I want someone to write a book on "heedlessness," tracking the theme wherever it leads through the world's literatures, the way Roberto Calasso does in his extraordinary books. For this, it seems, is the single most salient quality of American civilization in 2006: heedlessness. If the articles in this special section have a common theme, it is to urge us in the opposite direction: to pay attention, not least to consider the inadvertent consequences of our own actions; to look around at the places where we live and the bees and birds and rabbits and such as we share the land with. That is a program we should be able to agree on, without in any way supposing that all of our differences will thereby be resolved.
—JW

Jan Swammerdam was a young Dutch scientist devoted to God but haunted by bees. Between the years 1669 and 1673, he studied the honey bee with extraordinary intensity. He followed it. He sketched it. He probed it. He sliced it. He took notes and made drawings and more, day after day.

The microscope, newly available for this end, became for him a tool of intimate use, a means to see, marvel, and judge. By 1669, at the age of thirty-two, he had already become a path-breaking figure in entomology with the publication of Historia Generalis Insectorum. Narrowing his focus in subsequent years to the honey bee, he was able to establish, finally, that the queen bee indeed has ovaries and is thus responsible for all of the thousands of eggs swarming to life in her hive—just one of many grand mysteries he illumined and enlarged.

Hattie Ellis writes of "the exquisite dexterity" of Swammerdam's dissections as seen in his drawings. His tools were delicately miniature, requiring a microscope for proper sharpening, and his labor was arduous. By the time he brought his bee studies to a close, she notes, his "body and mind were battered; some think he never recovered."

A mere "obsessive"? Or a captive of wonder, perhaps, reaching toward mystery with unyielding, self-sacrificing awe?

It may well be that in the face of the honey bee, obsession is the only sane response available, reassuring evidence of true perception. Consider, for instance, this brute fact: that 16-ounce honey bear in your pantry exists only because tens of thousands of bees flew some 112,000 miles in a relentless, unquestioned pursuit of nectar gathered from 4.5 million flowers. Every one of those foraging bees was female. By the time the life of each ended—they live all of six weeks during honey-making season—each bee flew about 500 miles in twenty days, the span each lives outside the hive.

As these bees were flying themselves to death, the production inside the hive continued with stupendous efficiency, in the following sequence: Bee brings nectar to hive, carried tidily in her "honey stomach." Bee is greeted (cheerfully, one suspects) by a younger, homebody receiver bee, who relieves her of her load. Receiver bee deposits nectar into a cell and proceeds to reduce its water content and raise its sugar level by fanning it with her wings and regurgitating it up to two hundred times, killing microbes along the way. More bees surround this cell and others nearby and fan them with their wings 25,000 times or so, thus turning nectar into honey. When the honey is ripened, wax specialists arrive to cap off the cells. And that is how every single ounce of every single honey pot, bottle, or jar in the world—hundreds of thousands of them—is brought into being.

"Every gulp of raw honey is a distinct, unique, unadulterated medley of plant flavor; a sweet, condensed garden in your mouth," writes Holley Bishop, an awed amateur beekeeper, trying her level best with ordinary English to capture a miracle.

The four writers whose books occupy us here are trying their darndest to shock us to our senses. As if they can't help themselves, as if seized by a spirit that's compelled them to go forth, they grope for ways to show us what they've been made to see, and what we, the bee-fearers and -ignorers, have somehow missed. They seek to shock us into encounter, encounter with who we are and what we on this planet are doing.

Stephen Buchmann, an entomologist writing from the Arizona desert, goes so far as to frame his meditation on the honey bee with a passage from Deuteronomy, in which an aged Moses, with a tired and acute sense of desperation, urges the nation of Israel to "choose life," to choose "blessing," so that "both thou and thy seed may live." "Bees and flowers are as vital a part of the intricate web of life as we ourselves are," Buchmann intones. "The question we must ask is: Do we love life enough to save it?"

It is, as ever, a live question. Buchmann harbors dark fears about our ability to answer it well. "Everywhere I've been, the story is the same—the once vast wilderness, from spectacular desert landscapes to lush, steaming rainforests, has been chopped up and reduced to isolated islands." All he knows tells him that this transnational chopping does not bode well for the sustaining of life, whether animal, insect, or plant. "Increasing environmental degradation is diminishing the quality of all our lives as well as our emotional and spiritual well-being," he warns.

Hattie Ellis' graceful and sensitive exploration of the intertwining fates of honey bees and human life begins and ends very much in the same place. A British food writer, Ellis notes that many suspect that pesticides have contaminated the thousands of bee colonies—billions of bees—that have mysteriously died in recent years. The fact that bees are now safer in the city than in the country she takes to be a telling indicator of our morally and ecologically dubious state of affairs. "No bees, no flowers," she reminds us. (And for that matter, no bees, less food: scientists estimate that about one-third of our food supply is dependent at some point on the pollinating services of bees. Pesticides, apparently, aren't always clear on who the pests are and who they aren't. A sobering thought.)

Ellis' warning reveals her deepening worry: "If we lose our respect for these miraculous and mysterious insects, it is at our peril. For life is all one: as big as the world, and as small as the honeybee."

Something is happening to us, these writers contend, something big, consequential, alarming. And that something can be traced by following the story of the honey bee. So they take us, briskly, into the joint journey of humans, honey, and bees through time.

They do so in a way that underscores how disconnected we've become from our long (and ongoing) history with the natural world. Ellis describes hunter-gatherers who undertook the quest for honey as "a kind of sacramental adventure." She notes that until the 17th century the forest's main economic value for Germans lay not just in hunting but also in honey and wax. In ancient Greece the presence of honey was pervasive: "Death, life, mythology, and love: honey slid into them all," she writes.

But no more. Buchmann is nowhere more powerful than when he describes one of his visits to Malaysia, where he accompanies native honey hunters on one of their thieving expeditions. The achievement of the technical feat itself is so deeply embedded in ritual, so intricately laced with ancient stories, that a Western reader is tempted to wonder if Buchmann has somehow traveled back in time, or perhaps landed on a different planet. Could this entwining of the material and spiritual, of taste and transcendence, possibly be happening now, in my lifetime?

No wonder that when Ellis describes the "rising rationality of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries," one senses that, for her, something ominous is happening. Fading were the days when a bee sting might be received as direct—very direct—communication from a family member suffering in purgatory, as was commonly believed in France. Rising were the days when the lives of countless rural people were "shaken out of rhythm by the 'march of progress.'" Modern capitalism, empowered by modern science, would separate bees from people in a world ever more flat, mechanical, and, in her word, "homogenized." And bees would come to represent "an old-fashioned idyll as factories churned and cities spread," she writes.

Tammy Horn's ambitious book Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation takes the reader deep into the American side of this sprawling story. Bees had once been so present in the public imagination, she shows, that English gentry made elaborate, effective use of bee-inspired analogies to shape the colonizing of America. "Hiving off" to start a new colony was a demonstrably natural endeavor for a prosperous and efficient bee-like people, they argued. Milk and honey were sure to flow in the New World, provided they followed the bees' industrious example (and provided they transported cattle and bees to the New World, which they did). Horn, who teaches at Berea College in Kentucky, reads a certain malignity of intent in the use of "a biological model to justify a social phenomenon."

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than when these aristocrats referred to the poor as "drones," the male bees whose sole productive function is to mate with the queen, after which they die a quick (but one hopes glorious) death. As for those drones who suffer through the summer without a royal tryst, they are summarily put out of the hive by the more industrious females come cold weather: a word in season to the criminally unproductive. "Many American social policies—so conscious of work, labor, and time—are still based on the beehive model first adopted during the seventeenth century in England," Horn contends. "Unfair land acquisition, poor treatment, disenfranchisement": these were, in colonial America, "the real consequences of the beehive rhetoric."

Her sympathies clearly lie with the author of a remarkable 1874 letter to the Pittsburgh Leader, who lamented the passing of a day when "a 'bee course' was legal tender, almost." But now "Everything's changed… Everybody wants to speculate and monopolize things nowadays … You can't even take a hound or two for a little harmless sport any more without being hauled up for trespass, for somehow or another somebody's bound to inform on you. But of course, bee hunting suffers like everything else that was originally intended for man's benefit." As the 20th century neared, Horn observes, there were "ever-increasing conflicts between civilization and nature"; the "agrarian lifestyle" so basic to the nation's (and, for that matter, all nations') past "clashed with the ever-encroaching industrial one."

Of the four writers, Bishop is the one least bothered by this now completed encroachment, and the one who gives us the best glimpse of the fate of beekeeping in it. Her book, Robbing the Bees, is structured around a year in the life of a commercial beekeeper, a Floridian named Donald Smiley who makes a middling wage collecting, with obsessive delight, exquisite kinds of honey from his millions of bees. But Bishop's breezy style seems at odds with the sort of world she's describing, for Smiley faces enormous challenges trying to keep his treasured enterprise afloat: "Each minute he doesn't have all of his supers [i.e., the wooden boxes that contain the honeycombs] deployed to catch the strongest flow, he's losing money. Commercial beekeeping is a game of musical chairs with Mother Nature at the turntable."

Indeed, serious biological problems, stemming from beetles and mites—the varroa mite, to cite one example, killed ninety percent of Florida's bees in one year—have been multiplying. And it's not just Mother Nature who's doing the damage: besides battling the contagion of herbicides and pesticides, commercial beekeepers have been fighting to keep the flow of cheap foreign honey from putting them under. Perhaps the encroachment isn't complete after all.

In the face of this profoundly altered world, Ellis' hope, which elegantly shapes her book—the gem of the four—lies in a revival of more robust forms of local life. "The rediscovery of local foods is not about pretending to live in a long-gone past, a time when people were more limited to the food produced in their area," she writes. Rather, "eating local honey makes your backyard richer."

Such poignant longing for a richer way of life animates each of these writers. In the case of Buchmann, it takes on an unabashed spiritual dimension, as he speaks ardently of "our deep, sustaining, almost sacramental relationship with the natural world"—what he, following E. O. Wilson, terms biophilia. He turns to the bee as a means of awakening. In order to set our way straight once more, he whispers, we need "the recovery of that sense of wonder and amazement we all experienced as children when first discovering the plants and animals that surround us. I hope," he confesses, "that an intimate look at the enduring bond between bees and mankind … will rekindle that sense of wonder."

One cannot help but suspect, though, that the sort of metaphysical minimalism which frames these hopes is too small a frame to support so large a burden. How far, in the end, can secular awe take us toward the spiritual and moral renewal to which these authors call us?

For, as much as they disdain the effects of modernity on our relationship to the natural world, these writers—Buchmann, Ellis, and Bishop in particular—are carried into the past by a distinctly modern, pragmatist wind. Blown back in search of practices that offer a genuinely alternative way of experiencing material reality, they all the while remain curiously uninterested in engaging the big ideas of those times. Can the practices and rituals they find so appealing be widely sustained apart from our accepting, in some fashion, those ideas, and the One who stands behind them?

Jan Swammerdam would not think so. He, the obsessed 17th-century Dutch bee lover, had, it turns out, another love, and another faith. Poised at the edge of modernity, living during a time when Enlightenment still held the divine and the material in vibrant, magnetic tension, Swammerdam could not allow himself to rest easily in his fascination with insects. "Sir," he once wrote to a friend, "I present you the omnipotent finger of God in the anatomy of the louse." The insects he studied compelled him to look above, and beneath. Struggling anxiously to reconcile his loves, for a time he forsook his scientific studies to join a religious community. But in the end he came back to the honey bee. His posthumously published and most celebrated book, Bible of Nature, captured powerfully, Ellis writes, his "devotion to God and his creations."

The way to devotion to God always leads through that which is made. There is no other way. "I have noticed in my life," the Sioux writer Brave Buffalo observes, "that all men have a liking for some special animal, tree, plant, or spot of earth. If men would pay more attention to these preferences and seek what is best to do in order to make themselves worthy … they might have dreams which would purify their lives."

Who can doubt that the world needs such purification? Who can fault those who dream of it? We, who feel so much more at home in big box stores than in the company of bees, may yet see awe and wonder opening the way to our deliverance. And on our way, we may just find ourselves following the mysterious buzzing bees, eyes brightened by the gold to which they lead.

Eric Miller is associate professor of American history at Geneva College. He is at work on a biography of Christopher Lasch, to be published by Eerdmans.

Books mentioned in this essay:

1. Holley Bishop, Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey—The Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World (Free Press, 2005).
2. Stephen Buchmann, Letters from the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind (Bantam, 2005).
3. Hattie Ellis, Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee (Crown/Harmony, 2005).
4. Tammy Horn, Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation (Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2005).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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