Bees in Early Modern Transatlantic Literature

Sovereign Colony

Nicole A. Jacobs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000264173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria medieval y moderna temprana

This book examines apian imagery—bees, drones, honey, and the hive—in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary and oral traditions. In England and the New World colonies during a critical period of expansion, the metaphor of this communal society faced unprecedented challenges even as it came to emblematize the process of colonization itself. The beehive connected the labor of those marginalized by race, class, gender, or species to larger considerations of sovereignty. This study examines the works of William Shakespeare; Francis Daniel Pastorius; Hopi, Wyandotte, and Pocasset cultures; John Milton; Hester Pulter; and Bernard Mandeville. Its contribution lies in its exploration of the simultaneously recuperative and destructive narratives that place the bee at the nexus of the human, the animal, and the environment. The book argues that bees play a central representational and physical role in shaping conflicts over hierarchies of the early transatlantic world.

1 Bee Time

Shakespeare

Bees keep time. It is not necessarily in the human measures of seconds, hours, and years, but their timekeeping goes far beyond instincts of diurnal activity and nocturnal rest. From the hive’s perspective, bee time is both cyclical and generational, a concept that applies across many animal and insect species (including humans). Bees’ lives and labor are organized by a concept called temporal polyethism, where an individual worker’s labor designations shift with her age, as she graduates from feeding pupae the day she hatches to gathering nectar by one month old. Even the bee’s navigation is time-dependent, in that circadian rhythms constantly adjust her orientation of direction relative to the ever-changing position of the sun. Overall, the beehive structures its architecture, its labor, and its consumption and use of energy on the future. Bees are also keenly attuned to the seasons: spring and summer are times of collection and building food stores; fall brings the expulsion of male drones that would drain the hive’s resources; all so that in winter, the female workers and queen can make use of the shelter and sustenance their past labor has afforded them. One essential aspect of bee temporality relies upon communication, as the hive consults on time-sensitive issues like when to raise a new queen. Timing is one critical component of what biologist Thomas D. Seeley calls “honeybee democracy.”¹ Indeed, modern entomological research tells us that beehives engage in complex negotiations, demonstrating collective intelligence over decisions such as where to swarm. The ultimate goal of this communication is communal survival. And yet, a tension exists between the temporality of the individual worker bee and that of the collective hive.

I would contend that measures of nonhuman time, such as bee time, offer an important consideration in the study of animal and human cultures and how they interact across centuries and circumstances. Some modern critics have denied that insects or animals, more generally, experience time—at least in any way that is recognizable to humans—investing instead in a form of anthropomorphic romanticization of the nonhuman being that lives simply “in the moment.” Nietzsche, for one, views livestock as inextricably linked, for better or for worse, to the present, noting that cows “do not know what is meant by yesterday or today … fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure.”² He thus generalizes all creatures’ relationship to time: “the animal lives unhistorically: for it is contained in the present.”³ On the topic of bees, Michael Pollan similarly muses, “presumably insects can look at a blossom without entertaining thoughts of the past and the future.”⁴ However, animals’ experiences undoubtedly shift across histories, cultures, and technologies of domestication, or policies of eradication. I would suggest that consideration of animal time need not be subsumed by arguments about consciousness and its relationship to human timepieces or calendars. Indeed, animal time holds the potential to open up larger considerations of the interdependence between animals and humans, the effects of human displacement of animals (like those shipped to the New World colonies), and animal architecture and aesthetics (where and how they structure their lives). From an early modern perspective, bees and other animals share a complex set of temporalities that factor in not only their labor and suffering, but also their drives, inclinations, and pleasures. Though animal time has broad implications, this chapter will focus specifically on the ways in which Shakespeare’s exploration of bee time reveals the toll of exploitation and servitude on living beings. In The Tempest, particularly in the figures of Ariel and Caliban, Shakespeare ultimately reflects upon what it means to look to a future beyond service and struggle.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century beekeepers observed with admiration the hive’s seemingly inscrutable and precise communication about timekeeping. They perceived the enigmatic yet crucial interface between the temporality of the individual worker bee and that of her collective swarm. For instance, Edward Topsell’s Historie of Serpents (1608) takes from Aristotle the notion that an individual bee is responsible for hive waking and sleeping schedules:

When night approacheth, the signe and token being given by his Honny-pipe, or Cornet, (if you will so call it) a generall proclamation is made through the whole Hive, that every one shall betake himselfe to rest, so the watch beeing appointed, and all things set in order, they all make themselves ready and go to bed.⁵

Topsell’s observation of the striking nature of the timed “signe and token” is also echoed in John Milton’s famous bee simile in Book I of Paradise Lost. Milton’s epic, which I discuss in Chapter 4, describes the inhabitants of Pandemonium “[a]s Bees / In spring time, when the Sun with Taurus rides” and notes the amazement of the demon hive’s simultaneous transformation: “Till the signal given, / Behold a wonder!”⁶ This signal is responsible for synchronizing the sudden shrinking of Satan’s minions to minute size in preparation for “the great consult.”⁷ Milton’s use of the signal is indicative of the knowledge that the bee communicates orders to the hive instantaneously. Yet the passive construction of “the signal given” begs the question: who gave the signal? And how did the rest of the hive receive it? Another notable timekeeping bee appears in Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,” where God as “the skillful gard’ner” guides nature through both hourly and monthly time: “And, as it works, th’ industrious bee / Computes its time as well as we.”⁸ Although we now understand a great deal more about the role of pheromones, dance, vibration, touch, and smell, the early moderns could neither conceptualize nor replicate this means of instant communication and compliance among their own human laborers.

The hive is an excellent subject for exploring connections in the early modern period between time, labor, and the animal. Karen Raber has observed that critics “do not credit animals … with generating a consciously weighted cultural act. They find instead in animal labor a ‘natural’ sculpting of bodily material that sidesteps issues of a stratified and exploitative labor system.”⁹ Current research accepts that honeybees are eusocial, or live in a complex social structure, with discrete individuals forgoing personal reproduction and instead performing the various functions and tasks of a larger superorganism.¹⁰ Moreover, within this framework, the individual bee is capable of displaying emotional responses, such as pessimism.¹¹ However, in the early modern period, understandings of bee culture ultimately served human metaphors and perceptions of apian work and socialization. Indeed, beekeepers justified their reliance on essential bee labor by interpreting human expectations of yield as less exacting than the hive’s own. In particular, they highlighted a conviction that among bees any individual drive is necessarily subsumed by that of the collective. Charles Butler, for instance, speaks to the work ethic of elder bees in The Feminine Monarchie (1609): “they wil[l] never give over, while their wings can bear them: & then when they cease to worke, they will cease also to eate: such enemies are they to idleness[s].”¹² According to this logic, to the worker bee, her past labor is irrelevant to present service. What is so exemplary to Butler—the lesson to be gleaned for human consumption—is the bee’s sacrifice. Although a worker bee born in spring will not survive until the winter, she nevertheless prepares for a future in which she will never share.

The natural and moral positionality of the bee also offers a unique contribution to our understanding of what animal studies critics have termed human exceptionalism or negative human exceptionalism, where the human constitutes a distinct category among living beings, for better or for worse.¹³ The challenge to this paradigm posed by the status of the bee stems from the fact that it is regarded as at once superior and inferior to the human. In metaphorical terms, the beehive was promoted as an exemplum for human society: All members of a kingdom should be as obedient, self-sacrificing, and industrious as the bee. And yet in actuality, the hive was placed in service of human husbandry and economy, as its honey and wax were viewed as commodities for the benefit of humankind. These competing ideas of the hive speak to the larger representations of nonhuman life in the period. For instance, Ayesha Ramachandran and Melissa E. Sanchez have demonstrated the ways in which the human as a category stands as “productively ambiguous and malleable,” considering that “animals … ghosts, angels, subjects of conquest and colonization, and corporations could be both distinguished from and assimilated into the category of the human for polemical, economic, or experimental purposes.”¹⁴ Nonetheless, even within this framework of creaturely ambiguity, it is difficult to escape the specter of human dominance within animal studies. Indeed, as Joseph Campana has importantly argued, “to focus on capacity and capabilities” in nonhuman animals “even when invoking shared capacities, shared environments, or shared corporealities—may not be to dislodge the human from a position of centrality and privilege.”¹⁵ In Shakespeare’s apian metaphor, the dominant status of the human is inescapable, as his worker bee also reflects the struggles of the individual laborer in society.¹⁶ As Richard Grinnell observes, Shakespeare’s works frequently invoke bee imagery as “political placeholders for humans themselves.”¹⁷ In The Tempest, Shakespeare reveals a conflict between, on the one hand, human valorization of the hive’s work ethic, and on the other, the worker’s desire to follow her own inclinations.

In what follows, I will first trace the beeline forged through theorizations of the animal from Saint Bernard of Clairvaux to Protestant cleric Edward Topsell to contemporary ecocritics in order to examine the competing scales of servitude and authority in Shakespeare’s work. Second, I will examine the ways in which those designated by the Europeans of the play as creatures—especially Ariel, Caliban, and the bee—claim solidarity with suffering human laborers. In doing so, I explore the acoustics and musicality of Ariel’s song, “Where the Bee Sucks,” which has been ascribed to Blackfriars’ composer Robert Johnson especially for Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Third, I will discuss Miranda’s unique perspective on labor, which operates outside of typical European understandings of time and the individual. What is at stake in Shakespeare’s interventions into popular conceptions of the hive is the matter of whether the worker’s value is instrumental—contingent upon one’s usefulness to the human social structure—or intrinsic—based on one’s own merit within nature. In this chapter, I argue that Shakespeare, in concert with Johnson’s song, explores the boundaries between time and labor in the human and the animal in order to question what is lost and who gains when the collective is compelled to spend its time in the service of the few.

Bernardian Ecology and Ani...