As Busy as... You Know What

Melissographia (1625)

Our contemporary academic fields chop our one world into many pieces.  We classify a matter as falling within the area of history or biology or religion.  But such categorization can obscure the wholeness of our complex lives.  I was reminded of that drawback when I read the news story about three beehives of honeybees having survived the terrible fire in Notre-dame Cathedral in 2019. As the beehives on the roof had been part of a project to restore Paris's  population of critical pollinators, was the news story about environmentalism?  Or was it a story about biology because it testified to bees' natural durability?  Or, given the centuries-long history of that cathedral -- involving religious, political, and secular events -- does the bee story fall within the category of "history"?

Even within our category of "history," we create sub-categories.  And textbooks on the history of Christianity will be employed more often by religion professors than by the history department.  That sidelining of church history in our secular age means that the historical contributions of the church to preserving bees might go overlooked.  But monks and other church employees whose names have been forgotten cultivated bees for both tasty honey and the tallow to make church candles.  The environmental writer Paul Shepard informs us that:

"In Wittenburg, Germany, before the [Protestant] Reformation, some churches used 35,000 pounds of wax a year. On Candlemas Eve, hives were decked with ribbon and a song...beginning, ' Bees awake.' [was] sung as people carried wax candles,"

Bees have also navigated their way into the field of literary lore.  Many a Sherlockian enthusiast knows that Sherlock Holmes dreamed of eventually leaving stimulating London to retire to the English countryside -- where he would enjoy taking care of honeybee hives.

We also need to reserve a page in the mathematics textbook for bee geometry.  That is because the distinctive six-sided perimeter around each cell of honeycomb fits the greatest number of those tiny compartments into a hive.  It requires some higher mathematics to prove that an equivalent number of eight-sided cells would require greater space.  How do the bees "know" to go for hexagons? What pressures drive them?  To answer that puzzle, we would also need specialists in animal behavior.  And maybe a physicist too.

Bees also show up in the field of genetics.  Forget the familiar picture of two sexes coming together to create offspring with a 50-50 chance of being male or female.  In the peculiar world of honeybees, only the queen lays eggs, the numerous worker bees are undeveloped females, and the very few males that exist come from unfertilized eggs!

Bees have also buzzed their way into art books.  The complicated clash of circumstances and
personalities that occurred between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII is too often misrepresented

 as a stereotyped battle of truth vs. ignorance.  But if we follow the path of bees, we would find that before their conflict, Urban had praised Galileo's scientific writings and was a promoter of the arts and architecture.  Urban was from the Barberini family, whose signature symbol was bees.  A triad of bees mark many buildings in Roman built under that Pope's patronage; and golden bees grace Urban's tomb.

So numerous have been bees interconnections with the human race that we could develop a course titled "Honeybee History."  But then we'd have to argue over whether it should be handled by the history, biology, or environmental studies department.  Any professors up for co-teaching an interdisciplinary course?

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Specialization suits bees quite well. Do you think it suits humans?

(The Paul Shepard quotation is from his book The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, © 1996, p. 124.)