Bee Consciousness: the Latest Buzz from the World of Melittology (and How D. H. Lawrence Stung First)

Lars Chittka: The Mind of a Bee (Princeton University Press, 2022)

Stephen Buchmann: What a Bee Knows (Island Press, 2023)

 

I. 

 

According to Lars Chittka - a man who, after thirty-odd years of pioneering research, knows more (and cares more) about insect intelligence than most people - bees are sentient beings that deserve our respect and affection.

 

Not only can they count, recognise human faces, and learn simple tool use, for example, but Chittka's studies suggest that bees have a distinct sense of self, experience emotions, and conceptualise the world around them in abstract terms [1].

 

 

II. 

 

Stephen Buchmann, another insect-loving academic and author, has also arrived at the conclusion that bees have complex feelings - ranging from fear and frustration to joy - and, despite being small-brained, are far more mindful than even he imagined three decades ago [2].    

 

This, of course, raises ethical questions about how we treat bees, who play a vital role in food production (many fruits, nuts, and vegetables rely on bees for pollination). Presently, they are subject to shameful exploitation and abuse by an agricultural industry that makes billions of dollars from their intensive labour. 

 

Whilst the phenomenon of colony collapse disorder is often blamed on emerging diseases, the use of pesticides, and/or climate change, Buchmann and others concerned with this issue argue that the shocking decline in bee numbers is also due to the physical and psychological stress caused by the practices of industrialised agriculture; billions of bees are literally worked to death each year so vegans can pour almond milk on their organic cornflakes and feel virtuous [3].       

 

 

III. 

 

Like Buchmann and Chittka, I hope that things will change if enough people accept the fact that bees are sentient creatures - and can therefore suffer - and not merely tiny living machines [4].

 

And like both men, I am filled with a sense of wonder when I consider the mysterious, alien mind of a bee. 

 

However, coming as I do from an intellectual background heavily influenced by D. H. Lawrence, it does not surprise me in the least to discover that what is often called instinct in creatures such as bees, is the working of a primary mind - i.e., a form of spontaenous consciousness arising directly from the body, centeralising in the blood and nervous system.

 

Lawrence writes: 

"When a bee leaves its hive and circles round to sense the locality, it is attending with the primary mind to the surrounding objects, establishing a primary rapport between its own very tissue and the tissue of the adjacent objects. A process of rapid physical thought takes place [...] That is, there is a rapid sensual association within the body of the bee, equivalent to the process of reasoning; sensation develops sensation and sums up to a conclusion [...] which we may call a sensual concept." [5]

 

It's amusing, to me at least, how scientists, such as Buchmann and Chittka, have arrived at similar conclusions with reference to bee consciousness more than a century after Lawrence - who was a novelist and poet, not a zoologist, ethologist, or entomologist - wrote this astonishing passage.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lars Chittka is Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary University of London and author of The Mind of a Bee (Princeton University Press, 2022). 

      Not only has Chittka carried out extensive academic research on bees and their relationship with flowers, but he has been involved in a number of creative projects involving bees. For example, in 2006 he worked with installation artist Julian Walker to evaluate what bees think of Van Gogh's Sunflowers - click here - whilst in 2019 he and fellow members of the alternative rock band Killer Bee Queens released an album entitled Strange Flowers, which explores the world of bees and hopes to raise awareness of their fascinating biology. 

      Click here to play the first track on the album, entitled 'The Beekeeper's Dream'. The video uses footage from David Blair's surreal sci-fi documentary film Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991).

 

[2] Stephen Buchmann is a pollination ecologist specializing in bees and an Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Entomology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. See his book, What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees (Island Press, 2023). 

 

[3] Unfortunately, as Annette McGivney points out in an article in The Guardian (2 April, 2023), finding a method to mass-produce crops whilst at the same time reducing the pain and suffering of bees is not going to be easy: "If vegetarians and vegans who avoid eating animals for ethical reasons were to apply the same standards to foods pollinated by bees, they would have very little on their plates." Click here to read McGivney's piece in full. 

 

[4] Presently, there are no animal welfare laws protecting insects in a lab setting and experiments are often deliberately designed to fatally stress bees in order to determine out how much the insects can tolerate when working in the fields.  

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Nathaniel Hawthorne', chapter VII of the First Version (1918-19) of Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 241.

 

 

Would You Fuck a Queen Bee?

Joanna Frank as Regina in 

The Outer Limits (1964)

 

 

I. 

 

Amongst social insects, such as ants, wasps, and honey bees, a member of the reproductive female caste destined to become a queen is known as a gyne. Such a privileged bee is selected at the larval stage and fed a diet consisting exclusively of royal jelly; a protein-rich secretion which ensures her sexual maturity [1]. 

 

Raised in a specially constructed royal chamber, she will emerge as a virgin queen, bigger in size than a worker, but smaller than a queen in her prime. Her initial desire is not to fuck as many drones as possible, but, rather, to seek out and kill any potential love rivals; i.e., any other virgin queens, be they newly emergent like her, or still developing in their cells [2].     

 

Once she has established herself as top bee, the new queen will fly out on the first warm sunny day to a congregation area, where she will accept the attention of her admirers and mate with a dozen or more drones; male bees who exist only to sexually service the queen and who, having done so, fall to the ground exhausted and dying. 

 

In other words, drones are literally fucked to death by the queen and the congregation area is both an orgy zone and a killing field. 

 

Providing the weather remains fine, the queen may return to this area for several days until she feels herself to be sexually satisfied and full of sperm [3]. Then she is ready to start laying self-fertilised eggs at the rate of about 1,500 a day, whilst worker bees surround her and see to her every need (feeding her, disposing of her excrement, etc.).            

 

 

II.

 

So, the question - aimed primarily to heterosexual males amongst my readership - is this: Would you fuck a queen bee were she to assume human form? 

 

It's a question that was posed by my favourite episode of The Outer Limits: ZZZZZ; an episode in which a queen bee, having metamorphosed into a woman, attempts to seduce an entomologist in order to advance her species [4].

   

And why not, indeed? For as the narrator of the episode says: 

'Human life strives ceaselessly to perfect itself, to gain ascendancy. But what of the lower forms of life? Is it not possible that they, too, are conducting experiments and are at this moment on the threshold of deadly success?'

 

Leaving aside the anthropocentric conceit expressed here, let's provisionally grant that other species apart from man are conducting experiments in evolution and (unconsciously) striving for growth and greater complexity in order to gain an advantage over those against whom they compete for resources. 

 

And this is probably as true for bees as for any other species; for what is a bee, after all, but an evolved form of ancient wasp? [5] So, let's suspend our disbelief and experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to the outer limits ...

III.

In the episode under discussion, Dr Benedict Fields (played by Philip Abbott) takes on a new lab assistant; a beautiful, but somewhat odd young woman called Regina (played by Joanna Frank). Inventing a hard luck story, she is provided with room and board by the kindly (but boring) entomologist and his wife Francesca (played by Marsha Hunt). 

 

Fields is conducting research into the language of bees and hoping he might find some way to communicate with them. Regina is excited by the prospect - though not half as excited as she is by the mating habits of bees and the willingness of drones to sacrifice themselves in the act of love.

 

Despite being happily married - and old enough to be her father - Fields is clearly attracted to Regina. This naturally causes a certain amount of resentment in Francesca, although her suspicions of the younger woman are not simply the result of jealousy; she knows there is something queer or not-quite-right about her. 

 

This is confirmed when one night she watches Regina from her bedroom window dancing about in the garden from flower to flower and then momentarily morphing into a giant bee whilst licking nectar from a water lily. Of course, this is dismissed as a nightmare by her husband. 

 

Later, however, when Francesca finally confronts Regina, the latter releases the bees kept in the lab and encourages them to kill Francesca. Grief-stricken, but finally aware of Regina's true nature and purpose, Fields rejects her sexual advances and gives her a moral lecture on the eternal character of love between a man and his wife. 

 

Frightened that he is about to swat her, Regina backs away and accidently topples from the bedroom window to the ground below. The shock of the fall triggers a transformation back into her insect-self and she buzzes off into the night, presumably returning to the hive, or perhaps to die alone in some quiet spot, having failed in her mission to mate with a human.   

 

The closing narration reiterates the moral of the episode, just in case any viewers missed it:

 

'When the yearning to gain ascendancy takes the form of a soulless, loveless struggle, the contest must end in unlovely defeat. For without love, drones can never be men, and men can only be drones.'

 

 

IV. 

 

I have to say, if I were in the good doctor's shoes, I'm not certain I'd've been able to resist Regina's sexual allure and physical beauty; here was a woman not just with bee-stung lips, but a bee-stung body! And surely, as an entomologist, one would have a professional obligation to experience the unique (if deadly and perverse) form of interspecies experience being offered ...?

 

What I'm trying to say is that, in my view, Joanna Frank as Regina could turn any man into a melissophile ...

  

Notes

 

[1] All bee larvae are given a taste of royal jelly in their first few days, but only those destined to become queens are fed this exclusively; the others must make do with a mixture of nectar and pollen known as bee bread. 

 

[2] Unlike worker bees, the queen's stinger is not barbed and so she is able to sting (and kill) repeatedly without causing fatal injury to herself.

 

[3] A young queen stores sperm from multiple drones in her spermatheca, from where she will selectively release sperm for the remaining years of her life in order to fertilise her eggs. 

 

[4] I'm referring to episode 18 of season 1, entitled 'ZZZZZ', dir. by John Brahm and written by Meyer Dolinsky, which first aired on ABC in January 1964. The episode can be watched in full on the Daily Motion website: click here.   

 

[5] Bees evolved from ancient predatory wasps that lived 120 million years ago. Like bees, these wasps built nests and gathered food for their offspring, but while most bees feed on nectar and pollen, their wasp ancestors hunted other insects. 

      Whether this makes the former more perfect versions of the latter is of course highly debatable. As far as I understand it, natural selection is a process that facilitates adaptations to an evironment, thus improving the chances of survival, but there is no intelligent design at work and evolution isn't progressive (unless one happens to subscribe to an orthogenetic model of the latter).      

 

 

The Internet of Stings: On Apiculture and the Question Concerning Technology

Most people have heard about the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), which, basically, involves embedding computer chips in everyday objects thereby enabling them to send and receive data and to be connected into one great network via the internet.

But many of these people assumed that the things referred to would be inanimate objects; phones, fridges, cars, kettles, central heating systems, etc. with the aim of making dumb things smart or artificially intelligent.

Only a few realised that living beings would also be made part of the IoT. Thus it is that cows, seals, sharks, and now bees are being brought into line by putting them online; a project that we might term die Gleichshaltung von Insekten  ...

Initiating in Manchester, it's hoped that bees across the UK will eventually be fitted with RFID chips on their backs so that researchers can track their behaviour and movements. Their homes will also be bugged (no pun intended), so that hive information - such as temperature - can be monitored and processed.

The aim, it's claimed, is to help the endangered creatures survive in age of colony collapse disorder by enabling the insects to provide status updates and tweet their locations.

And there I was thinking that we just had to plant more wild flowers, use less neonic pesticides and remember that beekeeping is essentially a practice requiring care, rather than a question concerning technology ...  

Be Kind to Bees

Yesterday, struggling along the garden path, came an exhausted bee ...

Fond as I am of honey-producing insects, I decided to try and revive the poor thing with a spoonful of sugar dissolved in water. Happily, after a few sips of this simple but remarkably effective remedy the little creature seemed to perk up, so I left it to crawl among the flowers ...

In a world of climate change, habitat loss, disease, pesticide and colony collapse disorder, we should all be kind to bees ...