Insectopedia Part 4

This morning, I read that less than 1 percent of caterpillar eggs survive to adulthood. Such is the ferocity of the predators they face: the birds, reptiles, and mammals (large and small); the parasitoid wasps and flies, the ants, spiders, earwigs, and beetles; the viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Not to mention the gardeners. This state of affairs accounts for the caterpillars' spectacular battery of defenses: toxic flesh, chemical sprays, aggressive sounds, spiny bristles, garish coloring, biting mouths, silky escape ropes, unpleasant fluids regurgitated, repellant odors diffused, the precision mimicry of eyespots, horns, faces, and camouflage, the barbed hair, the stinging hair, the intimidating postures, the alliances with ants.1 Still, less than 1 percent survive to adulthood, to that moment when "with a reckless smile," as Roberto Bolano put it, they emerge anew.2

Less than 1 percent survive to adulthood? It must be difficult to establish this fact with confidence when there is no reasonable estimate of numbers to begin with and when each caterpillar instar-each larval stage, of which there are often five or six before pupation-can look quite different.

In short, consider the difficulty of establis.h.i.+ng this statistic with confidence when caterpillars, as the ecologist Daniel Janzen recently pointed out, "are the last unknown group of big things on the terrestrial world."3

One claim, two problems: the problem of quantifying survival and the problem of conceptualizing adulthood. If the first problem is insurmountable, the second is harder.

The textbooks explain that a caterpillar is a Lepidoptera larva, the stage in the life cycle of a b.u.t.terfly or moth between the hatching of the egg and the formation of the pupa. It is the stage that leads to metamorphosis and the adult form, the stage during which some animals increase their ma.s.s a thousandfold and repeatedly molt as they travel through their various instars.

Jules Michelet, the historian and naturalist, considered the ways in which this extended journey of the insect from one state to another might parallel the pa.s.sage of other animals "from the embryonic existence to the independent life." Unlike mammals, he wrote in L'insecte L'insecte in 1857, for pupating insects "the destination is not merely different, but contrary, with a violent contrast." This "is not a simple change of condition," and these are not "the gentle manoeuvres" by which the rest of us achieve maturity. These beings that are one and the same could not be more different: clay-footed yet ethereal, earthbound yet aloft in the skies, scurrying to the shadows yet drawn to the light, a grinder of leaves yet a sipper of nectar, unenc.u.mbered by genitalia yet dedicated to s.e.x. " in 1857, for pupating insects "the destination is not merely different, but contrary, with a violent contrast." This "is not a simple change of condition," and these are not "the gentle manoeuvres" by which the rest of us achieve maturity. These beings that are one and the same could not be more different: clay-footed yet ethereal, earthbound yet aloft in the skies, scurrying to the shadows yet drawn to the light, a grinder of leaves yet a sipper of nectar, unenc.u.mbered by genitalia yet dedicated to s.e.x. "The legs will not again be the legs.... The head will not be the head," wrote Michelet. This transformation, he saw, "is a thing to confound and almost to terrify the imagination."4 Michelet no doubt knew that the word larva larva had entered the Romance languages accompanied by older, darker a.s.sociations. In a time of meaningful correspondences between natural phenomena and everyday life, an age when people discerned potent signs in stones and storms, the word had entered the Romance languages accompanied by older, darker a.s.sociations. In a time of meaningful correspondences between natural phenomena and everyday life, an age when people discerned potent signs in stones and storms, the word larva larva conjured disembodied spirits, ghosts, specters, and hobgoblins, and it seized on its insect in a fit of recognition. The duality of the word expressed the occult ambiguity of the creature. It was Linnaeus who insisted on the restrictive modern meaning of the term and, with that s.h.i.+ft of logic and sentiment, began the textbook entry that still stands between us and the uncanny reality of the thing. conjured disembodied spirits, ghosts, specters, and hobgoblins, and it seized on its insect in a fit of recognition. The duality of the word expressed the occult ambiguity of the creature. It was Linnaeus who insisted on the restrictive modern meaning of the term and, with that s.h.i.+ft of logic and sentiment, began the textbook entry that still stands between us and the uncanny reality of the thing.

Here is the larva and there is the adult. For Michelet, author of a celebrated seven-volume Histoire de la Revolution francaise Histoire de la Revolution francaise, the event that lies between these states of being was a "revolution," an "astonis.h.i.+ng tour de force."5 It was perhaps possible for Linnaeus to disenchant the word but quite another matter to pacify the thing itself. It was perhaps possible for Linnaeus to disenchant the word but quite another matter to pacify the thing itself.

As stubborn as its goblin nature was the idea-still with us-of the larva as a mask behind which lies the animal's truth. One being enters the chrysalis. Another comes out. "All is thrown aside with the mask," said Michelet. "All is, and ought to be, changed."6 Michelet was fifty-nine when he published L'insecte. L'insecte. He would live for another seventeen years, but he was nonetheless already preoccupied with death. His ma.s.sive works of history were works of resurrection, of bringing back to life. And, indeed, the dead were always around him. When he was seventeen, his mother died. Six years later, it was his closest friend. When he was forty-one, his first wife died. Seven years after that, it was his father, with whom he shared a house. At fifty-two he lost a baby son, the only child of his new marriage; five years after that, his thirty-one-year-old daughter. He would live for another seventeen years, but he was nonetheless already preoccupied with death. His ma.s.sive works of history were works of resurrection, of bringing back to life. And, indeed, the dead were always around him. When he was seventeen, his mother died. Six years later, it was his closest friend. When he was forty-one, his first wife died. Seven years after that, it was his father, with whom he shared a house. At fifty-two he lost a baby son, the only child of his new marriage; five years after that, his thirty-one-year-old daughter.7 And his health was poor, riven by a series of psychosomatic complaints brought on by his agonized response to the upheavals that shook France from 1848: the February revolution that created the Second Republic and the subsequent imperial reaction under Napoleon III. A believer in the unity of nations, he was horrified by the a.s.sertion of cla.s.s on all sides. But the restoration of the emperor led-as it did for Fabre-to a dramatic reversal of Michelet's fortunes; in his case to his sacking from a prestigious position at the College de France and his untimely departure from Paris.8 Death was all around Michelet. "I have drunk too much from the black blood of the dead," he had written in 1853. Yet he is still drawn relentlessly to resurrection.9 And that surely is why he is drawn also so relentlessly to the larvae. And that surely is why he is drawn also so relentlessly to the larvae.

He is unconvinced by the primacy of the b.u.t.terfly, the a.s.sumption that this most seductive of animals is the fulfillment of the caterpillar in the same way that the adult human is understood to be the fulfillment (for better or worse) of the child. Some of that a.s.sumption antic.i.p.ates Darwinian teleology: the emphasis on reproduction as the purpose of existence confirms that the s.e.xually mature form is the only one that counts. Some of that a.s.sumption is more generally evolutionary: the logic of immaturity and development, the progression through ever greater, more advanced stages to ever more advanced, more perfect states that would become so deeply lodged in post-nineteenth-century politics, culture, and personal life-even though our experience of politics, culture, and personal life tells us emphatically that there really is no guarantee of directional progress.

But perhaps, suggests Michelet, the lesson of metamorphosis is not teleology but impermanence and its immortalities. "Throughout my life," he writes, "... each day I died and was born again; I have undergone many painful strugglings and laborious transformations.... Many and many times I have pa.s.sed from the larva into the chrysalis, and into a more complete condition; the which, after awhile, incomplete under other conditions, has put me in the way of accomplis.h.i.+ng a new circle of metamorphosis." He is a moment in the midst of many connected lives. Occasionally he catches himself making a gesture, an intonation, and feels his father alive inside him. "Are we two? Were we one? Oh! it was my chrysalis."10

More than a century and a half earlier, as 1699 rolled over into 1700, financially independent but hardly wealthy, twenty years of marriage and five more of ascetic withdrawal into the mystical Labadist community in West Friesland firmly behind her, twenty-something daughter and Amerindian slaves in tow, the fifty-two-year-old Maria Sibylla Merian, already a noted painter of European insects, rode a donkey through the tropical forests of the Dutch colony of Suriname, "the only European woman who journeyed exclusively in pursuit of her science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."11 Merian traveled with slaves, but as colonial travelers go, she was relatively benign, never speaking ill of the natives, bemoaning their vicious treatment at the hands of the Dutch settlers, and acknowledging with unusual candor (though in general terms rather than by name) the locals' substantial contributions to her collection.

Raised in a family of artists and publishers-her maternal grandfather was Theodore de Bry, whose iconic engravings made the New World real for readers of the first European travel narratives-Merian developed an early fascination for nature study that never left her. She began at thirteen with silkworms (another family connection: her mother's second husband's brother was in the silk trade) but was soon preoccupied by caterpillars in general and, above all, by their transformations.

The beauty of b.u.t.terflies and moths, she wrote later, "led me to collect all the caterpillars I could find in order to study their metamorphoses."12 It was an eccentricity in a girl, but as with the famous and similarly youthful heroine of the twelfth-century j.a.panese story "The Lady Who Loved Worms" (who did not pluck her eyebrows, did not blacken her teeth, who was, indeed, not very ladylike at all), the peculiarity was one of sensitivity and insight that perhaps indicated a philosophical refinement. It was an eccentricity in a girl, but as with the famous and similarly youthful heroine of the twelfth-century j.a.panese story "The Lady Who Loved Worms" (who did not pluck her eyebrows, did not blacken her teeth, who was, indeed, not very ladylike at all), the peculiarity was one of sensitivity and insight that perhaps indicated a philosophical refinement.13 It proved to be a tolerable eccentricity-despite the dark a.s.sociations that crawling creatures often carried. It proved to be a tolerable eccentricity-despite the dark a.s.sociations that crawling creatures often carried.

Surrounded by books and artists, Merian had access to a large library of natural history ill.u.s.tration. She collected her own insects and bred their larvae through their transformations, drawing and painting from life. She honed her conventional drafting skills, copying from the leading emblem books, including Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592), a popular collection of insect engravings executed by Jacob Hoefnagel in the style of his father, Joris. (1592), a popular collection of insect engravings executed by Jacob Hoefnagel in the style of his father, Joris.14 But Merian's times were different, and so was her vision: if the Hoefnagels' incandescent insect universe was dedicated to the revelation of the microcosmic, she occupied a world refreshed by the introduction of the microscope, in which the new preoccupation was with observation and the cla.s.sifications it made possible. Where Hoefnagel had arranged his insects in a symbolic order, Merian placed hers in a different relation, one that was drawn from her own life studies and revealed a fascination with the profusions of time, place, and connection. But Merian's times were different, and so was her vision: if the Hoefnagels' incandescent insect universe was dedicated to the revelation of the microcosmic, she occupied a world refreshed by the introduction of the microscope, in which the new preoccupation was with observation and the cla.s.sifications it made possible. Where Hoefnagel had arranged his insects in a symbolic order, Merian placed hers in a different relation, one that was drawn from her own life studies and revealed a fascination with the profusions of time, place, and connection.

Intensely colored, intensely subjective, dedicated on the opening page to both "lovers of art" and "lovers of insects," Merian's animals are oversize, the plants are shrunk, the proportions distorted; the animals in Merian's Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, the masterpiece she published in Amsterdam in 1705, "appear palpably close, yet imaginary and distant at the same time," as if we, too, are running a lens over their surfaces.15 Yet as never before, the drama of metamorphosis is given unity. On the same page, she paints the larva, the chrysalis, the b.u.t.terfly, and the plant on which the caterpillar feeds. (Sometimes she includes the eggs, proof that she had a.s.similated Francesco Redi's 1668 demonstration that maggots developed from eggs and not via Aristotelian spontaneous generation.) It is a dynamic, interactive world. Its principles are transformation, holism, and the overthrow of that earlier taxonomy of Aristotle, Aldrovandi, and Moffett, which segregated the insects into those that crawl and those that fly and, without knowing what it had done, sundered the b.u.t.terflies and moths from their larvae. Yet as never before, the drama of metamorphosis is given unity. On the same page, she paints the larva, the chrysalis, the b.u.t.terfly, and the plant on which the caterpillar feeds. (Sometimes she includes the eggs, proof that she had a.s.similated Francesco Redi's 1668 demonstration that maggots developed from eggs and not via Aristotelian spontaneous generation.) It is a dynamic, interactive world. Its principles are transformation, holism, and the overthrow of that earlier taxonomy of Aristotle, Aldrovandi, and Moffett, which segregated the insects into those that crawl and those that fly and, without knowing what it had done, sundered the b.u.t.terflies and moths from their larvae.

Michelet greatly admired Merian's paintings. He embraced his fellow traveler in the land of the insects and felt a secure bond across the centuries. Her paintings, he thought, not only expressed the feminine qualities that he expected to find-"the softness, breadth, and fulness of the plants, their l.u.s.trous and velvety freshness"-but remarkably also had "a n.o.ble vigour, a masculine gravity, a courageous simplicity."16 He examined the hand-colored copperplates that fill the Metamorphosis. Metamorphosis. All is change, all is impermanence, all is connection. The vitality of life itself erupts against the artificial tidiness of scientific categories. All is change, all is impermanence, all is connection. The vitality of life itself erupts against the artificial tidiness of scientific categories.

Nonetheless, the questions that gnawed at him are not solved here. What is the germ that carries through from one form to another, from one being to another? What is it that persists? What kind of creature is this? Is it one or is it many?

In j.a.pan many centuries earlier, the Lady Who Loved Worms spent her days collecting caterpillars from her garden, ordering them, examining them, admiring them, exclaiming over them. She was contemptuous of b.u.t.terflies, worthless things compared with the larvae from which they came and which could furnish her with, for example, silk. She liked the little crawly things. She was drawn to things that lacked pretense. She admired the fundamental phenomena-that is, the ever-changing reality behind the "reality" in which we foolishly live. It was, she said, "the essence of things" that interested her; it was the honji honji, a Buddhist term that the unknown author of the famous twelfth-century story uses to mean something like "original form," "original state," "primary manifestation."17 "The way people lose themselves in admiration of blossoms and b.u.t.terflies is positively silly and incomprehensible," said the young lady. "It is the person who is sincere and inquires into the essence of things who has an interesting mind." "The way people lose themselves in admiration of blossoms and b.u.t.terflies is positively silly and incomprehensible," said the young lady. "It is the person who is sincere and inquires into the essence of things who has an interesting mind."18 But Merian, riding her colonial donkey through the forests of Suriname, sailing to Amsterdam in a flurry of self-publis.h.i.+ng entrepreneurs.h.i.+p, found herself somewhere else entirely, completely disconnected from such thoughts. Her energies were observational, her a.n.a.lytics were visual. She must have abandoned ontological rumination when she quit West Friesland and tired in the most profound way of self-denial. Her principle is beauty, its creation, its appreciation, the surrender to its ineffability. "One day," she writes in one of her unaffected commentaries on the Suriname engravings, "I went far out into the wilderness and found, among other things, a tree the natives call a medlar.... There I found this yellow caterpillar.... I took this caterpillar home with me, and it soon turned into a light-wood-colored pupa. Fourteen days later, near the end of January 1700, a beautiful b.u.t.terfly emerged. It has the look of polished silver, covered with the most appealing ultramarine, green, and purple; it is indescribably beautiful. Its beauty cannot be rendered with a brush."19 And Michelet, straining too-though in a different way-to grasp both the poetics and the mechanics of transformation, found himself meshed in a metaphysical limbo. History plays strange games with historians. Have you ever visited the Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen, the famous flea market in central Paris? To get there, exit the metro at Porte de Clignancourt and look for the junction of avenue Michelet and rue Jean-Henri Fabre.

Wherever life takes you, there is always something that refuses to follow. However you travel, there is always something that tags along uninvited. "Everyone who walks this earth feels a tickling at his heel," Kafka's famous ape, Red Peter, tells the a.s.sembled academy. Kidnapped from his jungle, carried in chains across the ocean, forced to choose between the zoo and the vaudeville, transformed into something new, something part man, part greater than a man, no longer able to reach back to the old ape truth.20 "Whatever you do," wrote Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor, "it is always wrong." How symptomatic is it that, amid all the literature dedicated to b.u.t.terflies and moths, until recently there was no authoritative field guide to the caterpillars of any region? Conceptually and taxonomically, their existence is somehow doubtful. Despite all their defenses, less than 1 percent survive to adulthood. "Whatever you do," wrote Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor, "it is always wrong." How symptomatic is it that, amid all the literature dedicated to b.u.t.terflies and moths, until recently there was no authoritative field guide to the caterpillars of any region? Conceptually and taxonomically, their existence is somehow doubtful. Despite all their defenses, less than 1 percent survive to adulthood.

Language.

When I wish to attract some bees for training experiments I usually place upon a small table several sheets of paper which have been smeared with honey. Then I am often obliged to wait for many hours, sometimes for several days, until finally a bee discovers the feeding place. But as soon as one bee has found the honey many more will appear within a short time-perhaps as many as several hundred. They have all come from the same hive as the first forager; evidently this bee must have announced its discovery at home.

KARL VON FRISCH.

Karl von Frisch won a n.o.bel Prize in 1973 for his discovery of "the language of bees." It was the year of ethology, and along with von Frisch, the prize in Physiology or Medicine was also awarded to Konrad Lorenz and his Dutch colleague Nikolaas Tinbergen. There was nothing recondite here, no obscure fiddling at the margins of theory. The 1973 prize was awarded for populist research that illuminated the mysteries of animal existence and promised profound and far-reaching truths about the human condition.

Honeybees, said von Frisch, though so tiny and so different, possessed language, the capacity long definitive of humanity. Through a series of elegant experiments carried out over nearly half a century, he showed that they communicated symbolically, that, in a manner more complex than that of any other animals apart from humans, they drew on experience and memory to convey information to each other and to their fellows.

More than ninety years after his first reports, these discoveries are still exciting. And they are made more so by von Frisch's way of telling. By inclination and early training a naturalist, he offered nature not in today's technical language of genomics but in his own deeply personal language of bees, a remarkably affective language that imbued his subjects with purpose and intentionality, that made them appealing and familiar.

Von Frisch offered a science of "what animals do, and how and why they do it" that was as comfortable with ontological difference and abiding mystery as it was with the more familiar scientific impulse toward revelation.1 Unashamed in his confessions of affinity, he made readers believe-just as he did himself-that they could understand bees, psychologically and emotionally. He turned his public into animal a.n.a.lysts. And in doing so, he gave new impetus-though, perhaps, despite himself-to the Darwinian notion that not only the morphological but also the behavioral, moral, and emotional basis of human existence could be found in the lives of nonhuman animals. Unashamed in his confessions of affinity, he made readers believe-just as he did himself-that they could understand bees, psychologically and emotionally. He turned his public into animal a.n.a.lysts. And in doing so, he gave new impetus-though, perhaps, despite himself-to the Darwinian notion that not only the morphological but also the behavioral, moral, and emotional basis of human existence could be found in the lives of nonhuman animals.2 Von Frisch spoke for honeybees. And he made them speak. He didn't just give them language; he translated it. Is there anything that is more irresistible? Von Frisch spoke for honeybees. And he made them speak. He didn't just give them language; he translated it. Is there anything that is more irresistible?

Nonetheless, these affinities were deeply fraught in a discipline barely born yet already haunted by the specter of fallibility. Ethology's ghost was Clever Hans, the celebrity horse whose cleverness unfortunately lay not in mathematics but in an uncanny sensitivity to the nonverbal cues of his unwitting trainer. Clever Hans's much-publicized debunking by the psychologist Oskar Pfungst in 1907 pushed questions of animal cognition to the very margins of scientific legitimacy and made it clear that ethology was at mortal risk from the allure of its subjects.3 It was a foundational temptation to which the resolutely anti-psychological behaviorists would not succ.u.mb. But it was the seduction to which von Frisch, caught between affect and object, preoccupied, as he himself wrote, by the interplay between "psychological performance and the physiology of the senses," would forever be in thrall.4 Because von Frisch loved his bees. Loved them with a gentle pa.s.sion. Tended and nurtured their generations. Warmed them in his cupped hands when the brisk air stiffened their wing muscles. Held them as his "personal friends."5 They were his bees in the way that anthropologists of the past may have fancied the remote tribes among which they lived to be their tribes. That same heady mix of science, sentiment, and proprietorial pride, the same willingness to a.s.sume responsibility for another's fate. They were his bees in the way that anthropologists of the past may have fancied the remote tribes among which they lived to be their tribes. That same heady mix of science, sentiment, and proprietorial pride, the same willingness to a.s.sume responsibility for another's fate.

So even as he took such care over the tiny creatures' welfare, von Frisch would lovingly (with another love), painstakingly (with a professional patience), and delicately (with such safe hands) snip their antennae, clip their wings, slice their torsos, shave their eye bristles, glue weights to their thoraxes, and carefully paint sh.e.l.lac over their unblinking eyes, modifying their bodies, mutilating their senses, manipulating their behavior according to the experiment's requirement, reconciling his will to suture the yawning gap that separated human from insect with his unspoken a.s.sertion of a natural sovereign power.

In April 1933, the n.a.z.i-dominated Reichstag pa.s.sed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Jews, spouses of Jews, and political unreliables could now be legally dismissed from the universities.6 By then, von Frisch was director of the new Rockefeller-funded Inst.i.tute of Zoology at the University of Munich and a leading figure in German science. Years before, in the landscaped and columned courtyard of the inst.i.tute, he had, as he recalled in his memoir, fallen "irresistibly under the spell of the honey-bee."7 His enchantment by those he would come to call his little "comrades" had in fact begun even earlier. In 1914, with a magician's flair, he publicly demonstrated what now seems the rather unsurprising truth that honeybees-whose livelihood, after all, depends on their identification of flowering plants-are able to discriminate by color (despite being red-blind). Using the standard behavioral method of food rewards, he trained a group of bees to identify blue plates. He then showed them small squares of colored paper and watched delightedly as they congregated "as if by command" for his skeptical audience.8 But it was in the garden in Munich that the bees first danced for him: "I attracted a few bees to a dish of sugar water, marked them with red paint and then stopped feeding for a while. As soon as all was quiet, I filled the dish up again and watched a scout which had drunk from it after her return to the hive. I could scarcely believe my eyes. She performed a round dance on the honeycomb which greatly excited the marked foragers around her and caused them to fly back to the feeding place."

Although beekeepers and naturalists had known for centuries that honeybees communicated the location of a food source among themselves, no one knew how. Did they lead one another to the nectar? Did they diffuse scent trails? "I believe," von Frisch wrote more than forty years later, that this "was the most far-reaching observation of my life."9 Under the civil service law, von Frisch and his academic colleagues-as well as all other civil servants in the Reich-were required to produce doc.u.mentary proof of their Aryan ancestry. Already suspect for his willingness to sponsor Jewish graduate students even when their theses were far from his own specialties, von Frisch found himself in an even more dangerous dilemma.10 His mother's mother, now deceased, the daughter of a banker and the wife of a philosophy professor, was a Jew from Prague. At first the university protected its star zoologist, arranging for his safe cla.s.sification as "one-eighth Jewish." But imagine the virulent mixture of ideology and ambition that began to ferment, fed by a rigid inst.i.tutional hierarchy and the lack of opportunity for advancement among scholars locked out of academic privilege despite their years of training. In October 1941, the campaign against von Frisch succeeded in forcing his recla.s.sification as "second-grade His mother's mother, now deceased, the daughter of a banker and the wife of a philosophy professor, was a Jew from Prague. At first the university protected its star zoologist, arranging for his safe cla.s.sification as "one-eighth Jewish." But imagine the virulent mixture of ideology and ambition that began to ferment, fed by a rigid inst.i.tutional hierarchy and the lack of opportunity for advancement among scholars locked out of academic privilege despite their years of training. In October 1941, the campaign against von Frisch succeeded in forcing his recla.s.sification as "second-grade Mischling Mischling"-one-quarter Jewish-and securing the order for his removal from his post.

As we know, von Frisch survived the n.a.z.is. Inevitably, though, it was far from straightforward. Influential colleagues mobilized on his behalf, arranging a platform in Das Reich Das Reich, a new weekly in which Goebbels contributed the editorials. Von Frisch wrote about the national-economic contribution of the Zoological Inst.i.tute and how its work was vital to the resilience of the home front.11 Eventually, though, if in somewhat tortuous fas.h.i.+on, it was the bees that saved him. For two years, an outbreak of the parasite Eventually, though, if in somewhat tortuous fas.h.i.+on, it was the bees that saved him. For two years, an outbreak of the parasite Nosema apis Nosema apis had ravaged German hives. Both the national honey crop and agricultural pollination were threatened. Through the intervention of a highly placed ally, von Frisch was appointed as a special investigator, and a panicked Ministry of Food was induced to defer his dismissal from academia "until after the war." had ravaged German hives. Both the national honey crop and agricultural pollination were threatened. Through the intervention of a highly placed ally, von Frisch was appointed as a special investigator, and a panicked Ministry of Food was induced to defer his dismissal from academia "until after the war."12 The indifference of the honeybees to politics did not prevent their recruitment to the National Socialist war effort. The ministry soon expanded the Nosema Nosema remit to include a search for ways of persuading bees to rationalize pollination by visiting only economically desirable plants. Years before, von Frisch had experimented with scent guidance-training bees to respond to a particular odor before freeing them to visit the a.s.sociated flower-but he had been unable to generate commercial interest. This time, galvanized by looming calamity, national enthusiasm, and news of a large-scale Soviet research project along similar lines, the Organization of Reich Beekeepers rushed to sponsor his work. remit to include a search for ways of persuading bees to rationalize pollination by visiting only economically desirable plants. Years before, von Frisch had experimented with scent guidance-training bees to respond to a particular odor before freeing them to visit the a.s.sociated flower-but he had been unable to generate commercial interest. This time, galvanized by looming calamity, national enthusiasm, and news of a large-scale Soviet research project along similar lines, the Organization of Reich Beekeepers rushed to sponsor his work.

Exhausted by the intensifying air war on Munich, von Frisch and his lifelong co-worker, Ruth Beutler, evacuated to the village of Brunnwinkl on the sh.o.r.e of Lake Wolfgang, southwest of Salzburg. This was where von Frisch had spent his childhood summers, and attached to the family house was the natural history museum he had founded as an eager seventeen-year-old. It was here, pursuing adolescent obsessions, that young Karl had enrolled relatives and family friends in scouring the nearby woods and sh.o.r.eline for local fauna. It was here, at the old mill on the edge of Lake Wolfgang, under the quiet hand of his uncle, the prominent Viennese physiologist Sigmund Exner, that he developed the cla.s.sical skills in observation and manipulation that would characterize his experimental research.

And it was also here, here among the animals, that von Frisch found his "reverence before the Unknown," less a formal religious conviction than a commitment to a pantheistic relativism. "All honest convictions deserve respect," he insisted, "except the presumptuous a.s.sertion that there is nothing higher in the world than the mind of man."13 And it was here, as he tells it in straightforward yet often lyrical prose, that his liberal Catholic family-doctrinally liberal in an era when Austrian biologists were routinely dismissed for espousing evolution-created a bourgeois haven, a home for science and the arts, for the gentle satisfactions of polite culture far from the upheavals of early-twentieth-century Mitteleuropa: his spirited mother and his caring if reserved father, his three older brothers, all preparing merely for the uneventful unfolding of long and distinguished academic careers. And it was here, as he tells it in straightforward yet often lyrical prose, that his liberal Catholic family-doctrinally liberal in an era when Austrian biologists were routinely dismissed for espousing evolution-created a bourgeois haven, a home for science and the arts, for the gentle satisfactions of polite culture far from the upheavals of early-twentieth-century Mitteleuropa: his spirited mother and his caring if reserved father, his three older brothers, all preparing merely for the uneventful unfolding of long and distinguished academic careers.

And it was here, in the coc.o.o.n of family memory, as the Allied bombs rained firestorms on Munich and Dresden and as the air thickened over Auschwitz, that von Frisch and Beutler took advantage of their Reich permits to revisit the work on bee communication that he had laid aside some two decades earlier.

In those long-ago studies in the courtyard of the Inst.i.tute of Zoology, von Frisch had identified two "dances"-he named them the round dance and the waggle dance-and concluded that bees used the former to indicate a source of nectar and the latter to indicate a source of pollen. Beutler had continued this work in the intervening years but had begun to doubt the hypothesis. Resuming their experiments together in 1944, they discovered that when they positioned the feeding dishes more than 100 yards from the hive, it didn't matter what substance the bees were carrying: on their return, they all performed waggle dances. Rather than a descriptor of material, the variation they observed in the dances must be the bees' way of communicating the far more complicated information of location. This ability to accurately describe distance and direction "seemed," von Frisch wrote, "altogether too fantastic to be true."14 It was the complexity of the bees' behavior that was so arresting. Making connections between the intricate sociality of honeybees-which live in self-reproducing "colonies" of thousands of individuals-and the development of sophisticated forms of communication is commonplace now. But early-twentieth-century animal studies were dominated by the conviction of biologists and psychologists that animal behavior was fully explicable in terms of a range of simple stimulus responses, such as reflexes and tropisms. And von Frisch's bees were doing something that leading behaviorists such as John B. Watson and Jacques Loeb considered impossible: they were communicating symbolically, representing information through a form-a predictable pattern of physical movements-that was tied to its object "by social convention, tacit agreement, or explicit code."15 What was more, this representing could take place several hours after the flight it described. It relied on registering the details of that flight, recalling its content, and, of course, translating and performing the significant information. Moreover, it also required an audience able to interact effectively in its interpretation. To Donald Griffin, the tireless advocate of animal consciousness and the sponsor of von Frisch's 1949 lecture tour of the United States, this was "the most significant example of versatile communication known in any animal other than our own species." What was more, this representing could take place several hours after the flight it described. It relied on registering the details of that flight, recalling its content, and, of course, translating and performing the significant information. Moreover, it also required an audience able to interact effectively in its interpretation. To Donald Griffin, the tireless advocate of animal consciousness and the sponsor of von Frisch's 1949 lecture tour of the United States, this was "the most significant example of versatile communication known in any animal other than our own species."16 Von Frisch went further. It was, he believed, an accomplishment "without parallel elsewhere in the entire animal kingdom." Von Frisch went further. It was, he believed, an accomplishment "without parallel elsewhere in the entire animal kingdom."17 Contemporary bee researchers have refined von Frisch and Beutler's wartime revisions of the dance theory. There is, most now believe, no difference between the types of information contained in the two main dances.18 Both use waggling to communicate distance and direction, and in both it is the enthusiasm of the performance that conveys the quality of food. Similarly, in both, the type of flower is revealed by the scent clinging to the insect's body. Both use waggling to communicate distance and direction, and in both it is the enthusiasm of the performance that conveys the quality of food. Similarly, in both, the type of flower is revealed by the scent clinging to the insect's body.

In Munich, von Frisch had placed feeding stations directly alongside the hive to facilitate communication between his a.s.sistants observing the dances and those stationed at the feeders. However, in the round dances that the bees perform to indicate nearby food, the waggles are abbreviated, occurring just as the dancer turns to begin her new circle. Von Frisch and his team failed to observe those subtle cues, and it is likely that the bee audience doesn't take much notice of them either, relying instead on sense of smell to locate such proximate feeding places. But when food is further away-the transition occurs at a point between 50 and 100 yards for the Carniolan bee, the bee favored by von Frisch-bees returning to the hive interpose an additional sequence of steps, a straight run that contains a "vigorous wagging" of the abdomen, a side-to-side movement they may repeat thirteen to fifteen times per second.19 It is this distinctive stretch that contains the critical information. Gyrating in darkness amid the crush of bodies on what von Frisch called the hive's "dance floor," the returning forager is closely shadowed by three or four followers, who receive the dance information with their antennae, utilizing scent (to identify the type of flower), taste (to gauge the quality of its product), touch, and an acoustic sensitivity that allows them to pick up the near-air movements produced by the dancer's wings. It is this distinctive stretch that contains the critical information. Gyrating in darkness amid the crush of bodies on what von Frisch called the hive's "dance floor," the returning forager is closely shadowed by three or four followers, who receive the dance information with their antennae, utilizing scent (to identify the type of flower), taste (to gauge the quality of its product), touch, and an acoustic sensitivity that allows them to pick up the near-air movements produced by the dancer's wings.20 The dancer uses the sun as her reference point. Illuminated by daylight on the horizontal platform at the hive entrance, her movements are indexical, pointing directly ahead, "just as we point to a distant goal with raised arm and outstretched finger."21 Dancing in the open, she orients herself by angling her body so that the sun is at the same angle relative to her body as it was during her recent flight to the food source. Dancing in the open, she orients herself by angling her body so that the sun is at the same angle relative to her body as it was during her recent flight to the food source.22 But the vast majority of dances take place inside the hive, in total darkness, on the surface of a vertical comb. Those conditions present the bee with a significant set of problems, which she resolves by reconfiguring the indexical a.s.sociation between the dance and the food source. This interior dance involves a temporal and spatial displacement as the bee converts the angle of the sun, which has permitted her to mime her flight during the outdoor dances, into gravitational terms. To succeed, the bee must note optically the angle between the direction of the sun and the food source on her outbound flight, remember that information, accurately transpose it to an angle that relates to gravity, and in doing so, include a calculation that corrects for the movement of the sun in the time that has pa.s.sed between her outbound flight and the dance.23 If food is located in the direction of the sun, the bee runs upward along the comb; if the feeding place is away from the sun, she runs down. If the material is located at, say, eighty degrees to the left of the sun-as in feeding table II in the diagram-she points her waggle run eighty degrees to the left of vertical (II'), and so on.24 Even if the sun is obscured by clouds, she can locate its position by recognizing patterns of polarized light invisible to humans. Even if the sun is obscured by clouds, she can locate its position by recognizing patterns of polarized light invisible to humans.25 Von Frisch tracked bees foraging some seven miles from their hive and discovered that they convey distance through some combination of number and rate of waggles, velocity of forward movement, and length and duration of the straight section.26 However, distance is a "subjective" quality, which bees measure in terms of the amount of effort they expend on their outward flight. Von Frisch demonstrated this by appending weights of different kinds to various parts of the animals' bodies, exposing them to head winds, and forcing them to walk. In each case, they reported a greater distance than they did without the handicap. However, distance is a "subjective" quality, which bees measure in terms of the amount of effort they expend on their outward flight. Von Frisch demonstrated this by appending weights of different kinds to various parts of the animals' bodies, exposing them to head winds, and forcing them to walk. In each case, they reported a greater distance than they did without the handicap.27 Von Frisch liked to work with "calm and peaceful" bees.28 They were cooperative, and he was responsive, designing experiments and apparatus around their needs and desires. The bees were affected by wind and temperature. They revealed astonis.h.i.+ngly subtle senses of smell and touch. They responded actively to changing light conditions. They grew to recognize individual field-workers. Alert to their sensitivities, he could never be certain that their observed behavior was not symptomatic of the artificiality of experimental conditions and so allowed them to force him into exhaustive (and exhausting) replications of his tests as he struggled to find ways to repeat controlled experiments in natural conditions. When his discoveries were too astonis.h.i.+ng, he wondered whether his attention had created "a sort of scientific bee." They were cooperative, and he was responsive, designing experiments and apparatus around their needs and desires. The bees were affected by wind and temperature. They revealed astonis.h.i.+ngly subtle senses of smell and touch. They responded actively to changing light conditions. They grew to recognize individual field-workers. Alert to their sensitivities, he could never be certain that their observed behavior was not symptomatic of the artificiality of experimental conditions and so allowed them to force him into exhaustive (and exhausting) replications of his tests as he struggled to find ways to repeat controlled experiments in natural conditions. When his discoveries were too astonis.h.i.+ng, he wondered whether his attention had created "a sort of scientific bee."29 He began by building an observation hive. This was a standard beekeeping hive fitted with gla.s.s windows, through which the bees could be watched relatively undisturbed. But he soon realized that bright sunlight and the visibility of patches of sky distorted the dances, so instead he developed his own range of hives with removable panels that allowed him to manipulate external conditions.

He designed feeding stations and special food dispensers. And he invented an automatic counting apparatus disguised as a flower to record bee visits when it was impractical or unnecessary to use volunteers.

He devised a coding scheme-an ingenious one-that allowed visual identification of hundreds of individuals. And he used a fine brush to number each bee with spots of colored lacquer while they fed from his sugar water.

But his true gift was in the design of simple and effective experiments of exceptional elegance. (He initially translated the dance language, for example, by systematically removing to progressively greater distances from the hive the food source that his bees had been trained to seek and then closely observing the dances performed by the returning foragers.) And what underlay this-in addition to patience, self-criticism, and a creatively methodical practice-was his natural historical eye for bee ecology, temperament, and habit, and a deep affinity with bee ontology, the being of a bee.

It was all this that enabled him to recognize the individuality of the members of the hive, their characteristic predilections and temperaments, their s.h.i.+fting moods, and their subtle variations of activity. It was, without doubt, a profoundly anthropomorphic commitment. His bees are "shrewd," "eager," and "phlegmatic"; at one point they even exhibit "cla.s.s consciousness."30 But it would be a mistake to think that anthropomorphism, which we could think of here as the impulse to understand other beings by reference to human interiority, is a sufficient framework through which to make sense of his work. For von Frisch, the honeybees were personal friends, but they were also profoundly mysterious in their difference. And it is this gap and its crossings that permit both reverence and subjection, both the relentless search for some kind of redemptive communion and the willingness to brutalize along the way. But it would be a mistake to think that anthropomorphism, which we could think of here as the impulse to understand other beings by reference to human interiority, is a sufficient framework through which to make sense of his work. For von Frisch, the honeybees were personal friends, but they were also profoundly mysterious in their difference. And it is this gap and its crossings that permit both reverence and subjection, both the relentless search for some kind of redemptive communion and the willingness to brutalize along the way.

Perhaps it is just the moment in which all this is taking place (the terrifying, dehumanizing political-historical moment that is also the thrilling moment in which all these discoveries are entirely new). Or perhaps it is the revived ethological determination to find the human in the animal. But it is clear that both in von Frisch's estimation and in the unfolding of his study, the bees were his collaborators as much as his subjects. He tests them-and makes no effort to hide his disappointment on the rare occasions when they fail to demonstrate their acuity. But they also test him: challenging him to devise experiments sufficiently sensitive to approximate their enigmatic way of being.

Von Frisch plunged into the Brunnwinkl research as into the l.u.s.trous depths of another world. "I tried to bury myself in it completely," he recalled, "taking as little notice as I could help of the events around me." Life outside Brunnwinkl was beyond control. In Munich, the Inst.i.tute of Zoology lay in rubble, his house, too, "a gaping hole." The hostilities of professional life confounded him. He persuaded his wife to burn her diary.31 Who could be trusted? Who was reading? Who might be listening? But the bees ... The bees spoke, but they were indifferent to politics. Theirs was a language unsullied by the corrupting jargon of the Third Reich. The bees had a purity. The bees had an intelligible rationality. The bees offered refuge. Who could be trusted? Who was reading? Who might be listening? But the bees ... The bees spoke, but they were indifferent to politics. Theirs was a language unsullied by the corrupting jargon of the Third Reich. The bees had a purity. The bees had an intelligible rationality. The bees offered refuge.

We don't know how Ruth Beutler felt, but Martin Lindauer, eventually von Frisch's most distinguished student, describes returning severely wounded to Munich from the Russian front, expressing the desire to study science, and being sent by his doctor to attend a lecture on cell division by Karl von Frisch. Lindauer recalls the event as an epiphany that opened the prospect of a normal, meaningful life for a confused twenty-one-year-old who had refused to join the Hitler Youth and had been sent instead to dig the foundations of Dachau, who had volunteered for the German army after an earlier lecture-this by SS officers recruiting at his high school-and who found in von Frisch a stern mentor with a "zeal for science ... [who] tolerated no fraud ... [who was] an extremely exacting person."32 Perhaps it's no surprise that, like his teacher, Lindauer experienced a profound attachment to the bees. As the national authoritarian order descended into chaos and conditions for professional science crumbled all around, von Frisch created an island of calm on Lake Wolfgang, finding in his honeybees a regularity, an ordered way of being in which, as in all well-run inst.i.tutions, none need fear the unpredictable, none need feel unmoored. It was again the Germany of the amateur museum beside the Austrian lake, the Germany before the 1918 revolution, before the Weimar inflation, before the irruption of the n.a.z.is. "After experiencing the senseless regime of the Hitler time, which was malicious, dishonest, and wrong from all perspectives," Lindauer told an interviewer half a century later, "I drew strength from having work based on absolute correctness, honesty, and objectivity. Out of this material and spiritual collapse, this hopelessness, I was able, with Karl von Frisch as a teacher, to build a new way of life. I found a new home with the bees. It was really a new home, the bee colony."33

It is not hard to understand. The honeybee colony has tens of thousands of members whose everyday life is a wonder of self-regulated complexity, a productive order continuously brought into being through the intricate fluidity of its social relations, exchange practices, and division of labor. The very first thing von Frisch tells us in his 1953 work The Dancing Bees The Dancing Bees is that honeybees are obligate social beings, that the level of task integration and cooperative interdependence is such that a bee alone cannot survive outside the hive: "There is no smaller unit [than the colony].... One single bee, kept all by itself, would soon perish." is that honeybees are obligate social beings, that the level of task integration and cooperative interdependence is such that a bee alone cannot survive outside the hive: "There is no smaller unit [than the colony].... One single bee, kept all by itself, would soon perish."34 Like ants, termites, and the other social insects, honeybees live in what entomologists call caste societies, an a.n.a.logy zoologists use to indicate the presence of morphologically distinct occupational groups: the egg-laying queen, the mult.i.tude of nonreproductive female workers, and the few hundred fat male drones with big eyes whose sole purpose-so far as we know-is to have s.e.x with the queen on her single mating flight and who ultimately, as winter approaches and food resources dwindle, will be dragged from the hive by the workers, expelled to starve or, if resistant, stung to their death. "From that time onwards until the following spring," wrote von Frisch, evoking the feminist utopias of writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "the females of the colony, left to themselves, keep an undisturbed peace."35 Not surprisingly, it was the workers that attracted the researchers' attention. Von Frisch and Beutler catalogued their dances, and they made far-reaching discoveries concerning their orientation abilities. Lindauer extended their findings to swarming, nest location, and the extraordinary process of nest selection, which I describe below. All three carried out detailed studies of workers' division of labor and time allocation, although Lindauer pushed this furthest, by tracking the entire life history of a bee he called 107.

Below is Lindauer's first schematic of worker labor allocation. It shows what Thomas Seeley has called a "division of labor based on temporary specializations" and comes from Lindauer's cla.s.sic 1961 account, Communication among Social Bees Communication among Social Bees, a collection of lectures he gave at universities in the United States.36 The column of figures indicates age in days. The whimsical bee people on the left are carrying out the activity a.s.sociated with a particular point in a bee's life (cell cleaning, caring for the brood, building and repairing the hive, guarding the nest, foraging for nectar, pollen, and water). The sketches on the right show the corresponding development of glands in the animal's head (the nurse, or feeding, gland) and abdomen (the wax glands). Despite this tight linkage of activity, physiology, and life cycle, Lindauer was fully aware that under critical circ.u.mstances-for example, a sudden food shortage-these relations.h.i.+ps could be radically interrupted. In such a situation, the glands might stop developing and the bee begin foraging before its appointed day. A bee's physiology and behavior were flexible, adaptive, and responsive to changing conditions. The column of figures indicates age in days. The whimsical bee people on the left are carrying out the activity a.s.sociated with a particular point in a bee's life (cell cleaning, caring for the brood, building and repairing the hive, guarding the nest, foraging for nectar, pollen, and water). The sketches on the right show the corresponding development of glands in the animal's head (the nurse, or feeding, gland) and abdomen (the wax glands). Despite this tight linkage of activity, physiology, and life cycle, Lindauer was fully aware that under critical circ.u.mstances-for example, a sudden food shortage-these relations.h.i.+ps could be radically interrupted. In such a situation, the glands might stop developing and the bee begin foraging before its appointed day. A bee's physiology and behavior were flexible, adaptive, and responsive to changing conditions.

But that isn't all. When Lindauer tracked 107, he realized that she was not only spending more of her time mult.i.tasking than attending to the one expected a.s.signment, but she was also doing an awful lot of wandering around ("patrolling," indicated in Lindauer's diagram by the bowler hat and walking stick) and a considerable amount of what appeared to be nothing (40 percent of her time, in fact, "resting" on the chaise longue). Lindauer found explanations for these observations. Patrolling, he reasoned, was a form of site monitoring that allowed the bee to identify immediate needs and allocate her time accordingly. "Loafing," he claimed somewhat less convincingly, maintained the "reserve troops," who could swing into action as occasion demanded.37 Both of these unexpected activities suggested the importance of horizontal, peer-to-peer communication in a society organized without leaders or centralized decision making. The honeybees' ability to maintain the hive's internal environment-despite changes in external ambient conditions and the availability of critical resources-relies on contact between returning foragers and those already inside. The alacrity with which foragers are relieved of their loads, for instance, shows the degree of collective need for the substance in question. And not only is the recognizably sign-based language identified by von Frisch involved. Something more fundamental to social life is also going on. The bees are in constant physical contact, palpating each other's head and antennae, sensing each other's odor, pa.s.sing compressed pollen to each other, sharing and exchanging the sugary contents of each other's stomach, receiving each other's near-field vibrations. Together, constantly, in the deep communal darkness, exchanging substances, sucking and regurgitating, touching, feeling, smelling, tasting, sensing. Together, touching, in the warm darkness, sucking, feeling, touching, smelling, tasting, touching. Another country. Another language of bees.

And this language is somehow tied to that other language that is all around us here: the language of colonies, of castes and races, of sisters and half sisters, of queens and workers, the language of dance. The language of language, for heaven's sake! This language didn't disappear with von Frisch and Lindauer either. Today's bee scientists speak it too, even if they often bury it in a mechanical discourse of bioenergetics, a dissonance apparent in the distance between the anthropomorphic terminology and the machine-like organism it describes.

The new bee is an evolutionary bee for whom (as for all social insects) society is the individual and whose relations.h.i.+p to the hive is equal to that between the cell and the body. Out of these metaphors comes a compelling narrative of bee evolution in which selective pressures operate at the level of intercolony compet.i.tion for food, foraging area, and other resources, a narrative supported by the absence of observable tension within the hive.38 But von Frisch suggests a supplement. It is not only-as all beekeepers know-the hives that exhibit different personalities (some tidy, some messy, some peaceable, some aggressive). In von Frisch's story, the interplay between individual and collectivity leaves room for individual variability and for the role of varying bee capacities and talents in furthering collective success. In his version, the hive is the expression of a culture of cooperation among its thousands of distinct individuals.

Ernst Bergdolt, lecturer in botany at the Inst.i.tute of Zoology in Munich, joined the n.a.z.i Party in 1922, when he was just twenty years old. A presciently premature fascist, in 1937 Bergdolt became an editor of the Zeitschrift fur die gesamte Naturwissenschaft Zeitschrift fur die gesamte Naturwissenschaft ( (Journal for the Entire Natural Sciences), the most significant attempt to wrestle the biological sciences into conformity with n.a.z.i ideology.39 It was Bergdolt, the leading light of the German National Socialist Lecturers' League, who led the campaign to remove von Frisch from the Inst.i.tute of Zoology. This is from a letter he wrote to the Ministry of Education, calling for the director's dismissal: It was Bergdolt, the leading light of the German National Socialist Lecturers' League, who led the campaign to remove von Frisch from the Inst.i.tute of Zoology. This is from a letter he wrote to the Ministry of Education, calling for the director's dismissal: Professor v. Frisch has an unusual ability to make propagandistic use of the results of his research, the sort of ability we know from Jewish scientists. In contrast, he lacks entirely the ability to survey his work from a broader point of view, let alone to find connections to the natural establishment of a volkish polity, something that seems so self-evident and would be so easy given his areas of expertise, bees.40 Bergdolt had already tried and failed to arrange von Frisch's prosecution for cruelty to animals.41 His opening shot here is little more than a conventional invocation of "Jewish science." But the second charge was more unusual. While the logic of the hive offered von Frisch and Lindauer refuge from what they experienced as the disorienting chaos of the n.a.z.i Reich, for Bergdolt that same systematicity embodied the utopian promise of n.a.z.ism itself. The bees readily provided a mirror of the human. But they did so through lives that-despite the transparency of language-were sufficiently opaque to allow such apparently conflicting fantasies. Even if, in this instance, the fantasies were structured in the same feverish milieu. His opening shot here is little more than a conventional invocation of "Jewish science." But the second charge was more unusual. While the logic of the hive offered von Frisch and Lindauer refuge from what they experienced as the disorienting chaos of the n.a.z.i Reich, for Bergdolt that same systematicity embodied the utopian promise of n.a.z.ism itself. The bees readily provided a mirror of the human. But they did so through lives that-despite the transparency of language-were sufficiently opaque to allow such apparently conflicting fantasies. Even if, in this instance, the fantasies were structured in the same feverish milieu.

This is only partly a matter of different ideas of order. For the n.a.z.is, of course, order required and enforced a savage and exemplary hierarchy. In the hive, however, hierarchy was profoundly ambiguous. Not only were the gender relations of the bee world drastically at odds with the ideals of National Socialism, but the nominal leader-the queen-was a figure of doubtful autonomy, subject in almost all respects to the workers who serviced her. Yet such inconvenient details of bee order were as nothing in light of the allegorical possibilities of formal orderliness: the disciplined subjection to the well-being of the greater good, the self-sacrificial altruism of the nonreproducing workers, the dissolution of the individual in the anonymity of collective purpose, the efficient disposal of lives not worth living, the dedication to a civilizational temporality. And perhaps what also drew Bergdolt to the hive was the brute visuality of that bounded world, self-sufficient and regimented despite its teeming energy, so evocative of totalitarian aesthetics.

Unlike his n.o.bel co-laureate Konrad Lorenz, who was not only an active member of the n.a.z.i Party but also a key figure in its Office for Race Policy, von Frisch-as Bergdolt realized-had little interest in the larger a.n.a.logy.42 Where Lorenz explicitly established racial-hygiene correspondences between the degeneration of domesticated animals and the decline of the civilized human races, von Frisch most often restricted his own editorializing to remarks on the majesty of the bees' senses. In this period, instinct for Lorenz had a particular meaning, in which "instinctive action"-common to humans and other animals-is directed to the preservation of the species and the category "species" is h.o.m.ologous to the Where Lorenz explicitly established racial-hygiene correspondences between the degeneration of domesticated animals and the decline of the civilized human races, von Frisch most often restricted his own editorializing to remarks on the majesty of the bees' senses. In this period, instinct for Lorenz had a particular meaning, in which "instinctive action"-common to humans and other animals-is directed to the preservation of the species and the category "species" is h.o.m.ologous to the Volk. Volk. Evolution, he maintained, is imbued with moral purpose, selection operates at the level of the community, the subordination of the individual is a social good, and further, the elimination of individuals of "inferior value" is a social necessity. These ideas were also promoted by Alfred Ploetz and the Nordic strand of German Evolution, he maintained, is imbued with moral purpose, selection operates at the level of the community, t