Sweetness And Light Part 5

As is often the case, the row began with a standoff and ended with a whimper. After the deaths of his wife and his backer Otis, Langstroth, still in poor health, felt unable to press the lawsuit; it was dropped, and King and many others continued to make their new hives without paying him a cent. In his History of American Beekeeping History of American Beekeeping (1938), Frank Pellett remarks that it would have been better for Langstroth if he had simply given his idea to the world, instead of trying to defend his patent. (1938), Frank Pellett remarks that it would have been better for Langstroth if he had simply given his idea to the world, instead of trying to defend his patent.

Beekeepers managed to unite when the two national organizations merged in 1871 to become the North American Beekeepers' Society. Ladies could join for free; men paid a $1 members.h.i.+p fee. n.o.body could speak for more than five minutes at the meetings-apart from Langstroth, who was honored with the right to talk at any time, and for as long as he liked. He had by this time gained the respect of beekeepers who had previously challenged his right to a royalty on each new hive, and was fast being recognized as the father of American beekeeping.

A photograph of Langstroth, aged eighty, shows a kindly face that radiates goodness: at first glance, he has the air of a jolly cleric looking benevolently over his gla.s.ses; then you notice a clean innocence to his brow. But the longer you look, the more you perceive a set to his mouth and jaw that is the mark of the survivor, and see a light in his eyes that carries both sorrow and hope. With an unshowy intensity, it is a mesmerizing face; in the photograph, he still appears to be thinking.

Lorenzo Langstroth died in 1895, collapsing in church at the age of eighty-five, and many memoirs and obituaries were published in the specialist bee press. Much was made of his kindness in words and actions. An argument with him (about bees, naturally) would rapidly be followed by a dignified and humane apology; conversations with him were rich with anecdote and learning. "Time always took flight when he became a companion," wrote Albert John Cook, a friend who was a biology professor. Another admirer, the eminent American beekeeper A. I. Root, called Langstroth "one of the most genial, good-natured, benevolent men the world has ever produced." He clearly had his quirks, however. Researchers are still mystified by the secret scribbles in his diaries: there is more to Langstroth than the eulogies would imply.

Lorenzo Langstroth, the father of modern beekeeping.

FURTHER BEEKEEPING innovations followed thick and fast in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1865, Major Franz von Hruschka, an Austrian living near Venice, gave his son a piece of honeycomb in a basket. The boy swung the basket around his head-a reckless gesture of playfulness-and his father noticed how honey was thrown out of the comb by centrifugal force. This principle was used to create extractors that removed the honey more easily from the comb; previously it had been squeezed out and dripped laboriously through a bag. innovations followed thick and fast in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1865, Major Franz von Hruschka, an Austrian living near Venice, gave his son a piece of honeycomb in a basket. The boy swung the basket around his head-a reckless gesture of playfulness-and his father noticed how honey was thrown out of the comb by centrifugal force. This principle was used to create extractors that removed the honey more easily from the comb; previously it had been squeezed out and dripped laboriously through a bag.

Other major advances were made on the age-old practice of using smoke to pacify the bees. You puff away on a pipe and blow the tobacco smoke toward the bees, but this homespun method was not entirely effective. At the first British beekeeping show in Crystal Palace in 1874, a prize was offered for the best "bee-subduing" device. One entry was a briar pipe with a rubber tube to blow the smoke through; another, The Bee Quieter, entered by a Reverend Blight, had a burner attached to a small pair of bellows with a wooden nozzle at the end to direct the smoke. The best design on this principle came from America. Here, one of the foremost proponents of commercial beekeeping, Langstroth's friend A. I. Root, had adapted a tin used for popping corn, filling it with rotten wood and burning coals that he extinguished before himself blowing the smoke into the hives. Root decided, in the end, that he'd rather be stung than smoked out by this Heath Robinson device. Then in 1873, another prominent American beekeeper, Moses Quinby, improved the bellows method so the smoker could be used with one hand. It is this design, with a further refinement patented by T F. Bingham, that is still used today.

Beekeepers using Langstroth's moveable-frame hives wanted to take honey out of the frames as easily as possible, and to do this, the combs needed to be free of brood. The "queen-excluder" was a perforated sheet, placed above the brood chamber, which kept the queen from going up into the honeycomb and laying eggs because her wider abdomen could not fit through the holes. Primitive versions of this device had been used at the start of the century; improved, ma.s.s-produced excluders were common at its end. By now, beekeepers also employed "bee escapes," mechanisms used at harvest time permitting the bees to leave the supers but not reenter.

One of the greatest advances of this time was the introduction of sheets of pre-prepared wax foundation, which formed a base within the moveable frame and gave the bees a head start on building the comb, saving vital energy. Foundation sheets were often reinforced with wire to enable the comb to withstand centrifugal force so the honey could be spun out of the comb in the new extractors.

All these inventions fed off each other, with ideas and designs constantly succeeding one another; in the meantime, humans organized like insects as specialist publications and beekeeping a.s.sociations spread and strengthened on both sides of the Atlantic. American Bee Journal American Bee Journal was founded in 1861 by Samuel Wagner, a bank cas.h.i.+er whose pa.s.sion in life was the honeybee. Wagner had learned German to enable him to translate the writings of the Reverend Johann Dzierzon, a German-speaking Pole working in Silesia who was also working on the concept of moveable frames. When he came across Langstroth, Wagner concentrated instead on promoting his fellow-American's revolutionary idea. was founded in 1861 by Samuel Wagner, a bank cas.h.i.+er whose pa.s.sion in life was the honeybee. Wagner had learned German to enable him to translate the writings of the Reverend Johann Dzierzon, a German-speaking Pole working in Silesia who was also working on the concept of moveable frames. When he came across Langstroth, Wagner concentrated instead on promoting his fellow-American's revolutionary idea.

Another prominent journal was Gleanings in Bee Culture Gleanings in Bee Culture, published and edited by A. I. Root, who gathered together many practical ideas, some "gleaned" from such specialist publications as American Bee Journal, Bee World, Prairie Farmer American Bee Journal, Bee World, Prairie Farmer, and Rural New Yorker Rural New Yorker. Initially planned as a quarterly, the magazine immediately became a monthly publication after the success of its first edition in January 1873. Root had fallen in love with bees when he first saw a swarm. He questioned everyone he could about his "strange new acquaintances," searched high and low for bee books, and eventually met the famous Langstroth. Root became a beekeeping evangelist, and his journal spread the word. At first, he employed a printing press operated by a treadle. Wind power was added to foot power when he attached a windmill to the machine, not entirely successfully-subscribers unhappy about the printing quality of some of the pages were told the vagaries of the wind were to blame. Root subsequently used the more reliable method of a steam engine to produce Gleanings Gleanings. The subscription list grew year after year: five hundred, then more than eight hundred, and nearly double this by the end of the third year.

THE INVENTIONS being churned out and publicized in the new specialist press were snapped up by beekeepers who, thanks to Langstroth's moveable-frame hives, were now producing large quant.i.ties of honey. being churned out and publicized in the new specialist press were snapped up by beekeepers who, thanks to Langstroth's moveable-frame hives, were now producing large quant.i.ties of honey.

This was the start of ma.s.s production. The man who did most to build up the honey industry in the United States-the dollar t.i.tan of this sweet capitalist gold-was John Harbison, The Bee King of California. Originally from Pennsylvania, Harbison first came west prospecting for real gold in Cavaleras County. He soon turned to growing fruit trees in Sacramento, and it was there that he saw the potential of the honeybee.

By the midcentury, East Coast bees had swarmed naturally up to the mountain barriers, with the exception of those brought to the Salt Lake area by the Mormons in 1848. To bring a large number farther west would be an epic task, and was first undertaken by a botanist named Christopher Shelton. Only one of Shelton's twelve colonies survived, and he himself died when a steamboat he was traveling in caught fire and sank. A certain Mr. Grindley did manage to bring four colonies across the plains in the back of his wagon from Michigan, stopping occasionally to let the bees out for a feed, but it is hard to imagine this method on any scale; other efforts were also only successful in transporting small numbers.

Harbison, though, was a man who thought big. The number of colonies he brought west was soon in the hundreds and his means of travel was by sea.

On his first successful journey, the hives left the family apiary in Pennsylvania on November 15, 1857, to be loaded on board a s.h.i.+p in New York City. The bees were released, once, for a breather, then they journeyed on, crossing the isthmus of Panama by land and continuing by sea to San Francisco-finally reaching Sacramento on yet another boat. In all, the bees had traveled nearly six thousand miles in forty-five days. It was a successful trip, not least because it proved it was possible to bring over a reasonable number of colonies. The original sixty-seven colonies had been reduced to fifty, but these soon multiplied, and there were plenty of people prepared to pay for this rare commodity. The journey cost Harbison around $800; he made more than $12,000 in profit.

Further journeys produced their trials as well as their rewards. Of the one thousand colonies of bees Harbison brought west between October 1858 and April 1859, poor handling meant just two hundred survived by May. Among the six thousand colonies s.h.i.+pped over in the winter of 1859-60 was the dreaded American foulbrood. This bacterial disease, which kills the larvae, began to attack the bees in the West. In a downbeat ending to his account of bringing bees to California, Harbison admits that some lost money, others their reputation: "The result has been bad for all concerned." These early steps and setbacks show the fragile origins of the honey business, surprisingly so, considering how phenomenally successful it was shortly to become.

Californian honey production continued to grow apace. When people heard rumors that Harbison had made $30,000 from his 1859 trading, it sparked something of a bee rush, or "bee-fever" as the headlines put it. The following year, an estimated ten thousand colonies traveled west by this sea-and-isthmus route. By the end of the 1860s, Harbison himself had two thousand colonies, most of them along the Sacramento River, south of Sutterville. During the 1870s, he was the biggest honey producer in the world.

The Langstroth bee-s.p.a.ce discovery was by then making an impact, though his patented hive did not solve all of Harbison's problems, as first he'd hoped. Harbison found that Langstroth's patented hive was too small and flat to suit the conditions in California with its magnificent nectar flow. His own major advance was to invent a hive that produced small squares of honeycomb that could be taken straight out of the hive and sold to the public. These 2-pound combs were packed in pails and sold as a package of pure goodness. There began the "honeycomb era." A major load of Californian honey-ten railcars packed full of combs-arrived in New York City from San Diego in 1876, causing an enormous stir.

During the 1870s and 1880s, San Diego County was a region of sage and buckwheat-both excellent honey plants. This was pioneer land; one of the best areas for small apiaries was the back-country, inland from the coast up to the Volcan, Cuyamaca, and Laguna mountains. Here, smallholders would subsist on a homestead with vegetables and livestock, including a row of beehives.

A gloomy comment came from Harbison, who said pioneer settlement and clearing was destroying the bee industry by damaging its forage plants. A debate ran in the bee press about which plants you could grow to boost nectar supply. There was still plenty to go around, however. More and more citrus and other fruit trees were being planted each year, for example, providing excellent food for the bees. By 1884, Californian apiarists achieved an annual production weighing more than two million pounds. Curiously, given that honeybees help pollinate trees, there was some conflict between fruit growers and beekeepers; Harbison wrote a letter to the American Bee Journal American Bee Journal in 1893 saying he had lost some 350 hives to arson in just one year due to this. But despite such tussles, California became the leading honey-producing state in the United States. in 1893 saying he had lost some 350 hives to arson in just one year due to this. But despite such tussles, California became the leading honey-producing state in the United States.

IN THE LATTER HALF of the nineteenth century, there emerged something of a cult following for what became known as the Italian bee. of the nineteenth century, there emerged something of a cult following for what became known as the Italian bee. Apis mellifera ligustica Apis mellifera ligustica is still much admired today for its attractive yellow coloring, productivity, and docility. During the Napoleonic Wars a Captain von Baldenstein served in northern Italy, where he admired these pretty, useful bees. He returned to live in his castle in the Tessin Valley, an area of Switzerland that borders Italy, and later sent men to fetch some of the insects; the bees arrived in September 1843. Johann Dzierzon brought them to Vienna ten years later, and his writings continued to spread enthusiasm for the Italian bee around Europe and over in America. is still much admired today for its attractive yellow coloring, productivity, and docility. During the Napoleonic Wars a Captain von Baldenstein served in northern Italy, where he admired these pretty, useful bees. He returned to live in his castle in the Tessin Valley, an area of Switzerland that borders Italy, and later sent men to fetch some of the insects; the bees arrived in September 1843. Johann Dzierzon brought them to Vienna ten years later, and his writings continued to spread enthusiasm for the Italian bee around Europe and over in America.

An early attempt, in 1855, to bring Italian bees across the Atlantic failed because a s.h.i.+p's officer stole some honey and the bees starved. Samuel Wagner, of the American Bee Journal the American Bee Journal, with support from Langstroth, again imported some in 1859, but there were questions about their genetic purity.

There were attempts to get the U.S. government to support the project, with forecasts of spectacular dividends from this fabled honey producer. Then a botanist, S. B. Parsons, undertook the journey himself. He bought some bees from H. C. Hermann, a German beekeeper whose book The Italian alp-bee, or, the gold mine of husbandry The Italian alp-bee, or, the gold mine of husbandry (1859) had done much to popularize the variety. The bees were packed in cigar boxes filled with honeycomb; in all, twenty colonies were sent off to the States. (1859) had done much to popularize the variety. The bees were packed in cigar boxes filled with honeycomb; in all, twenty colonies were sent off to the States.

Parsons had packaged the bees into three batches; a third for the U.S. government, a third for the beekeeper P. J. Mahan, and a third for himself. On April 18, 1860, when the Arago Arago steamer docked in New York, their Italian queens were finally unloaded in the United States-alive, but only just. The combs had loosened in their boxes, and many of the insects were crushed. None survived in the government's batch; none in Mahan's; of all the bees that set out, at a cost of $1,200, only two Italian queens had made it. Once landed, this pair still faced a precarious future. A W. Cart of Coleraine, Ma.s.sachusetts, took one queen and an Austrian beekeeper, Bodmer, the other. The Austrian failed with his queen; luckily, Cart had more success. He created a large apiary of Italians for Parsons, and these were the genesis of the Italian bee industry in the States. A total of 111 of these queens were taken to California, most arriving in good condition. steamer docked in New York, their Italian queens were finally unloaded in the United States-alive, but only just. The combs had loosened in their boxes, and many of the insects were crushed. None survived in the government's batch; none in Mahan's; of all the bees that set out, at a cost of $1,200, only two Italian queens had made it. Once landed, this pair still faced a precarious future. A W. Cart of Coleraine, Ma.s.sachusetts, took one queen and an Austrian beekeeper, Bodmer, the other. The Austrian failed with his queen; luckily, Cart had more success. He created a large apiary of Italians for Parsons, and these were the genesis of the Italian bee industry in the States. A total of 111 of these queens were taken to California, most arriving in good condition.

ITALIAN QUEENS arrived in England before the United States, imported by Thomas Woodbury (1818-1870). Woodbury was one of the most important British beekeepers of the modern "scientific" era. He studied the great bee writers and, after becoming fascinated by the possibility of other races arrived in England before the United States, imported by Thomas Woodbury (1818-1870). Woodbury was one of the most important British beekeepers of the modern "scientific" era. He studied the great bee writers and, after becoming fascinated by the possibility of other races of Apis mellifera of Apis mellifera, imported one thousand Italian bees from H. C. Hermann. They arrived by train in a box: you can imagine his excitement when, back home near Exeter, he shook the bees out, hunting for the queen. He placed her carefully in a winegla.s.s and carried her to a skep where she was put among other bees. A fortnight later, when he spotted workers carrying plenty of pollen into the hive to feed new brood, Woodbury knew that the colony and its new queen were thriving.

Woodbury was quick to adopt the principle of the bee s.p.a.ce and is credited as being the first person in Britain to use moveable frames, in 1860. He also developed his own hive, incorporating Langstroth's innovation. With a typical inventiveness, he was planning a hive suitable for the giant eastern bee Apis dorsata bee Apis dorsata, when he died, suddenly, at the age of fifty-two.

Another interesting aspect of Woodbury's life was that he corresponded with Charles Darwin. After formulating his earth-shaking theory of evolution, Darwin continued to live in the quiet seclusion of Down House in Kent, carrying on an extensive correspondence and taking daily walks in his garden where he would peer into the flower beds, minutely observing the behavior of insects. He now consulted pigeon fanciers and beekeepers such as Woodbury about native species. He was most intrigued when Woodbury sent him a sample of the new comb foundation in the 1860s, and also wrote about how bees tend to visit one sort of flower at a time, remarking how important this is to the cross-fertilization of plants of the same species. "Humble [b.u.mble] and hive-bees are good botanists," he commented, "for they know that varieties may differ widely in the colour of their flowers and yet belong to the same species."

SCIENTIFIC ADVANCES and the development of beekeeping groups led to the growth of a specialist press in Britain as in America. The and the development of beekeeping groups led to the growth of a specialist press in Britain as in America. The British Bee Journal British Bee Journal, launched in 1874, came out monthly, then weekly, and settled down as a fortnightly paper. Events such as the first bee and honey exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1874 helped to spread ideas and inventions. This was set up by the newly formed British Beekeepers' a.s.sociation, which aimed for "the encouragement, improvement and advancement of bee-culture in the United Kingdom, particularly as a means of bettering the condition of cottagers."

Since the start of the century, beekeeping had become an increasingly useful part of the rural economy. In 1870, a professional gardener named A. Pettigrew wrote his Handy Book of Bees Handy Book of Bees (1870), with an attractively plain-speaking tone-not unlike William Cobbett's in the 1820s, but with an even more businesslike perspective. Pettigrew's father had been a laboring man and beekeeper in Lanarks.h.i.+re. His sons helped look after the bees, and when the future bee author became an apprentice, then journeyman-gardener in Middles.e.x, he would keep his own bees in addition to managing his employers' bees. Money was an important incentive: "Stings do not seem half so painful," he wrote, "to the man whose annual proceeds of bee-keeping amount to 10, or 20, or 50." He also praised the occupation for its productive, moral nature and recommended that swarms be given as gifts to deserving servants: "Who has not seen hundreds of working men blessed and charmed beyond description in attending to their bees and cow?" he asked. "Such men are superior to the low vulgarities of the public-house, and superior in every sense to those who waste their time and strength in drinking." He hadn't much time for Italian bees, a.s.serting that a gullible susceptibility to the new was the greatest weakness of an Englishman, and he also found straw skeps infinitely preferable to the newfangled wooden hives. (1870), with an attractively plain-speaking tone-not unlike William Cobbett's in the 1820s, but with an even more businesslike perspective. Pettigrew's father had been a laboring man and beekeeper in Lanarks.h.i.+re. His sons helped look after the bees, and when the future bee author became an apprentice, then journeyman-gardener in Middles.e.x, he would keep his own bees in addition to managing his employers' bees. Money was an important incentive: "Stings do not seem half so painful," he wrote, "to the man whose annual proceeds of bee-keeping amount to 10, or 20, or 50." He also praised the occupation for its productive, moral nature and recommended that swarms be given as gifts to deserving servants: "Who has not seen hundreds of working men blessed and charmed beyond description in attending to their bees and cow?" he asked. "Such men are superior to the low vulgarities of the public-house, and superior in every sense to those who waste their time and strength in drinking." He hadn't much time for Italian bees, a.s.serting that a gullible susceptibility to the new was the greatest weakness of an Englishman, and he also found straw skeps infinitely preferable to the newfangled wooden hives.

But Langstroth's advances and a generally more scientific approach to beekeeping were spreading. At the end of the century, a Suss.e.x beekeeper, Samuel Simmins, wrote a book promoting beekeeping as a profitable pursuit. His prediction of the market shows how perspectives had s.h.i.+fted toward industrialization. He talked of how bees, through pollination, helped along fruit being grown for jam, one of many foods that were now ma.s.s-produced. Simmins saw that, with the aid of modern extractors, liquid honey was the future now, not comb: "Honey in the comb will ever remain a luxury," he wrote, "but that in the liquid form is destined ere long to be found in general use in almost every family." It was a prediction that has proven true to this day.

CHAPTERNINE.

CREATIVE BEE.

At the start of the twentieth century, The Life of the Bee The Life of the Bee by the symbolist playwright and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck became a best-seller. This Belgian, who went on to win the n.o.bel Prize for Literature, wrote his account of the honeybee in an explicitly literary style, which appealed to the general public and not just a beekeeper readers.h.i.+p. My copy is a small, moss green hardback, embossed with gold flowers, with fin de siecle tendrils swooping elegantly across the endpapers and spine. The book accompanied me on trains, park benches, and bus seats, slipping in and out of my coat pocket for a month or so. This was the edition's seventeenth printing; I became intrigued by what drew so many people to bees at that time. by the symbolist playwright and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck became a best-seller. This Belgian, who went on to win the n.o.bel Prize for Literature, wrote his account of the honeybee in an explicitly literary style, which appealed to the general public and not just a beekeeper readers.h.i.+p. My copy is a small, moss green hardback, embossed with gold flowers, with fin de siecle tendrils swooping elegantly across the endpapers and spine. The book accompanied me on trains, park benches, and bus seats, slipping in and out of my coat pocket for a month or so. This was the edition's seventeenth printing; I became intrigued by what drew so many people to bees at that time.

The volume had belonged to my great-aunt Isobel and sat on her bookshelves alongside W. B. Yeats, Tennyson, and Rupert Brooke. Bees were a motif in the work of all these poets. Yeats dreamed of a "bee-loud glade" on the Isle of Innisfree; Tennyson dreamt of "the moan of doves in immemorial elms,/And murmuring of innumerable bees." "And is there honey still for tea?" asked Rupert Brooke, a line ever-glowing with nostalgia. Bees represented an old-fas.h.i.+oned idyll as factories churned and cities spread.

Maeterlinck's book starts on a similar note, with the storybook account of his first meeting with an apiarist. This old man lived in the Dutch countryside, a place of little trees marshaled along ca.n.a.l banks, of polished clocks and the musical voice of the perfumed, sunlit bee garden. He had retreated from human affairs, and kept twelve straw skeps painted pink, yellow, and blue to attract the bees. In this beautiful place, Maeterlinck writes, "the hives lent a new meaning to the flowers and the silence, the balm of the air and the rays of the sun."

At times Maeterlinck's descriptions of bees are anthropomorphic. He ponders on the virgin queen's flight, wondering if she is a "voluptuary" who enjoys mating in the air. The big-eyed mating drone is a doomed romantic hero whose unique kiss will lead to his death. The duels between the virgin queens, stinging fights to the death, are vicious as only a dramatist could make them.

But while Maeterlinck waxed lyrical, he also had a background in the craft: he had been a beekeeper for twenty years and kept an observation hive in his study in Paris. His book follows the life of the bee through the life of the year, from spring awakening, to swarming, to the building of a new colony and its filling with honey. He watches events unfold with a sense of awe. Fighting queens will hold back if it looks as if they are about to sting each other to death, leaving the nest leaderless: the central mystery of the hive, for him, was the way the individual bee works for the good of the colony.

Why did they do this? In the pre-Darwinian world, it would have been seen as due to G.o.d's divine design. But The Life of the Bee The Life of the Bee is disturbed by the shock waves of Darwin; this was now a world in which humans could be descended from apes. Maeterlinck is tentative about the theory of evolution, perhaps because he saw its implications. His language is still religious in timbre; the mystical life force he sees in a hive of bees is similar to the Holy Spirit. Yet meaning has slipped from "G.o.d" to "Life": a mysterious force of nature. The meaning of life, for the bees, is survival. "The G.o.d of the bees is the future," he concluded. is disturbed by the shock waves of Darwin; this was now a world in which humans could be descended from apes. Maeterlinck is tentative about the theory of evolution, perhaps because he saw its implications. His language is still religious in timbre; the mystical life force he sees in a hive of bees is similar to the Holy Spirit. Yet meaning has slipped from "G.o.d" to "Life": a mysterious force of nature. The meaning of life, for the bees, is survival. "The G.o.d of the bees is the future," he concluded.

THE SYMBOLISM of the hive found a novel expression in the building in Paris known as La Ruche (The Beehive). This collection of studios, off pa.s.sage de Dantzig near Montparna.s.se, was used by such artists as Chagall, Leger, Modigliani, and Soutine. Originally a wine pavilion for the 1900 Universal Exhibition, La Ruche was designed by the engineer Alexandre Eiffel, famous for his tower. It was dismantled and taken to its current site three years later by the philanthropic sculptor Alfred Boucher. Boucher, a popular artist, spent some of his earnings on a piece of land, where he rebuilt the pavilion to attract artists and writers, leasing out its studios for a small rent. of the hive found a novel expression in the building in Paris known as La Ruche (The Beehive). This collection of studios, off pa.s.sage de Dantzig near Montparna.s.se, was used by such artists as Chagall, Leger, Modigliani, and Soutine. Originally a wine pavilion for the 1900 Universal Exhibition, La Ruche was designed by the engineer Alexandre Eiffel, famous for his tower. It was dismantled and taken to its current site three years later by the philanthropic sculptor Alfred Boucher. Boucher, a popular artist, spent some of his earnings on a piece of land, where he rebuilt the pavilion to attract artists and writers, leasing out its studios for a small rent.

Boucher explicitly compared his artists' colony to a beehive and called the inhabitants his bees. There were eighty studios in its central, skeplike rotunda. The insects' communal life set an example of artistic productivity: out of the hive comes honey; the studios brought forth sculpture, painting, and literature.

The building is still in use today, after a campaign in 1969 halted plans to turn the site into apartments and a parking garage. The present occupants enter between two jauntily topless female statues, as if at the hive entrance; they pa.s.s one another in the hall as they pick up mail, greet one another, look at posters for exhibitions, swap gossip. The floor is covered with brown tiles in a honeycomb pattern and the central stairway goes up the "hive body," to three twelve-sided landings where each wall has a door leading to a studio "cell." The building offers both privacy and company: it is easy to imagine how a "bee" in need of a break would hear a door open, or someone clattering up the stairs, and dart out to meet up on the landing. Artists and writers work largely alone, and yet their antennae need to catch the electricity in the air: La Ruche provides both solitude and social contact, showing how architecture helps people lead their lives better.

FIVE MINUTES' WALK from La Ruche is Parc Georges Bra.s.sens, one of those Parisian parks that is calm, civilized, and well planted. Having been swept out of La Ruche as a gate-cras.h.i.+ng tourist by a cla.s.sically formidable concierge, I needed to recover and followed a winding path that led quietly away from the growling of the city toward trees and flowers. Lines of vines etched one slope, and a bank of blooms bounced lightly with bees; these signaled the edge of a city apiary with sixteen hives. Paris is a city that encourages beekeeping; several of its parks have such sites. from La Ruche is Parc Georges Bra.s.sens, one of those Parisian parks that is calm, civilized, and well planted. Having been swept out of La Ruche as a gate-cras.h.i.+ng tourist by a cla.s.sically formidable concierge, I needed to recover and followed a winding path that led quietly away from the growling of the city toward trees and flowers. Lines of vines etched one slope, and a bank of blooms bounced lightly with bees; these signaled the edge of a city apiary with sixteen hives. Paris is a city that encourages beekeeping; several of its parks have such sites.

Relaxed by this urban idyll, I turned around and suddenly saw its backdrop: vast, looming tower blocks that were the opposite in scale and intimacy to La Ruche. These brutish buildings made people and neighboring places insignificant.

Afterward, wandering around the quarter, I was struck by how many houses from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were decorated with small, natural details: a home adorned with ironwork marigolds painted orange and green, the gliding metal ferns hinging a plate-gla.s.s door. Even if the countryside was fading to the distance, people still felt instinctively close to nature, and wanted it in their urban surroundings, just as they wanted to read Maeterlinck's book on the honeybee.

THE HONEYBEE continued as a positive symbol; but now this was partly in reaction to the disjunctions of an era of world wars and grinding industrialization. One radical thinker fascinated by bees for this reason was the educationalist Austrian Rudolf Steiner. continued as a positive symbol; but now this was partly in reaction to the disjunctions of an era of world wars and grinding industrialization. One radical thinker fascinated by bees for this reason was the educationalist Austrian Rudolf Steiner.

Steiner (1861-1925) was born into a family that had worked the land for generations. His father was a gamekeeper on an aristocratic estate, until he became a stationmaster and telegraphist for Austrian Imperial Railways, just one of many countrymen whose life was shaken out of rhythm by the "march of progress."

The educator thought his own school lessons were overa.n.a.lytical; for Steiner, the trend toward specialization, which modern science represented, took away the meaning-the spirit-of the whole. "Through the microscope and other instruments we have come to know a great deal," he said in a lecture he gave in 1922. "But it never leads us nearer to the etheric [spiritual] body, only farther from it." Instead of following the mainstream, he developed his concept of anthroposophy from anthropos anthropos (humankind) and (humankind) and sophia sophia (wisdom), a holistic philosophy of education that remains influential today. Having lost the land and all it represented, Steiner wanted us to find our way back to a more natural and "connected" way of living. (wisdom), a holistic philosophy of education that remains influential today. Having lost the land and all it represented, Steiner wanted us to find our way back to a more natural and "connected" way of living.

Steiner admired honeybees' collective life and used their example to ill.u.s.trate his ideas about the world. In 1923, he gave a series of lectures about bees to an audience of Swiss construction workers in which he praised the unconscious wisdom of bees, the love in their community, and how each individual bee is part of a whole.

Much to the consternation of a beekeeper who was in the audience, he questioned some of the disruptive practices that had arisen with the new "rational" beekeeping, such as breeding queens artificially in order to improve and disseminate such stock as the fas.h.i.+onable Italian bees. In the past, beekeepers treated their insects in a "personal and proper" manner; now, he pointed out, humans could make profound changes-such as using wooden hives instead of straw skeps-without really considering the effect it would have on these living creatures. We have lost our instinctive knowledge of nature, he said, and this was bound to have major consequences.

STEINER COMPARED the hive to a human being, with the bees circulating like the blood cells in a body. This powerful image was to influence the pioneering avant-garde German artist Joseph Beuys. the hive to a human being, with the bees circulating like the blood cells in a body. This powerful image was to influence the pioneering avant-garde German artist Joseph Beuys.

Beuys (1921-1986) first read Steiner as a soldier, then as an art student after the war. By the time he died, he had ama.s.sed more than 120 volumes of Steiner's writings, around 30 of them scored dark with underlining. He acknowledged the Austrian's influence, writing how he also wanted to sweep away the alienation and distrust people felt toward the spiritual world.

As a young man, Beuys was shot down over the snowy wilderness of the Crimea while serving as a paratrooper in the Second World War. He was found frozen and close to death by nomadic Tartars; as he lay unconscious for eight days, they brought him back to life, wrapping him in felt blankets and salving his wounds with animal fat. This life-or-death experience lay behind the artist's later use of felt and fat in his work; for him, such materials had a metaphorical meaning. Partly inspired by Steiner, Beuys also used honey and beeswax.

For Beuys, there were clear links between bees and creativity: the production of wax, from within the bees' own bodies, was itself a "primary sculptural process." Temperature was as important as s.p.a.ce and form in sculpture, he believed, and honey and wax were both natural expressions of warmth. He compared honey and blood, pointing out that they were of a similar temperature (many people comment on the heat of honey fresh from the hive). In an interview in a German beekeeping journal, Beuys spoke of how nectar, "the flower's own form of honey," flowed under the hot sun; he talked also of how beeswax melted to a liquid when heated.

Such conversions represented change; Beuys wanted his art to provoke transformation. There is an urgency in his work-a feeling that it matters-that is lacking in the installations of many of the artists who followed him. He believed in performance art, with a political subtext, rather than permanent creation; it was called social sculpture.

In his 1977 installation Honey Pump at the Work Place Honey Pump at the Work Place, Beuys pumped honey in transparent pipes around the Museum Fridericianum in Ka.s.sel, Germany. Here, during the hundred days of the artwork, people from all over the world and from many walks of life-economists, community workers, musicians, lawyers, actors, trade unionists-discussed issues such as nuclear energy, urban decay, and human rights. This was Beuys's Free International University, and it was about changing the world: the ideas being discussed should pump through society just as the honey circulated the building.

The meaning of such "actions" relied on the ideas behind them, and the pieces later displayed in museums-photographs, blackboards of scribbles spray-fixed for posterity-are remnants of almost shamanistic events. In this sense, they are similar to the geometric patterns left behind by the honey-hunting rock artists. Beuys wanted to tap into the same source of power as our Stone Age ancestors. In these mechanistic times, he believed animals had the spiritual energy that human society needed; the honeybee was part of the life force we had lost.

THE MANY WAYS in which bees and their communal life have inspired artists and architects are brilliantly explored in in which bees and their communal life have inspired artists and architects are brilliantly explored in The Beehive Metaphor The Beehive Metaphor by Juan Antonio Ramirez, published in 1998. Ramirez, a Spanish art history professor, has a personal connection to bees; his father, Lucio Ramirez de la Morena, was a dreamer with visions of making money from modern beekeeping. The theory ran that each spring, a colony produced at least one swarm, which could then be hived; an apiary should, in theory, double in size each year, generating endlessly growing profits. In the 1940s, Senor Ramirez began to promote scientific hives by starting a national beekeeping service, converting old-fas.h.i.+oned hives into the modern moveable-frame version, selling them speculatively and instructing beekeepers in the new methods. Alas, his optimism was let down by practice. The venture failed and his hives were impounded. by Juan Antonio Ramirez, published in 1998. Ramirez, a Spanish art history professor, has a personal connection to bees; his father, Lucio Ramirez de la Morena, was a dreamer with visions of making money from modern beekeeping. The theory ran that each spring, a colony produced at least one swarm, which could then be hived; an apiary should, in theory, double in size each year, generating endlessly growing profits. In the 1940s, Senor Ramirez began to promote scientific hives by starting a national beekeeping service, converting old-fas.h.i.+oned hives into the modern moveable-frame version, selling them speculatively and instructing beekeepers in the new methods. Alas, his optimism was let down by practice. The venture failed and his hives were impounded.

Meanwhile, Juan Ramirez, who had kept a certain skeptical distance from all these schemes, had taken to reading in the new local library, heading off on his eventual path as an academic. But when he later looked again at one of the hives, he became more interested. He suddenly realized that his father had designed a "building" for bees, with a roof, a window, and commodious s.p.a.ces in which they could dwell. The parallels between the bee house and human architecture had the power of a metaphor. This thought grew into his remarkable book on how bees have influenced artists in the twentieth century.

ARCHITECTS, the practical artists of society, design buildings for constant, communal use; many have been inspired by the well-designed nests made by social creatures such as honeybees.

This underlying influence can clearly be seen-if you look for it-in the work of the Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926). Gaudi spent long stretches of his childhood in the countryside and later called the pure and pleasing parts of nature his constant mistress. The organic forms of the natural world are obvious in his buildings. One of Gaudi's most distinctive inventions was the parabolic arch, which rises and falls in a single, seamless loop. He disliked the interruptions of traditional columns and arches: this was his sublime solution. What was his inspiration? Ramirez believes it was honeycomb.

The first of Gaudi's parabolic arches was in the bleaching room of a cooperative textile factory in Mataro, built around 1883. He started the commission shortly after the sudden death of his elder brother, Francisco, a scientist whose only published article was about bees; the subject may well have been on Gaudi's mind. The arches that form the body of the building, as Ramirez has pointed out, echo the pendulous curves of wild comb and the hanging chain of bees that starts to build the comb. More explicitly, a drawing Gaudi made for the project replaces builders with bees, and the crest of the cooperative was also a bee, made to his design.

The parabolic arch went on to feature in many of this idiosyncratic architect's buildings, including the Palacio Guell in Barcelona, designed as a home for Gaudi's patron, Eusebio Guell. The main entrance to the building, on a street off the port-end of the Ramblas, is composed of two of these beautiful single-line arches. The central cupola of the building is supported on four further arches and the roof itself is covered in a honeycomb of hexagons, some of which illuminate the dome with geometric stars of daylight. Bee imagery appears elsewhere in Gaudi's work; the Sagrada Familia has a Sacred Heart carved onto the facade, surrounded by the insects, symbolizing how souls are insects sipping from G.o.d's nectar in the blood of his son.

OTHER ARCHITECTS working in the first half of the twentieth century were obliquely and explicitly influenced by bees. In 1921, Mies van der Rohe (18861969) entered a compet.i.tion for a high-rise building in Berlin. His submission, called Honeycomb, had the radical idea of using gla.s.s for the external walls. If the outside of a building was no longer load-bearing, why not use this structural freedom? This is the modern skysc.r.a.per. Juan Ramirez believes Mies van der Rohe's "honeycomb" design has elements of a flat observation hive, which holds a single layer of comb behind two sheets of gla.s.s. Traditional architecture hid its engineering; these gla.s.s walls showed off the essential structure of both building and honeycomb. working in the first half of the twentieth century were obliquely and explicitly influenced by bees. In 1921, Mies van der Rohe (18861969) entered a compet.i.tion for a high-rise building in Berlin. His submission, called Honeycomb, had the radical idea of using gla.s.s for the external walls. If the outside of a building was no longer load-bearing, why not use this structural freedom? This is the modern skysc.r.a.per. Juan Ramirez believes Mies van der Rohe's "honeycomb" design has elements of a flat observation hive, which holds a single layer of comb behind two sheets of gla.s.s. Traditional architecture hid its engineering; these gla.s.s walls showed off the essential structure of both building and honeycomb.

Frank Lloyd Wright (18671959) designed buildings that were more obviously influenced by the honeybee. He described his work as a.n.a.logous to what happened in the natural world: "Building on the earth is as natural for man as it is for other animals, birds, or insects. And as the difference between man and animals grew, so his buildings were converted into what we call architecture." He incorporated the hexagonals found in honeycomb in his buildings from the 1920s onward. The designs for a summer camp building on Lake Tahoe, in western America, is based on six-sided rooms; in the Jiyu Gakuen school in Tokyo, the schoolroom is full of this geometry, down to details such as the backs of chairs; and in his thirties Honeycomb House in Stanford, California, 120-degree angles-like those of comb-replace the conventional right angles not just in walls and windows but also in cus.h.i.+ons, a fireplace, and furniture.

It was the honeybee's practice of collective living that most influenced the Swiss architect and town planner Charles Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier (18871965). The son of an enamelist, Le Corbusier enrolled at his local art school during a decade when Art Nouveau was prevalent. But the ideas behind Modernism were starting to stir; he was encouraged to look at the forms underlying nature, and not just their surface, decorative value. One of his earliest designs was a watch case combining a geometric pattern with a bee on a flower. Le Corbusier continued his education in Paris at a time when La Ruche was alive with artistic endeavor. It is more than likely that he knew this famous artists' colony; he later went on to design a building for one of its former inhabitants, his contemporary and compatriot, the avant-garde writer Blaise Cendrars.

Le Corbusier subsequently lived in Berlin at the same time as both Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. Even more than these two architects, Le Corbusier seems to have been inspired by the internal dynamics of the hive. His vision of the city was a place where many people could live in collective harmony and modernity; he wanted homes, not just businesses, to be in tower blocks, and came up with such concepts as buildings with "precise breathing," which kept the internal temperature at a constant level using methods of insulation similar to those in a hive. His blocks of flats-on-columns echo beehives placed on stands.

AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR, Le Corbusier's references to collective living were more muted; communism and fascism had made ma.s.s movements more suspect. Juan Ramirez points out how the idea of living in a beehive is a vision of h.e.l.lish urban living to us today: overcrowded, rootless, and impersonal. In our individualistic, consumer society, we have become increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of close a.s.sociation, such as that of cl.u.s.tering social insects; and meanwhile, the ideals of the tower blocks of Le Corbusier have been discredited through many inner-city failures.

A greater ambivalence crept into the way bees were portrayed artistically. Spirit of the Beehive Spirit of the Beehive, a masterpiece by the Spanish film director Victor Erice, is set in the 1940s, after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and was shot in 1973, during the last gasp of Franco: the deadened atmosphere of the film conveys two layers of repression, the tense aftermath of war and the stifling fear of a dictators.h.i.+p. In a bleak Castilian landscape, scoured by wind, Erice shows us a family in which the adults drag through their muted lives, the husband morbidly obsessed by his bees while his wife dreams hopelessly of romantic escape. The torpid frustration of the couple is compared to the alive, imaginative world of their daughter Ana; the inner emotional world of the child offers redemption.

In the film, the bees' world is cruelly impersonal; watching them in the observation hive is no longer a matter of fascination and enlightenment. The man's thoughts about his insects do not lead him out of his despair, only further in. The family's village seethes with distrust, betrayal, and violence; the scurrying insects are no longer a symbol of unity but of the pitiless universe. The honeybee reflects the eye of its beholder; communal life is not a model but a threat.

IN THE 1960s, the poet Sylvia Plath incorporated her experiences of keeping bees and meeting beekeepers into her intense form of autobiographical art. This aspect of her work has a further personal layer because her father was a bee expert. 1960s, the poet Sylvia Plath incorporated her experiences of keeping bees and meeting beekeepers into her intense form of autobiographical art. This aspect of her work has a further personal layer because her father was a bee expert.

Otto Plath wrote a thesis on b.u.mblebees that was published as a book in 1934. His sweet tooth first led him to bees-as a child, he would follow them to their nests and use a straw to suck out wild honey; he would also catch insects and keep them in cigar boxes to examine them. After growing up in Poland with German parents, he emigrated to live with his grandparents on a farm in Wisconsin. The plan was for him to join a Lutheran ministry. However, the creationist seminary forbade one of his favorite authors, Darwin; Otto went instead into teaching, causing an irrevocable split with his family. He married Sylvia Plath's mother relatively late in life and died, when their daughter was just eight, from complications arising from diabetes. One of Plath's biographers, the poet Anne Stevenson, has pointed out that this condition could have been linked to his sweet tooth.

When Sylvia Plath touched on the traumatic subject of her father, she would sometimes turn to bee imagery. When he died, she said it was as if she had gone into the ground like a hibernating bee. Otto could catch a bee in his hand and put it in his ear, like a trick of natural magic; his daughter wrote of a man who could clench bees in his fist. In 1959, she wrote a poem after seeing her father's grave for the first time. It was called "The Beekeeper's Daughter."

In the summer of 1962, Sylvia Plath and her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, started to keep honeybees. Her diary describes attending a June meeting of beekeepers local to the mid-Devon village where they had a house. Plath was considering a novel based on the lives of the people around her in this secluded part of England: these were notes that could be worked up into literature.

The humor and reportage in Plath's outsider view on village life make a contrast to the dark drama in her poetry. Writing about this beekeeping meeting, she goes into great detail about what each person wears, describing the veiled hats and, particularly, the atmosphere surrounding the rector. At first there is respectful silence around him; then he surprises Plath by tucking her bee veil into her collar-a sudden, curiously intimate moment. The beekeepers, as if licensed by the protection of their white suits, start to tease him about the bees buzzing around his dark trousers (bees are said to dislike such colors and leave lighter ones alone), saying they were his new congregation.

The same diary entry contains a precise, evocative description of what it is like to encounter bees as a novice. After seeing the villagers don their hats, Plath feels increasingly naked, highlighting the vulnerability and antic.i.p.ation you feel approaching a hive. There is the odd sight of a frame of honeycomb crusted with bees, and the p.r.i.c.kles, itches, and tension she feels, now standing in claustrophobic bee clothes in this strange situation.

Plath's sense of unreality is heightened when the Devonians have lost all their homely quirks and have changed, with their garb, into uniform creatures with identical veiled faces. The villagers' unfamiliar actions are oddly ceremonial, and she prays to the spirit of her dead father for protection. The bees fly around as if on pieces of long elastic, a brilliant description of how their free flight is connected to a cohesive whole. Then the meeting ends on a prosaic note, with the secretary selling raffle tickets for a honey show, or as Plath puts it, "chances for a bee-festival."

Charlie Pollard, a local bee man, later brought a box of Italian-hybrid bees to the Hugheses' and the colony was settled in a hive in the orchard, away from the house. When Plath visited the insects, she was delighted to see them entering the hive with pollen on their legs.

IN OCTOBER THAT YEAR, Sylvia Plath rose at five a.m. when the sleeping pills she was taking wore off, drank coffee, and began what was to be a series of five poems about bees, written over one week. She was separated from her husband and living with her two small children in a flat in London. Just over four months later, she would be dead.

The experiences in the journal became literature: "The Bee Meeting" expresses her thrumming fear and the way the villagers transformed into "knights" and "surgeons" in their strange garb. She is led toward the hive as if in some sort of initiation rite. "The Arrival of the Bee Box" has the terror of the insect mob; even as she stands amid the bucolic setting of the garden with its pretty cherry trees, she sees power and powerlessness. In "Stings," she writes of the sweetness of the flowers she had painted on the hive; but the mood turns ugly as she thinks of the bees as female: the old, ragged queen, and the drudging workers with their domestic tasks. Another oblique figure-we now know this to be Hughes-is gone. Plath wants to recover, to be a queen, to fly across the sky like a red, soaring comet. The life of the hive is an impersonal engine that has destroyed her, yet she flies in some terrible resurrection. In "The Swarm," written the next day, she expands the destructive element of bees to the stage of European war; she finds death, power, and defeat within their lives.

Two days later came the last and best poem of the sequence, "Wintering." The honey has been collected, extracted from the combs, and put in jars in the cellar. Plath finds fear in the black of this room; but in the darkness of the hive, the bees are now quietly moving in their slow winter state. The countryside around is pure white with snow. The female bees have gotten rid of the male drones and have entered a time of meditative waiting. There is a quiet, still, serene form of antic.i.p.ation in the poem, quite different from the excitement Plath felt at the initial bee meeting.