T SOCIAL LIFE AMONG THE INSECTS1 By Professor WILLIAM MORTON WHEELER LECTURE III-BEES SOLITARY AND SOCIAL 10 those who are not entomologists the word "bee" naturally signifies the honey-bee, because of all insects it has had the most delightful, if not the longest and most intimate association with our species. Of course, the key to the understanding of this association is man's natural appetite or craving for sweets and the fact that till very recently honey was the only accessible substance containing sugar in a concentrated form. It is not surprising, therefore, that man's interest in the honey-bee goes back to prehistoric times. He was probably for thousands of years, like the bears, a systematic robber of wild bees till, possibly during the neolithic age, he became an apiarist by enticing the bees to live near his dwelling in sections of hollow logs, empty baskets or earthen vessels. Savage tribes keep bees to-day and within their geographic range we know of no people that has not kept them. They figure on the Egyptian monuments as far back as 3500 B. C., and we even know the price of strained honey under some of the Pharaohs. It was very cheap-only about five cents a quart. The keeping of the honey-bee could not fail to excite the wonder and admiration of primitive peoples. It was at once recognized as a privileged creature, for it lived in societies like those of man, but more harmonious. Its sustained flight, its powerful sting, its intimacy with the flowers and avoidance of all unwholesome things, the attachment of the workers to the queen-regarded throughout antiquity as a king-its singular swarming habits and its astonishing industry in collecting and storing honey and skill in making wax, two unique substances of great value to man, but of mysterious origin, made it a divine being, a prime favorite of the gods, that had somehow survived from the golden age or had voluntarily escaped from the garden of Eden with poor fallen man for the purpose of sweetening his bitter lot. No wonder that the honey-bee came in the course of time to symbolize all the virtuesthe perfect monarch and the perfect subject, together constituting the perfect state through the exercise of courage, self-sacrifice, 1 Lowell Lectures. affection, industry, thrift, contentment, purity, chastity every virtue, in fact, except hospitality, and, of course, among ancient peoples bent on maintaining their tribal or national integrity, the fact that bees will not tolerate the society of those from another hive was interpreted as a virtue. With the passing centuries the bee became the center of innumerable myths and superstitions. It was supposed to have played a rôle in the lives of all the more important Egyptian, Greek and Roman divinities. Among the Latins it even had a divinity of its own, the goddess Mellonia. Medieval Christians seem to have been quite as eager to show their appreciation of the insect. While the housefly had to be satisfied with the patronage of Beelzebub and the ant was given so obscure a patron saint as St. Saturninus, the honey-bee enjoyed the special favor of the Virgin or was even made the "ancilla domini," the maid-servant of the Lord. Those who represented the divinity on earth, of course, added the honey-bee to their insignia. It appears on the crown of the Pharaohs as the symbol of Lower Egypt, on the arms of popes and on the imperial robes of the Napoleons. Among the ancients the behavior of bees was supposed to be prophetic and the insect thus naturally became associated with Apollo, the Delphic priestess, the Muses and their protegées, the poets and orators. Honey and wax were early believed to have medicinal and magical properties and were, of course, used for sacrificial purposes. Their ritual value is apparent also in the Christian cult, for honey was formerly given to babies during baptism and the tapers of our churches are supposed to be made of pure bees' wax ("nulla lumina nisi cerea adhibeantur"). Among the many myths that have grown up around the honeybee, that of the "bugonia" may be considered more fully, because it shows how entomology may throw light on questions that have puzzled and distracted the learned for centuries. For nearly three thousand years people believed that the decomposing carcass of an ox or bull can produce a swarm of bees by spontaneous generation. The myth evidently started in Egypt and appears in a distorted form among the Hebrews, among whom, however, it is a dead lion in which Samson finds the honey-comb. Among the Greeks and Romans it becomes more elaborate, and Virgil, in the fourth book of the Georgics, and many other authors give precise directions for the killing and treatment of the ox if the experiment is to be successful. The medieval writers repeat what they read in the classics or invent more fantastic accounts. It was not till the eighteenth century that Réaumur showed that what had been regarded as bees issuing from the decomposed ox carcass must have been large two-winged flies of the species now known as Eristalis tenax, which breed in great numbers in carrion and filth and look very much like worker bees. The history of this myth of the oxen-born bees has been more adequately discussed by a distinguished dipterist, Baron Osten Sacken. He remarks that "the principal factor underlying the whole intellectual phenomenon we are inquiring into is the well-known influence which prevails in all human matters, and this factor is routine." "Thinking is difficult, and acting according to reason is irksome," said Goethe. People see and believe in what they see, and the belief easily becomes a tradition. It may be asked: If those people had that belief, why did they not try to verify it by experiment, the more so as an economical interest seemed to be connected with it? The answer is that they probably did try the experiment, and did obtain something that looked like a bee; but that there was a second part of the experiment, which, if they ever tried it, never succeeded, and that was, to make that bee-like something produce honey. If they did not care much about this failure, and did not prosecute the experiment any further, it is probably because, in most cases, they found that it was much easier to procure bees in the ordinary way. That such was really the kind of reasoning which prevailed in those times clearly results from the collation of the passages of ancient authors about the "Bugonia." It would seem that the strange vitality of the bugonia myth during so many centuries must have been due to some keen emotional factor or religious conviction deeper than the mere inertia of routine thinking to which Osten Sacken refers. Let us work backwards from the golden bees embroidered on the state robes of Napoleon I and supposed to symbolize his official descent from Charlemagne, who is said to have worn them on his coat of arms. It is probable that the fleurs-de-lys, which also figure on his arms. and those of the later French kings are really conventionalized bees and not lilies, spear-heads or palm trees with horn or amulets attached, as some archeologists have asserted, and that Charlemagne derived his bees from one of the first kings of the Salian Franks, the father of Clovis, Childeric I, who died A. D. 481. In 1653 the tomb of this monarch was opened at Tournay, in Flanders, and found to contain a number of objects which indicated that he had been initiated into the cult of Mithra, that soldiers' religion which had been so widely diffused by the Romans over Gaul, Britain and Germany during the first centuries of our era and had come so near to supplanting Christianity. Among the objects taken from Childeric's tomb were a golden bull's head and some 300 golden bees, set with precious stones and provided with clasps which held Philippines. These are the only people among whom it has yet appeared, to the best of my knowledge, but if it should at some time appear among other peoples, I am confident that it will be easy to uncover its tracks back to Africa. But more important is the fact that the Tar-baby is the story that more than any other holds the Negro's mind, and it holds his mind more than it does the mind of any other people. Three fifths of the "genuine" versions are his. All negroes know it and love it. A friend living near Baltimore tells me that he once had a cat named "Tar-baby." The suggestive power of this name was so great that an old colored servitor of his, merely on seeing the cat walk across the yard, would be thrown into violent fits of laughter. Other friends have told me of Negro servants who were acquainted with the Tar-baby story, and that too not from reading. The story is the common property of the black race. It is for them, as it were, the climax of a great animal epic, the grand theme of their fiction. Fundamentally there is no reason why the Negro should not be the creator of the tale. He has created others; at least he tells a number of stories that seem unknown to other peoples.10 Once created the tale was bound to live and wander just as perseveringly, though perhaps not so widely and quickly, as one that arose in India or Babylonia or Egypt; for vitality and travel are prime qualities of folk-tales. Hence it has in time become one of the Negro's few contributions to the general culture of the world. 10 For example, the story of the two animals that make a hunger wager. The one that can go without food the longer is to secure the prize, which is frequently the hand of some female. SOCIAL LIFE AMONG THE INSECTS' By Professor WILLIAM MORTON WHEELER LECTURE III-BEES SOLITARY AND SOCIAL those who are not entomologists the word "bee" naturally most delightful, if not the longest and most intimate association with our species. Of course, the key to the understanding of this association is man's natural appetite or craving for sweets and the fact that till very recently honey was the only accessible substance containing sugar in a concentrated form. It is not surprising, therefore, that man's interest in the honey-bee goes back to prehistoric times. He was probably for thousands of years, like the bears, a systematic robber of wild bees till, possibly during the neolithic age, he became an apiarist by enticing the bees to live near his dwelling in sections of hollow logs, empty baskets or earthen vessels. Savage tribes keep bees to-day and within their geographic range we know of no people that has not kept them. They figure on the Egyptian monuments as far back as 3500 B. C., and we even know the price of strained honey under some of the Pharaohs. It was very cheap-only about five cents a quart. The keeping of the honey-bee could not fail to excite the wonder and admiration of primitive peoples. It was at once recognized as a privileged creature, for it lived in societies like those of man, but more harmonious. Its sustained flight, its powerful sting, its intimacy with the flowers and avoidance of all unwholesome things, the attachment of the workers to the queen-regarded throughout antiquity as a king-its singular swarming habits and its astonishing industry in collecting and storing honey and skill in making wax, two unique substances of great value to man, but of mysterious origin, made it a divine being, a prime favorite of the gods, that had somehow survived from the golden age or had voluntarily escaped from the garden of Eden with poor fallen man for the purpose of sweetening his bitter lot. No wonder that the honey-bee came in the course of time to symbolize all the virtuesthe perfect monarch and the perfect subject, together constituting the perfect state through the exercise of courage, self-sacrifice, 1 Lowell Lectures. |