, and the still more
impudent assertion of the mushroom-spawn of the greenroom, that the
Radicals were “a low, degraded crew” … We will teach these slothful titled
drones, these mushroom Right Honourables, that the Radicals are not such
a “low, degraded crew.”30
Hunt’s comparison of “titled drones” to fungi, organisms lumped together

by Linnaeus with algae, lichen, and moss, and negatively associated with
decay, darkness, cemeteries, death, and coprophagia, reverses traditional
hierarchies by positioning the aristocracy at the very base of the kingdom
of nature. Much like Cobbett’s description of Oxford University, Hunt
uses natural history to reclaim the ideologies of education and knowledge,
the assumed prerogative of an enlightened gentry. Growing popular
knowledge about the drone bee foregrounded the fallacy of authoritarian
didacticism, and signposted that there was a new lesson to be disseminated
about honeybees.
The abundance of bees we find in the dialogues of radicals like Cobbett
and Hunt contradicts the critical perception that bees underwent figura-
tive distancing in early nineteenth-century democratic thought owing to
the political violence that emerged during the French Revolution.
According to some scholars of Romanticism, this event apparently exposed
the error of conflating bees with humans in British culture, because “not
only was the very symbol of Napoleon’s emperorship” a bee, “honey
became rapidly linked with the cannibalism trope widely used to depict the
Terror.”31 The poetry of Romantics like William Cowper, Robert Southey,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, therefore, illustrates a
figurative revaluation of the meaning of bees and honey in industrial soci-
ety, with Cowper framing the bee as a symbol of “consumerist greed,”
Coleridge negatively noting that the “German word for fanaticism is
derived from the swarming of bees,” and Southey repudiating the “busy,
busy” nature of the bee as “narrow, mechanical” and “miserly.”32 However
appropriate such distancing may have been with respect to radical-cum-
conservative poets like Southey and Coleridge, to describe the use of bees
in the following quatrain from Shelley’s “Song to the Men of England”
(1819) as “cynical” and designed to “call into question the organic anal-
ogy between human and apian society” is to ignore Shelley’s awareness of
just how toxic the deterministic logic of comparative zoology could
become when directed at a working-class audience recovering from the
Peterloo Massacre:
Wherefore, Bees of England, forge

Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
120 C. HARRINGTON
That these stingless drones may spoil

The forced produce of your toil.33
Shelley’s “Bees of England” is hardly a cynical anthropocentric poem

crafted to goad the “Men of England” into realising they are men and not
bees. The poem’s andromorphic and anti-nationalistic (“England be your
sepulchre”) sensibility, its oscillation between working man and working
bee, its rhetorical questions, and its emasculating tone, are designed to
universalise revolution by foregrounding a contradiction in culture that
the bees have recognised in nature, namely that the drones are “stingless.”
The poem’s meaning is reliant on a working-class knowledge of compara-
tive zoology, and it reflects Shelley’s awareness that bees were becoming
integral to radical working-class popularism in the early nineteenth century.
Shelley’s radicalisation of bees in “Men of England” should be thought
of as interdiscursive, that is, as a response to apiculture’s pre-existence
within the popular mindset of an emergent working class. As the radical
popularism of the Peterloo-period metamorphosed into the Chartism of
the early Victorian period, the apicultural discourse utilised by Henry
Hunt and William Cobbett was transformed and expanded to speak to the
working-class populations of Britain, particularly those in the north where
the abuse of industrial capitalism was being most viciously felt. In the
Northern Star (1837–1852), a leading Chartist newspaper owned and
edited by the Irish Chartist Feargus O’Connor, the figurative bifurcation
between drones and bees would be significantly expanded via the estab-
lishment of a language of bees that enabled readers of the Northern Star
to imagine their place within the political reform being envisioned by the
Chartists. The article “The Damnable Act” (1838), which was published
to gather momentum for the circulation of the first big attempt at the
“People’s Charter,” illustrates the Northern Star’s turn to popular apicul-
ture via the creation of the “Northern Hive.” “Let Anti-Poor Law and
Universal Suffrage Associations be formed in every city, town and village
throughout the Northern Hive,” proclaims the author in a pseudo-biblical
style, and “We will shortly call upon each to send a representative to
Leeds” and “after which, we shall expect the hive to swarm, when summer
comes in order to sting the drones.”34 The same deterministic logic of
apiculture was reiterated by O’Connor in his public speeches throughout
the year of 1838. Those “drones who fatten upon the people’s industry,”
exclaimed O’Connor to an audience at Bristol, were to be driven “from
the hive,” he repeated to audiences in Halifax, Bolton, and Nottingham.35
This recurrent promise to banish the drones was reportedly greeted with
“(cheers)” and “(repeated cheers).”36 Building up to the infamous
“monster-swarm” on Kersal moor in September 1838, the Northern Star
informs its readers that “Lancashire is about to redeem its former charac-
ter on the 24th of this month. Upon that day the Northern line will swarm
and sting the drones, who have for many seasons been consuming their
honey.”37
The language of bees utilised in the Northern Star may appear to con-
temporary readers as playful and comic, but it was also sophisticated in
simultaneously speaking to the competing ideologies at work within the
emergent Chartist movement. On the one hand, the discourse of bees,
drones, hives, swarms, honey, and stings could be translated by moral-
force chartists into symbolic activity devoid of any material reality. The
purpose of the meeting on Kersal Moor in 1839 was to elect delegates to
a National Convention that would help organise a National Petition, or
People’s Charter, to be presented to Parliament in the following year. The
symbolism of “stinging the drones” could signify the activity of pens sign-
ing petitions, the election of representatives, and the effect that demo-
cratic reform would have in removing a privileged minority of “drones”
from the political hive. On the other hand, the violence implied by “sting-
ing the drones” provided physical-force Chartists with an effective means
of expressing threats of revolutionary violence in a language that would be
rendered absurd at their following trials for riot and sedition. Peter Murray
McDouall, a Scottish surgeon and outspoken physical-force Chartist
imprisoned in 1839 for purchasing muskets and telling an assembly of
radicals that “50 determined people could capture the country” by seizing
the “arms at the Tower of London,” frequently turned to the language of
bees to naturalise his desire for armed political insurrection.38 At the end
of a lecture given on the “Rights of Labour” in 1841, McDouall con-
cludes by informing his listeners to consider the “bees” which, “after they
have laboured the whole summer, and perceive that the drones increase—
they assemble, march them out and destroy them, because if they did not
do that, they would soon eat all up.”39 Here, the aetiological movement
from assembled gathering to collective marching, to the necessity of vio-
lence, establishes a literal connection to the findings of contemporary
entomology in order to naturalise advocacy for armed militancy.
The emergence and collapse of Chartism in mid-century Britain was
met by numerous literary responses designed to conciliate with but redi-
rect working-class discontent into a controllable and conservative avenue.
122 C. HARRINGTON
This helps explain the ubiquity of honeybee and drone bee metaphors that
appear in social problem novels like Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1844) and
Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1849). In the second half of this chapter,
however, I want to consider the appearance of honeybees and beekeeping
in late nineteenth-century colonial Australian literature during the wom-
en’s suffrage movement. The emergence and success of women’s suffrage
activism in colonial Australia and New Zealand during the 1890s was the
result of a conglomeration of individual, social, and political movements,
one of which encompassed the literary culture of colonial fiction. Popular
colonial literature, as Susan Lever has noted, constituted a significant node
in contemporary debates about women’s suffrage and the location of
women in colonial politics, because fiction granted women an acceptable
platform in the 1890s, enabling women to “enter the debate about social
change and women’s rights,” to “speculate about the possibilities of a
more liberated future,” and to do so in a manner capable of registering the
contradictory gender ideals at work in colonial society.40 I suggest the
ostensible backgrounding of contemporary issues like suffragism reap-
pears in literature when we consider the political implications embodied in
the representation of women as beekeepers in Mary Gaunt’s Kirkham’s
Find and Ada Cambridge’s “A Sweet Day.”
Ada Cambridge’s “A Sweet Day” was published multiple times through-
out 1897 and 1898, appearing first in a collection of short stories (At
Midnight and Other Stories) and then in the regional South Australian
newspaper The Narracoorte Herald, and subsequently in the popular The
Australian Country and Town Journal.41 Here, it entered a literary culture
at work in debating suffragettism by generating competing and highly
stereotyped images of the New Woman as demonic, angelic, progressive,
and degenerate. Ostensibly an apolitical, romantic work of domestic fic-
tion, “A Sweet Day” is told from the perspective of the politically entitled
British aristocrat, Lord Thomas de Bohun (known comically as Mr. Bone),
who meets, falls in love with, and marries the colonial beekeeper Letty
Kemp—all in one sweet day. What, however, Lord Bone comes to admire
and desire in Letty, both intellectually and erotically, concerns the political
commitment to social prosperity embodied in Letty’s beekeeping and the
seductive nature of Letty’s labour, which is used to romantically circum-
vent conventional notions of feminine beauty and passivity. In “A Sweet
Day,” Cambridge uses the physical activity of beekeeping to construct an
erotic environment in which women’s political enfranchisement, labour
empowerment, and professional independence are positioned to be
encouraged by a heteronormative masculine gaze because such attributes

are shown to enhance the sexual desirability of women.
From the beginning of “A Sweet Day,” it is the physiological expression
of Letty Kemp’s labour as a beekeeper that undergoes visual eroticisation.
Letty is first viewed voyeuristically by a semi-naked Lord Bone, and from
a position redolent of Jean-Leon Gerome’s contemporary painting
“Bathsheba at Her Bath” (1895). Letty appears before his patriarchal gaze
adorned in a beekeeping costume he describes suggestively as an “all-
embracing tight apron” (p. 259).42 Her work uniform is shown in no way
to impede upon Lord Bone’s gaze. The imagery of Letty labouring within
it as she lifts her heavy beehives about better reveals the contours of “her
supple body” (p. 260), just as the romantic early morning sunrise, which
is connected to Letty’s appearance at work before anyone else, “lighted up
her figure so effectively” (p. 259). The erotic implications of Lord Bone’s
lust for Letty’s labouring body are skilfully intensified by Cambridge when
he offers to work for Letty in the honey house: a tight, sticky, and messy
space, where, according to Lord Bone, the “situation was—well, notice-
able” (p. 264). The hot atmosphere of the honey house and the cramped
nature of the labour establishes physical “attitudes” (p. 267), along with a
figurative intimacy between bees, honey, labour, and other bodily secre-
tions: “Letty’s hot face lighted up at the sight of him. Beads of perspira-
tion lay like dew on her clear eyes, and over her pretty lips” (p. 269). In
the honey house, Letty’s physical excretion of sweat transforms the mun-
dane imagery of industrial work into the honeyed spectacle of feminine
industry, and it exemplifies Cambridge’s use of beekeeping to represent
labour as a sexually attractive activity.
Cambridge’s eroticisation of labour should not, however, be conceived
as an end in itself, because it is coupled with her discreet commitment to
contemporary suffragism via the politicised representation of Letty’s bee-
keeping as an egalitarian activity tied to nation building and social prosper-
ity. When the politically entitled Lord Bone enters the honey house to
work for Letty, he is symbolically stripped of patriarchal authority and
repositioned in a state of infantile vulnerability before her bees. His fear of
these insects, which threaten to crawl into his underpants (“under the
hems of his trousers” (p. 263)), is slowly supplanted by trust and respect
when he observes Letty’s courage and skill in management. Loss of power
combined with the fear of castration better positions conservative readers
to learn how Letty’s beekeeping is driven by neither hostility towards men
nor self-interest, but broader social, financial, and political concerns about
124 C. HARRINGTON
the modernising Australian economy. Lord Bone becomes “oddly touched,

and more interested and amused than he had ever been in his life” when
Letty explains how “wool is down and cattle selling for nothing, and the
value of [her family’s farm] is dropped to less than what they are mort-
gaged for; therefore something must be done” (p. 264). When Lord Bone
listens to Letty’s political ideology, his sexual desire for her body is strate-
gically conflated with her political and social idealism, and it becomes hard
for him, along with readers, to disentangle the two—hence the “oddity”
with which he listens to a young woman he originally just wanted to sexu-
ally harass in the customary fashion of the Victorian gentleman. He thus
becomes doubly “touched” to “see a pretty girl regarding her destiny
from such a point of view … She really wanted to work, and not to flirt—
to do something for men, instead of being done by them” (p. 266).
The idea of being enabled to do something for one’s self so that one
can thereby do something for society is essential to the mythology of par-
ticipatory democracy, and Cambridge further uses beekeeping to embed
this ideology within a larger network of representations positing that
women’s enfranchisement would not denote a departure from conven-
tional gender norms. When, for example, Lord Bone informs Letty that he
has a ten-month-old baby in London, Letty is quick to take a maternal
interest in the child, arguing that it is unnatural for a baby not to be raised
by its parents, and educating Lord Bone about the various diseases
neglected infants are liable to catch when not shown the appropriate
maternal attention. While eating breakfast Letty croons over her honey,
shoving it into Lord Bone’s maw in a maternal fashion, and in the evening
Letty entertains Lord Bone in a domestic setting by playing him a charm-
ing intermezzo on the family piano. The colonial antifeminist stereotype
of the New Woman as a beer-guzzling feral and committed misandrist is
averted via Letty’s nocturnal display of cultural refinement. Her work as a
beekeeper is shown to be compatible with the performance of maternal
ideologies and traditional feminine accomplishments, and the perverse
Lord Bone is granted an interior view of the New Woman and her “many-
sided excellence” (p. 273).
It will most likely appear unsurprising to readers familiar with the syn-
thetic nature of romantic fiction that Lord Bone is shown to lack Letty’s
“many-sided excellence.” Although introduced by Cambridge as anything
but “a roue and a reprobate” (p. 253), this is clearly a display of comic
irony on Cambridge’s behalf, because Lord Bone later admits to having
“admired” “thousands of pretty women” in “his time” (p. 274). Unlike
the industrious and virginal Letty, he has never worked a day in his life,
terms the baby he has abandoned to go “kangaroo hunting” in colonial
Australia a “brat” (p. 267), views his two former wives (one who died in
childbirth) as cold because of their apparent dislike of children, and he
describes Letty’s mother Mrs. Kemp as a “faded old woman” full of “bab-
ble” (p. 273) when she appears akin to him with respect to age and con-
versational aptitude. All that Lord Bone can be said to possess is a penis
and some political status, or the born parliamentary entitlement of a
British aristocrat. But it is exactly this form of political entitlement that
Cambridge’s beekeeping New Woman lacks and seeks to symbolically
obtain through romantic synthesis.
This same use of romance to narrate the political ascendance of the
New Woman is employed by Mary Gaunt in her beekeeping novel
Kirkham’s Find. But as a much longer narrative structure beekeeping is
employed by Gaunt to both romantically position the New Woman in the
contemporary debate about women’s suffrage, and to realistically repre-
sent apiculture as a welcoming profession through which women can
achieve economic, political, and emotional empowerment. At the start of
Kirkham’s Find, Gaunt’s romantic hero Phoebe Marsden is unflatteringly
introduced to readers as ugly, plain, and slovenly, lacking in self-esteem,
and doomed at the age of twenty-five to become an impoverished spin-
ster.43 Phoebe’s purchase of three colonies of bees is used to plot an escape
from confinement to spinsterhood in a domestic space governed by a
morose patriarch unsympathetic to contemporary ideas about women’s
equality. These three hives are shown to yield 35 pounds of honey. Phoebe
harvests this honey and sells it to Ballarat cake shops, green-grocers, and
fruiteries. The profits made from these sales are promptly reinvested by
Phoebe in “bee necessities”: modern frame hives, smokers, bee books, and
a honey extractor. The prices of all these items, along with where to buy
them, are detailed by Gaunt, and Phoebe is depicted woodworking, read-
ing contemporary apicultural literature in church, corresponding with the
real beekeeping specialist A.I. Root, ordering Queen bees from
H.L. Jones’s “bee stud” in Queensland, and haggling with shopkeepers
over the price of her honey. The professional nature of Phoebe’s behav-
iour, which is initially represented as deviant, is slowly normalised by
Gaunt, and when Phoebe decides to leave home in order to start a bee
farm, the reader is positioned to recognise that pre-marital mobility
beyond the domestic sphere is necessitated by motives beneficial to wom-
en’s well-being. Incrementally, Phoebe’s bee colonies grow from three to
126 C. HARRINGTON
six, to twenty, to thirty-two, to ninety, and by the novel’s close Phoebe is

depicted as a content and economically independent New Woman living
in a progressive community open to discussing contemporary issues like
women’s suffrage.
The radical and potentially queer implications of Phoebe’s transforma-
tion into an independent beekeeper who has escaped the phallogocentric
plotting of middle-class femininity are strategically downplayed by Gaunt
when she, like Cambridge, uses beekeeping to contend that women’s eco-
nomic and political equality will not impede upon traditional gender
norms. What is shown to separate Phoebe from her petulant and impulsive
younger sister Nancy, thus making her a better beekeeper but also poten-
tially a better mother, concerns the maternal care Phoebe performs while
tending her bees. Phoebe refuses Nancy’s request to extract too much
honey from her beehives too early in the honey season because she rightly
fears it would prove harmful to brood development. Phoebe constructs
shelters to support her bees from rain, and she decides to depart with her
bees from home when her father threatens to drown her bees. Likewise,
Phoebe’s business of hawking honey in the back-alleys of regional Ballarat,
which is initially perceived by her family to undermine the genteel mythol-
ogy of the “lady,” paradoxically reinscribes those very gender ideals, when
Phoebe realises that the success of her honey business may be dependent
upon exploiting the underlying sex appeal of her middle-class femininity.
Phoebe “would dare to offer her honey for sale,” but she would do so in
a bright new dress of “blue gingham” and with a matching “sailor hat”
adorned with a “band of broad blue ribbon round it” (p. 78). A “new
dress she must have,” because “something told her to be as well dressed as
possible” (p. 78). This “something” proves to be correct, as Phoebe is
repeatedly depicted in Kirkham’s Find as succeeding in business by appeas-
ing the perverted gazes of middle-class men like the Warrnambool Real
Estate Agent Mr. Smith. He, like nearly all the gatekeepers Phoebe
encounters, decides to assist Phoebe primarily because of her sex appeal.
He “thought this young woman” who wore a “close fitting tweed dress,”
which “set off her figure to advantage,” a “very charming young person
indeed” (p. 141).
Phoebe’s ascent to a position of autonomy in the world is shown not to
detract from but enhance the heteronormative codes of romantic desire,
and this is a point ingeniously constructed by Gaunt so that sexual desire
is amalgamated to the New Woman and the associated ideology of wom-
en’s suffragism. Indeed, Kirkham’s Find is powered by the romantic idea
that there is a transformative relationship between women’s political

autonomy and feminine beauty. Phoebe’s conservative mother is first
made to register this when an argument with Phoebe about beekeeping
and women’s liberation (“the ideas are in the air” [p. 81]) provokes
Phoebe into a feminist rage that reveals her to be “beautiful,” a “truly”
“good-looking” woman, but only when “there was nothing girlish about
her” (p. 81). Josiah Sampson, the wealthy lawyer and suffragette who
finances Phoebe’s bee farm, translates Mrs. Marsden’s glimpse of Phoebe’s
feminist beauty into the more direct expression of sexual attraction for the
New Woman. Unlike Phoebe’s father, who resents the physiognomic simi-
larity he shares with his daughter and is thereby incapable of recognising
their psychological similarities, and unlike Phoebe’s brother Stanley, who
compares feminism to vomit because he fears women’s progress will
remove the entitlement he has received from birth, Sampson finds
Phoebe’s beekeeping feminist ideology sexy: “how attractive I think you,
and how attractive many another man would think you if he only got the
chance to know you as I do” (p. 132). His desire for Phoebe is used by
Gaunt to present readers with the argument that the cultural inability to
view women as simultaneously strong and sexy is a masculine failing. “No
man worth calling a man,” contends Sampson while doting on Phoebe’s
Artemisian visage, “will look down on a woman because, instead of drift-
ing along with folded hands, she sets out against many odds to make a
place for herself in the world” (p. 132). Such men “ought to be well
spanked” (p. 132).
Phoebe’s sexual desirability is made to increase in conjunction with the
success of her beekeeping and the broader project of autonomy tethered
to it, so that by the close of the novel readers are presented with a “honey
woman” (p. 88) who bears no resemblance to her original “plain” self.
The novel’s “hero” Ned Kirkham, who originally displays no interest in
Phoebe, desiring her flirtatious sister Nancy and conforming to the con-
ventional view of Phoebe as euphemistically “plain,” returns from the
genocidal violence of the colonial frontier to discover Phoebe transformed
into a queenly and mysteriously sexy beekeeper: “Could this young hand-
some woman be Phoebe Marsden?” He “could hardly believe it possible
that any woman could have improved so.” She was “good looking” but
also “strong willed,” a “perfect woman” with “true, honest dark eyes,”
and a woman who “carried her head as she had been a princess of the
blood royal” (p. 180). Her “firm mouth and chin; those white even teeth
told of strength of will and force of character,” but “that smile on her lips
128 C. HARRINGTON
showed she was a woman still, a woman to be wooed and won, a woman
well worth winning” (p. 193). Phoebe’s physical and moral “perfection,”
like Cambridge’s construction of Letty’s “many sided excellence,” is ulti-
mately grafted onto a body designed to represent the desirable New
Woman and colonial suffragist. In both stories, beekeeping becomes
essential to romanticising this ideology.
If, as I contended at the outset of this chapter, Chartism and colonial
Australian suffragism were paradoxical in using honeybees to erect diver-
gent political fantasies, it should not seem too surprising given the way
that honeybee biology inverts the sociology of patriarchy. The working-
class men who made up the bulkhead of Chartism were more like female
insects because they existed as politically emasculated semi-subaltern
beings whose ability to speak became ironically tethered to an affirmation
of their own industrial emasculation. They were unlike women, both
working-class, middle-class, and aristocratic women, in that their labour
was seldom if ever viewed sexually (the case of homosexual labour forms a
very rare and unacknowledged exception) by the men who governed
them. The masculine appeal to the violence performed by a caste of sexless
female insects must have, paradoxically, seemed quite logical, especially
given the limited nature of interclass communication and the way that an
animalising rhetoric was already being used to represent egalitarianism as
irrelevant, deviant, and suspicious.
In colonial Australia, the middle- to upper-class white women who
made up the bulkhead of suffragism held a much different relationship to
power and performed a very different type of labour compared to Chartist
men. Women and their reproductive sexuality were assumed to be essen-
tial to the operative logic of patriarchy, which lacks a womb and seeks to
ensure access to one by instituting political asymmetries imposed on
women at the level of culture. Colonial suffragists thereby differed signifi-
cantly from their Chartist counterparts, because women’s labour was to be
treated as invisible by the men who governed society. “Sex work,” to con-
clude by way of an example, was seldom if ever viewed by late Victorian
society as a legitimate form of work. It was individualised as prostitution
and psychopathologised as an atavistic form of moral degeneracy, and yet
many middle-class suffragists openly compared their domesticated identi-
ties to a form of sex work, so that when women sought to render them-
selves visible as political subjects, the appeal to the asexual industry of the
working bee would have proved counterintuitive.
Notes
1. The first paragraph in this chapter appeared as a query in Notes and Queries
(2018): 263–264.
2. Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996), 186; Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian
Writing and Political History (Durham: Duke University Press,
1991), 15–16.
3. Diane Rodgers, Debugging the Link Between Social Theory and Social Insects
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press), 47, 48.
4. Jan Swammerdam, The Book of Nature, translated by Thomas Flloyd (Soho:
C.G Seyferet, 1758), 166.
5. Swammerdam, The Book of Nature, 166.
6. Swammerdam, The Book of Nature, 166.
7. Joseph Warder, The True Amazons: Or The Monarchy of Bees (London:
Printed for Jack Pemberton, 1726), 5.
8. R.A.F. Réaumur, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes (Paris: De
I’imprimerie royale, 1734–1742), 5: 142; Charles Bonnet, Oeuvres
d’histoire naturelle et de philosophie (Neuchatel: L’imprimerie de Samuel
Fauche, 1781), 158–167; François Huber, Nouvelles observations sur les
Abeilles (Paris: J.J Paschoud, 1814), 1: 31.
9. Réaumur, 5: 338; Gilles August Bazin, The Natural History of Bees
(London: Printed for J. and P. Knapton 1744), plate 2; Thomas Wildman,
Treatise on the Management of Bees (London: Printed for the Author,
1768), 8; Huber, New Observations on the Natural History of Bees, 302;
William Kirby, Monographia apum Angliæ (Ipswich: Printed for the Author,
1802), 1: 210.
10. Ian Stell, Understanding Bee Anatomy (Middlesex: The Catford Press,
2012), 116–123; Robert Snodgrass, Anatomy of the Honey Bee (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1956), 108–112.
11. Réaumur, 5: 510: ‘cruelle guerre’ & ‘tuerie effroyable.’
12. Réaumur, 5: plate 35, Fig. 4.
13. Huber, 144.
14. James Duncan, The Natural History of Bees (Edinburgh: W.H Lizars,
1840), verso.
15. Duncan, 71.
16. James Rennie, Insect Miscellanies (London: Charles Knight, 1831), 261.
17. Anonymous, Insect Manufactures (London: Printed for the Society for the
Promoting of Christian Knowledge, 1847), 77.
18. Margaret Gatty, Parables from Nature (London: Bell and Daldy, 1865),
pp.18–33; Acheta Domestica, Episodes in Insect Life (New York: J.S
130 C. HARRINGTON
Redfield, 1851), 1:239; Priscilla Wakefield, An Introduction to the Natural

History and Classification of Insects (London: Printed for Darton, Harvey
and Darton, 1816), 118.
19. Robert Huish, Bees: Their Natural History and General Management
(London: Henry G Bohn, 1844), 96.
20. Robert Huish, 103–104.
21. Robert Huish, The History of the Private and Political Life of the Late Henry
Hunt (London: John Saunders, 1836), 238: ‘they seize with avidity, and
use without scruple, every shred and remnant of power which remains to
them, in order, like drones in a hive, to live at the expense of the people
at large.’
22. Huish, The Late Henry Hunt, 253.
23. Huish, The Late Henry Hunt, 253.
24. Robert Huish, Memoires of the Late William Cobbett (London: John
Saunders, 1836), 349.
25. Huish, Memoires of the Late William Cobbett, 474.
26. William Cobbett, ‘Summary of Politics,” Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register,
7 September, 1805, n.p., British Library Newspapers.
27. William Cobbett, ‘To the Labouring Classes,’ Cobbett’s Weekly Political
Register, 31 May, 1823, n.p., British Library Newspapers.
28. William Cobbett, “To the King,” Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 28
April, 1827, n.p., British Library Newspapers: ‘The saucy insolent drones
would no longer devour the fruit of the labour of the bee’; William
Cobbett, “Corn Laws,” Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 15 February,
1834, n.p., British Library Newspapers; “The Remedy,” Cobbett’s Weekly
Political Register, 26 November, 1831, n.p., British Library Newspapers.
29. William Cobbett, Rural Rides (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1832), 34.
30. Henry Hunt, To the Radical Reformers, Male and Female of England,
Ireland and Scotland (Ilchester Jail: Anonymous Publisher, 1820), 27–28.
31. Andrew Cooper, “The Appian Way: Virgil’s Bees and Keats’s Honeyed
Verse,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 33, no.2 (1991): 164.
32. Cooper, 165.
33. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy. To Which is Added, Queen
Liberty; Song—To the Men of England (London: J. Watson, 1842), 24.
34. Anonymous, “The Damnable Act,” Northern Star and Leeds General
Advertiser, 24 March, 1838, n.p., British Library Newspapers.
35. Anonymous, “Meeting of the Working Men’s Association at Bristol,”
Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 31 March, 1838, n.p., British
Library Newspapers; Anonymous, “Great Radical Meeting at Halifax,”
Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 4 August, 1838, n.p., British
Library Newspapers.
36. Anonymous, “Great Popular Demonstrations,” Northern Liberator, 10

November, 1838, n.p., British Library Newspapers.
37. Anonymous, “The Great Lancashire Meeting,” Northern Star and Leeds
General Advertiser, 1 September 1838, n.p., British Library Newspapers.
38. Ray Challinor, “Peter Murray McDouall and Physical Force Chartism,”
International Socialism vol.2 no.1 (1981). For natural law in McDouall’s
thought, see Ariane Schnepf, Our Original Rights as a People (Bern: Peter
Lang, 2006), 132.
39. Anonymous, “Chartist Intelligence,” Northern Star and Leeds General
Advertiser 13 February, 1841: n.p., British Library Newspapers.
40. Susan Lever, Real Relations: The Feminist Politics of Form in Australian
Fiction (New South Wales: Halstead Press, 2000), 1–18.
41. Ada Cambridge, “A Sweet Day” in At Midnight and Other Stories (London:
Ward Lock & Co., 1897); “ A Sweet Day,” The Narracoorte Herald
(Narracoorte, South Australia), 25 June, 1897, 1; “A Sweet Day”
Australian Town and Country Journal I ( Sydney, New South Wales), 6
August 1898, 32, and 16 August 1898, 32.
42. Cambridge, “A Sweet Day,” 259. From here on citations from “A Sweet
Day” will be given intext.
43. Mary Gaunt, Kirkham’s Find (London: Methuen and Co., 1897), 1–30.
From here on citations from Kirkham’s Find will be given intext.
CHAPTER 8
Housewives and Old Wives: Sex

and Superstition in English Beekeeping
Adam Ebert
Women occupy an ambiguous position in the history of English beekeep-

ing. Consider the words of seventeenth-century gentleman John Levett,
who categorized England’s beekeepers as the “unlearned and Country
people, especially good women.”1 A sprinkling of similar passages estab-
lished the idea that beekeeping was an overwhelmingly female responsibil-
ity.2 Over the centuries, it became automatic to defer to descriptions of
farmwives whose “pets were her cows, her poultry, her bees, and her flow-
ers.”3 Such statements rightly maintained a record of women’s centrality
in domestic production. Contemporaries, however, sometimes questioned
the quality of care that women provided their bees. Levett, for one, classi-
fied hives under the care of early modern women as a situation “much the
worse for the poore Bees.”4 By the later eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries, there was less assumption or evaluation of women frequently keeping
bees. Victorian commentaries and instructions about beekeeping centered
A. Ebert (*)
Ebert Honey LLC, Mount Vernon, IA, USA

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39570-3_8
134 A. EBERT
much more on male beekeepers. Nineteenth-century authors often did

not seem to regard beekeeping as a standard component within the scope
of women’s work. Why, and when, did these shifts occur? In view of the
uncertain relationship between humankind and the bees they kept, this
study will present a more complete analysis of how sex, class, practice, and
reform interrelated in English bee culture. Early modern evidence serves
as a foundational backdrop that contrasts with substantial evolutions that
unfolded during the long nineteenth century.5 Science and superstition
served as formative catalysts within the rhetoric of beekeeping reform and
influenced actual changes that transpired during the second half of the
nineteenth century. Beekeeping reform especially centered on the rise of
“scientific,” “enlightened,” or “rational” beekeeping as a movement away
from traditional straw hive beekeeping. Beekeepers that resisted or ignored
that reform agenda were prone to criticism as lost causes who were super-
stitious and backward. Such denunciations were not bereft of basis. There
was a culture of belief attributing supernatural meaning to certain behav-
iors of bees and a few rituals connected to their keeping. Consequently,
this case study analyzes how reform priorities intersected with sex and
practice during an era that, albeit slowly, witnessed actual changes in bee-
keeping practice amid broader shifts in cultural perceptions and identities
of men and women beekeepers.
This chapter concentrates on the popular side of beekeeping. It tracks
portrayals of men and women as beekeeping practitioners and the social
mores that framed them. Assessments of beekeepers who were not affluent
are especially important in the analysis. Many depictions of these beekeep-
ers come from reform-minded people that gained more significance
around the start of the nineteenth century. The reformers tended to be
economically advantaged, even if not wildly wealthy, and as a cohort they
held an array of passions. Their interests included the study of beekeeping
for scientific advancement, service in voluntary associations with philan-
thropic goals, and they often exhibited paternalistic mindsets aiming to
impart social and economic improvement of the poor. The main point of
interest for this chapter, however, involves the practices and depictions of
people engaged in beekeeping as it reexamines spheres of responsibility
during an era of extensive social transformation.
Bees belong to a category of “livestock” that has received limited atten-
tion from historians.6 When beekeeping has attracted academic commen-
tary, some conclusions, particularly about gendered labor and beekeeping,
have emerged without the support of an extensive review of source
8 HOUSEWIVES AND OLD WIVES: SEX AND SUPERSTITION IN ENGLISH… 135
material. For example, historian Nicola Verdon’s work on farmwives spe-

cifically places bees in the “province of the country housewife.”7 Sources
occasionally label beekeeping as a predominantly female pursuit, but how
historians should handle such statements is ripe for reconsideration. A
careful review of sources (c. 1600–1900) reveals evidence of male and
female beekeepers that fluctuated in their prominence and portrayal.8
Many of the texts consulted in this study belong to the literature of
early modern improvement and nineteenth-century scientific agriculture.
The popularization of beekeeping was compatible with their intentions of
economic and social advancement, though beekeeping was a recurrent
rather than universal topic. Reformist rhetoric influenced the portrayals of
the men and women they allegedly sought to instruct. While such rhetoric
offers insights into the mentalities of authors and reformist popularizers, it
also makes uncorroborated anecdotes and generalizations questionable.9
Cross-analysis of material published over three centuries helps to detect
how reform agendas influenced content at different times. In order to
support observations related to practice, and not strictly representation
and rhetoric, I integrate analysis based on the records of nineteenth-
century societies that tracked participation by name and sex.
This method supports a further purpose. As historian Jane Whittle
explained, “not all households contained women who spun, brewed,
baked and made butter and cheese.”10 Instead, more complex issues com-
plicate understanding of any component within the domestic realm. These
include “[t]he scale of production, relationship of each activity to the mar-
ket and how it changed over time requires investigation, as well as the
gender of workers.”11 The present study seeks to refine apiculture’s place
within the diversified and evolving notion of the household. It will also
consider how producers’ method of production reflected on their per-
ceived character. Therefore, this chapter includes analysis of how represen-
tations of “good housewives” compared to the figures of superstitious
“old wives” in the history of English beekeeping.
I shall begin with housewives. Early modern treatises on well-ordered
agriculture and domestic management sometimes referenced women as
the sex most responsible for keeping bees. In a specific and influential
instance, William Lawson opened the tenth chapter of The Country House-
wives Garden in 1618 with the statement that “I will not account her any
of my good House-wives, that wanteth either Bees, or skilfullnesse about
them.” He deemed “Bees, well ordered” as on par with household prin-
ciples of “cleannesse” and ornamentation.12 The physical locations where
136 A. EBERT
hives were kept probably influenced Lawson’s conviction. They often

resided in a garden adjoining the home, and sometimes they recessed into
the exterior wall of the dwelling.13 Therefore, tending bees seemed to be
a natural extension of women’s household and garden responsibilities.
This rationale supported historian H. M. Fraser’s pronouncement that “it
seems reasonable to suppose that the women commonly looked after the
bees.”14 Further, the common straw hive weighed less than fifty pounds
even when filled with bees and honey, so it was not an activity that required
male strength.15
Besides suiting the physical capabilities of women, the promise of finan-
cial rewards made beekeeping enticing. Lawson concluded that forty hives
could produce more wealth than forty acres of land, a strong incentive “to
make good Housewives love and have good gardens and bees.”16 Indeed,
economic gain represented the most consistent benefit touted in the pop-
ularization of beekeeping. No one actually expected rural households to
harbor the forty hives in Lawson’s hypothetical calculation. Still, honey
and wax could earn a few pounds per year and contribute toward cottage
rent. Charles Butler offered an anecdote describing a woman who kept a
single hive on shares with a partner, offering an extreme example of coop-
erative beekeeping on the smallest scale.17
Quantified evidence appears in an analysis of 167 probate inventories in
seventeen English counties, c. 1550–1730. The data support the concept
of beekeeping as supplementary income. Overall, the average number of
hives per household varied from 2.0 for laborers, 3.6 for husbandmen and
yeomen, to 4.4 for gentlemen.18 At around a shilling per pound of honey,
and somewhat more per pound of wax, this level of production could ease
financial straits but not transform social standing. The early modern pro-
bate data correspond with apicultural manuals that advised cottagers to
keep only a few hives to supplement household income.19 Nineteenth-
century popularizers of beekeeping continued to advocate small-scale
beekeeping.20
Even when operated on a small scale, not all associations between
women and bees were positive. Sometimes bee-related disturbances arose.
A sobering example involved a toddler—the tragically named Mary Water.
She drowned in a tub of kitchen water while the maid eagerly chased after
a swarm of bees in Sussex.21 Since English beekeepers usually killed their
hives at harvest, owners wanted to catch as many of their swarms as pos-
sible. Otherwise, they would have few bees for the next year. In this case,
the servant’s swarm-chasing cost Mary her life. Another grim instance saw
the mother of young John Sydserff fearing his death. She witnessed stings
plucked from his body after an attack in the bee garden. His brother
recounted pulling several of John’s stingers “out of the tongue, and thir-
teen out and off one of the ears.”22 He survived. In light of such traumas,
some authors questioned whether women possessed the courage to keep
bees. London printer Samuel Bagster attempted to design a new hive that
would cure his wife’s fear of his beloved insects. She begged exemption
from his hobby unless he managed to make “bees without stings, or hives
that … take away fear in management.”23 But overall, it was suggested that
good housewives should keep bees and that economic reward represented
the main benefit.
Although the prospect of a substantial socioeconomic leap did not
enter the equation, reformers encouraged other forms of self-improvement.
John Keys reiterated a common sentiment when he urged readers not to
“forget the moral instruction” that accompanied beekeeping, and
Reverend William Cotton classed bee gardens as “only second to a Sunday-
school.”24 In other words, bees served as a model society that could teach
women, men, and children higher behavioral standards.25
Aside from improving individual character, Sandra Sherman has
observed that domestic literature promoting beekeeping probably con-
tained an overarching goal. The aim was to replicate bees’ “communality”
within the household.26 Every caste of bee, living in a community of thou-
sands, somehow coordinated their actions for the hive’s collective benefit.
Each bee automatically pursued its “travail unto death” under the (sup-
posed) government of a queen.27 This was domestic management
extraordinaire.
Within the human household, communality depended upon the char-
acter and habits of its female leadership. Honeybee society was a “Mirror”
even for “the finest Dames” for three main reasons.28 The most frequent
and most general explanation appeared in The True Amazons by Joseph
Warder, MD. He explained that when rain struck, “being forc’d to stay at
home … [bees] are not idle, but like good House-wives mind their
Domestick Affairs.”29 In other words, bees kept their homes in perfect
order through constant labor, surveillance, and under all circumstances.
Second, their exceptional housekeeping involved a stunning degree of
cleanliness. Apiarist John Keys considered bees’ cleanliness inferior only to
the domestic skill of Dutch women.30 Third, children benefited from the
example of bees as well. Thus, a mother keeping bees did her family ser-
vice, because “many a lesson a man and his wife may teach their children
138 A. EBERT
at the mouth of their Hives.”31 Women who guided their families with
such principles nurtured a kingdom better schooled in labor and domestic
behavior. Bees were therefore “interesting, civilising, and
remunerative.”32
The problem with most of the evidence related to beekeeping house-
wives is the lack of empirical confirmation. Authors stated values, impres-
sions, and expectations with an eye toward their own purpose. The
situation exemplifies Jane Whittle’s caution that “[l]iterary evidence pro-
vides a list of tasks women might be expected to do in a rural household,
but it should not be mistaken for representative evidence of what rural
women actually did.”33 Still, we might evade part of the confusion by care-
ful reading. Lawson, who defined his good housewives as beekeeping
housewives, openly confessed that “I learned by experience (being a Bee-
master myself),” and he seemed quite content to see that “our House-
Wives will count beholding unto mee.”34 In other words, he offered no
defense for venturing into a supposed feminine realm. Other literary and
archival instances reveal beekeeping carried out by either sex or in coop-
eration.35 At best, it seems safest to consider beekeeping an area of “shared
work” rather than “women’s work.”36 For this reason, I am partial to
wording found in an article by Penelope Walker and Eva Crane that states
“[f]rom the late sixteenth century, some English authors assumed [my
emphasis] that countrywomen would care for both the garden and the
bees.”37 Nonetheless, it requires minimal effort to identify male beekeep-
ers. They often bore the title “bee-master,” whereas women sometimes
appeared as “bee-mistresses.”38 Present-day readers are probably most
familiar with the term “beekeeper” as a neutral catchall, but sex-specific
equivalents were quite common into the nineteenth century.
Women were not the only sex targeted for improvement. The civilizing
dimension of beekeeping applied to men too, and this was evident from
the early modern era onward.39 It remained conventional to assert “[t]he
Bee is an excellent mentor,” regardless of the sex of the keeper.40 Author
Richard Remnant thought men could learn to “rule most women,” if they
were conscious of the similarities between keeping bees and ruling women.
He found three consistencies: women and bees were “sensible and appre-
hensive of any good or evill,” “very teachy and passionate,” and both
needed effective government to ensure industrious behavior. Otherwise,
one should expect “hurt and trouble.” His advice was to govern through
“reasons and love,” but a wise man should avoid women and bees “so sot-
tish and sluttish, that they cannot bee ordered.”41 Patriarchal idealization
of men presiding over well-behaved women and bees were not the only
lessons male beekeepers were supposed to derive from bees. In the moral
sphere, they might develop greater appreciation for “the wonders of
Nature” and escape “the attractions of the public-house.”42 In the words
of Reverend William Cotton, “[t]he best Bee-master is a water-drinker, for
Bees only drink water.”43 Men and women were both eligible for lessons
under the tutelage of honeybees.
Characterizing an agricultural activity as character-building was unex-
ceptional. Early modern improvers celebrated any productive activity that
might instill habits of industry through labor.44 Such convictions lasted
into the nineteenth century. Hence, William Cobbett’s treatise on cottage
economy included familiar “arguments in favour of good conduct, sobri-
ety, frugality, industry, [and] all the domestic virtues” among the “labor-
ing people.” Just as improvers had envisioned in prior centuries, Cobbett’s
idyllic people exuded productivity and industry. He saw beekeeping as an
activity that cultivated those qualities. He trusted young mothers to instill
such values in their families, so he threatened to take the ears of any parson
who failed to give his book, Cottage Economy, to newlyweds.45
The evidence presented to this point suggests, first, that apicultural
literature clearly encouraged men and women to pursue beekeeping.
Familiar interests of economic and moral improvement made it an ideal
model of familial order. Second, textual evidence strongly suggests that
both sexes engaged in beekeeping. The use of gendered equivalents of
“beekeeper,” and readily identifiable practitioners of both sexes, make this
clear. But these conclusions require further qualification. While there is no
difficulty in identifying beekeepers of both sexes, in what remains of this
chapter I show, through the evolving rhetoric of popularization and the
surviving data from nineteenth-century beekeeping societies, that there
was significant change for beekeeping during three centuries of socioeco-
nomic upheaval. While men and women both retained a presence in
English beekeeping from the early modern period through to 1900, the
portrayal and evaluation of beekeepers underwent substantial shifts.
By the late eighteenth century, women beekeepers faced stricter expec-
tations for entry into Lawson’s category of “good House-wives.”46
Concern mounted that bees ought to be kept according to scientific-
humane principles and more complicated management practices. Two
trends were underway. First, scientific principles took firmer hold among
reformers in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and the accumula-
tion of biological knowledge about honeybees accelerated through the
140 A. EBERT
nineteenth century.47 Scientifically oriented beekeepers, normally of sub-

stantially more affluent standing than the cottagers they sought to reform,
despised traditional hive management. Traditional straw hives were small
and not very manipulable, so reformers argued for rational hive designs
that permitted precise inspection and manipulation. They claimed that
their more elaborate hives allowed easier management, simpler harvest,
and economic benefits. Truthfully, a practical alternative did not develop
until the second half of the nineteenth century, and fringe expenses related
to using the future moveable-frame hive made it too expensive for many
rural beekeepers.48 Second, the movement for humane treatment of bees,
which traced its roots to at least the early seventeenth century, gained
momentum.
The straw hive, its management, and the act of “apicide” went hand in
hand, and a growing cohort supported scientific management and opposed
killing bees.49 Use of the straw hive in England usually entailed the har-
vesttime death of the bees. This method was known as “suffocation” and
involved killing off the bees over the fumes of a brimstone pit to safely
harvest the honey and wax. The practice kept beekeepers safe from sting-
ing attack. Seventeenth-century gentleman John Levett offered no sympa-
thy toward the bees. He derided the “opinion that it is great pitty to kill
the Bees,” but he was familiar with the argument to save them. A character
in his dialogue declared that humane concerns do not pertain to “these
silly creatures,” or any other livestock that served human purposes.50
Despite mixed opinions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it
became more conventional to denounce suffocation during the nineteenth
century.
But regardless of shifting mentalities that favored the preservation of
bee life and humane treatment of many other animals, the lethal harvest
was still perceived as “the English method” through most of the nine-
teenth century, and it increasingly ruffled the conscience of bee lovers.51
Reformers aimed to stop the harvesttime massacre. Their quest involved a
union between science and humane ethic, and their effort to popularize
their views developed rhetoric against “Country Bee Mistresses” who
were cited as corruptive forces upholding traditional rural practice.52
At the same time that humane ethic and biological knowledge swung
upward, assumptions of a primarily female cohort of beekeepers receded.
Instead, male writers authored an expanding body of apicultural literature,
and they almost always based their publications on experience. Rather
than imply that bees belonged to a specifically feminine domain, their tone
shifted toward beekeeping as “an occupation eminently suited to women”

and not limited “to men alone.”53 But even as some popularizers contin-
ued to encourage women to keep bees, they condemned women who
used methods that followed the traditional path of suffocation. The “good
housewife” of seventeenth-century literature receded as her nemesis took
shape as the resistant “old wife” of the long nineteenth century.
Negative portrayals of women beekeepers frequently invoked arche-
typical “old wives.” Few authors dismissed women as fundamentally
incompetent as potential beekeepers, but the rancorous Robert Huish was
one of them. He judged women “very sorry apiarians.”54 While other
authors held more hope for women’s potential, they often shared Huish’s
dim view of rural women’s beekeeping techniques. He reflected a com-
mon sentiment when recalling a tour of rural Sussex with reform-minded
companions. They found:
to our great mortification, the hives generally belonged to, and were under
the management of the female branches, particularly the elder ones of the
family, who were so strongly devoted to the old method of managing bees
[in straw by suffocation].55
The men suggested reforms, presumably advocating newer hives and more
humane management. It ended with Huish and his companions earning
“the character of some malignant witch.”56
Huish’s charge that cottage women were on the lookout for “witches”
opened an attack on popular superstition. Blaming women for harboring
and spreading folk beliefs was nothing new. For the protagonist of Daniel
Defoe’s famous novel on the 1665 plague, these “old Women” and “old
Wives Tales” perpetuated the backwardness of a people “addicted” to
astrological and irreligious explanations of how the world functioned.57
Within the purview of apicultural literature, authors repeatedly con-
demned superstition among beekeepers. For example, Dr. Edward
Scudamore looked forward to embarking on a new hobby in 1809, but
first he parted with a gold coin. The “good little old woman” who sold
him the hive refused to accept anything but gold. Other payment, when
selling bees, supposedly caused bad luck.58 Other reports stated that gold
payment might bring bad luck too—in which case it was necessary to trade
instead.59 Many authors viewed such beliefs as “superstitious and foolish”
ideas that ranked among “old wives fables.” Ironically, Richard Remnant’s
denunciation of such “fables” divulged a superstition of his own. He
142 A. EBERT
asserted that stealing bees served no purpose because “stollen goods will
not prosper.”60
Additional superstitions surfaced throughout the long nineteenth cen-
tury, and they often linked family circumstances to the health of the bees.
A common belief involved the need to inform the bees if their owner
died—otherwise the bees might fail too. One cottage woman followed
protocol after the death of her aunt. She promptly “told every skep myself,
and put them into mourning.” In such cases, the person informing the
bees of their loss went out at midnight and tapped the hives while saying
“So-and-so is dead.” Her bees died anyway, and she despaired in confu-
sion.61 Other rural beliefs included the beating of pots and pans to force a
swarm to settle (“tanging” or “ringing”), interpreting a swarm on a dead
hedge as forewarning an imminent death, and the belief that spousal quar-
rels compelled bees to abandon their owners.62 Reformers looked forward
to the day when bees no longer foretold human destiny as “portenders of
good or evil.”63 That judgment carried across the Atlantic too, where the
movable-frame hive’s inventor, Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, com-
mented, “A large book would hardly suffice to set forth all the supersti-
tions connected with bees.”64 Reformers used such beliefs as ammunition
justifying their mission to improve the “unenlightened.” Nonetheless, it
seems clear that such superstitions genuinely existed at some level through-
out the long nineteenth century. W. H. Harris carefully specified several
counties where he “ascertained the existence” of such beliefs, and some
were firsthand experiences.65
Of course, a measure of restraint should qualify these accusations of
rampant superstition and how pervasively they may have functioned.
Nonetheless, not all charges of superstition merit a high level of confi-
dence. Rumor and class-based antagonism almost certainly elevated the
prominence of these reports. It served to vent frustration. Humane-
scientific beekeepers witnessed very little change in popular practice until
the very late nineteenth century.66 But rather than holding themselves
accountable for flaws in their dissemination tactics or conceding the pro-
hibitive cost of their new hives, reformers developed a habit of blaming
old wives and cottagers, in general, for the lack of progress.67 The result
was an enlivened rhetoric that cast superstitious old wives as culprits, and
the shifted target swung attention toward denouncements of these old
wives rather than the descriptions and duties of the responsible housewives
featured in earlier publications.
Crucially, not all authors portrayed rural women as absolutely incapable

and hopelessly superstitious. Hope remained that they could overcome
their perceived backwardness. W. H. Harris, who viewed superstition so
narrowly, believed that “female dexterity of hand and finger” would prove
valuable in hive manipulations.68 Such encouragements represented fleet-
ing suggestions rather than regular points of emphasis. They also showed
less concentration on the domestic role of housewives, though printer
Samuel Bagster’s hive certainly looked like a house. His 1834 publication
promoted a “Ladies’ Safety Hive” with the “assurance that [ladies] need
not fear either a sting or ingratitude” from the bees.69 His “fair readers,”
however, seemed rather different from the rural women who drew atten-
tion from so many nineteenth-century writers.70 Bagster’s wife, and the
pricey house-like hive he proposed, bore little in common with the culture
and means of cottage households.
But what actually happened in practice? What roles did men and women
fulfill outside the realms of periodical publication and full-blown treatises?
Detailed records survive in connection with several voluntary organiza-
tions of the nineteenth century. The first sustained beekeeping organiza-
tion in England lasted 1799–1809. The thirty-four individuals that
founded Exeter’s Western Apiarian Society included no women.71 A less
exclusive story developed in the records of the humane-minded, scientific
beekeeping societies that spread across the British Isles in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century. Women played a significant role in them,
though they were greatly outnumbered.
The records of late nineteenth-century provincial societies show women
on executive committees that guided society activities. Generally, only one
or two women served on an executive committee at any given time, but
Staffordshire’s association broke slightly above that level when Mrs. Saint,
Miss Blore, and Miss Stubbs all joined the leadership in 1905.72 Despite
their numerical disadvantage, certain women exercised an importance that
belied their minority presence. Miss Drewell, a society secretary in
Berkshire, organized over one hundred spectators to witness live demon-
strations in 1894.73 Dedicated committee service represented one of the
essential components in an association’s survival, and most late nineteenth-
century beekeeping societies benefited from female participation in that
capacity.
Overall, women also represented a significant minority in the member-
ship rolls of county societies. For example, the Gloucestershire association
counted 41 women (17%) in its 1886 list of 237 members.74 Somerset,
144 A. EBERT
after facing very low female membership in at the turn of the twentieth
century, rose to 91 women (21%) out of 431 members in 1909.75 In other
words, women paid dues to participate in the continuing mission of bee-
keeping reform, and they sought the expertise and support that reform-
intentioned societies circulated. Their prevalence would scarcely occur to
anyone reading the nationally circulated publications discussing English
beekeeping. Widely circulated literature tended to acknowledge upper-
class patronesses rather than the women who cultivated local connections.
The extraordinarily wealthy president of the British Bee-Keepers’
Association, Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, garnered far more attention
than any other woman.76
The evolution of women’s portrayal in English beekeeping, then,
evolved from an early modern literature that sometimes assumed female
practitioners. Writers describing women who kept bees, or who they
thought should keep bees, linked the task to good housewifery. Bees gen-
erated income, fostered communality, and encouraged habits of industry.
Such qualities cultivated godliness within the household. While those pur-
poses remained important for popularizers of scientific beekeeping in the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a different type of woman gained
prominence in the publications of this later period. Old cottage wives
earned blame as opponents of scientific management and technological
innovation. Their influence and superstitions helped explain why country
folk like “old Tom Stick-in-the-mud” refused “new fangled ways.”77
Especially by the nineteenth century, apicultural literature saw the printed
profile of the beekeeping housewife recede.
While arguments for women to start keeping bees continued, they now
confronted different standards when practicing.78 Keeping bees no longer
counted as inherently “good.” The goals of apicultural reformers replaced
the less proscriptive advice of early modern housewifery manuals. Reform-
minded popularizers focused on beekeeping now required humane har-
vest methods, and they often promoted new hives to make this
technologically plausible. Humane harvests, however, involved unfamiliar
methods and more expensive hive designs. Quite reasonably, cottagers
continued to practice a form of beekeeping that had proven sustainable for
several centuries. In response, many women that early modern authors
would have classified as “good housewives,” in terms of keeping bees,
acquired some version of the label “old wife.” As such, they represented a
gendered category within the broader class of “cottagers,” who suffered
nearly identical criticisms.79 The rules of polite comportment had changed
in the world of beekeeping. But all along, beekeeping involved female and
male practitioners.
Notes
1. John Levett, The Ordering of Bees; Or, the True History of Managing Them
(London: Printed by Thomas Harper, for John Harison, 1634), pref-
ace, n.p.
2. See below for statements along these lines by H. M. Fraser, Frederick
Prete, and Nicola Verdon.
3. Mary Mitford, Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery
(London: G. Bell & Sons, 1854), 54.
4. Levett, The Ordering of Bees, preface, n.p.
5. For a review of sources on women in British and European beekeeping, see
Eva Crane, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (New
York: Routledge, 1999), 586–590.
6. Authors periodically considered bees as a form of “livestock.” See, for
example, John Mills, An Essay on the Management of Bees: Wherein Is Shewn
the Method of Rearing Those Useful Insects (London: J. Johnson and
B. Davenport, 1766), 69; John Keys, Practical Bee-Master (1780), vi;
Alfred Neighbour, The Apiary: or, Bees, Bee-hives, and Bee Culture (London:
Neighbour and Sons, 1865), 125.
7. The quotation is from Anon., The farmer’s wife; or complete country house-
wife (London: Printed for Alex. Hogg, c. 1780), preface, cited in Nicola
Verdon, “‘…Subjects Deserving of the Highest Praise’: Farmers’ Wives
and the Farm Economy in England, c. 1700–1850”, AgHR 51 (2003): 28.
8. For initial questions on the reliability of viewing women as the primary
practitioners of English beekeeping, see Adam Ebert, “Nectar for the
Taking: The Popularization of Scientific Bee Culture in England,
1609–1809”, AgHR 85 (2011): 337–338.
9. For a careful discussion on handling “rhetorics and records” where “not
many, if any, should be taken at face value,” see Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons:
Change, Crime and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8–11.
10. Jane Whittle, “Housewives and Servants in Rural England, 1440–1650:
Evidence of Women’s Work from Probate Documents,” Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society 15 (2005), 68.
11. Whittle, “Housewives,” 68.
12. William Lawson, The Country House-Wives Garden: Together, with the
Husbandry of Bees, Published with Secrets Very Necessary for Every House-
wife: As Also Divers New Knots for Gardens (London: Printed by A. Griffin
for J. Harrison, 1653), 85.
146 A. EBERT
13. The broad range of hive models, and manners of situating them, is reviewed
in Crane, World History of Beekeeping, 238–257 and 313–325.
14. H. M. Fraser, History of Beekeeping in Britain (London: Bee Research
Association, 1958), 73. Frederick R. Prete echoed Fraser’s opinion in
“Can Females Rule the Hive? The Controversy over Honey Bee Gender
Roles in British Beekeeping Texts of the Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries,”
Journal of the History of Biology 24 (1991):129.
15. On ranges of hive weights, see J. H. Payne, The Apiarian’s Guide (London:
Simpkin & Marshall, 1833), 8; Robert Maxwell. The Practical Bee-Master
(Edinburgh: Printed by Robert Drummond, 1747), 17; Robert Huish,
Bees: Their Natural History and General Management (London:
H.G. Bohn, 1844), 331–332. For an analysis of gender and strength dif-
ferences in waged labor, see Joyce Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages in
Industrial Revolution Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 106–114.
16. Lawson, Country House-wives Garden, 91.
17. Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie or the History of Bees (London:
John Haviland for Roger Jackson. 1623), C5.
18. Penelope Walker and Eva Crane, “The History of Beekeeping in English
Gardens,” Garden History 28 (2000): 247.
19. On recommending a limited number of hives for beekeeping households,
see examples in Payne, Apiarian’s Guide, x. For considerations regarding
pasturage as a reason to only “keep a few stocks,” see John Keys, The
Antient Bee-Mafter’s Farewell (London: Printed for G.G. and J. Robinson,
1796), 144.
20. The longevity of promoting beekeeping for paying rent is evident in the
twentieth-century title of Tickner Edwardes, Bees as Rent Payers (Arundel:
Mitchell, 1906).
21. Whittle, “Housewives and Servants,” p. 65.
22. Robert Sydserff, Sydserff’s Treatise on Bees (Salisbury: B. C. Collins,
1792), 5.
23. Samuel Bagster, The Management of Bees (London: Bagster and Pickering,
1834), 211.
24. Keys, Practical Bee-Master, 352; William Cotton, My Bee-Book (London:
Rivington, 1842), xliv.
25. For general commentary on the concept of bees imparting lessons to their
keepers, see Ebert, “Nectar for the Taking”: 325–327.
26. Sandra Sherman, “Printed Communities; Domestic Management Texts in
the Eighteenth Century,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 3
(2003): 57–59.
27. Butler, Feminine Monarchie, C6.
28. Butler, C1.
29. Joseph Warder, The True Amazons: Or, The Monarchy of Bees (London:
Pemberton, 1720), 21. For an earlier remark on bees staying occupied
during “unkind weather,” see Butler, Feminine Monarchie, C6.
30. Keys, Practical Bee-Master, 20.
31. Cotton, My Bee-Book, xliv.
32. John Cumming, Bee-Keeping by “The Times” Bee-Master (London:
Sampson Low, 1864), 1.
33. Whittle, Housewives and Servants in Rural England, 64. See also Amanda
Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and
Chronology of English Women’s History,” in Women’s Work: The English
Experience 1650–1914, ed. Pamela Sharpe (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 1998), 294–298. A response aimed at pinpointing what women
actually did, rather than how they were instructed, appears in the method-
ology of Burnette, Gender, Work and Wages, 3–7, 11–15.
34. Lawson, Country Housewives Garden, 85.
35. The account books of Henry Best called for “a man and two women” to
perform harvesttime manipulations. Henry Best, Rural Economy in
Yorkshire in 1641 (Durham: The Society, 1857), 65–68. In the nineteenth
century, John Lawrence employed “an aged laborer” and his wife to care
for his bees and other animals. See John Lawrence, A Practical Treatise on
Breeding, Rearing, and Fattening (London: Sherwood, 1816), 57.
36. The evidence suggesting that beekeeping must be considered an activity
practiced by both sexes, though perhaps in evolving manners, adds merit
to Linda Kerber’s argument related to the danger of holding too closely to
notions of “separate spheres” in matters of gender history. See Linda
K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The
Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75 (1988): 38.
37. Walker and Crane, “History of Beekeeping in English Gardens”: 234.
38. The title “bee-master” represented experience and knowledge, but it usu-
ally did not indicate a person dependent on bees for their main income.
For chronological examples of the language of “bee-master,” see examples:
Lawson, Country House-wives Garden, 85; Maxwell, Practical Bee-Master
(1747); Samuel Cooke, The compleat bee-master (London: Cooke, c.
1780); Keys, Practical Bee-Master (1780); Sydserff, Sydserff’s Treatise on
Bees (1792), 21; Keys, Antient Bee-Mafter’s Farewell (1796); John
Lawrence, A Practical Treatise on Breeding, Rearing, and Fattening, 274;
John M. Hooker, Guide to Successful Bee-Keeping (Kings Langley: John
Huckle, 1888), iii; Tickner Edwardes, The Bee-Master of Warrilow
(London: Pall Mall, 1907).
39. The combination of “pleasure and profit” was recurrent in beekeeping
literature as well as the popularization of other agricultural pursuits. On
changing approaches to thrift and profit, see Andrew McRae, God Speed the
148 A. EBERT
Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996), 135–168. For examples of beekeeping
portrayed as pleasurable and profitable over a broad chronology, see exam-
ples: Moses Rusden, A Further Discovery of Bees (London: H. Million,
1679), preface and 68; George Strutt, The Practical Apiarian; or, A
Treatise on the Improved Management of Bees (Clare: Shearcroft, 1825), 5,
73; Charles Nettleship White, Pleasurable Bee-Keeping (London: Arnold,
1895), 19.
40. Strutt, Practical Apiarian, 73.
41. Richard Remnant, A Discourse or Historie of Bees (London: Robert Young,
1637), 39.
42. Herbert R. Peel, Who Is a Bona Fide Cottager? (London: Herbert R. Peel,
1883), 15.
43. Cotton, My bee-book, xliv–xlv.
44. McRae, God speed the plough, 3, 18, 60–67.
45. William Cobbett, Cottage Economy (London: John Doyle, 1828), 4.
46. Lawson, Country House-wives Garden, 85.
47. The work of the blind, Swiss naturalist François Huber exerted interna-
tional influence. Publication of his New Observations on the Natural History
of Bees earned greater currency in the British Isles after an English-language
edition appeared in 1806 (Edinburgh). The book popularized the findings
of previous scientists and his personal observations on bee behavior.
48. A coherent explanation of the emerging movable-frame hive and its
“advantages” appears in Neighbour, The Apiary, 36–85.
49. “Apicide” is a synonym for bee murder. The term is based on the scientific
name for honeybees, Apis mellifera. For use, see Cotton, My Bee-Book,
81–82. On “bee-murder,” see Rev. George Tooker Hoare, The Village
Museum; or, How We Gathered Profit with Pleasure (London: George
Routledge, 1858), 39–40.
50. Levett, Ordering of Bees, 41
51. Anon., “Bees and Beekeeping,” London Quarterly Review 26 (1866):133.
The importance of humane ethic in advocating for nineteenth-century
reform is denied in Gene Kritsky, The Quest for the Perfect Hive: A History
of Innovation in Bee Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 123.
52. Warder, True Amazons, 5.
53. W. H. Harris, The Honey-Bee: Its Nature, Homes, and Products (London:
Religious Tract Society, 1884), 2.
54. Huish, Bees: Their Natural History, 287–288.
55. Huish, 167–168.
56. Huish, 168.
57. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (London: E. Nutt, 1722), 24–25.
58. Edward Scudamore, Artificial Swarms: A Treatise on the Production of

Early Swarms of Bees by Artificial Means (London: Longman, 1848), iv.
On the need for gold payment, see also Keys, Practical Bee-Mafter, 90–91.
Moses Rusden voiced his opposition to this superstition and others in the
seventeenth century: Rusden, A Further Discovery of Bees, preface.
59. Huish, Bees: Their Natural History, 160.
60. Remnant. A Discourse or Historie of Bees, 13.
61. F. G. Jenyns, A Book About Bees (London: Gardner, 1886), 191–195.
These pages recount additional superstitions.
62. Henry Taylor, The Bee-Keeper’s Manual (London: Groombridge, 1839),
111; Payne, Apiarian’s Guide, 51; British Bee Journal (BBJ) 1 (1873): 27;
BBJ 4 (1876): 67; Robert Huish, The Cottager’s Manual for the
Management of his Bees (London: Wetton and Jarvis, 1820), 41–42; Harris,
The Honey-Bee, 259–267.
63. John Worlidge, A Discourse of the Government and Ordering of Bees
(London: Thos, 1678), 3–4. Worlidge believed that bees’ “Prescience is
most observable.”
64. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee
(Northampton: Hopkins, Bridgman & Co, 1853), 303.
65. Harris, The Honey-Bee, 263.
66. A Berkshire case study on the slow transition toward movable-frame tech-
nology appears in Adam Ebert, “Hive Society: the popularization of sci-
ence and beekeeping in the British Isles, 1609–1913” (Unpublished PhD
thesis, Iowa State University, 2009), chapter 5, especially 168–169.
67. Harris explained the persistence of these superstitions by linking the bee-
keepers to “the more ignorant classes, among whom wonderful stories
easily arise, are rapidly propagated, and tenaciously believed.” Harris, The
Honey-Bee, 266.
68. Harris, The Honey-Bee, 2. Edwardes also respected female dexterity as an
asset. Edwardes, Bee-Master of Warrilow, 225–229.
69. Bagster, Management of Bees, 9.
70. Bagster, 222.
71. Rules of the Western Apiarian Society Instituted for Promoting the Knowledge
of the Best Method of Managing Bees (Exeter: Trewman, 1800), 16–18.
72. John W. Whiston, History of the Staffordshire Beekeepers’ Associations
1876–1976 (Walsall: South Staffordshire & District Beekeepers Association,
1976), 11.
73. Museum of English Rural Life, Flood Collection. D88/1/2/10. Berkshire
Bee Van Notebook (July 19, 1894).
74. Gloucestershire Bee-Keepers Association. Annual Report 1886 (Gloucester:
Gloucestershire Bee-Keepers Association, 1887), 10–14.
150 A. EBERT
75. Somerset Bee-Keepers’ Association, Annual Report 1910 (Bristol:

Somerset Bee-Keepers’ Association, 1911), 11–20.
76. Philanthropist Burdett-Coutts offered some of her reasons for supporting
beekeeping in an introduction to F. G. Jenyns’ 1886 manual. She consid-
ered beekeeping a means to elevate the piety and productivity of the popu-
lation. See Jenyns, A Book About Bees, pp. ix–xi.
77. Hoare, Village Museum, 39–40.
78. The secretary of England’s Royal Agricultural Society named beekeeping
in a Dublin speech on “Some of the duties of the farmer’s wife”. See White,
Pleasurable Bee-Keeping, 17. The speech was delivered at the dairy show of
the Royal Dublin Society in October 1883.
79. For examples of gender-neutral critique of cottage beekeepers, see: Thomas
Nutt, Humanity to Honey Bees (Wisbech: Cambs, 1835), 190–191; Alfred
Rusbridge, Bee-Keeping Plain and Practical; And How to Make It Pay
(London: Allen, 1883), 126–136; White, Pleasurable Bee-Keeping, 51;
S. L. Bensusan, The Children’s Story of the Bee (London: Mills and Boon,
1909), 243.
CHAPTER 9
Bees in Nineteenth-Century Lore and Law
Katy Barnett
It can never be said that bees are incapable of exciting passion. In an

American court case heard in 1811, Wallis v Mease, Mr Mease was reputed
to have said to Mr Wallis, within the hearing of the people of the town of
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, “You are a damned thief and I can prove it,”
which led Mr Wallis to bring an action in slander. What had brought about
Mease’s angry statement? Mr Mease believed that Mr Wallis had stolen
bees from a “bee-tree”1 on his property. The Supreme Court of
Pennsylvania found that Mr Wallis had not committed theft, because the
bees were wild, and therefore Mr Mease had never owned them in the first
place. Pronouncing on the case, Chief Justice Tilghman said:
Thank you to Alexis Harley and Chris Harrington for their exceptionally helpful
comments on drafts, to Craig Anderson for his advice on Scots bee law, and to
Scott Thompson and “Lorenzo” M. Warby for picking up infelicities.
K. Barnett (*)
University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39570-3_9
152 K. BARNETT
The taking of wild bees, has been considered by the people of the country
as a species of hunting. Bees are of a wild nature; and without deciding what
the law might be, if they were removed from the tree, and secured in a hive,
I am of opinion, that while they remain in the tree, they are not the subject
of a felony. This wild nature remains unchanged, nor are they completely,
and for any valuable purpose, reduced to possession.2
Wallis v Mease was not the only nineteenth-century American case

where an allegation of theft of a bee tree resulted in an action in slander.
In 1829, in Idol v Jones,3 Mr Jones was alleged to have said of Mr Idol, “he
has stolen my bee tree,” and “he was a rogue, and kept at home a rogue-
hole, and harboured rogues.”4 And in 1845, in Cock v Weatherby,5 Mr
Cock was alleged to have said of Mr Weatherby, words to the effect of
“You are a damned rogue. You intended to steal, and did steal, and I can
prove it. You stole a bee-tree. Your family is a damned trifling pack or set
and I wish your family was out of the settlement.”6 In none of these cases
were the allegations of theft true, because the bees in question were wild
and could not be stolen.
Conversely, in 1850, in another American case concerning bees, Mr
Earl’s horses were repeatedly stung by bees from the fifteen hives kept by
Mr van Alstine next to the public highway, and, allegedly, one horse was
stung so badly it died. The question was whether Mr van Alstine was
strictly liable for the actions of his bees. In passing judgment, Justice
Selden of the Supreme Court of New York said:
however it may have been anciently, in modern days the bee has become
almost as completely domesticated as the ox or the cow. Its habits and its
instincts have been studied, and through the knowledge thus acquired it can
be controlled and managed with nearly as much certainty as any of the
domestic animals; and although it may be proper still to class it among those
ferae naturae [of a wild nature], it must nevertheless be regarded as coming
very near the dividing line, and in regard to its propensity to mischief, I
apprehend that such a thing as a serious injury to persons or property from
its attack is very rare, not occurring in a ratio more frequent certainly than
injuries arising from the kick of a horse, or the bite of a dog.7
Immediately, a contradiction is evident in the way in which American

courts of the nineteenth century depict bees. In Wallis v Mease, bees are
depicted as entirely wild and difficult to control; in Earl v Van Alstine,
they are depicted as practically domesticated and almost equivalent to
9 BEES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LORE AND LAW 153
oxen or cows. For the purposes of ownership, bees are described by com-
mon law courts as being wild; conversely, when bees cause harm to others,
they are described by common law courts as being tame, or at least par-
tially so.
There are legal, historical and social reasons behind the different char-
acterisations of bees in nineteenth-century legal literature, including the
constraints of common law legal doctrine, as well as a growing knowledge
of the science of bee behaviour, bee-breeding and beekeeping. This chap-
ter puts the nineteenth-century cases in the broader context of a rich and
surprising legal literature on the subject of bees and shows how this tradi-
tion was complicated by developments in the understanding of bees dur-
ing the nineteenth century.
Bees are challenging for any legal system, even in modern times. In
many societies, humans assert legal ownership of non-human animals,
including bees, but bees give rise to particular problems. If people assert
ownership of a domesticated non-human livestock animal such as a cow,
they keep the cow in a pen to signal she is theirs, and mark her or brand
her as theirs.8 If the cow escapes and eats a neighbour’s crops, or hurts a
neighbour, it’s generally clear whose cow she is, and evident that the
owner had an obligation to ensure she was properly kept away from other
people’s crops, or from hurting people. A cow is potentially able to be
controlled by a prudent owner, at least to an extent.9
Courts of the nineteenth century wrestled with the question of whether
bees were different from other livestock, and, if they were a form of “live-
stock” (as seemed to be suggested by Selden J in Earl v Van Alstine), how
they differed from other stock. There is limited scope for marking a par-
ticular bee as “your” bee,10 although the philosopher Aristotle had noted
that beekeepers in the ancient world sometimes sprinkled flour on bees to
identify them when they returned to the hive.11 Moreover, a worker bee’s
value depends upon being part of a hive: it is the collectivity which is valu-
able, not the individual worker bee. Bees can (and often do) roam wher-
ever they please, and while they usually return to the same hive, they can
(and often do) swarm to different places at unpredictable times, or split
into multiple swarms, or merge with other swarms.12 Bees can get angry
when their honey is taken, particularly, as was the case for much of the
nineteenth century, when taking honey necessitated destroying brood
comb (before the introduction of moveable hive frames and queen exclud-
ers). Bees can be subdued and perhaps partially controlled with smoke, a
fact known since ancient times, but which was less reliably exercised before
154 K. BARNETT
the development of modern “smokers”.13 Of course, honeybees can also

sting, which raises the question of who is responsible if bees from a per-
son’s hive sting another or their livestock. Sometimes bee stings can kill
people or animals, or harm them badly. Bees have therefore excited legal
attention for thousands of years.
There is an ancient and consistent Indo-European legal principle that if
bees swarm, the owner must give chase and keep them in sight in order to
retain ownership.14 However, there has been ambivalence about whether
bees should be categorised as wild or tame, and whether they should be
compared to other domestic animals. The Roman jurist Gaius stated that
bees should be regarded as wild, but that qualified ownership could be
taken in bees if they were hived and tended to return to the hive.15 If a
swarm was pursued and kept in sight, ownership could be retained as long
as recovery was possible. If the bees were not recovered, they became wild
again. While Gaius regarded bees as wild, Pliny the Elder disagreed, and in
his Naturalis Historia, regarded them as occupying an intermediate posi-
tion in between wild and tame.16 Roman law principles were adopted in
the English common law,17 and in Scots law, too.18 By contrast, medieval
Irish Brehon law took a unique approach, not derived from Roman law.
The Bechbretha (“bee-judgments” in Old Irish) chose to analogise bees to
other kinds of livestock, particularly cows, and make the owners of bee
hives pay landowners when bees “trespassed” on their land,19 as well as
allowing for “seizure” of repeat offenders.20 While the need for pursuit to
retain ownership of a swarm was still present, the rules regarding owner-
ship and division of the honey varied according to who owned a swarm,
who pursued it and where it landed.21
I have found one reported case in the eighteenth century, from America
in 1790, in which ownership of a bee tree was disputed.22 Legal cases
involving bees increased exponentially during the nineteenth century,23
with fourteen cases in the United States, one from Canada and one from
Scotland. By the twentieth century, cases concerning bees are too numer-
ous to list here (although some twentieth-century cases will be mentioned
in this chapter). The nineteenth-century cases therefore undergird the
current common law legal framework which governs the ownership of
bees, and liability for any injury caused by bees.
Two strands are visible in the case law. In the cases dealing with owner-
ship of bees, they are described as being wild. Conversely, in common law
countries, when bees cause harm to others, they are described by common
law courts as being tame, or at least partially so. When the law considers
ownership of animals, in both common law and civilian countries, bees are
grouped with other wild or semi-wild non-human animals, which are dif-
ficult to control, including fish, doves and foxes.24 A person may obtain a
qualified ownership of bees (even wild bees) by capturing them, or doing
something practical to keep them, as long as the bees return to the hive. It
remains the case that once the bees leave the hive, the owner must chase
them and keep them in view to maintain ownership. In order to chase bees
onto someone else’s land, the pursuing owner of the bees might trespass
onto the land of another.
The nineteenth-century American cases give a flavour of the kinds of
ownership disputes that arise. If the purported owner cannot show that
bees on another’s land belonged to them originally, they will not be enti-
tled to the bees.25 If wild bees alight on someone’s land, the landowner
has to put some effort into keeping the bees, and if they do not, the bees
remain wild.26 Similarly, if wild bees are found on the land of another, it is
not enough to simply mark the tree with one’s initials on another’s land.27
Conversely, if the original owner chases their own bees, marks the tree and
intends to come back later to collect them, this is sufficient to show an
intention to regain possession, and a person who destroys the hive and
takes the honey commits trespass.28 Generally, actual possession of wild
bees needs to be taken even if the owner of the land upon which they
alighted gives permission for the bees to be taken.29 If the pursuer of the
bees asks permission to enter, and the owner of the land does not object,
this is enough to ensure that the finder of wild bees is not a trespasser. 30
If one person has put up an empty hive on a second person’s land without
their permission, with the intention of capturing bees, and a third person
comes and takes the bees from the hive, the first person cannot claim they
owned the bees, because the second person (the owner of the land) did
not give permission to put up the hive.31
The slander cases mentioned at the start of this chapter, where the
courts tend to say that bees are wild, might seem to suggest that bees can-
not be stolen.32 However, bees which have been hived and kept by some-
one can be stolen.33 Nonetheless, a twentieth-century Australian case
illustrates that there can be evidential difficulties in proving that the bees
held by the alleged thief are the same as those owned by the original
owner.34 Wild bees found on land, on the other hand, cannot be stolen
because they were never owned in the first place.35
Outside the United States, there seems to be more concern about tres-
passing onto the land of another to regain bees. In the 1893 Scottish case,
156 K. BARNETT
Harris v Elder, in the Perthshire Sheriff Court, Harris’s bees swarmed to

a disused chimney on Elder’s farm. Harris had pursued the bees from his
own farm and followed them to Elder’s land. When he attempted to
reclaim them, Elder refused admittance. Sheriff-Substitute Grahame said:
Bees in a wild state were the property of the person who could get posses-
sion of them. When they came into cultivation and swarmed from a hive,
they remained the property of the owner so long as he was pursuing them
where he was entitled to go. If they went upon another person’s land, that
person was entitled to prevent pursuit on his ground, and if they were hived
by that person they became his property. In this case the pursuer had not
managed to hive his bees. If he had been allowed access to the chimney and
hived the bees, they would have been his. But the defender was not obliged
to give entrance to his kitchen. The law would not oblige him to open his
door, and the bees became the property of the person who hived them.36
The Sheriff-Substitute seems to be influenced by the English common law

notion of ratione soli (mentioned in Blackstone) whereby ownership in
wild animals derives from ownership of land. However, this is not part of
either Roman or Scots law. Nonetheless, even under Scots-Roman law
principles, the pursuer had lost control of the bees once they had gone
into the kitchen chimney, and ownership had been lost.37
In a later twentieth-century case from England, where bees swarmed to
a neighbour’s land and the neighbour would not allow entry, it was found
in common law that there was no entitlement to trespass on another’s
land, and the bees return to being wild if they show no tendency to
return.38 The Scottish case is interesting, because Scots law (as noted ear-
lier) is derived from Roman law to a greater degree than the law of England
and Wales, and it is arguable that any influence of notions of ratione soli
was misconceived. Indeed, in the Roman law-influenced Civilian code
jurisdictions, a different approach was taken.
Civilian codes were enacted across Europe in the nineteenth century
(and subsequently adopted in many other jurisdictions across the globe).
While the Civilian jurisdictions were inflected by Roman law, the purpose
of codes was to state the law in simple terms so that a lay person could
understand the principles governing their legal obligations. The first such
code was the Napoleonic Code Civile (ultimately finalised in 1804). In the
nineteenth-century European Civilian codes, the position regarding entry
onto the land of another was (and still remains in later versions of the
codes) very different to the approach of English and Scots law. It was gen-
erally allowable for a person to enter onto the land of another to regain
their bees. In most European countries, including France,39 Austria,40
Italy41 and Spain,42 provisions allowed the owner of a swarm to pursue
them within a certain time (generally two days). In Germany, the pursuit
had to be immediate.43 Most civilian countries give the right to enter onto
another’s land to regain bees within a certain time and pay damages for
any damage done. The classification of bees as wild or domesticated seems
to be generally irrelevant: the concern is simply to state a clear rule for
swarming, pursuit and ownership. An obsession with the Indo-European
ideal of pursuit of swarming bees remains evident in the majority of these
nineteenth-century codes, with the exception of the Swiss code, where the
original owner of the bees retains ownership regardless of any pursuit.44
Although political philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that codification
was preferable on the basis that the law should be easily stated, able to be
justified and knowable by the public,45 Civilian style-codes were not
adopted in most common law jurisdictions (except in territories which
were French-influenced, such as Louisiana or Quebec).46
While bees were still mostly regarded as wild for the purposes of owner-
ship, when courts were attempting to ascertain who was responsible when
bees swarm and sting or annoy people or domesticated animals, there was
a tendency to characterise bees as at least partially domesticated and capa-
ble of being controlled. Liability would be imposed on the owner if a lack
of care had been taken in beekeeping. This may reflect the radical change
in knowledge of and attitude towards bees from the seventeenth century
onwards because of research by natural scientists. Clark has noted, “[p]re-
dating the Romans, hive beekeeping in England had remained virtually
unchanged after the Saxon introduction of the coiled straw skep, in place
of wicker hives, in the sixth century.”47 In the seventeenth century, this
began to change across Europe and elsewhere, as scientists and beekeepers
began to study different ways of hiving bees.48 By the late eighteenth cen-
tury, the Swiss researcher François Huber had created a “folio” hive with
glass-covered frames, which could be opened like the leaves of a book.
This allowed his assistants to observe the bees and discover more about
bee behaviour.49 Placing the bees in these glass folios also rendered bees
more docile and able to be observed, so that Huber said, “they soon
become accustomed to their situation, and in some measure tamed by it,
and at the end of three days one may open the hive, carry away parts of
combs, substitute others, without bees exhibiting too formidable signs of
158 K. BARNETT
displeasure.”50 He did not, however, think that he had domesticated bees

thereby:
I conceive, when I observe bees may be rendered tractable, that it needs to

be added, I do not arrogate to myself the absurd pretence of taming them,
for this excites a vague idea of tricks… I ascribe their tranquility on opening
the hives, to the manner that the sudden introduction of light affects them;
then, they seem rather to testify fear than anger.51
An English translation of Huber’s work (from which the above passages

are taken) became available in London in 1806. Later, Englishman
Thomas Nutt believed he had discovered that temperature and adequate
ventilation of bees was the key to preventing them from swarming and
sought to improve the treatment of bees kept by humans, but also to
improve the quality of honey.52 Clark has pointed out that, just as bees
could be managed, controlled and observed, there was a concomitant
notion in social theory of the time that people could be managed, con-
trolled and observed, with the provision of proper housing and other ame-
nities.53 Hence, Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon (a transparent
prison where all cells would be visible, and the actions of prisoners observ-
able by hidden guards in the centre)54 bears a distinct similarity, Clark
suggests, to the new transparent observatory bee hives. The Whig belief
that society could be improved by managing the environment of both
animals and people coupled with evolutionary ideas that laid bare the rela-
tionship between non-human animals and humans as a species of animal,
arguably fostering analogies in theories about social improvement and ani-
mal welfare. Clark has noted that as a result, the nineteenth century saw
“[a] concern with the processes and deep structure of life at the same time
as Romanticism displaced the Classical episteme.”55 In the nineteenth cen-
tury, the Enlightenment desire to categorise and structure the world in a
rational manner was complicated and complemented by a desire to break
down the dualist division between human society and the natural world.
The shift in depiction of bees as wild in Wallis v Mease to “almost as
completely domesticated as the ox or the cow” in Earl v Van Alstine may,
in part, reflect a social knowledge of the discovery that bees could, with
proper treatment and keeping, be made more tractable and that bees fol-
lowed knowable rules of behaviour. However, no reference is made to the
work of any natural historian in the cases, apart from in the 1873 Québécois
case, Tellier v Pelland.56 The Québécois attitude may reflect the fact that
Civilian and hybrid jurisdictions are generally more open to considering

scholarly works than common law jurisdictions. It is startling, in fact, how
little of bees the common law judges seem to know.
It might also be asked why Justice Selden compares bees to oxen and
cattle. At first, it may seem to be poetic whimsy. There seems to be no
other legal analogue, apart from the medieval Irish laws. It may be that
American law was influenced in some way by Irish law, given that both
systems make an idiosyncratic equivalence between cows and bees. Given
that US law also possesses the rare notion that bees can trespass, continu-
ing to the present day,57 it could be possible that Irish Brehon law had
some influence on the development of American law. However, there is no
proof of this. It is more likely, perhaps, that both Justice Selden and the
author of the Bechbretha linked cattle and bees because they were influ-
enced (consciously or unconsciously) by Biblical verses about the “land of
milk and honey”,58 albeit at different times and in different cultures.
Tammy Horn notes that English settlers in the United States were deter-
mined to recreate this characterisation of the Promised Land on American
soil, even though neither cows nor honeybees lived in North America
before European settlement.59 Both cows and honeybees were introduced
swiftly in order to transform American colonies into a land of milk and
honey, and the trope was used to cheer religiously motivated colonists.60
Indeed, the industrious nature of bees inspired settlers, as Horn notes, to
come up with notions such as a “quilting bee” or a “husking bee” to com-
plete work in a communal fashion.61 While Justice Selden may have been
influenced by this figurative coupling of bees and cows and their associa-
tion with providential care for a chosen people, he may equally have been
influenced by Biblical stipulations regarding “goring oxen”,62 another
non-human animal, which though generally useful to humans, can some-
times be harmful.
Alas, lawyers, like Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, tend to speak in prose
without knowing it. There is also a prosaic doctrinal reason behind the
judicial desire to portray bees as tame in Earl v Van Alstine. It arises from
the operation of a strange area of law called scienter,63 which originated in
medieval England,64 but still exists in many common law countries to this
day. Scienter provides that if an animal is categorised as intrinsically dan-
gerous, then the person possessing it at that time (the keeper) will be
strictly liable for any damage done by it, regardless of whether the keeper
was at fault. Conversely, if the animal is not intrinsically dangerous, it must
be shown that the keeper knew of that animal’s vicious propensity before
160 K. BARNETT
he or she will be liable. If liability is imposed, it will be available regardless

of where the injury occurs: on the victim’s own land, on the highway or
on the owner or keeper’s land, and regardless of any fault on the part of
the owner of keeper. It was this doctrine that was in question in Earl v van
Alstine: should Mr van Alstine be strictly liable for any damage his bees did
to Mr Earl’s horses? It all hinged upon whether the bees were wild, in the
sense of intrinsically harmful.
The division between wild and tame non-human animals does not
operate in the same way for the doctrine of scienter as it does for owner-
ship. The law of scienter distinguishes between intrinsically harmful non-
human animals, on the one hand (which are usually wild,65 but may
sometimes be tamed, as with elephants66 or monkeys67), and non-human
animals that are generally harmless, on the other hand (domesticated ani-
mals, but also some wild or semi-wild animals, such as rabbits). Thus,
some non-human animals that are regarded as “wild” for the purposes of
ownership will not be regarded as “wild” for the purposes of scienter,
including bees. Justice Selden was reluctant to find that bees were intrinsi-
cally harmful for the purpose of scienter, as Mr Earl was attempting to
argue. If he found that they were, all beekeepers would be liable for any
injury caused by a bee, regardless of whether it was their fault or not and
regardless of where it occurred. This might disincentivise people from
keeping bees. Justice Selden was acutely aware of the usefulness of bees, as
his judgment discloses. He said:
[T]he law looks with more favor upon the keeping of animals that are useful
to man, than such as are purely noxious and useless. And the keeping of the
one, although in some rare instances they may do injury, will be tolerated
and encouraged, while there is nothing to excuse the keeping of the other.
In the case of Vrooman v. Lawyer, the court say “If damage be done by
domestic animal kept for use or convenience, the owner is not liable to an
action without notice.” The utility of bees no one will question, and hence
there is nothing to call for the application of a very stringent rule to the case.
Upon the whole, therefore, I am clearly of the opinion that the owner of
bees is not liable at all events for any accidental injury they may do.68
He then decided that keeping the bees near the highway was not wrong-
ful, as they had been kept there for eight or nine years, and there was no
evidence that anyone else had been harmed: indeed, evidence was led that
other people had passed the hives without being stung, and hence Mr van
Alstine did not know the bees were dangerous to horses.69 In a late
twentieth-century case, a South Australian judge quoted Justice Selden’s
words in Earl v Van Alstine with approval,70 and thus, his legacy lives on.
Earl v Van Alstine can be compared with the 1873 Québécois case,
Tellier v Pelland.71 In that case, the defendant kept 112 hives of bees two
or three feet from the plaintiff’s property, and the plaintiff’s horse (which
was pulling a hay wagon at the time) died after bees stung it numerous
times. Magistrate Fontaine consulted several scholarly works on beekeep-
ing and the toxic effect of bee stings.72 Quebec possessed a Code Civile,
which allowed the Magistrate to hold someone liable for damage caused
by “imprudence, négligence ou inhabilité” [imprudence, negligence or
inability].73 The Code also made a person liable for careless treatment of
things in a person’s custody,74 including animals.75 It is worth noting that
Quebec followed the French Civilian tradition to some degree, and con-
sequently the Magistrate had Code provisions covering the situation; this
was something the common law courts lacked at this time.
Negligence in the common law is often thought not to have fledged
until 1923.76 In the nineteenth century, the common law doctrines avail-
able to deal with bee stings and other irritations caused by bees were sci-
enter, nuisance or the rule in Rylands v Fletcher (imposing strict liability
for escape of dangerous substances from one’s property).77 Hence, in the
1889 US case of Olmsted v Rich, when the plaintiff argued that excessive
numbers of bees were kept near his house, the action was brought in nui-
sance, on the basis that the bees were interfering with his quiet enjoyment
of his property.78
Nonetheless, a nascent concept of negligence was used in beekeeping
cases well before 1923, particularly if the court thought that too many
bees were kept in a small area too close to a neighbour’s premises.79
Consequently, in the 1903 Irish case of O’Gorman v O’Gorman, where
swarming bees caused the plaintiff’s horse to bolt and crush him against a
wall, later leading to his death, while one judge relied on nuisance, another
judge relied on negligence to hold the defendant beekeeping neighbour
liable. Similarly, in the 1906 Canadian case of Lucas v Pettit, when the
defendant’s bees stung the plaintiff and his horses, the court held that the
number and closeness of the hives to the plaintiff’s land was unreasonable.
In fact, a series of cases decided from 1850 to 1931 arose, from the United
States, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand, where plaintiffs claimed dam-
ages for incidents where bees stung horses (often resulting in the death of
the horses and, in one case, the death of the man handling the horse).80
162 K. BARNETT
These cases dropped off once the motor car replaced the horse and cart on
roads, and once the tractor replaced the horse on farms. In all cases where
liability was made out, the beekeeper kept many hives in a small area, near
the person who was injured by the bees. The lack of any recourse to bee-
keeping or scholarly literature in the common law cases is startling: the
Civilian Québécois case is the exception to the rule.
These days, beekeeping is regulated by government ordinance, and it is
not commonly a matter of litigation between private citizens. Nonetheless,
disputes still arise between neighbours. If the keeping is reasonable, courts
tend to excuse a few stings or any irritation. The most common reason
why a person may be restrained from keeping bees in the current day is
that a neighbour has a potentially deadly allergy to bee stings.81 The begin-
ning of an attempt at government regulation of beekeeping can be seen in
the 1889 American case, City of Arkadelphia v Clark, where Mr Clark was
tried for violating an ordinance which provided that “it shall be unlawful
for any person or persons to own, keep, or raise bees in the city of
Arkadelphia, the same having been declared a nuisance” and that any per-
son who kept bees in the city must remove them or be fined. Mr Clark
challenged the validity of the ordinance. The court found that the ordi-
nance was too broad, saying:
Neither the keeping, owning, nor raising of bees is in itself a nuisance. Bees
may become a nuisance in a city, but whether they are so or not is a question
to be judicially determined in each case. The ordinance under consideration
undertakes to make each of the acts named a nuisance, without regard to the
fact whether it is so or not, or whether bees in general have become a nui-
sance in the city.82
Put simply, bees are perceived as too useful to us to be banned altogether,

and perhaps the greater knowledge about how to keep bees tractable and
docile that arose in the nineteenth century has contributed to the notion
that they should not be regarded as wild in this aspect of the law.
The nineteenth-century cases involving disputes over bees have led us
to consider the history of bees and the law, and why the respective courts
might have portrayed them in such mutually contradictory ways: wild and
uncontrollable in the one case, docile and controllable in the second. The
people of European nations and their diaspora value the produce and
activity of European honeybees and have been fascinated by them for
thousands of years. Legally, while we have much more idea of why bees
behave as they do, we are still heirs to the Roman law notion that bees’
lack of predictability makes it difficult to establish the control generally
necessary to establish ownership of non-human animals. Perhaps Pliny the
Elder was right to say that bees occupy an intermediate position—some-
where between wild and domesticated—but the law struggles with that
which it cannot categorise. Therefore, they are generally regarded as wild
for the purposes of ownership, at least in common law jurisdictions.
But we do not categorise bees as wild when they sting people or other
non-human animals. There are several explanations for this. First, the cases
reflect a general societal shift in relationships with nature and knowledge
of bees and bee behaviour: previously inexplicable behaviour came to be
explained by research. Moreover, humans regarded bees fondly, as a crea-
ture which showed that in the proper environment and with proper treat-
ment, nature could be “tamed”. Second, it is suggested that bees have
always had (since ancient times) a very important social use, and in the
modern day, an important environmental role, and that courts recognise
this as generally more important than the possibility of a few stings. Third,
the strange persistence of strict liability under the doctrine of scienter as a
means of dealing with injuries by non-human animals in common law
countries explains why Justice Selden was at pains to depict bees as equiva-
lent to oxen or cows: he did not want an owner of bees to be strictly liable
for any injury caused, and accordingly, it was necessary to emphasise that
bees were not intrinsically dangerous and had considerable use to humans.
The nineteenth-century cases discussed in this chapter beautifully illus-
trate the long-standing issues arising from bees and the law and our diffi-
culties in depicting our complex relationship with bees and their produce.
We wish to think that we control nature and have tamed it, but part of us
recognises that, despite nineteenth-century technologies that allow
unprecedented knowledge of bees and manipulation of their behaviour,
bees have a wild aspect; they would continue happily without us if we dis-
appeared tomorrow.83
Notes
1. A hollow tree occupied by a colony of honeybees; sometimes natural,
sometimes created deliberately by humans. Bee trees have a long history in
colonial America: see Tammy Horn, “Bees and New World Colonialism”
in Bees in America: How the Honeybee Shaped a Nation (Lexington, KY:
Kentucky University Press, 2005), 19, 35.
164 K. BARNETT
2. Wallis v. Mease, 3 Binn. 546, 549 (Pa. Sup. Ct., 1811).

3. Idol v. Jones, 2 Dev. 162, 13 N.C. 162 (N.C. Sup. Ct, 1829).
4. Idol v. Jones, 2 Dev. 162, 164, 13 N.C. 162, 164 (N.C. Sup. Ct, 1829).
5. Cock v. Weatherby, 5 Smeades & M. 333, 13 Miss. 333 (Miss. High
Ct., 1845).
6. Cock v. Weatherby, 5 Smeades & M. 333, 333–35, 13 Miss. 333, 333–35
(Miss. High Ct., 1845).
7. Earl v. Van Alstine, 8 Barb. 630, 635–36, 1 Am. Negl. Cas. 368 (N.Y. Sup.
Ct., 1850).
8. The possibility of marking or identifying a non-human animal via distinc-
tive markings is noted in Craig Anderson, Possession of Corporeal Moveables
(Edinburgh, Edinburgh Legal Education Trust, 2015) [7–58].
9. Actual control may be less important than symbolic expressions of control:
see Michael J. R. Crawford, An Expressive Theory of Possession (Oxford:
Hart Publishing, 2020).
10. It may be possible to distinguish a “domesticated” Apis mellifera (e.g.,
Apis mellifera buckfast) from a “wild” Apis mellifera.
11. Aristotle, Historia Animalium [History of Animals], trans. A. L. Peek
(London: Heinemann, 1965), 366–367, ll. 19–20.
12. The general principles of ownership of wild animals are discussed in Katy
Barnett and Jeremy Gans, Guilty Pigs: the weird and wonderful history of
animal law (Collingwood: Latrobe University Press, 2022), 27–31.
13. Arianna Pretto-Sakmann, “‘You can Never Tell with Bees’: Good Advice
from Pooh for Students of the Lex Aquilia” in, Mapping the Law: Essays in
Honour of Peter Birks, ed. Andrew Burrows and Alan Rodger (Oxford:
Oxford University Press: 2006), 476, 482–84.
14. Brian D Joseph, “Comparative perspectives on bee-law in Indo-European”
Chatreššar: International Journal for Indo-European, Semitic and
Cuneiform Languages 18, no. 2 (2018): 16.
15. Digest of Justinian 41.1.5.2–41.1.5.4. Pretto-Sakmann has an excellent
discussion of the Roman Law.
16. Pliny the Elder, 8.220, 11.12. Earlier Roman jurists had been swayed by
Pliny the Elder’s view, but Gaius was not: Bruce W. Frier, “Bees and
Lawyers”. The Classical Journal 78, no. 2 (1982): 105, 106–110.
17. In the thirteenth century, see Henry de Bracton, De Legibus et
Consuetudinibus Angliae [On the Laws and Customs of England], ed.
G. E. Woodbine, trans. S. E. Thorne (London: Publications of the Selden
Society, 1968–77), l. 2, c. 1, fol. 9 [De Adquirendo Rerum Dominio, vol 2,
43], and in the eighteenth century, see William Blackstone, Commentaries
on the Laws of England Book II, ed. Simon Stern (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2016), 392–393.
18. Anderson, above n 13, [7–47]–[7–48], [7–56], [7–85], [7–105]–[7–110].
19. Bechbretha, Early Irish Law Series Volume 1, ed. & trans. Thomas Charles-
Edwards and Fergus Kelly (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies,
1983), §§1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
20. Ibid., “Appendix 6”, 189–191.
21. Ibid., §§36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49.
22. Merrils v. Goodwin, 1 Root 209 (Conn. Sup. Ct, 1790).
23. Gillet v. Mason, 7 Johns. 16 (N.Y. Sup. Ct., 1810); Wallis v. Mease, 3 Binn.
546 (Pa. Sup. Ct., 1811); Ferguson v. Miller, 1 Cow. 243, 13 Am. Dec. 519
(N.Y. Sup. Ct., 1823); Idol v. Jones, 2 Dev. 162, 13 N.C. 162 (N.C. Sup.
Ct, 1829); Goff v. Kilts, 15 Wend. 550 (N.Y. Sup. Ct., 1836); Cock v.
Weatherby, 5 Smeades & M. 333, 13 Miss. 333 (Miss. High Ct., 1845);
State v. Murphy, 8 Blackf. 498 (Ind. Sup. Ct., 1847); Earl v. Van Alstine, 8
Barb. 630, 1 Am. Negl. Cas. 368 (N.Y. Sup. Ct., 1850); Tellier v Pelland
(1873) 5 Revue Légale (O.S) 61 (Décisions des Tribunaux Cour Supérieure,
District des Trois Rivières, Quebec); Harvey v. Commonwealth, 22 Grant.
941, 64 Va. 941 (Va. Sup. Ct. of App., 1873); Adams v. Burton, 43 Vt. 36
(Vt. Sup. Ct., 1870); Rexroth v. Coon, 15 R.I. 35, 23 A. 37, 2 Am. St. Rep.
863 (R.I. Sup. Ct., 1885); Olmsted v. Rich, 3 Silv. 447, 6 N.Y.S. 826
(N.Y. Sup. Ct, 1889); City of Arkadelphia v. Clark, 52 Ark. 23, 11 S.W. 957,
20 Am. St. Rep. 154 (Ark. Sup. Ct, 1889); Harris v Elder (1893) 57 JP
553; State v. Repp, 104 Iowa 305 (Iowa Sup. Ct., 1893).
24. Mere pursuit does not establish ownership of a hunted fox in American
law: Pierson v. Post, 3 Caines 175 (N.Y. Sup. Ct., 1805). See also Angela
Fernandez, Pierson v. Post, The Hunt for the Fox (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2018).
25. See e.g., Merrils v. Goodwin, 1 Root. 209 (Conn. Sup. Ct. 1790).
26. The same is true in “hybrid” legal systems such as those of Scotland and
South Africa. See Anderson [7–20], [7–32], [7–40].
27. Gillet v. Mason, 7 Johns. 16 (N.Y. Sup. Ct., 1810).
28. Goff v. Kilts, 15 Wend. 550 (N.Y. Sup. Ct., 1836).
29. Ferguson v. Miller, 1 Cow. 243, 13 Am. Dec. 519 (N.Y. Sup. Ct., 1823).
30. Adams v. Burton, 43 Vt. 36 (Vt. Sup. Ct., 1870).
31. Rexroth v. Coon, 15 R.I. 35, 23 A. 37, 2 Am. St. Rep. 863 (R.I. Sup.
Ct., 1885).
32. Wallis v. Mease, 3 Binn. 546, 549 (Pa. Sup. Ct., 1811); Idol v. Jones, 2 Dev.
162, 13 N.C. 162 (N.C. Sup. Ct, 1829); Cock v. Weatherby, 5 Smeades &
M. 333, 13 Miss. 333 (Miss. High Ct., 1845).
33. State v Murphy, 8 Blackf. 498; Harvey v Commonwealth, 23 Gratt. 941, 61
Va. 941 (Va. Sup. Ct. of App., 1873).
34. R v Gadd [1911] QWN 31.
35. State v Repp, 104 Iowa. 305 (Iowa Sup. Ct., 1808).
36. Harris v Elder (1893) 57 JP 553.
166 K. BARNETT
37. I am indebted to Craig Anderson for providing me with this more nuanced
interpretation of the case.
38. Kearry v Pattinson [1939] 1 KB 471. See criticism of this (and comparison
to the above-mentioned nineteenth-century Civilian Codes) in E. J. Cohn,
“Bees and the Law” Law Quarterly Review 218 (1939): 289.
39. Art 10, loi du 4 avril 1889 sur le code rural (and the earlier loi des 28
sept–6 oct 1791, tit. i, sect. iii, art. 5.)
40. General Civil Code of Austria, Allgemeines Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (AGBG)
(1811), art 384.
41. Italian Civil Code, Il Codice Civile Italiano (1865), art 713.
42. Spanish Civil Code, Código Civil (1889), art 612.
43. German Civil Code, Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB) (1900), arts 961, 962,
963 and 964.
44. Swiss Civil Code, Code Civil Suisse or Schweizerisches Zivilgesetzbuch (ZGB)
(1907), art 719.
45. “Legislator of the World”: Writings on Codification, Law, and Education, ed.
Philip Scholfield and Jonathan Harris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
contains several of Bentham’s writings on this topic.
46. Draft Civil Codes were proposed for several US jurisdictions but were
never passed. The British government undertook codification in India and
Malaya throughout the nineteenth century, but the laws were half-way
between a Code and a statute.
47. J. F. M. Clark, Bugs and the Victorians (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009) 57.
48. Ibid., 57–62.
49. Huber himself was mostly blind by this stage, but observations were
relayed to him by his wife, his servant François Burnens, and, later, his
children.
50. François Huber, Nouvelles Observations sur les Abeilles, adressés à M. Charles
Bonnet [New Observations on the Natural History of Bees] (London:
Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1806), 6–7. The English translation
was dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks, then President of the Royal Society, and
the translator is unattributed.
51. Huber, ibid., 256.
52. Thomas Nutt, Humanity to Honey-Bees: Or Practical Directions for the
Management of Honey-Bees (Wisbech: H & J Leach, 1834, 2nd edn).
53. Clark, 67–70.
54. Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon, or The Inspection House (Dublin: Thomas
Byrne, 1791).
55. J. F. M. Clark, “‘The Complete Biography of Every Animal’: Ants, Bees,
and Humanity in Nineteenth-Century England” Studies in History and
Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 29, no. 2 (1998): 249, 249.
56. (1873) 5 Revue Légale (O.S) 61 (Décisions des Tribunaux Cour Supérieure,
District des Trois Rivières, Quebec), refers to the mid-eighteenth century
multi-volume work on bees by René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur,
Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes, and the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury medical work, Traité élémentaire et pratique de pathologie interne, by
Augustin Grisolle.
57. See, e.g., Lenk v Spezia, 213 P.2d 47 (Cal Dist Ct App, 1949); Bennett v
Larsen Co, 348 N.W.2d 540 (Wis. Sup Ct. 1984); Yawn v. Dorchester
County, No. 20-1584 (4th Cir. 2021).
58. Exod., 3: 8; Num., 14: 8.
59. Horn, 19–22.
60. Ibid., 24.
61. Ibid., 30–31.
62. Exod., 21: 28–31
63. A more detailed discussion of scienter is in Barnett and Gans, 95–104. The
name comes from the first two words of the common law writ used to
plead the cause of action: scienter retinuit (“knowingly retained”).
64. Robert C. Palmer, English Law in the Age of the Black Death (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 228.
65. See, e.g., Marlor v Ball (1900) 16 TLR 239 (two zebras in a menagerie
savaged a man).
66. See, e.g., Behrens v Bertram Mills Circus Ltd [1957] 2 QB 1 (a circus ele-
phant trampled some performers).
67. See, e.g., May v Burdett (1846) 9 QB 101 (a monkey bit a woman).
68. Earl v. Van Alstine, 8 Barb. 630, 636, 1 Am. Negl. Cas. 368 (N.Y. Sup.
Ct., 1850).
69. Ibid.
70. Stormer v Ingram [1978] 21 SASR 93.
District des Trois Rivières, Quebec).
District des Trois Rivières, Quebec), 64–65.
73. Civil Code of Lower Canada 1866, Art 1053.
76. Donoghue v Stevenson [1936] AC 562, involving the potential presence of
a decayed snail in a bottle of ginger beer.
77. See David Frimston and David Smith, Beekeeping and the Law—Swarms
and Neighbours (Burrowbridge: Bee Books New & Old, 1993) 7–8.
78. Olmsted v. Rich, 3 Silv. 447, 6 N.Y.S. 826 (N.Y. Sup. Ct, 1889).
168 K. BARNETT
79. See e.g., O’Gorman v O’Gorman [1903] 2 IR 573 (very early instance of
negligence in Barton J’s judgment in that case); Lucas v Pettit (1906) 12
OLR 448; Stormer v Ingram [1978] 21 SASR 93.
80. Earl v. Van Alstine, 8 Barb. 630, 1 Am. Negl. Cas. 368 (N.Y. Sup. Ct.,
1850); Tellier v Pelland (1873) 5 Revue Légale (O.S) 61 (Décisions des
Tribunaux Cour Supérieure, District des Trois Rivières, Quebec);
O’Gorman v O’Gorman [1903] 2 IR 573 (Ireland); Parsons v. Mansor, 119
Iowa 88, 93 N.W. 86 (Iowa Sup. Ct., 1903); Petey Manufacturing Co. v.
Dryden, 5 Penn. 166, 62 Atl. 1056 (Del. Sup. Ct., 1904); Lucas v Pettit
(1906) 12 OLR 448 (Canada); Robins v Kennedy [1931] NZLR 1134.
81. See e.g., Bauskis v Director General, NSW Agriculture [2003] NSWADT
228; Branesac v Director General, NSW Agriculture [2003] NSWADT 237.
82. City of Arkadelphia v Clark, 52 Ark. 23, 11 S.W. 957, 20 Am St. Rep. 154.
83. See Thomas Seeley, ‘Are Honeybees Domesticated’ in Thomas Seeley, The
Lives of Bees: the untold story of the honey bee in the wild (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2019) 79.
CHAPTER 10
Thomas Hardy’s Bees, Sex, Domestication

and Wildness
Alexis Harley
In his study of variation among domesticated animal and plant species,

Charles Darwin would refer wryly to the ages-old domestication of hon-
eybees—“if indeed their state can be considered one of domestication”.1
This chapter brings the question of honeybees’ domestication to the inter-
changes between honeybees and human characters in three of Thomas
Hardy’s novels, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native
and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the first two of which were published within a
decade of Darwin’s remark of 1868. The proximity of honeybees to
humans in Hardy’s novels brings into contact what were generally treated
in the latter decades of the nineteenth century as entirely separate discus-
sions: one concerning whether honeybees were domesticated or domesti-
cable (a question that plays out in fascinating ways in nineteenth-century
legal disputes over honeybees, as we see in Katy Barnett’s discussion of
bees and the law in Chap. 9 of this volume) and the other about the extent
A. Harley (*)

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39570-3_10
170 A. HARLEY
to which human sexual instincts naturally corresponded with social mores.

While the bees of Hardy’s novels cohabit with humans, they nonetheless
make their own mating arrangements and swarm at will. Equally, they find
themselves scooped from a tree into a basket by a human up a ladder or
carried off thirty miles to market. They offer Hardy an example of a sexu-
ality and reproductive impulse somewhere between wildness and domesti-
cation, along with a set of seemingly contradictory associations—sweetness
and the sting, sociability and queenliness, the industry of the worker and
the idleness of the drone.
The apian imagery of Far from the Madding Crowd, published in 1874,
runs the gamut of these associations. When bees are read in analogy with
the human characters, these apian associations in turn analogise a tension
between “wild” human sexuality and a sexuality that is domesticated by
principles of sociability. The delicate balance in the novel’s worldview this
affords is vital to its establishment as a romance. With differently placed
emphases on its key events, Far from the Madding Crowd could easily have
been construed instead as tragedy. As it is, despite the awful deaths of
Fanny Robin and her baby, the not particularly lamentable death of
Sergeant Troy, the imprisonment of Farmer Boldwood and the accidental
deaths of many sheep, the novel itself veers ultimately towards a comedic
conclusion.
The Return of the Native, published just four years later, would offer a
far bleaker vision of “wild” sexuality and, accordingly, comes closer to
realising a tragic structure. The character who is perhaps most like
Bathsheba, Eustacia, travels a tragic course, and although Diggory Venn
arrives at the conventionally happy ending of marriage with Thomasin, the
conclusion seems out of joint with the novel’s emotional trajectory
(indeed, in the 1912 Wessex edition of the novel, Hardy claimed that “the
original conception of the story did not design a marriage between
Thomasin and Venn”).2 In this later novel, questions about the tension
between human sexuality and social norms once again play out in a milieu
literally buzzing with bees. But while there is some scope for reading this
novel’s human characters as beelike, the bee-human analogies crumble
almost as soon as they are touched. I want to suggest two reasons for this.
Firstly, as recent critics have argued, Hardy’s representation of Egdon
Heath reflects a heightened ecological sensibility—no one nonhuman spe-
cies could possibly preponderate in what Gillian Beer sees as Hardy’s
reconstitution of the “entangled bank” of Origin of Species.3 Secondly, and
perhaps related to the heightened Darwinian spirit of The Return of the
10 THOMAS HARDY’S BEES, SEX, DOMESTICATION AND WILDNESS 171
Native, Hardy’s abortive invocation of honeybees as analogues for humans

in this later novel has something to do with the emphasis within its plot on
what “wild” sexuality can mean, for women especially (although Damon
Wildeve’s death, like Troy’s, is a not entirely convincing warning to sexu-
ally impulsive men too). In the overarching narrative logic of Far from the
Madding Crowd, the sting is held in tension with the sweetness, the eroti-
cisation of the individual’s pursuit of instinctive desire in tension with an
approving representation of sociability (and a disapproving account of its
antithesis). The Return of the Native is nowhere near as wholeheartedly
committed to the romantic harmonisation of wildness and domesticity;
although, as Hardy’s ultimate decision to marry Thomasin and Diggory
suggests, Hardy was aware of his readers’ appetite for such a harmony.
Finally, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, honeybees work, I show, to represent
the simultaneously natural and sociable world of the cottaging commu-
nity. Bees’ eradication from the scenes of exploitation and violence perpe-
trated by the Stoke-d’Urbervilles coincides both with that family’s artifice
and with Alec d’Urberville’s sexual libertinism. Here the bees are not so
much in analogy with the characters as their presence is signifying the
sociability of an agrarian beekeeping community and their absence the
removal of that community’s protections.
Across these three novels, we see a gradual shift, then, from what might
be read as analogy-making between honeybees and humans towards a
more committed representationalism. George Levine argues that Hardy
“was not an awkward realist but a poet of a new way—a post-Darwinian
way—of looking at the world”.4 That is, Hardy’s is a Darwinian realism,
thick with interspecies analogy-making because reality, in the Darwinian
view, is itself characterised by co-constitutive relationships and common
origins that produce comparable effects in diverse organic forms. The
scenes of human and bee copresence that seem to hum with some more
than literal significance in these novels are consistent with the realist
agenda that also sees Hardy deploy bees in ways that are structurally insig-
nificant for the narrative. That is to say, Hardy’s realist agenda includes the
work of realising what humans have in common with other species.
Today, killing a hive’s presiding queen every one or two years and
replacing her with a mated or artificially inseminated queen who has
arrived by parcel post is a common beekeeping routine. This practice, as is
argued in Chap. 1 of this book, had its roots in nineteenth-century tech-
nologies. Tracking down the queen, for instance, was prohibitively chal-
lenging before the adoption of hive boxes with moveable frames, most of
172 A. HARLEY
which now resemble Lorenzo Langstroth’s patent of the 1850s. Polish-

German priest, Johannes Dzierzon, who had designed a practicable hive
with moveable frames as early as 1838, told Darwin that annual requeen-
ing mitigated against swarming and the supposed overproduction of
drones,5 a recommendation he had made more widely public among
German readers in his Rationelle Bienenzucht, first published in 1861.6
Contemporary bee-breeding, which aims to produce queens who carry
the genes for notionally desirable characteristics, also builds on the interest
of nineteenth-century apiculture in the isolation and development of sub-
breeds of Apis mellifera. From Linnaeus’ identification of Apis mellifera in
1758, a further ten subspecies of Apis mellifera would be named over the
course of the nineteenth century. By 1880, a paper would be read at the
British Bee-keepers’ Association meeting on “The Ligurian Queen Bee:
Her Introduction to Alien Stocks and the Best Means of Pure Propagation”.
The Ligurian honeybee, Apis mellifera ligustica, was widely marketed by
beekeeping enterprises like George Neighbour and Sons as a more pro-
ductive and “less irascible” alternative to local honeybee populations.7 The
dissemination of information about Ligurian queen breeding and hive
requeening among literate British beekeepers pushed their hives towards
the domesticated end of the wild-domesticated axis. But despite such
mostly later nineteenth-century efforts to regulate honeybee reproduction
and (avant la lettre) hive genetics, interventions of this kind would have
been unimaginable to Hardy’s beekeepers, whose fictional lives are staged
decades before the novels’ publication. For one thing, the skeps used by
the beekeepers of Wessex lacked moveable frames, which meant that
searching a hive for an old queen would more often than not have involved
cutting out combs of uncapped brood, very likely destroying the colony in
the process. Even the harvest of honey from skeps, as we read in Under the
Greenwood Tree, generally involved the “murder” of the bees.8
Short of locating honeybees in isolated locations far from both man-
aged and unmanaged honeybee colonies, the beekeepers of Hardy’s fic-
tional world could not control the reproductive arrangements of their
bees. Bees mate in flight, and male honeybees, drones, were known to
wander up to two miles (or even five miles, according to one manual of the
1870s)9 in search of a queen. Where honeybees were endemic, there was
no way of knowing, let alone controlling, the provenance of the drones
with whom a queen might mate. In this sense, honeybees were virtually
unique among early nineteenth-century English livestock in escaping the
husband’s strategic manipulation of their reproduction to produce an ani-

mal more congenial to human service.
When Darwin published Variation of Animals and Plants Under
Domestication in 1868, honeybees were not yet subject to widespread
attempts at artificial selection, although there were instances of such
attempts, alluded to above. Humans still exerted selective influence over
bees, however, impacting on the divergence of the species into different
varieties. Transported by beekeepers “into almost every corner of the
world”, Darwin wrote, honeybees had been subject to the selective pres-
sures of various climates, floras and competitors for nectar, with the result
that bees living in different areas had come to differ in size, colour, temper
and habits.10 The common practice of nineteenth-century skep beekeep-
ers, of destroying the bees in order to rob them, also exerted selective
pressure. If this was not artificial selection, but natural selection, it was a
natural selection in which human actors played a part: to say that hive-bees
were wild, if what wild meant was entire freedom from human manipula-
tion, was not completely true. For these reasons, and also, because, on the
other hand, honeybees could, and often still do, remain happily indepen-
dent from humans, for Darwin, honeybees are neither fully domesticated
nor fully outside human influence.11
Honeybees, then, offered European writers of the late nineteenth cen-
tury a uniquely apt vehicle for conveying an ambivalence about the domes-
tication of sexuality itself. While the devastating impacts of men’s sexual
predation or their refusal to support pregnant women or their children are
a recurring theme in Hardy’s novels, suggesting that he is far from com-
mending a purely “wild” sexuality, Hardy also implies that the domesticat-
ing or civilising of sexuality can extend to pathological outcomes. In a
1912 postscript to Jude the Obscure, Hardy describes the marriage laws
(which in that novel enforce soul-destroying contracts, lead to the suffer-
ing of children, and drive characters apart) as “the tragic machinery of the
tale”. And he does not disown the assessment of an unnamed German
critic that Sue Bridehead, averse to sexual intercourse as well as marriage,
is a delineation of “the woman of the feminist movement—the slight pale
‘bachelor’ girl—the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that
modern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet”.12
In most of his novels, however, Hardy’s heroines achieve what many
Victorian readers found a piquant balance of the wild and domestic. An
essay by sexologist Havelock Ellis on “Thomas Hardy’s novels”, published
in 1883, indicates how thoroughly Hardy’s early female characters were
174 A. HARLEY
understood by nineteenth-century readers as pleasing depictions of instinct

in tension with domestication. Ellis refers approvingly to Hardy’s “instinct-
led women, who form a series which for subtle simplicity, for a certain
fascinating and incalculable vivacity which is half ethereal and half homely,
can never be matched”.13 To be “half homely” is of course to be “partly
familiar”, but it is also to be “partly domesticated”. Ellis is reading, I
think, the ways in which the women of Hardy’s novels are both subject to
and transcendent of their domestication. The tension between natural
instinct and domestication manifests again in his reading of Hardy’s
women as “characterized by a yielding to circumstance that is limited by
the play of instinct”. They are “untamed children of Nature” who are “not
quite without some principles of conduct”.14 For anyone who missed the
memo, Ellis writes: “One feels compelled to insist on the instinctiveness of
these women”.15
Bees of course perform many functions in Hardy’s novels, not least in
simply serving as part of the mass of circumstantial detail needed to accu-
rately realise agrarian life in the country of his childhood. But they also
serve, I argue, to evoke the idea of lives lived on the edge of wildness and
domestication. In his first contemplation of the possibility of sexual union
with Bathsheba Everdene, the reclusive Farmer Boldwood “went meditat-
ing down the slopes with his eyes on his boots, which the yellow pollen
from the buttercups had bronzed in artistic gradations”.16 That he
becomes, effectively, a pollinating insect the moment he enters into the
plot of the romance will be no surprise given that the novel’s central female
character, Bathsheba, seems to adopt both the colouration and behaviour
of a bee from the moment she first appears to the reader and Gabriel Oak
atop her yellow wagon. She is later seen by Cainy Ball, on her flight with
Troy, wearing “a beautiful gold-colour silk gown, trimmed with black
lace” (vol. 2, p. 38). Among other farmers at Casterbridge, Bathsheba is a
queen in a drone congregation area: “Among these heavy yeomen a femi-
nine figure glided, the single one of her sex that the room contained. She
was prettily and even daintily dressed” (vol. 1, p. 149). Strangely recalling
the yellow wagon on which Bathsheba arrives, the narrator continues:
“She moved between them as a chaise between carts, was heard after them
as a romance after sermons, was felt among them like a breeze among
furnaces” (vol. 1, p. 149). Bathsheba’s “instinct” at the farmers’ market
“was to merely walk as a queen among these gods of the fallow, like a little
sister of a little Jove, and to neglect closing prices altogether” (vol. 1,
p. 151). Both the narrator and various characters refer to Bathsheba as a
queen,17 Troy notably describing her as “Queen of the Corn-market” (vol.

1, p. 284). Troy flirts with Bathsheba, perversely, by telling her that she is
a bane to “her race” because a hundred men will covet her and only one
win her (not, incidentally, the honeybee way: and, as things pan out,
Bathsheba does, like a queen bee, mate successively with more than one
male). In making this speech: “The handsome sergeant’s features were …
as rigid and stern as John Knox’s in addressing his gay young queen” (vol.
1, p. 290). Hardy’s simile here turns Bathsheba into Elizabeth I, whose
accession occurred three months after the publication of John Knox’s
awesomely misogynistic First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous
Regiment of Women, published in 1558. Among Knox’s arguments for the
unsuitability of women (and particularly Mary I, Elizabeth’s half-sister)
for office, is the contention that:
Nature hath in all Beasts printed a certain Mark of Dominion in the Male,
and a certain Subjection in the Female, which they keep unviolate: For no
Man ever saw the Lion make Obedience or stoop before the Lioness; neither
yet can it be proved, that the Hind taketh the Conducting of the Herd
amongst the Harts.18
Charles Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie, first published in 1609, and

popularising the discovery that the beehive was “an Amazonian or femi-
nine kingdom”,19 refuted Knox’s claim and implied parallels between the
orderly and benevolent reign of the queen bee and of Elizabeth 1.
Bathsheba, “wild in a steady way” (vol. 1, p. 332), has an ambivalent
relationship to her own authority and indeed domestication. Correcting
Gabriel Oak of the misapprehension that she has been “got” by somebody
“as a sweetheart”, she says “I hate to be thought men’s property in that
way” (vol. 1, p. 4). But when Oak proposes, she rejects him, saying “I
want somebody to tame me; I am too independent; and you would never
be able to, I know” (vol. 1, p. 51). Dismissing Oak from her service in
what Hardy treats as a fit of embarrassed pique after Oak has chastened her
over her affair with Troy, Bathsheba announces, “I shall be my own man-
ager” (vol. 1, p. 323), a reference both to the management of her farm
and her sexuality, a move that she later repents on both fronts.
There are decided parallels between this characterisation of Bathsheba
and Hardy’s characterisation of the Weatherbury bees, late in swarming
and unruly when they do so. The swarm-catching scene in Far from the
Madding Crowd has been widely read for Hardy’s pointing of individual
176 A. HARLEY
human drama against larger vital forces. Michael Millgate notes that the
scene emphasises the novel’s “specifically seasonal structure”. He writes:
recurring moments in the pattern of Weatherbury life are set off, in their
essential timelessness and changelessness, against the rapid and often strenu-
ous action of the narrative itself, but they are also used, again and again, as
both the setting and raw material of a series of magnificent scenes in which
the seasonal moment, evoked in all its details, becomes an integral part of
the presented experience.20
Anne Alexander’s reading of the swarm-scene begins with the bees as ana-
logues for the protagonists’ situation, and then shows how both (bees and
Bathsheba and Troy) are for Hardy manifestations of patterns that tran-
scend the here and now, that transcend any individual or indeed species.
The “‘unruly’ behaviour of the bees”, Alexander writes, “seems to suggest
the nature of Bathsheba’s passion”.21 The bees’ choice of uppermost
bough “seems to hint at that complication of affairs caused by her incon-
venient instinctive reaction to Troy”. But “As the instincts of the bees
coincide in that apparently random choice, Hardy suggests ‘a process
somewhat analogous to that alleged formation of the universe, time and
times ago’. In this, Hardy seems to suggest that the surrounding narrative
describes an archetypal pattern of behaviour.”22
If these are archetypal patterns of behaviour at work, they are shared
between species. The swarm-scene is a mess of suggestive interspecies par-
allels. Bathsheba’s “instinctive reaction to Troy” makes her swarmlike—as
feelings that seem incoherent and without direction cohere like bees on a
branch—but there are parallels between these bees and Sergeant Troy too,
which turn Bathsheba into a stung beekeeper. Preparing to capture the
swarm, Bathsheba had “made herself impregnable with armour of leather
gloves, straw hat and large gauze veil” (vol. 1, p. 300). While she is
“impregnable” to the stings of the worker bees, when she hears Troy’s
voice, she is immediately rattled by its “strange power in agitating her”
(vol. 1, p. 300). Troy penetrates her psychic armour, and she removes her
literal armour to give to him. The next scene has him cutting and thrust-
ing his sword in a secret assignation before kissing her, a gesture that “set
her stinging as if aflame” (vol. 1, p. 313). Her “folly” as the narrator
describes her associating with Troy in the opening lines of the next chap-
ter”, was (rather than being intrinsic to her nature) “introduced as lymph
on the dart of Eros” (vol. 1, p. 314), another winged stinging creature
associated, in this case, with erotic sweetness. Much later, Oak imagines
“the sting” of Bathsheba’s discovery that Troy had impregnated Fanny
Robin (vol. 2, p. 150).
Troy, who administers these stings, is far more drone than worker-bee:
not least in that, like a drone, he has a penis, rather than the envenomating
modified ovipositor of a worker-bee. Pettigrew’s Handy Book of Bees, pub-
lished four years before Far from the Madding Crowd, describes drones as
“idle gentlemen” who in “fine weather … take longer excursions into the
country for pleasure than working bees do for food”.23 His representation
of the drone as lazy, willing to “die of want rather than work”, perhaps not
even willing to “feed themselves in the midst of plenty”,24 captures some
of Troy’s indolence. Troy’s summer-long excursions into the country for
pleasure see him engaging in a sequence of love affairs that are catastrophic
for others (particularly for Fanny Robin and her baby, but also, in less dire
ways, for Bathsheba and Gabriel Oak, and for Boldwood, who will be
imprisoned when he kills Troy). In Winter he leaves the society of
Weatherbury for his garrison in Melchester (perhaps, like Mellstock and
Budmouth, one of Wessex’s bee-themed toponyms: “chester” being an
anglicised version of the Latin for “camp of soldiers”, and “mel” deriving
from the Latin for honey). Marrying Bathsheba and seizing authority over
her farm, Troy prefers wassailing over work and leads the entire male
workforce into a drunken stupor that jeopardises seven hundred and fifty
pounds worth of weather-exposed wheat and barley (saved by Oak).
Troy’s pleasure drives are not moderated, or not sufficiently moderated,
by care or concern for his fellows. Hardy’s judgement of this is articulated
through his approval of Gabriel Oak, who is ultimately rewarded with a
happy marriage to Bathsheba, and who arrives at the profoundly sociable
realisation “that among the multitude of interests by which he was sur-
rounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the most
absorbing and important in his eyes” (vol. 2, p. 159).
In reading Far from the Madding Crowd, I suggest that the ambiguous
relationship between honeybees and husbandry in Hardy’s world—with
bees not entirely the objects of either artificial or natural selection, never
quite domesticated, but also not entirely escaping the pressures of human
activity—makes them especially significant accomplices to Hardy’s envi-
sioning of how his human characters, Bathsheba, Troy, Boldwood, Oak,
Fanny Robin, negotiate their sexual instincts. Crucially for the analogical
work that Hardy does in his novel, honeybees had been widely understood
for centuries to have their own internal social order, and the sexual or
178 A. HARLEY
reproductive instincts of the honeybee society did not manifest solely in

individuals but were distributed throughout the hive. John George Wood’s
account of the queen in Insects at Home, observations from which pepper
Hardy’s notebooks, devolves authority from the queen to the bee collec-
tive. The one perfect female, Wood begins in a tellingly passive voice, is
“permitted to live within the hive, her duty being a very simple one—to
lay an enormous number of eggs from which proceed the future swarms”.25
The hive’s other potentially reproductive entities, the drones, are, in
Wood’s handling, similarly passive and resigned to their role. The distribu-
tion of agency throughout a honeybee society puts pressure on simplistic
divisions between instinct and society, divisions readily invoked in accounts
of Hardy’s sexual ethics. Complicating the idea that instinct either belongs
to individuals or is an agent of their individuation, honeybees potentially
enrich how one might read individual and social action in Hardy’s novels.
Egdon Heath, the landscape of The Return of the Native, is inhabited
by a human working population of furze-cutters who gather the young
shoots to sell as Winter feed for cattle. Where there is furze there are also
honeybees working its blooms. Ulex europaeus, as early readers of The
Return of the Native would likely have known, was widely recognised in
the nineteenth century as one of the most constant sources of both nectar
and pollen in English moorland. As we meet the furze-cutters of Return
of the Native, they seem to be both with and like the honeybees with
whom they share the plant, sociable, mead-quaffing heath-dwellers.
In what might be a scene of bee-human identification, Eustacia Vye’s
gorgeous dark hair is regularly caught, we read, “by a prickly tuft of the
large Ulex Europæus—which will act as a sort of hairbrush” and “she would
go back a few steps, and pass against it a second time”.26 Repeatedly brush-
ing against Ulex europaeus, Eustacia Vye might be seen as conscripted,
despite herself, into the role of a worker-bee, inadvertently accumulating
furze pollen in her hair. But she is maladapted to worker-bee life (“too idle
to be charming,” in the words of Mrs Yeobright (vol. 1, p. 274)). She is
an individualist rather than sociable, and she disdains the workers and their
work. A series of creaky puns might suggest an analogy between bees and
Eustacia. She is a migrant from Budmouth who competes (or vies) with
Thomasin Yeobright, the daughter-figure/niece of Blooms-End, for sexual
union with Damon Wildeve, before working instead to couple with
Thomasin’s cousin, Clym, and later renewing her entanglement with
Damon. Eustacia is described in the novel’s opening scene, and again
throughout the novel, as a queen. An initially unmarried young woman,
she exerts a compulsion over her company that challenges the authority of
the maternal figures of Susan Nunsuch and Mrs Yeobright. Resenting
Eustacia’s perceived enthralment of her son, Johnny, Susan stabs Eustacia
with a stocking-needle in church and destroys a beeswax effigy of her.
Hardy had read of queen rivalry in George Wood’s Insects at Home while
writing Return of the Native in 1876, jotting down a note on the subject
as he read. He had also read a detailed account of the queen-bee killing off
pupating queens by envenomating them with her stinger in Origin of
Species, an account in which Darwin invites his readers to “admire the sav-
age, instinctive hatred of the queen-bee, which urges her instantly to
destroy the young queens her daughters as soon as born or perish herself
in the combat”.27 Darwin’s account emphasises the intergenerational
dimension to rivalry between queens, the mother competing with her
daughters, although, in fact, particularly if the “mother” queen has
swarmed or died, “sister” queens can compete with one another. The
intergenerational edge to the sexual-maternal competition of queen bees
is arguably visited in Return of the Native where sexual rivalry seems to
exist both between “sisters”, or at least women of the same generation,
competing for husbands, and also between Eustacia and a series of mother
figures who resent what they perceive as her erotic capture of their sons.
While Susan manifests this rivalry by stabbing Eustacia, Eustacia’s other
would-be maternal-sexual rival, her mother-in-law Mrs Yeobright, is stung
to death (by an adder) after Eustacia chooses not to admit her to the home
she shares with Clym.
But Eustacia’s competition with the novel’s mother figures is not
enough to sustain Hardy’s identification of her with the honeybee. As
Hardy wrote to his sometime illustrator, Arthur Hopkins, “Thomasin, as
you have divined, is the good heroine …. Eustacia is the wayward & erring
heroine—she marries Yeobright, the son of Mrs Yeobright, is unhappy, &
dies.”28 She is not, that is, a good social insect, and her incidental associa-
tions with moths and beetles seem to offer more apt comparisons. A
“queen of night”, as she’s dubbed in the title of the fifth chapter, Eustacia
is involved in a number of pivotal nocturnal scenes and accordingly con-
sorts with various moths—as does Wildeve, who signals his presence at her
window by dragooning a moth to fly into her candle. In her winter dress,
Eustacia is like “a tiger-beetle which, when observed in dull situations,
seems to be of the quietest neutral colour, but under a full illumination
blazes with dazzling splendour” (vol. 1, p. 141).
180 A. HARLEY
The sociability of the honeybee is an important dimension of its nature:

while the superorganism will not be fully dictated to by the average
nineteenth-century beekeeper, its constituent organisms are subject to the
will of the whole. Because of this, comparisons with solitary insects better
mark those characters, like Eustacia, who come close to refusing sociability
altogether. Cytherea Graye expresses a complicated version of this refusal
in Desperate Remedies: “Though it may be right to care more for the ben-
efit of the many than for the indulgence of your own single self, when you
consider that the many, and duty to them, only exists to you through your
own existence, what can be said?” Her name aligns her of course with
Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love, but also with the genus of bee flies,
Cytherea—solitary insects and not, despite the common name, bees.
Eustacia is identified with a multiplicity of species in part because of the
sheer lavishness of the traffic between Hardy’s human characters and the
more-than-human nature of these novels, a lavishness that troubles a sus-
tained identification between any one human and any one species. Unlike
Cytherea or Eustacia, Eustacia’s husband, Clym, might be read as an
exemplary analogue to the social insect: “Yeobright loved his kind. … He
wished to raise the class at the expense of individuals rather than individu-
als at the expense of the class. What was more, he was ready at once to be
the first unit sacrificed” (vol. 1, p. 263). Clym’s tendency away from indi-
vidualism and towards labouring sociability is consummated when too
much reading damages his eyesight and he chooses to join the furze-
cutters: “he sallied forth with his new fellow-labourer” (vol. 2, p. 71). So
far, so worker-bee-like. For good measure, while Yeobright works the
furze, we read that “[h]is daily life was of a curious microscopic sort, his
whole world being limited to a circuit of a few feet from his person. His
familiars were creeping and winged things, and they seemed to enrol him
in their band” (vol. 2, pp. 71–72). Hardy names the first of these familiars,
promisingly, as the bees who “hummed around his ears with an intimate
air, and tugged at the heath and furze-flowers at his side in such numbers
as to weigh them down to the sod” (vol. 2, p. 72). But the narrator imme-
diately follows these bees with Clym’s other “familiars”: the “strange
amber-coloured butterflies which Egdon produced, and which were never
seen elsewhere,” who “quivered in the breath of his lips, alighted upon his
bowed back, and sported with the glittering point of his hook as he flour-
ished it up and down”, and then catalogues in gorgeous detail the
“emerald-green grasshoppers” that “leaped over his feet”, “[h]uge flies,
ignorant of larders and wire-netting, and quite in a savage state”, brilliant
blue and yellow snakes, and litters of rabbits (vol. 2, p. 72). If he is enrolled
into the band of furze-tugging bees, then he is equally enrolled into the
band of the rabbits, snakes, grasshoppers, flies and butterflies, the furze
itself. Gillian Beer notes in this scene of Clym on the heath Hardy’s “per-
sistent anthropomorphism” of the nonhuman creatures (the grasshoppers
as “unskilled acrobats”, for instance), an anthropomorphism which “dis-
limns human boundaries”.29 Ultimately, she writes of this scene, “The
‘entangled’ or ‘tangled bank’ which in Darwin’s text is peopled by plants,
birds, insects and worms, here has room also for man, not set apart from
other kinds.”30 Beer reads this passage as depicting a brief moment in
which Clym becomes fully enmeshed with the ecosystem, not human like
nature, but human as nature, even though, for the most part, Clym dis-
rupts the stability of Egdon Heath by his return.
Hardy’s cross-species comparisons here mutate before they can settle
into sustained allegories not least because the reality Hardy envisions is
too teeming and multiplicitous for anything as stable and binaristic as a
sustained comparison between two species. Clym is in the bees’ band, but
also the butterfly’s, and also the grasshopper’s and the rabbits’ and the
snakes’. “The discovery of the law of evolution,” Hardy wrote in 1910,
“revealed that all organic creatures are of one family,” and “shifted the
centre of altruism from humanity to the whole conscious world collec-
tively”31—an extraordinary statement for its flattening of the humanist
distinction between conscious humans and the animal world (meaning
that the anthropomorphism Beer identifies above was perhaps not anthro-
pomorphism at all, but an acknowledgement of a personhood in common
among creatures). Hardy’s statement is also remarkably perceptive for its
suggestion that the idea of an organic common origin should de-centre
humanity, not in favour of any one species, but the organic, con-
scious whole.
Understandably, given Hardy’s representation of organic entangle-
ment, a representation which he achieves in part via the haring of his meta-
phors down diverging zoomorphic paths, it has become common for
critics to deal with a multiplicity of species in his work, rather than a single
species. Michael Irwin argues that discussing the interconnections of ani-
mals in Hardy’s novels would be a task “simultaneously too easy and too
large”, but the more “confined” topic of Hardy’s insects adequately offers
a sense of “the range and scale of the issues”.32 In an excellent discussion
of the role of the plentiful and diverse arthropods of the novels, Irwin
argues that “[t]he teeming presence in the novels of insects, creatures so
182 A. HARLEY
small, so ubiquitously numerous, is a continual reminder that each of us ‘is

one of a long row only’”.33 Emanuela Ettore has likewise detailed a crowd
of diverse insects in Hardy’s writing, a crowd that testifies, she suggests,
“to an unexpected intimacy with the world of the humans, while, at the
same time” becoming “paradigmatic of a reflection on the precariousness
of human life, and on the misery this life constantly inflicts upon men—
men who are often depicted as amazed spectators of these creatures and
their unimaginable gaiety”.34 In her recent essay on the treatment of ani-
mals in The Return of the Native, Anna Feuerstein rehearses Alex Woloch’s
argument that “the incorporation of minor characters into the nineteenth-
century realist novel represents the ‘democratic impulse’ of the nineteenth
century”.35 Feuerstein suggests that a similar claim could be made about
Hardy’s incorporation of animals into his oeuvre and sets out to investi-
gate his novels as “a fruitful space for imagining a multispecies political
community”.36 The success of the imagining depends on a reader’s capac-
ity to register animals as part of that community, rather than so much liter-
ary ornamentation. Of his “minor characters”, Woloch writes that although
“many are represented … attention flows toward a delimited center”, indi-
cating “the competing pull of inequality and democracy within the
nineteenth- century bourgeois imagination”.37 The reader’s ideological
limitations play an important role in whether Hardy’s “minor creatures”
(to use Kreilkamp’s variation on Woloch’s phrase)38 register at all, but so
does Hardy’s commitment to writing in this novel the struggling, entan-
gling, enchanting and tragic world of the wilderness.
What that wilderness ultimately means for women, in Hardy’s reckon-
ing, is grim indeed. We see its culmination in Alec d’Urberville’s treat-
ment of Tess Durbeyfield. Having failed to seduce Tess in somewhat more
regulated spaces, he leads her to the Chase, where in darkness, fog and
under “the primeval yews and oaks”,39 he compels Tess to drink some-
thing from a “druggist’s bottle” (vol. 1, p. 138), wanders off to get his
bearings, and, finding her unconscious on his return, rapes her. The wild-
ness of the space puts him beyond detection and exempts Alec’s violence
from the modulation of more sociable influences—“no dart or thread of
intelligence”, Hardy writes, gave the nearest cottagers “the least inkling
that their sister was in the hands of the spoiler” (vol. 1, p. 141). Beekeeping
culture is a part of these cottagers’ and Tess’s family life: indeed, she is
taking hives to market in the small hours when she falls asleep and the fam-
ily’s horse, Prince, is killed by the oncoming mail coach (vol. 1, p. 56).
The hives indicate Tess’s acculturation in a cottaging society in which
small-scale beekeeping is common; her presence there on the wagon tak-

ing the hives to market indicates her investment in the welfare of her fam-
ily of birth, even as her father sleeps away his night of drinking. The
Stoke-d’Urbervilles’ poultry house, where Tess finds work after Prince’s
death, is a travesty of cottaging. A cottage that would once have been the
scene of generations of a family’s complex life and varied industry has been
given over entirely to chickens. With the ousting of the cottagers has come
the ousting of their bees: “The chimney corner and once blazing hearth
was now filled with inverted beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs”
(vol. 1, p. 109). Where beehives had been the difference between survival
and starvation for the Durbeyfields, in the possession of the wealthy new-
comers they become antiquated junk, repurposed for the accommodation
of Mrs Stoke-d’Urberville’s fancy pets—“Hamburghs, Bantams, Cochins,
Brahmas, Dorkings, and such other sorts as were in fashion just then”
(vol. 1, p. 112)—products of what by the mid-nineteenth century had
become increasingly whimsical acts of artificial selection among
chicken-fanciers.
In all this we can see again honeybees’ signification of something that
is wild and natural but also sociable and domestic in ways the Stoke-
d’Urberville chicken house merely mocks. It may be no accident that
Hardy chose two tree species that are pollinated by wind, rather than
insects, to preside over Alec’s assault on Tess. These “yews and evergreen
oaks” reappear alongside the building with the octagonal tower where
Tess is hanged at the novel’s end (vol. 3, p. 276), creating a resonance that
suggests that Alec’s attack is perhaps a manifestation of a larger violence,
one at odds with the simultaneously natural and sociable world of both
cottagers and the honeybees with whom they live.
The pastoral has been described as “a discourse of retreat”, a literary
means of escaping modernity, the city, or the court.40 Hardy’s Wessex nov-
els, with their lusciously lively Arcadian ecosystems, are arguably apiece
with the escapist pleasure-giving function of the pastoral, although the
intrusions of passing soldiers or newly wealthy bourgeois landowners are
frequent and catastrophic enough to remind the reader that the outside
world, the reader’s world, is putting irrecoverable pressure on their pasto-
ral fantasy. Along with the disappearing world, disappearing life ways and
disappearing ecosystems that are elegised in Hardy’s novels, beekeeping as
Hardy had known it was disappearing. Over the last decade of his life,
Britain’s first honeybee hybridisation programme began in Dartmoor.
Overlaid by the fictional geography of Wessex, Dartmoor would be
184 A. HARLEY
somewhere between Budmouth and Melchester, deep in Hardy’s world.

Here, a Benedictine monk named Brother Adam would house the mating
station that enabled him to breed the Buckfast bee, a pedigreed breed that
exists to this day, maintained through isolated mating stations and artificial
insemination. Brother Adam’s breeding programme is just one symptom
of the fact that the half-wild, half-domesticated honeybees that Hardy rep-
resents in his novels were increasingly, in real life, the subjects of the kinds
of artificial selection that shaped Mrs Stoke-d’Urberville’s fancy chickens.
The symbolism they were able to bring to Hardy’s novels, where they sug-
gest the interstice of domestication and wildness, was, like the small-
holding, cottaging society those novels depict, itself on the verge of being
obliterated.
Notes
1. Charles Darwin, Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication,
vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1868), 297.
2. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, Wessex edn. (London: Macmillan
& Co., 1912), 464.
3. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 238.
4. George Levine, Reading Thomas Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2018), x.
5. Darwin, Variation, 298.
6. Johannes Dzierzon, Rationelle Bienenzucht, oder Theorie und Praxis des
Schlesischen Bienenfreundes (Karlsmarkt: 1878), 183.
7. Alfred Neighbour, The Apiary; or Bees, Beehives and Bee Culture, 3rd edn.
(London: Kent and Co, 1878), 35. Neighbour also commends their hand-
someness: “being of a golden colour, they are prettier than our black bees”.
8. Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree (Berlin: A. Asher & Co Unter
den Linden, 1873), 189.
9. Darwin, 300.
10. Darwin, 298.
11. Contrary to this, Jonathan Smith points out in Chap. 11 of this volume
that John Lubbock engaged in a considerably more “scientific” and intri-
cately manipulative relationship to hymenoptera than a Dorset cottager
with her skeps and believed that bees and wasps were tameable, much as
“savages” were capable of rising into a civilised state, and he drew consid-
erable attention at the 1872 British Association meeting when he displayed
a wasp he had tamed.
12. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, Wessex edn. (London: Macmillan and
Co., 1912), 42.
13. Havelock Ellis, “Thomas Hardy’s Novels”, Westminster Review 119, no.
236 (1883): 336.
14. Ellis, 337.
15. Ellis, 337.
16. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, 2 vols. (London: Smith,
Elder & Co., 1874), vol. 1, 209. Further references to this novel will
appear in parentheses.
17. Hardy, Madding Crowd, vol. 1, 151; vol. 1, 284; vol. 1, 290; vol. 2,
239–240.
18. John Knox, First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of
Women (London: 1687), 15.
19. Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie: Or the Historie of Bees (London:
John Haviland, 1623), preface, n.p.
20. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Palgrave, 1994), 91.
21. Anne Alexander, Thomas Hardy: The “Dream-country” of his Fiction
(London & New York: Vision Press, 1987), 48.
22. Alexander, 48.
23. A. Pettigrew, The Handy Book of Bees: Being A Practical Treatise on Their
Profitable Management (Edinburgh and London, William Blackwood,
1870), 27.
24. Pettigrew, 26.
25. John George Wood, Insects at Home: Being a Popular Account of Insects,
Their Structure, Habits and Transformations (New York: Charles Scribner,
1872), 376.
26. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, 2 vols. (1878; Leipzig: Bernhard
Tauchnitz, 1879), vol. 1, 104. Further references to this text will appear in
parentheses.
the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John
Murray, 1859), 203.
28. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, eds., The Collected Letters of
Thomas Hardy, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 53.
29. Beer, 238.
30. Beer, 238.
31. Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), 373.
32. Michael Irwin, Reading Hardy’s Landscapes (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2000), 25.
33. Irwin, p. 30.
186 A. HARLEY
34. Emanuela Ettore, “‘Ephemeral & Happy’: Thomas Hardy and the
Crowded World of Insects”, The Hardy Society Journal 13, no. 2 (2017):
19. See also Michael Irwin, “Insects in Hardy’s Vision”, in Philip V. Mallett
and Ronald P. Draper, eds., A Spacious Vision: Essays on Hardy (Newmill:
The Patten Press, 1994), 1–10.
35. Anna Feuerstein, “Seeing Animals on Edgon Heath: The Democratic
Impulse of Hardy’s Return of the Native”, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in
the Long Nineteenth Century (2018), no. 26, https://doi.org/10.16995/
ntn.816.
36. Feuerstein.
37. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the
Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 31,
quoted in Feuerstein.
38. Feuerstein notes that Ivan Kreilkamp has also considered extending
Woloch’s idea of “minor characters” to animals in “Dying Like a Dog in
Great Expectations”, in Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay,
eds., Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian
Literature and Culture (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 81–94. He has since
elaborated on this idea in Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals and the
Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
39. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully
Presented, vol. 1 (London: James R. Osgood, 1892), 140.
40. Terry Gifford, Pastoral (New York: Routledge, 2020), 47.
CHAPTER 11
“Through the Agency of Bees”: Charles

Darwin, John Lubbock, and the Secret Lives
of Plants and People
Jonathan Smith
The 1860s into the 1880s were auspicious decades for the bee in British
science. Charles Darwin and John Lubbock, Darwin’s one-time protégé,
neighbor, and fellow scientific naturalist, were the figures most responsi-
ble. Darwin’s studies on plant fertilization in the 1860s and 1870s showed
just how dependent most plants were on bees and other pollinators, how
plants had evolved to secure and maintain the services of bees, and what
advantages plants derived from it. Lubbock in turn played a key role in
popularizing and extending Darwin’s work, focusing on the activity and
evolution of the busy bees that plants employed as flying panders. Darwin’s
books on orchids and on those plants with flowers that came in two or
three different sexual forms had particular scientific and popular impact,
and Darwin reveled in the elaborate structures and reproductive
J. Smith (*)
University of Michigan-Dearborn, Dearborn, MI, USA

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39570-3_11
188 J. SMITH
possibilities of these species. At the same time, Darwin used the discourse
of bourgeois Anglican marriage to describe the relationship between bees
and flowers, and when it came time to apply this work to humans, Darwin
avoided the more obvious and controversial possibilities. The reasons were
partly personal, but also partly out of concern for the status of his theory
of sexual selection, which he was developing and defending in those
decades. Sexual selection was central to Darwin’s explanation of the origin
of the human races, and it reflected his views of women, of “savages,” and
of human sexuality. This took him into the realm of Lubbock’s other
major scientific interest, prehistoric archaeology, with the evolution of
humanity and the habits of early humans. For both men, natural selection
was the key to understanding human as well as natural history, and in their
exchanges we can chart Darwin’s anxieties about what the agency of bees
in the sex lives of plants might mean for himself, his family, and the history
of humanity.
Darwin’s botanical studies remain largely overlooked today, although
attention is increasingly being accorded them.1 Yet plants were Darwin’s
major experimental concern in the 1860s and 1870s, and he wrote six
books on them. On the Origin of Species (1859) and the works that fleshed
out and extended its “long argument”—The Variation of Animals and
Plants Under Domestication (1868), The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex (1871), and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals (1872)—were in many respects brilliant syntheses or compila-
tions of the works of others with some of Darwin’s own experimental
researches. If Variation provided the evidence for the ubiquity of variation
in organisms on which natural selection depended, and offered a mecha-
nism for inheritance of those variations, Descent and Expression together
brought humanity fully under Darwin’s evolutionary aegis. Not just the
human physical form, Darwin attempted to show, was the product of nat-
ural selection. Our mental abilities, moral sense, sense of beauty, and emo-
tions—the characteristics most often deemed unique to humans by
Darwin’s critics—had all originally been inherited by us from animals.
Darwin’s botanical studies, on the other hand, represented extended,
original experimental and observational work. He labored in his green-
houses and nearby fields, peered through his microscopes, counted and
measured and weighed. The works he produced were more like detailed
morphological and behavioral studies of familiar domestic species than
sweeping theoretical treatises or even the exhaustive taxonomical mono-
graph he had produced in the early 1850s on barnacles. Like the barnacle
11 “THROUGH THE AGENCY OF BEES”: CHARLES DARWIN, JOHN LUBBOCK… 189
dissections, however, Darwin’s botanical investigations were vital to his

species theory. For Darwin used natural selection not only to account for
a number of long-standing botanical conundrums but to blur the bound-
ary between plants and animals.
That blurring of boundaries occurred in three prominent ways. The
Movement and Habits of Climbing Plants (1875) and The Power of
Movement in Plants (1880) showed that plants were imperfectly regarded
as stationary in contrast to the locomotive powers of animals. Insectivorous
Plants (1875) focused on those species like the sundew and the Venus’s
fly-trap that capture and digest insect “prey,” and thus can be said to eat
in ways analogous to animals. Most extensively, Darwin examined the sex
lives of plants, and especially their dependence on insects in fertilization.
Darwin was not the first to recognize that insects were essential to the
transfer of pollen, but he helped to make that fact far more widely known,
and he was responsible for showing both the fact and the importance of
cross-fertilization over self-fertilization, even in plants whose flowers con-
tain both male and female sexual organs. His first book after Origin, in
fact, was On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids
Are Fertilised by Insects (1862). In it, he showed that the extraordinary
colors, markings, and structures of orchids lead insects to the nectaries in
such a way that their pollen masses become attached to the insect’s body
at a spot where pollen transfer can only occur on another flower, and thus
typically on another plant. Orchids and their insect pollinators offered a
classic case of co-evolution, as Darwin argued that the splendor of orchids
was not a divine gift of beauty to humans but the product of natural selec-
tion, with plants exchanging nectar for the spreading of their pollen. In
two subsequent books—The Effects of Cross- and Self-Fertilisation in the
Vegetable Kingdom (1876) and The Different Forms of Flowers in Plants of
the Same Species (1877)—Darwin both demonstrated the evolutionary
advantages of cross-fertilization and displayed the lengths to which plants
could go to effect it. Plants, Darwin argued, like animals, derive benefits
from crossing. Cross-fertilization, he showed, generally results in more
vigorous and more fertile offspring.
The Different Forms of Flowers was, like Orchids, a striking work that
captured the public as well as the botanical imagination. It focused on
plants whose flowers came in two or even three distinctly different sexual
forms, their stamens and pistils set at different heights. While Darwin dis-
cussed a number of exotic species from distant corners of the globe, his
attention was mainly directed at familiar English flowers from the genera
190 J. SMITH
Primula (particularly the primrose, cowslip, and oxlip), Linum (flax), and
Lythrum (loosestrife). Much to his surprise, Darwin found that the differ-
ent sexual forms functioned almost as separate sexes. A flower with long
stamens and short pistils achieved full fertility only when pollinated by a
flower with short stamens rather than with pollen from its own long sta-
mens or even a separate long-stamened individual. Flowers with short sta-
mens similarly produced more seeds and more vigorous offspring when
fertilized with pollen from flowers with long stamens. An insect visiting a
short-stamened flower would be dusted with pollen in a position on its
body from which the pollen was easily transferred only to the pistils of a
flower of the other form and vice versa. These different sexual forms thus
functioned both to minimize self-fertilization and to facilitate crosses with
a different sexual form.
The case of the cowslip, with its two different sexual forms and thus
four different reproductive combinations, had Darwin effusing about its
“remarkable sexual relations.”2 But the case of loosestrife, with three dif-
ferent sexual forms, was far more complex. Since each of its three forms
came in two different variations, Darwin discovered that an astonishing
eighteen different reproductive combinations were possible. “In their
manner of fertilisation,” he remarked, “these plants offer a more remark-
able case than can be found in any other plant or animal.”3 Loosestrife
sexuality, he memorably summarized, consisted of “a triple union between
three hermaphrodites,—each hermaphrodite being in its female organ
quite distinct from the other two hermaphrodites and partially distinct in
its male organs, and each furnished with two sets of males.”4 The eighteen
different combinations, moreover, yielded a spectrum of fertility: the
greater the difference in length between pistil and stamen, the greater the
infertility of the union. Once again, however, only the six crosses involving
comparable sexual elements of different sexual forms consistently resulted
in full fertility. The other twelve possible crosses ranged from nearly full
fertility to complete sterility. This is arguably the apex of “queerness,” in
both the Victorian and modern senses of that term, in all of nineteenth-
century natural history.
The language Darwin used to describe the reproductive variety of cow-
slips and loosestrife betrays both delight and unease. As he had done with
some of his more sexually unusual barnacles, Darwin reveled in the mar-
velous complexity, the sheer array of reproductive possibility, in these
plants. At the same time, he employed terminology that muted or reduced
that complexity. Darwin called the crosses between the different forms
“legitimate unions” because they resulted in complete fertility, while the

crosses between the same forms were “illegitimate unions” because they
resulted in incomplete fertility.5 And Darwin coined the term “heteromor-
phic” to describe these “legitimate,” fully fertile unions between flowers
of different forms, and “homomorphic” to characterize the “illegitimate,”
less productive unions between flowers of the same form. While Darwin
was apparently not exposed to the contemporary Continental discussions
of human sexuality that were constructing the categories of “homosexual”
and “heterosexual,” his initial description of plant sexuality obviously
resembles that discourse. He collapsed his remarkable spectrum into a
binary. He lumped together under a single label all the reproductive com-
binations that resulted in less than complete fertility. He employed the
terms “legitimate” and “illegitimate,” with all their implications of moral
judgment in human “unions,” here tying legitimacy to the greatest pos-
sible production of offspring by parents of different sexual form, illegiti-
macy to sterility or lessened fertility of parents of the same sexual form.
While the discovery of loosestrife’s three sexual forms caused Darwin to
abandon his hetero/homo binary in favor of “dimorphic” (for those flow-
ers with two sexual forms) and “trimorphic” (for those with three), by the
time this research was published, he had returned, albeit grudgingly, to
the hetero/homo binary. And in his schematic illustration of the loose-
strife’s sexuality, he reduced the “triple union of three hermaphrodites” to
the six “legitimate unions” between different forms that resulted in full
fertility; the twelve other reproductive combinations of varying fertility,
the “illegitimate unions,” were not even indicated. Moreover, Darwin’s
textual description deployed a linguistic framework that relied on cultural
and specifically Anglican notions of sexuality and procreative marriage.
“Union,” his favored term for fertilization in both Orchids and Different
Forms of Flowers, comes with echoes of the opening of the marriage cere-
mony in The Book of Common Prayer.6 In Orchids, he had spoken of “how
well moths had performed their office of marriage-priests” for species in
the genus Orchis.7 In Different Forms of Flowers, he describes the “triple
union of three hermaphrodites” in loosestrife as a case in which “nature
has ordained a most complex marriage-arrangement.”8 While it is signifi-
cant that “nature” does the “ordaining,” the triple union of three her-
maphrodites becomes a “marriage” in which only fully fertile crosses
between different sexual forms are deemed legitimate. And matrimony,
The Book of Common Prayer asserts, “was ordained for the procreation of
children” and “to avoid fornication.”9 “Offspring” appears more than
192 J. SMITH
eighty times in Different Forms of Flowers, and Darwin speaks frequently

of parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren. If the process
and products of illegitimate unions were visually absent from Different
Forms of Flowers, they were nonetheless textually prominent: Darwin’s
chapter on “Illegitimate Offspring” detailed the dwarfed stature and sex-
ual sterility of these botanical bastards, but also noted the extreme range
in fertility and acknowledged exceptions in which illegitimate offspring
were more fertile.10 As Gowan Dawson has chronicled with regard to
Darwin’s treatment of sex and gender in Descent of Man, Darwin was
keenly aware of the dangers for himself and his theories in being too
closely associated with free-thinking views of human sexuality and the
depictions of them in avant-garde literature and art, what Deborah Lutz
has called “the new eroticism” of the 1860s and 1870s.11 The language of
Anglican marriage and of legitimacy in Darwin’s botanical work certainly
has the similar effect of tempering the potentially explosive implications of
plants’ sexual relations.
Darwin was not a botanist, confessing as much in his introduction to
Different Forms of Flowers. His close friend and scientific confidant Joseph
Dalton Hooker, assistant director and then (from 1865) director of the
Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, used the occasion of his Presidential
Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1868
to call Darwin’s fertilization studies the most significant botanical work of
the previous decade.12 Indeed, by the early 1870s, Darwin was being cred-
ited with having revolutionized botany, even with bringing into existence
what was often called “a new philosophy of flowers.”13 The evolutionary
relationship of flowers and insects, and the claim that insects could differ-
entiate and appreciate the colors and markings of flowers, quickly became
a staple of books and periodical articles aimed at a general audience.
Darwin’s botanical books were widely reviewed and were incorporated
into, and helped to fuel, a new wave of botanical popularization.14
Darwin’s friend, neighbor, and fellow scientific naturalist John Lubbock
played a key role in both spreading and building on Darwin’s fertilization
work. When Darwin moved to the Kentish countryside in 1842, the
Lubbocks and their estate were just two miles away. Lubbock was only
eight at the time, the eldest son of Sir John Lubbock, the head of a promi-
nent London banking family but also a mathematician and astronomer. As
a boy and young man, the younger Lubbock displayed interest and apti-
tude in natural science, which Darwin helped to encourage, becoming a
mentor of sorts. Lubbock was called to join the family’s bank while still in
his teens, but he continued to pursue his early scientific interests in ento-
mology and prehistoric archaeology.15 Darwin proposed Lubbock for
membership to the Entomological Society in 1850, when Lubbock was
just sixteen, predicting to the Society’s President that the young man
would prove to be “a good & active Naturalist.”16 Lubbock’s first pub-
lished papers, in 1853 and 1854, were on crustaceans from Darwin’s
Beagle collections. By 1856, Darwin regarded his young neighbor as a
confidant and potential ally, discussing “the species question” with him.
When Darwin published Origin, he was eager for Lubbock’s opinion.17
Lubbock became influential in promoting scientific naturalism, the view
that all phenomena are legitimate objects of scientific inquiry and should
be investigated solely with regard to natural rather than supernatural
causes. He spoke in support of Darwin at the famous Oxford meeting of
the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860 and
remained a vocal proponent of natural selection. Endorsing the applica-
tion of natural selection to the development of humanity in his concluding
chapter to Pre-historic Times (1865), Lubbock declared what Darwin had
only dared to hint at in the closing paragraph of Origin of Species: that
natural selection “is to biology what the law of gravitation is for
astronomy.”18
From the 1860s into the 1880s, Lubbock became known for his work
on prehistoric archaeology and then on social insects, even as he became
head of the family bank after his father’s death in 1865 and took a more
active role in public and political life, being elected to Parliament in 1870.
Pre-historic Times and The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive
Condition of Man (1870) made him a prominent voice among anthro-
pologists and archaeologists and put him squarely in the camp of those
publicly adopting an evolutionary account of human history with the races
as part of a single species.19 In the 1870s, he increasingly turned to insects
in On the Origin and the Metamorphoses of Insects (1872), On British Wild
Flowers Considered in Relation to Insects (1875), Ants, Bees, and Wasps
(1882), and On the Senses, Instincts and Intelligence of Animals, with
Special Reference to Insects (1883). As these titles suggest, Lubbock’s
interests overlapped with and complemented Darwin’s botanical work: if
Darwin was concerned primarily with the flower, Lubbock’s first concern
was with its insect pollinator.
Lubbock was aggressive in making known the results of Darwin’s
botanical researches and in casting them in evolutionary terms. Like many
scientific contemporaries who published in both professional and popular
194 J. SMITH
venues, Lubbock presented the same material in a variety of forms for dif-
ferent audiences. As Bernard Lightman’s work has made clear, many pop-
ularizers of Darwin’s work ignored natural selection, challenged it directly,
or simply interpreted it in natural theological terms as providing evidence
of divine wisdom and beneficence.20 Lubbock, by contrast, not only
praised Darwin in British Wild Flowers Considered in Relation to Insects for
his studies of cowslips and loosestrife, but endorsed natural selection as
the explanation for their sexual structures and their relationship to their
insect pollinators.21 A liberal Anglican rather than a Huxleyan agnostic,
Lubbock sought to exclude theology and dogma from science, but he did
so diplomatically. In British Wild Flowers, he spoke in his Preface of “that
higher view of creation which we owe Mr. Darwin,” and while he stated
that it was not his purpose to discuss natural selection, he proceeded to
explain the basic elements of Darwin’s theory and apply them to flowers:
“There has thus been an interaction of insects upon flowers, and of flowers
upon insects, resulting in the gradual modification of both.”22 He pro-
vided extended discussions of Darwin’s work in Orchids and Different
Forms of Flowers, reproducing some of Darwin’s illustrations from both
works, including the schematic diagram of the “legitimate unions” of
loosestrife. Lubbock also repeatedly emphasized the points of significance
that Darwin had stressed: the greater vigor and fertility of crosses, and the
elaborate floral structures that promoted cross-fertilization and prevented
self-fertilization.
Lubbock was more than just a popularizer of Darwin’s work. He
extended Darwin’s researches on flowers and insects, and he conducted
extensive research on “the social hymenoptera”—ants, bees, and wasps.
Indeed, Lubbock’s books on these topics can look less original and influ-
ential than they actually were. Recountings of the floral visitations by an
individual bee or wasp may appear to the modern eye as rooted in the
tradition of gentlemanly observational natural history, but for Lubbock
and his contemporaries, as J. F. M. Clark has argued, these accounts were
significant in introducing disinterested experimentalism into a field domi-
nated by collecting and classification.23 Ants, Bees, and Wasps captured the
dual professional and popular elements of Lubbock’s work. It drew on
material Lubbock had already presented at the Linnean Society between
1874 and 1881 and published in the Society’s Journal. It sold well,
remaining in print and going through eighteen editions over the next half
century. It was also well-regarded by Lubbock’s scientific contemporaries.
It appeared in the International Scientific Series, the ambitious scientific
publishing venture that for a decade under the influence of Huxley and his
allies had promoted the work of scientific naturalists to general audiences.
Clark in fact has called Ants, Bees, and Wasps “Lubbock’s most significant
contribution to the spread of scientific naturalism.”24 One of the hallmarks
of the series was that its authors were experts in their subjects, and Lubbock
described it in his preface as “the record of various experiments” designed
to test the “mental condition and powers of sense” of these insects rather
than merely to describe their habits.25 As such, it included some of his own
work in extending Darwin’s fertilization studies, particularly with regard
to the color sense of bees and wasps. In British Wild Flowers, Lubbock had
noted that bees’ ability to distinguish colors was “no doubt a just infer-
ence” but that he was not aware of “any direct evidence on the subject.”26
In his Linnean Society papers and then in Ants, Bees, and Wasps, he sup-
plied just that evidence, documenting his experiments with colored paper
to establish bees’ color preferences and their ability to associate color with
the presence of nectar. If Darwin’s work implied all of this, Lubbock sup-
plied the empirical experimental evidence to support it. In doing so, he
was buttressing not just Darwin’s plant work but also his theory of sexual
selection, which Darwin had elaborated in The Descent of Man. Darwin
had argued that mate choice throughout the animal kingdom hinged on
the ability of (mostly female) animals to distinguish differences in color,
ornament, song, and so on and select as a mate the one most pleasing to
them. Many contemporaries found a color sense in mammals and birds
hard to accept, but Lubbock helped to confirm its presence in insects.
Lubbock’s work on bees was such that he became culturally associated
with them, well beyond the relationship of his researches to Darwin’s. He
believed bees and wasps were tamable much as “savages” were capable of
rising into a civilized state, and he drew considerable attention at the 1872
British Association meeting when he displayed a wasp he had tamed. Soon
thereafter he attempted (unsuccessfully) to tame bees.27 Punch famously
caricatured him in 1882 as a bee, the caption capturing his scientific, par-
liamentary, and banking interests: “How doth the banking busy bee /
Improve his shining hours / By studying on Bank Holidays / Strange
insects and wild flowers!”28 Parodying the first stanza of Isaac Watts’s
famous children’s poem “Against Idleness and Mischief” (1715)—“How
doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour, / And gather honey
all the day / From every opening flower!”—Punch drew attention to
Lubbock’s polymathic productivity. Lubbock at the time had just com-
pleted a term as President of the British Association, was President of the
196 J. SMITH
Linnean Society and the Institute of Bankers, and was MP for London
University. He had drafted the Bank Holiday Bill in 1871 and was a
staunch advocate of education, particularly scientific education, as a vehi-
cle for the economic and moral improvement of the nation and its work-
ing classes. The prefaces of his scientific books often drew attention to the
limited time available to him for scientific pursuits. Opening the preface to
Ants, Bees, and Wasps, he acknowledged the gaps in his experiments of the
previous decade: “Other occupations and many interruptions, political
and professional, have prevented me from making them so full and com-
plete as I had hoped. My parliamentary duties, in particular, have absorbed
most of my time just at that season of year when these insects can be most
profitably studied.”29 Setting a model for workers by taking his own advice
and employing his leisure time in a useful fashion, Lubbock nonetheless
found time during the parliamentary and apian seasons—including, pre-
sumably, as Punch hinted, on the August bank holiday—to generate some
scientific “profit.”
Lubbock’s relationship to the bee was more complex than Punch’s dog-
gerel suggested, however. British Wild Flowers contained an extended
paean to bees and to the recent scientific work of Darwin and others on
their relation to flowers. These researches
have made known to us in the economy of the hive many curious peculiari-
ties which no poet had dreamt of, and have shown that bees and other
insects have an importance as regards flowers which had been previously
unsuspected. To them we owe the beauty of our gardens, the sweetness of
our fields. To them flowers are indebted for their scent and colour; nay, for
their very existence, in its present form. Not only have the present shape and
outlines, the brilliant colours, the sweet scent, and the honey of flowers,
been gradually developed through the unconscious selection exercised by
insects; but the very arrangement of the colours, the circular bands and
radiating lines, the form, size, and position of the petals, the relative situa-
tions of the stamens and pistil, are all arranged with reference to the visits of
insects, and in such a manner as to ensure the grand object which these visits
are destined to effect.30
Although careful to make the choices of insects “unconscious,” Lubbock

pointed to both the aesthetic and agro-economic significance of bees as
pollinators. Yet Lubbock prefaced this statement by noting that he had
been “good-humouredly accused of attacking the Bee, because I have
ventured to suggest that she does not possess all the high qualities which
have been popularly and poetically ascribed to her,” acknowledging that

“scientific observations do not altogether support the moral and intellec-
tual eminence which has been ascribed to Bees.”31 That “good-humoured”
accusation was almost certainly delivered by the Spectator in response to
Lubbock’s first paper on ants, bees, and wasps at the Linnean Society. In
it, Lubbock launched directly into a kind of inventory of unsubstantiated
or inferentially dubious claims by previous entomological authorities on
the intelligence of ants, bees, and wasps. Putting these to the test, Lubbock
found them repeatedly wanting. Bees were “much less clever in finding
things than I had expected,” seemed heedless of dead comrades, and had
poorer communication skills and a worse sense of direction than they were
reputed to possess.32 The Spectator, as Punch would later do, played on
Watts’s poem, declaring that “Sir John Lubbock has been devoting his
attention to the mental qualities displayed by bees and wasps, with a result
which would be very far from satisfactory to Dr. Watts and those other
orthodox admirers of the busy bee.”33 If anything, The Spectator expressed
relief and satisfaction at being freed from the tyranny of the bee’s example
by Lubbock’s “iconoclastic” results and “heterodox” experiments: “The
unreasoning enthusiasm for bees, on the strength of their gift for architec-
ture and organization, has so prejudiced the eyes of naturalists, that they
have been credited with all sorts of qualities not in the least borne out by
facts.”34
Lubbock’s ardor for bees as experimental subjects cooled considerably
over the ensuing years. Ants, Bees, and Wasps was really a book on ants,
with bees and wasps each being accorded a single chapter. Lubbock’s shift
in interest from bees to ants is evident in the Linnean Society papers that
became the book. In the first paper, read in March of 1874, the title,
“Observations on Bees and Wasps,” omitted ants, and in a closing para-
graph Lubbock noted simply that “My experiments with ants have not
been very successful.”35 By the third paper, read twenty months after the
first, ants were moved to first position in the title and comprised the vast
bulk of the paper, while bees received the least attention. Three years later,
Lubbock’s papers in the Linnean Journal were devoted almost exclusively
to ants. What had happened? As he noted in the preface to Ants, Bees, and
Wasps, “I soon found that ants were more convenient for my experimental
purposes, and I think they have power and flexibility of mind. They are
certainly far calmer, and less excitable.”36 Ants were smarter and more
docile, and they didn’t sting. He had, moreover, developed specialized
nests between plates of glass that he mounted on an upright post from
198 J. SMITH
which individual nests could be swung out for observation. These devices,
which became known as “Lubbock nests,” enabled Lubbock to conduct
his experiments and observations indoors, providing him with “special
facilities for observing the internal economy of ant life” and for making a
“careful record of the actions of individual ants.”37 So high did Lubbock’s
opinion grow of ants from his familiarity and long-standing close observa-
tions of colonies and even individuals, that he opened Ants, Bees, and
Wasps with the assertion that while apes are most similar to humans in
bodily structure, ants “have a fair claim to rank next to man in the scale of
intelligence.”38 The ant nest, with its social organization, elaborate colo-
nies, roads, domesticated animals, and sometimes slaves, was a better ana-
logue for human society than the hive.
Lubbock’s high opinion of ants developed too late for them to have
influenced Darwin in the Origin or even in Descent of Man. Darwin in the
Origin treated slave-making among ants and hive-construction among
bees as “the most wonderful of all known instincts” among animals.39 As
was his wont, Darwin took up the most difficult or extreme cases, exam-
ples he knew would be used against him, and pre-emptively offered an
account of how natural selection could have brought them about. The
smattering of references to Lubbock in the Origin, however, did not have
to do with ants and bees. Lubbock’s impact on Descent was much greater
and—as Alison Pearn has argued—cannot be fully measured by the num-
ber of citations: that Lubbock and Darwin were near neighbors meant
that much of their scientific conversation took place in person rather than
through the post.40 And its impact was not about ants or bees or the sex
lives of plants, but the sex lives of humans.
Darwin’s fertilization studies of plants had the potential for many con-
troversial applications to humans. The language he deployed practically
invited discussions of illegitimacy, promiscuity, inter-class marriage, homo-
sexuality, and incest.41 In the concluding paragraph of Orchids, turning
finally but briefly to the wider implications of his book, Darwin ruminated
on the “astonishing fact” that such elaborate mechanisms for transporting
pollen had evolved in preference to simpler, more efficient self-
fertilization.42 “Nature thus tells us, in the most emphatic manner,” he
asserted, “that she abhors perpetual self-fertilisation.”43 The specific infer-
ence he drew from this abhorrence, however, was “that marriage between
near relatives is likewise in some way injurious,—that some unknown great
good is derived from the union of individuals which have been kept dis-
tinct for many generations.”44 The form of “marriage between near
relatives” that Darwin clearly had in mind was a form that, in English
society, particularly among the upper- and upper-middle classes, was a
commonplace rather than a crime or a cause for scandal: marriage between
first cousins.
Victorian debates over cousin marriage were second in intensity and
longevity only to those over a man’s ability to marry his deceased wife’s
sister.45 In England, marriage between first cousins had been legal for cen-
turies and helped to consolidate wealth among propertied families. But
from the late eighteenth century, fueled by the conflicting evidence and
opinions of agriculturalists and breeders about the effects of in-breeding,
the question arose as to whether cousin marriage counted as in-breeding,
and if so, whether it should not be again outlawed or at least avoided. This
was also an issue that cut close to the bone for Darwin. He was himself
married to his first cousin, and several other such marriages had taken
place between the Darwins and the Wedgwoods. He worried incessantly
that his own chronic ill health and that of his children was the result of too
much interbreeding, and his fertilization experiments increased his anxiet-
ies.46 They established the “great good” derived from cross-fertilization
and the corresponding evils from self-fertilization. So Darwin sought
direct evidence from the human realm. He encouraged his son George’s
independent researches on cousin marriage, and he attempted unsuccess-
fully to have a question about cousin marriage inserted into the 1870
Census. The person he recruited to put the question to the House of
Commons was John Lubbock.47 The majority of Lubbock’s Parliamentary
colleagues found an inquiry into the fecundity of first cousins and the
physical and mental health of their offspring not only too intrusive but
bordering on the prurient. Yet here, too, Darwin was attempting to steer
the implications of his “triple union between three hermaphrodites” to a
culturally safer landing point.
The other major point of contact between Darwin and Lubbock on
human sexuality concerned not contemporary cousin marriage but prehis-
toric marriage practices. In Pre-historic Times, Lubbock had warmed
Darwin’s heart by declaring the antiquity of humanity, the monogenetic
heritage of the human races, and the ameliorative impact of natural selec-
tion on humans. Using a common strategy, Lubbock argued that modern
“savages” provided an excellent guide to what primitive humans must
have been like, and the wide gulf between “savages” and civilization gave
reason to believe that the future course of humanity was progressive.
Natural selection, Lubbock asserted, “teaches us humility for the past,
200 J. SMITH
faith in the present, and hope for the future.”48 After reading the book’s
closing chapter, Darwin wrote to congratulate Lubbock, calling it “an
admirable & profound discussion.”49 As Alison Pearn argues, “Lubbock
succeeded in framing human descent from ape-like ancestors in such a way
that he was able to present an optimistic view of the perfectibility of
humans, and of religion as a natural concomitant of civilization, in a way
that Darwin never could—valuable propaganda that made broadly
Darwinian ideas far more widely palatable.”50
Darwin’s reaction to Lubbock’s Origin of Civilisation, published while
Darwin was working on Descent of Man, was more mixed, primarily
because Darwin saw the problems it posed for his own views on primitive
sexual relations. Adrian Desmond, James Moore, Evelleen Richards, and
Shuman Seth have all traced the intellectual difficulties Darwin faced from
evolutionary anthropologists like Lubbock.51 Darwin’s personal and fam-
ily commitments to anti-slavery were a significant factor in shaping his
monogenetic account of humanity. Humans were a single species, the
races mere varieties, and for Darwin, the races resulted from sexual selec-
tion—from the varying aesthetic preferences of females in different human
populations. Lubbock, E. B. Tylor, John McLennan, and Lewis Morgan,
however, all agreed that primitive humans practiced “communal” rather
than individual marriage, a key question being how individual marriage
had arisen. For Lubbock, the roots of individual marriage lay in wife-
capture as a spoil of inter-tribal conflict, in his view the only plausible way
in which a man would have been able to lay claim to an individual woman
in groups that practiced communal marriage. In a Darwinian turn,
Lubbock argued that the advantages of exogamous pairings would soon
have become apparent: “Even were there no other cause, the advantage of
crossing, so well known to breeders of stock, would soon give a marked
preponderance to those races by whom exogamy was largely prac-
ticed….”52 While his reference here was to the familiar one of stock breed-
ers, when he first brought McLennan’s concept of exogamy to Darwin’s
attention in 1867, Lubbock noted, perhaps with Darwin’s orchids, prim-
roses, and loosestrife in mind, “I should have thought that the objection
to marriage between near relations might have had much to do with it.”53
Lubbock’s invocation of breeders and reference to “marriage between
near relations” closely echo Darwin’s similar invocation of “the vast major-
ity of the breeders of our domestic productions” and his reference to
“marriage between near relatives” in the closing sentence of Orchids.54 For
Darwin, however, it was communal marriage itself that posed the
problem. When his presentation copy of Origin of Civilisation arrived—

the same week that the two men were corresponding about Lubbock’s
effort to get cousin marriage into the census—Darwin groaned: “on some
very important points for me, I shall be able & must modify what I have
written.”55 In Descent of Man, Darwin devoted a section to “the Causes
which prevent or check the Action of Sexual Selection with Savages,” chief
among them communal marriage.56 Darwin largely conceded the exis-
tence of communal marriage but clung to the fact that selection might still
have occurred: “Men and women, like many of the lower animals, might
formerly have entered into strict though temporary unions for each
birth… As far as sexual selection is concerned, all that is required is that
choice should be exerted before the parents unite, and it signifies little
whether the unions last for life or only for a season.”57 The analogy with
“the lower animals” was telling, as it moved Darwin from anthropological
to zoological grounds. A page later he invoked it again, more extensively:
while conceding that “almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely
common,” Darwin claimed that “Nevertheless from the analogy of the
lower animals, more particularly of those which come nearest to man in
the series, I cannot believe that this habit prevailed at an extremely remote
period.”58 Humanity had an even deeper past than the one Lubbock and
others wrote of, a time when we were not “so utterly licentious,” when
men valued their wives and did not practice female infanticide, when
females exercised choice and the races emerged.59
Lubbock was not swayed. When he finished reading Descent he sent
Darwin a short list of comments. The longest flagged the passages just
quoted. “I am surprised that you quote the analogy of the lower animals
as opposing our views on Communal Marriage,” Lubbock wrote. “I think
the lower animals support us. What monkey ever watched over the con-
duct of a daughter? or scrupled to carry off anothers wife?”60 Moreover,
Lubbock gently corrected Darwin’s conflation of “communal marriage”
with the practice of “promiscuous” intercourse, the former not necessarily
involving the latter. “Communal marriage does not necessarily involve the
actual practice of promiscuous intercourse,” Lubbock wrote, “but seems
to me to indicate the retention by the woman of all her rights over herself,
which she may exercise as she pleases; whereas marriage is the surrender of
them to another.”61 This opened a door for Darwin: if communal mar-
riage did not involve promiscuous intercourse, and if in it a woman
retained “all her rights over herself,” then perhaps he needn’t simply deny
that communal marriage prevailed in the earliest mists of human history.
202 J. SMITH
When the much-revised second edition of Descent appeared three years

later, in 1874, the discussion of communal marriage and promiscuity was
one of the “Principal Additions and Corrections to the Present Edition.”62
Darwin largely retained his original text for the section on communal mar-
riage, but with a telling addition and a telling revision. The addition came
near the beginning of the section, helping to frame the discussion, and
concerned his use of the term “marriage.” He used it not in the sense that
anthropological writers like Lubbock did, as “a recognised right,” but “in
the same sense as when naturalists speak of animals as monogamous,
meaning thereby that the male is accepted by or chooses a single female,
and lives with her either during the breeding-season or for the whole
year.”63 Darwin again shifted the ground of comparison from “savages” to
animals, and he defined monogamous marriage in this context as only
requiring a pairing for a season or a year. “This kind of marriage,” he reit-
erated, “is all that concerns us here, as it suffices for the work of sexual
selection.”64 The telling revision came near the end of the section and
concerned his summation of the marriage habits of very early humans. In
the first edition Darwin had asserted that “it is extremely improbable that
primeval men and women lived promiscuously together.”65 Lubbock hav-
ing corrected his notion that communal marriage implied promiscuity,
Darwin simply omitted this from the second edition. His claim in the first
edition that “the most probable view is that primeval man aboriginally
lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support
and obtain,” however, shifted in the second edition to the statement that
the “most probable view” was that early men lived “each with single wife,
or if powerful with several.”66 While still clearly appalled, as he had long
been, by the “promiscuity” and “licentiousness” of modern “savages,”
Darwin rested more comfortably in knowing that communal marriage
retained a space in which sexual selection could operate, and in which
something that could be called monogamous marriage existed.
Lubbock seems to have been a bit less squeamish than Darwin, at least
with regard to human sexuality. In the preface to The Origin of Civilisation,
he noted that while he had “endeavoured to avoid everything that was
needlessly offensive” in his discussions of marriage and religion, yet it was
“impossible not to mention some facts which are very repugnant to our
feelings.”67 Lubbock’s opinion of the morality of “savages” was as low as
Darwin’s or his culture’s generally, but, as Clark has argued, his progres-
sive and ameliorative view of evolution enabled him to regard savages as
capable of rising to a civilized state, just as he regarded bees and wasps as
tamable.68 For all of Darwin’s delight in the “remarkable sexual relations”

of his plants and the often-elaborate mechanisms by which flowers secured
the services of insects in cross-fertilization, he kept “illegitimate unions”
largely invisible, and he replaced the promiscuity of savages with a vision
of early humans as practicing a form of monogamy.
The lessons for humanity to be drawn from the behavior and social
organization of bees had a long and complicated history prior to the mid-
Victorian period, but the scientific investigations of Darwin and Lubbock
only added to that complexity. Between them, Darwin and Lubbock
greatly enhanced appreciation for the bee’s role as a pollinator. Karl von
Frisch’s twentieth-century discoveries about the sensory and communica-
tive capacities of bees owed much to the theoretical, experimental, and
methodological work of Darwin and Lubbock. For Darwin in particular,
however, the importance of bees for the fertilization of flowers, and espe-
cially for cross-fertilization, made sexuality a prominent and unavoidable
element of these discussions. Keenly aware in the 1870s of the dangers of
having his work associated with any form of sexual impropriety, Darwin
couched plant fertilization by insects in the language of Christian marriage
and left unexpressed and unexplored the more controversial implications
of plant sexuality for humans. Lubbock was more comfortable than
Darwin in acknowledging the evidence of untraditional marriage in human
societies, although he, too, was disparaging of promiscuity in primitive
cultures. Despite being more directly associated with bees than Darwin,
Lubbock was seen by contemporaries as a heterodox denigrator of the
bee’s reputation as much as he was a celebrator of its moral and intellec-
tual qualities. In his admiration of ants, Lubbock perhaps prefigures
another modern zoologist who claimed Darwin’s legacy: Edward
O. Wilson, whose work on ants and other social insects was central to his
efforts to extend evolutionary thought to the human realm in books like
Sociobiology, On Human Nature, and Consilience.
Notes
1. Mea Allen, Darwin and His Flowers: The Key to Natural Selection (New
York: Taplinger, 1977); Peter Ayres, The Aliveness of Plants: The Darwins
at the Dawn of Plant Science (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008); Richard
Bellon, “Charles Darwin Solves the ‘Riddle of the Flower’; Or, Why Don’t
Historians of Biology Know about the Birds and the Bees?” History of
Science 47, no. 4 (2009): 373–406, https://0-doi-org.wizard.umd.umich.
204 J. SMITH
edu/10.1177/007327530904700402; Richard Bellon, “Inspiration in

the Harness of Daily Labor: Darwin, Botany, and the Triumph of
Evolution, 1859–1868,” Isis 102, no. 3 (2011): 393–420, doi:
10.1086/661591.
2. Charles Darwin, “On the Two Forms or Dimorphic Condition in the
Species of Primula, and on their Remarkable Sexual Relations,” Journal of
the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London (Botany), 6 (1862): 77–96,
http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F1717&viewty
pe=text&pageseq=1.
3. Charles Darwin, The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species
(London: John Murray, 1877), 137, http://darwin-online.org.uk/con-
tent/frameset?itemID=F1277&viewtype=text&pageseq=1.
4. Darwin, Different Forms of Flowers, 138.
6. The 1662 Anglican marriage rite calls “holy Matrimony” an “honourable
estate, …signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and
Church.” “The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony,” The Book of
Common Prayer, https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-
worship/worship-t exts-a nd-r esources/book-c ommon-p rayer/
form-solemnization-matrimony.
7. Charles Darwin, On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign
Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing
(London: John Murray, 1862), 41, http://darwin-online.org.uk/con-
tent/frameset?itemID=F800&viewtype=text&pageseq=1
9. “The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony,” The Book of Common Prayer.
10. Darwin rarely used the term “bastard,” and when he did, it was typically in
citing a German source—“bastard” in German botanical writing being
used for “hybrid”—or in quoting another observer. In Origin of Species,
Darwin distinguished between “hybrids” (the offspring of the union of
two species) and “mongrels” (the offspring of the union of two varieties).
In that context, he was keen to show that, apart from fertility, few differ-
ences existed between the two groups. Darwin applied the term “mon-
grel” to plants as well as animals in Origin and Variation of Animals and
Plants Under Domestication, but he used the term sparingly or not at all in
his botanical works.
11. Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Deborah Lutz, Pleasure
Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (New York:
Norton, 2011).
12. Joseph D. Hooker, “Address by the President,” Report of the Thirty-Eighth
Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London:
John Murray, 1869), lxvi, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/

item/93116#page/71/mode/1up.
13. See, for example, J. E. Taylor, Flowers: Their Origin, Shapes, Perfumes, and
Colours (London: Hardwicke & Bogue, 1878), chap. 1 (“The Old and the
New Philosophy of Flowers”).
14. On the popular reception and cultural impact of Darwin’s botanical works,
see Bellon, “Inspiration”; Jim Endersby, Orchid: A Cultural History
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016) and “Deceived
by Orchids: Sex, Science, Fiction and Darwin,” British Journal for the
History of Science 49, no. 2 (2016): 205–29; Devin Griffiths, “Flattening
the World: Natural Theology and the Ecology of Darwin’s Orchids,”
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 37, no. 5 (2015): 431–52; and my “Grant
Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, and the Dissemination of Darwin’s
Botany,” in Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth-
Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 285–306, and “Une Fleur du Mal?
Swinburne’s ‘The Sundew’ and Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants,” Victorian
Poetry 41, no. 1 (2003): 131–50.
15. For biographical information on Lubbock, see Horace G. Hutchinson,
Life of John Lubbock, Lord Avebury (London: Macmillan, 1914); Janet
Owen, Darwin’s Apprentice: An Archaeological Biography of John Lubbock
(Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2013); Mark Patton, Science, Politics, and
Business in the Work of Sir John Lubbock: A Man of Universal Mind
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007)
16. Charles Darwin to G. R. Waterhouse, [Jan-June 1850]; Darwin
Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 1144,” accessed 11 March 2018,
http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-1144.
17. Charles Darwin to John Lubbock, [22 November 1859], Darwin
Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 2532,” accessed 12 March 2018,
18. John Lubbock, Pre-historic Times, As Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and
the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages (London: Williams and
Norgate, 1865), 481.
19. George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987),
especially 150–56, 197–218, 248–73, passim.
20. Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for
New Audiences (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007),
particularly chapters 2 and 7.
21. John Lubbock, On British Wild Flowers Considered in Relation to Insects
(London: Macmillan, 1875), 34.
22. Lubbock, British Wild Flowers, 3, 5.
206 J. SMITH
23. J. F. M. Clark, “‘The Ants Were Duly Visited’: Making Sense of John
Lubbock, Scientific Naturalism and the Senses of Social Insects,” British
Journal for the History of Science 30, no. 2 (1997): 151–76, and Bugs and
the Victorians (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2009), 80–85.
24. Clark, Bugs and the Victorians, 85.
25. John Lubbock, Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A Record of Observations on the
Habits of the Social Hymenoptera (New York: Appleton, 1882), v.
26. Lubbock, British Wild Flowers, 12.
27. Clark, “‘The Ants Were Duly Visited,’” 172–74.
28. “Punch’s Fancy Portraits.—No. 97. Sir John Lubbock, M.P., F.R.S.,”
Punch, 83 (19 August 1882), 82.
29. Lubbock, Ants, Bees, and Wasps, v.
30. Lubbock, British Wild Flowers, 45–46.
31. Lubbock, British Wild Flowers, 45.
32. John Lubbock, “Observations on Bees and Wasps,” Journal of the Linnean
Society (Zoology) 12 (1876): 125.
33. “Sir John Lubbock on ‘The Busy Little Bee,’” Spectator, 4 April 1874, 9.
h t t p : / / a r c h i v e . s p e c t a t o r. c o . u k / a r t i c l e / 4 t h -a p r i l -1 8 7 4 / 1 0 /
sir-john-lubbock-on-the-little-busy-bee.
34. Spectator, 4 April 1874, 9.
35. Lubbock, “Observations on Bees and Wasps,” 139.
36. Lubbock, Ants, Bees, and Wasps, vii.
37. Lubbock, Ants, Bees, and Wasps, 5.
38. Lubbock, Ants, Bees, and Wasps, 1.
39. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859),
216, http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F373&vie
wtype=text&pageseq=1.
40. Alison Pearn, “The Teacher Taught? What Charles Darwin Owed to John
Lubbock,” Notes and Records 68 (2014), 8–9.
41. Only in a passage summarizing the results of illegitimate unions in one
species of Primula does Darwin use the term “incest.” See Different Forms
of Flowers, 216–17.
42. Darwin, Orchids, 359.
45. On cousin marriage in Britain, see Nancy Fix Anderson, “Cousin Marriage
in Victorian England,” Journal of Family History 11 (1986): 285–301;
Adam Kuper, “Changing the Subject—About Cousin Marriage, Among
Other Things,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2008):
717–35; Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family:
Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England
(New York: Academic Press, 1978); Sybil Wolfram, In-Laws and Outlaws:
Kinship and Marriage in England (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987).
46. Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (New York: Knopf,
2002), 279–82.
47. Charles Darwin to John Lubbock, 17 July 1870; Darwin Correspondence
Project, “Letter no. 7281,” accessed on 12 March 2018, http://www.
darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-7281.
48. Lubbock, Pre-historic Times, 481–82.
49. Charles Darwin to John Lubbock, 11 June [1865]; Darwin Correspondence
50. Pearn, 14.
51. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred
of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2009); Evelleen Richards, Darwin and the Making of
Sexual Selection (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2017); Shuman Seth, “Darwin and the Ethnologists,” Historical Studies in
the Natural Sciences 46, no. 4 (2016): 490–527.
52. John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of
Man (New York: Appleton, 1870), 94.
53. John Lubbock to Charles Darwin, 25 March 1867; Darwin Correspondence
55. Charles Darwin to John Lubbock, 21 July [1870]; Darwin Correspondence
56. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
(London: John Murray, 1871), vol. 2, 358, http://darwin-online.org.uk/
content/frameset?itemID=F937.2&viewtype=text&pageseq=1.
57. Darwin, Descent of Man, vol. 2, 360.
60. John Lubbock to Charles Darwin, 18 March [1871]; Darwin
Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 7598,” accessed on 16 March 2018,
61. Lubbock to Darwin, 18 March [1871].
62. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd
ed. (London: John Murray, 1874), vii, http://darwin-online.org.uk/con-
tent/frameset?itemID=F944&viewtype=text&pageseq=1.
63. Darwin, Descent of Man, 2nd ed., 588.
64. Darwin, Descent of Man, 2nd ed., 588.
208 J. SMITH

66. Darwin, Descent of Man, vol. 2, 362; Darwin, Descent of Man, 2nd ed., 591.
67. Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation, vi.
68. Clark, “‘The Ants Were Duly Visited,’” 172.
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Curran, Stuart. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Oxford: Oxford University
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224 FURTHER READING
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Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Sally
Shuttleworth, 285–306. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
———. “Une Fleur du Mal? Swinburne’s ‘The Sundew’ and Darwin’s Insectivorous
Plants,” Victorian Poetry 41, no. 1 (2003): 131–50.
Smith, Jordan P., Tim A. Heard, Madeleine Beekman, and Ros Gloag. “Flight
Range of the Australian Stingless Bee Tetragonula Carbonaria (Hymenoptera:
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Index1
A Bazin, Gilles, 114

Acheta Domestica, 116 Beekeeping, 136
Alcock, Mary, 70 by women, 113, 123, 124, 126, 145
A. I. Root, 30 Beekeeping associations, 143, 144
American Bee Journal, 11 Beekeeping journals, 33
Analogy, 22, 23, 34, 42, 43, 48, Bees, 15, 16
53, 54, 203 Amegilla cingulata, 93
Animal rights discourse, 72 Colletidae, 99
Arnold, Matthew, 4 Halictidae, 99
Australian literature Hyeloides concinna, 93
Bradley, James, 103 and Indigenous knowledge, 99, 101
Juchau, Mirielle, 104 Megachilidae, 99
Malouf, David, 104 native bees, 105
Tennant, Kylie, 103 Stenotrididae, 99
Tetragonula carbonaria, 102
Trigona, 14
B Beetles, 179
Bagster, Samuel Bentham, Jeremy, 158
Ladies’ Safety Hive, 143 Bevan, Edward, 6
Banks, Joseph, 94 Botany, 100, 101
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

Switzerland AG 2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39570-3
228 INDEX
Breeding, 13, 172, 173, E

183, 184 Ellis, Havelock, 174
Buckfast bees, 184 Endangered species, 105
Butler, Charles, 70, 136, 175 Evans, John, 2, 10, 12
The Bees, 52
C
Cambridge, Ada F
“A Sweet Day,” 113, 125 Fabricius, Johann Christian, 93
Chartism, 113, 121 French Revolution, 119
Cobbett, William, 118
Colonisation, 93, 94
Colony collapse disorder, 9, 103 G
Comstock, Anna, 24 Gaunt, Mary
Kirkham’s Find, 113, 128
Gerstaecker, Carl, 12
D
Darwin, Charles, 42, 54, 169
fertilization (see Plant sexuality) H
human evolution, 188 Hardy, Thomas
human sexuality, 199, 201 Desperate Remedies, 180
Origin of Species, 4, 14, 170, Far from the Madding Crowd,
181, 188 170, 178
pollination, 189 (see Pollination) Jude the Obscure, 173
and realism, 171 Return of the Native, 171
sexual selection, 188, 202 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 171, 183
Variation Among Animals and Under the Greenwood Tree, 9, 172
Plants, 188 Hive design, 9, 31, 96, 137, 140,
Variation of Animals and 143, 158
Plants, 173 Honey, 42
Darwin, Erasmus, 5, 45 Honeybees
The Botanic Garden, 53 American colonialism, 159
The Economy of Vegetation, 44 and animal welfare, 9, 73, 140
Temple of Nature, 45 and Australia, 101
Zoonomia, 54 and colonisation, 14, 98, 103, 113
Della Cruscans, 62, 63 drone massacre, 115, 116
Disraeli, Benjamin, 122 drones, 11, 34, 86, 112–114, 118,
Domestication, 153, 154, 163, 170, 119, 121, 177
175, 195 and eroticism, 68, 177
Dumoustier, Hélène, 10 as industrious, 64, 65
Duncan, James, 115 industriousness, 77
Dzierzon, Johannes (Jan), 11, 172 in Irish law, 154
INDEX 229
and labour politics, 73 The Fall of Hyperion, 84, 86

and the law, 163 Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, 82
and monarchy, 70 Lamia, 83
and moral instructions, 22, 26, 27, pharmacological training, 79
34, 35, 137–139 Kingsley, Charles, 122
and Napoleon, 70 Kirby, William, 15, 114
ownership, 155
racialisation, 13, 15
reproduction, 12 L
in Roman law, 154 Labour politics, 63, 112,
and sedition, 70, 74 119, 121
and sociability, 180 Langstroth, Lorenzo, 8, 11, 25, 30,
social reform, 31 31, 142, 172
and social theory, 27, 36, 112 Ligurian honeybee, 172
stinging, 137, 152, 154, 161 Linnaeus, Carl, 12
superstition and lore, 81, 142 Lubbock, John, 4, 26, 187
swarm-catching, 157 ant intelligence, 198
swarming, 23, 156, 161 Ants, Bees, and Wasps, 196
wild, 152, 155 British Wild Flowers, 197
worker bees, 112 as Darwin popularizer, 194
Honeybee society, 62 entomology, 193
Hooker, Joseph Dalton, 192 friendship with Darwin, 193
Huber, François (Francis), 115, 158 human sexuality, 200, 201
Huish, Robert, 23, 118, 141 Lucretius, 42
Hunt, Leigh, 119
M
I Maeterlinck, Maurice, 24
Insects Mandeville, Bernard, 4, 112
pejorative references, 64 Mangles, James, 100
Invasion ecology, 94, 95, 98 Metaphor, 102
Minor creatures, 182
Molloy, Georgiana, 106
J Moths, 179
Jurine, Christine, 114
N
K Natural theology, 29
Keats, John Neighbour, Alfred, 6
“To Autumn,” 88 New Woman, 124
The Eve of St. Agnes, 82 Nutt, Thomas, 9, 32, 158
230 INDEX
P Spence, William, 15
Pastoral, the, 183 Swammerdam, Jan, 7, 10, 113
Plant sexuality, 9, 190 Swarm-catching, 136
Pollination, 8, 9, 44, 46, 187 Swarming, 176
Pollination ecology, 92 Sweetness, 42, 79, 82
“Sweetness and light,” 4
Swift, Jonathan, 3
Q
Queen bee, 12, 23, 175, 179
Queen Victoria, 23, 111 T
Termites, 15
Toxicity, 80
R Trimmer, Sarah, 73
Réaumur, R. A. F., 10, 114
Religious Tract Society, 28
Requeening, 172 U
Romanticism, 77 Urban beekeeping, 162
Ruskin, John, 16
V
S Von Siebold, Karl, 11
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 120
Skeps, 31, 157, 172
Smeathman, Henry, 15 W
Sociability, 62 Wakefield, Priscilla, 116
Social insects, 6, 62 Warder, Joseph, 114
Social reform, 135 Wildman, Thomas, 114
Social theory, 7 Women’s suffrage, 113, 122
Southey, Robert, 63, 73, 74 Wood, John George, 178

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

Bees, Science, and Sex

Bees, Science, and Sex

ISSN 2634-6338 ISSN 2634-6346 (electronic)

Cover illustration: mikroman6/Getty Images

Paper in this product is recyclable.

Katy Barnett is a professor at Melbourne Law School and the co-author,

Christopher Harrington teaches literary studies at Victoria University

Stealing Sweetness: Science, Sex

Christopher Harrington and Alexis Harley

But ah! What sweetness steals upon the sense

In 1806, John Evans, a Welsh physician employed to manage an Infirmary

C. Harrington • A. Harley (*)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

invocation to the Roman poet Virgil, whose poetical treatise on beekeep-

and European honeybees, long conscripted into the European imperial

light constitute a vital corrective to the disenchantments of the “mechani-

Transformations of the eighteenth-century literary tropes of “sweetness

the bees be neither starved nor murdered, is not so much an amusing as a

As Evans’ quotations above suggest, the eighteenth century had witnessed

Long is her tapering form, and fring’d with gold

Thus, in the bloom of youth, and glory, shone

The SABLE WARRIOR, dazzling to behold,

This comparison, Virgilian in form if not content, hints at Evans’ aspira-

presuppositions about the utility of bees than any contemporary under-

civilisational spectrum that moved upwards from “lower” insects, com-

anthropocentric evaluation of bees and other insects in terms of their

is currently valued at around $2 a pound (https://honey.com/honey-­

Nachtsheim, A Human Geneticist Under National Socialism, and the

Modern Science, Moral Lessons

In 1847, a series published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Victorian Honey bee Social Order

monarchy under a queen’s leadership not only reflected a nineteenth-cen-

Description of bees extended beyond a simple division of labor, encom-

Ideas of social order in the literature on honey bees tended to be pre-

Expertise and Popularization

Entomological texts included a mixture of scientific experiments,

I have elsewhere endeavored to show the purifying and ennobling influence

Publishers with explicit religious credentials continued to publish popular

Some Christian publishers were sponsored by specific denominations or

as a science, is the history of the works of the Almighty.”30 Despite this

The Religious Tract Society (RTS) was formed in 1799 as an interdenomi-

evolution. A chapter in the above book by the Religious Tract Society

Modern Beekeeping Literature

The attention of Clergymen is particularly solicited to the study of this

Although beekeeping appears to be a strictly practical endeavor, some of

“Langstroth capitalized on centuries of science and sentiment centered in

One beekeeping book on the modern management of the hive, written

Books on bees were reviewed and advertised in bee journals, alongside

the real march forward in this country, so far as bee-keeping is concerned,

Children’s Literature on Bees: Scientific

Children’s literature was another avenue for disseminating knowledge on

photographs. Bees Shown to Children, written by Ellison Hawks, a member

After the nanny proceeds in explaining the creation of a queen in a hive,

The dissemination of these ideas could be found in books of natural his-

been recognized for potentially plagiarizing Eugène N. Marais’s work

31. Anon., vi.

52. Thomas Nutt, Humanity to Honey-Bees (Wisbech, UK: H. and J. Leach

is currently valued at around $2 a pound (https://honey.com/honey-

It is difficult to imagine an insect more welcome to grace the middle-class