Bees in America Read online

  When English clergy and politicians adopted a beehive metaphor to explain seventeenth-century social ills, they unwittingly initiated complex implications for the new century, the New World, and its new inhabitants, especially those from Africa. The book examines the various communities that arrived in America and their reasons for doing so: religious intolerance, political instability, or land shortages. In addition to Massachusetts, Maryland, and Virginia, other European colonists in the New World, such as those in New Netherlands, New Sweden, and France, brought beekeeping skills with them. These European colonists brought an agrarian philosophy that depended on cows and bees to extend and define an agricultural legacy inherited from classical Greek and Roman writers. The pastoral legacy of bees and cows, it was assumed, would guarantee the New World’s potential to provide for the immigrants in search of new opportunities.

  But the New World also needed new labor. As much as the colonists valued their own industry, they were not opposed to using slaves. Because the Dutch were extensively involved with the African slave trade, Africa too played an important role in how America implemented its value system. The African tribes valued bees and cows, and this book would be incomplete without some acknowledgment that African American slaves came from prolific beekeeping countries. In short, a basic argument of this book is that America’s beekeepers and honey hunters formed a global network as early as the seventeenth century.

  Before sugar had become an established product in the Caribbean or North America, bees fulfilled an important need in English diet, economy, and culture. Beeswax and honey were staples of medieval and Renaissance life. Bees provided sweeteners, wax for candles and waterproofing, and honey for mead. In fact, mead was Queen Elizabeth I’s favorite drink. And at the opposite end of the social spectrum, peasants used products from the hive to pay taxes, to supplement their diets, and to barter for wheat and salt.2

  Although the English always had been passionate about their bees, seventeenth-century writers were really creative in their admiration of honey bees. Queen Elizabeth I had proven to be a very successful political ruler. Under her leadership, the arts flourished, the economy boomed, and the military and naval forces protected English interests. She was the ultimate queen bee, in part because she never married and was thus able to manipulate suitors, countries, and policies to her favor.

  Soon after Queen Elizabeth I died, her beekeeper, Charles Butler, published The Feminine Monarchie (1609). On the surface, the book reflected a dominant philosophy of seventeenth-century England—that is, nature was a model for human virtue. Butler wrote of the bees: “In their labour and order at home and abroad they are so admirable that they may be a pattern unto men both of the one and of the other.”3 The bees were loyal to the queen, refusing any type of anarchy or oligarchy. They labored incessantly for the good of the commonwealth. Therefore, according to historian Kevin Sharpe, “The keeping of bees was a pastime that was a lesson in statecraft and also one in personal conduct.”4 Sharpe’s thesis works well with Frederick Prete’s argument that although initially British bee books were used to teach women how to be better nurturers, Butler wrote to men and women, instructing them all in ways to be better members of the commonwealth.5

  I.1. Queen and worker bees. Courtesy of Bee Culture. The queen is longer than the worker bees. Primarily an egg-laying machine, she is encircled by workers who groom her and transmit her pheromone to the rest of the hive. Pictured here are the house bees tending the queen. Charles Butler (1609) recognized that the monarch of the hive was a queen. Until then, people assumed that a king bee ruled the hive.

  However, Butler’s book had quieter and more indirect consequences. In very simple terms, he suggested a queen—not a king—was responsible for laying eggs in the hive. Thus, writers used the hive to reinforce hierarchical and patriarchal power structures. Butler challenged this cultural norm when he classified bees into three types: the queen, her female workers, and the male drones. His book had two strong implications: the first was that the queen “ruled” the hive, although we know that such a phrase is quite misleading. A more serious, but unintended implication of Butler’s research was that the unemployed poor were considered drones. In short, Butler reordered the hive for the English, and as such a brief introduction is in order.

  I.2. Three types of bees. Courtesy of Bee Culture. Pictured here are three types of bees—a queen, a drone, and a worker. The queen is taller, the drone wider. The worker bee specializes in various tasks, depending on the needs of the hive. When seventeenth-century English thinkers transfered the drone label to their poor, the English began to colonize the New World with a value system based upon thrift, work, and stability.

  We know now that bees aren’t actually “governed” the way seventeenth-century English society wanted to believe colonies were. Instead, order within a hive is maintained by complex interactions among the queen, her female workers, and the male drones. Quite frankly, the queen is nothing more than an egg-laying machine. However, if she is strong, her presence in the hive sends signals to the rest of the workers that the colony is healthy. The workers clean the hive, guard the entrance, build cells, find pollen and nectar, store honey, raise brood, and even maintain temperature control through the changing seasons. The male drones have but one function: to mate with the queen. Because there is not enough room and food to feed the drones through the winter, the worker bees dispose of any drones remaining at the end of autumn.

  I.3. Drone bee. Courtesy of Bee Culture. The drone is fatter than the other bees and has bigger eyes, which assist him in finding the queen when she goes on her nuptial flight. Other than mating with the queen, the drone does very little in the hive.

  Given that the worldview at the time was to find lessons in nature, the image of lazy drones dying at the end of summer had powerful implications. The concept that labor was a virtue was readily adopted by the seventeenth century, because after all, the honey bees followed the natural and divine laws organizing a commonwealth. When Butler first hypothesized that the queen ruled the hive and that drones do nothing, he inadvertently provided a convenient analogy for seventeenth-century English writers, clerics, and politicians. These groups applied the drone label to thousands of unemployed and starving people.

  King James and King Charles I, the monarchs who followed Queen Elizabeth I, ruled during unstable times, and their laws and ineffective social policies exacerbated the problems, leaving many poor people vulnerable. Even though England enjoyed economic prosperity during the seventeenth century, existence was hand to mouth in many regions. Peasant people were bound to the land in feudal arrangements or marginalized when the land was sold to yeoman farmers who did not adhere to the feudal system. “The old undeveloped agrarian society did not adjust with sufficient rapidity to provide employment for the thousands of laboring poor,” explains historian Carl Bridenbaugh. Famine, late frosts, droughts, and damaged crops—the country suffered all of these during the early 1600s, and royal authorities refused to provide any financial or social relief.

  Nor did the century get any easier. Bad weather and late frosts affected corn crops, accentuating the effects of an economic depression. In his diary, farmer Walter Yonge in Plymouth wrote about “three successive years, beginning in 1607, in which severe frosts or heavy rains caused an ‘extreme dearth of corn.’”6 Hard times plagued the English countryside from 1619 to 1624, from 1629 to 1631, and from 1637 to 1640. Because roads were so bad, many people could starve in one town while another town enjoyed great prosperity.

  Ever fearful that the poor classes would rebel, especially in 1623 and 1630, the royal authorities divided the poor into two classes: the impotent poor and the idle. The royal courts perceived poverty to be “symptomatic of a deterioration of public order.”7 The impotent poor consisted of disadvantaged widows, the mentally and physically challenged, and orphans. Small amounts of relief for these people were available through church networks or feudal relationships. Moral judgment was not applied to this
class. These people were considered unfortunate, but not immoral. The idle poor, on the other hand, included the unemployed, abandoned wives, unmarried mothers, beggars, and migrant workers. Royal authorities thought these people immoral because they did not work. The civil government feared that such unemployed masses might organize a rebellion.

  Philosopher Francis Bacon best defined the fear of rebellion in his essay “An Advertisement Touching upon a Holy War,” written during the famine year of 1622. Bacon proposed that masses of people be compared to various species of animals in the natural world, if left unchecked by the civil authorities. Historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker explain why Bacon was so influential among the royal classes: “By taking his terms from natural history—a ‘swarm’ of bees, a ‘shoal’ of seals or whales, a ‘rout’ of wolves—and applying them to people, Bacon drew on his theory of monstrousness. These people had denigrated from the laws of nature and taken ‘in their body and frame of estate a monstrosity.’”8 Even though the reasons behind English poverty were complex, Bacon and writers before him simplified the issue by blaming civil unrest on the destructive capabilities of people, comparing them to a swarm and giving a negative connotation to honey bees that differed markedly from the Roman and Greek writers.

  During the 1600s, therefore, the honey bee could be a double-sided mirror in English writings: it could signify order, or it could signify mass destruction. Bacon’s essay best reflects the English mind-set regarding poor people, but many English writers found this drone image a convenient analogy to convince poor people to go to the newly emerging colonies in America. For instance, the image of honey bees was used in sermons, tracts, scientific proposals, and travel literature. Scholar Karen Ordahl Kupperman quotes John Cotton, who wrote: “Nature teacheth bees to doe so, when as the hive is too full, they seek abroade for new dwellings: So when the hive of the Common-wealth is so full, that Tradesmen cannot live one by another, but eate up one another, in this case, it is lawfull to remove.”9 Cotton was not the only one encouraging people to “hive off” to the New World.

  Hiving off is a term synonymous with swarming. When colonies become too crowded, the queen will lay eggs for another queen, and then make preparations to leave the hive in search of a new place to live. Entomologist Tom Webster states that hiving off is when “one colony divides into two, i.e., hiving off is colony reproduction. Honey bees, like people, are highly social and do not thrive as isolated individuals. So, they must venture off in large groups when they are ready to establish themselves in new locations.”10

  And large groups were exactly what the seventeenth-century royal authorities were frightened of. More poor people seemed to be in the streets, even though women were waiting until later to get married. The transfer of the economy from large estates to small farms required fewer workers and more specialized techniques. When peasants were displaced, they often drifted to cities for lack of anyplace else to go. To those in authority, the poor had the potential to organize and rebel. Just as the drone imagery was convenient to apply to English beggars, so too the concept of swarming became convenient to apply to the poor masses.

  Thus, politicians, clerics, and entrepreneurs adopted a biological model to justify a social phenomenon. Writers such as John Cotton, Richard Hakluyt, Richard Eburne, and Francis Bacon were convinced that overcrowded conditions, lack of jobs, and poverty were valid reasons for the mother country to hive off to the New World. To quote Kupperman, “Just as bees swarmed from the overfull hive, English men and women should leave England, groaning under its heavy burden of overpopulation, for the good of the commonwealth.”11 From an average English person’s perspective, the New World was the perfect place for idle people to swarm: plenty of room, plenty of work, and plenty of exploitable resources, including poor men.

  The English also wanted to extend philosophies from translated Greek and Roman beekeeping and agricultural texts. In fact, the Greco-Roman myth of Aristaeus prefigured the biblical promise of a land of milk and honey. In ancient Greece, the story goes, honey bees lived in rocks and caves, but Aristaeus managed to domesticate bees, thus ensuring an adequate diet for the Olympian gods and goddesses. Honey was needed for celestial nectar and ambrosia (the food and drink of the gods). Celestial nectar was made from fermented honey and water; those deities who drank it returned to health. Ambrosia was made with milk and honey; those deities who ate it enjoyed eternal beauty and bloom. Aristaeus supplied the Olympian deities with their food and drink and lived a carefree shepherd’s life—until he saw Eurydice. Eurydice was the intersection point between two myths—one involving the bee-loving Aristaeus, and the other involving the talented musician Orpheus.

  The Orpheus myth remains well known even in the twenty-first century: Orpheus could play so well that he charmed wild beasts. When he and Eurydice married, everyone assumed they would live happily ever. However, while Eurydice was walking in the fields after the wedding, Aristaeus fell in love with her at first sight and began to chase her. While she was running from Aristaeus, Eurydice stepped on a viper. She died from its bite. She was taken to Hades, where Orpheus descended to try to bring his wife back. But Greek gods were not known for their forgiving ways. To punish Aristaeus, Olympian nymphs smashed his hives and killed his bees. And for most people, that was the end of the myth.

  But the myth continues for those of us who love bees. Broken-hearted, Aristaeus appealed to his mother, Cyrene, the sea goddess. Cyrene taught Aristaeus how to negotiate with Proteus, the shape-changing god who took care of the sea calves. When Proteus arrived at midday with his sea calves, he set them loose to graze and then took a nap. Aristaeus tied him in fetters, so when Proteus awakened, he was trapped. Proteus tried to change shapes, but Aristaeus had tricked him. So Proteus worked out a deal with Aristaeus that would atone the death of Eurydice and also let the beekeeper have his bees. In the myth, Proteus tells Aristaeus, “Select four bulls of beauteous form and as many heifers whose necks were yet untouched by yoke. Sacrifice these animals on the altars. After their throats have emitted the sacred blood, leave their bodies in a leafy grove. Return in nine days and see what will befall.” Aristaeus returned to find the carcasses of the cows teeming with swarms of bees. This image of cows and bees—so symbiotically connected—embodies the pastoral traditions in Greece and Rome. In other words, once this myth establishes a relationship between bees and cattle, it verifies an agrarian and interdependent civilization promoted as an ideal throughout the centuries.

  The Aristaeus myth established this popular misconception about the symbiotic relationship between bees and cattle, but it was not the only cultural document to perpetuate the metaphor of a land where milk and honey are interdependent. Translations of Pliny’s Natural History (available in 1601) and Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics impressed on the English mind the importance of bees in those ancient worlds. Virgil detailed how to produce bees from oxen. Pliny advised his readers how to rejuvenate dead bees: by burying them in a carcass of an ox in dung. The linking of these images in mythology and literature reflect these societies’ perception of the symbiotic relationship between cows and bees. The myth emphasized to farmers in the Greek and Roman societies that their lands needed to be kept fertile and productive.

  This myth and the texts that sprang from it provided a convenient analogy for the ideal place, a civilization where people could go for a new start in life, but one that could also extend the prosperity from better times. Although the seventeenth century was notorious for famines and overpopulation, English writers conveniently drew parallels from prosperous Greek and Roman societies to their own. The English saw themselves as being direct, linear extensions of superior Greek and Roman traditions; King Arthur was widely regarded as the descendant of Aeneas, and Elizabeth I could be seen as the English version of Dido. It was only natural that England, like Rome, should extend her power via swarms of people to the New World. William Symonds (1609) wrote of an England “where [the] mightier like old strong bees thrust the weaker, as
younger, out of their hives.”12 Significantly, the English writers secularized the image of the honey bee when making the parallels between the two time periods. It was no longer a direct link between human and Olympian society. In an effort to use a symbol that would justify colonization, some English writers stripped the honey bee of its status as a divine symbol, which had been unquestioned in Greco-Roman society.

  England did thrust the “younger” bees out of the hive, expecting the “drones” to go to the New World and immediately reap the benefits of farming, as if the New World were like England. However, until Samuel Hartlib finally published the first practical book for English farmers and beekeepers in 1655, the first English colonists had very little training in apiculture. Hartlib’s A Reformed Commonwealth of Bees marked a new era in English agriculture because Hartlib wrote about English lands and plants, not Greek ones. According to Timothy Raylor, the book was the “high point” in Hartlib’s agricultural reform efforts because it was not based on “classical authority or native experience” but rather verifiable experiments and analyses.13 Hartlib’s book focused on new advances in English beehives instead of Greek beehives or practices because he wanted to persuade Parliament to quit relying on the slave trade and colonies for sugar. He was convinced that all of England’s sweetener needs could be produced by English beekeepers, if there were just more beekeepers and more money to pay them. If the financial resources were kept within England, Hartlib reasoned, the country would not suffer such economic hardships.