There is an ancient understanding between bees and the people who keep them. We give them a place to live and take their honey in return. It’s worked for ages.
In ancient times, people kept the bees in baskets or hollow logs and had to des-troy the hive to get a few pounds of honey. Beekeepers tinkered with other ways of doing it until 1851 when Lorenzo Langstroth from Philadelphia found out the secret. Three-eighths of an inch. Bees fill any bigger space in their hive with comb. Any space less than a quarter of an inch, they seal with their answer to caulk-ing, propolis. But furnish them a box in which everything is three-eighths of an inch apart and the bees put their energy into making honey — lots of it. Then beekeepers just had to keep up their end of the deal and be sure the bees had a safe place to live and a place to keep all their honey. So, beekeepers hang frames of wax in boxes like files in a hanging file drawer and stack these supers on top of the hive where the bees live and make new bees. The bees obligingly fill the supers with honey. Females do all the work.
Not too long ago I got a call from the entomology department. Someone had delivered a package there instead of anthro-pology. That happens. I try to understand the ways of people, not bugs. But bugs have taught me a lot about modern societies like our own. I used to keep bees. I had three hives, each with its own mail-order pedigree queen and her workers, each stacked high with neat white supers. From the vantage point of the beekeeper it was pretty easy to understand what was going on.
I checked on my bees more than I need-ed to because I just liked to see what they were up to in there. I marvelled at this process. It made me feel like one of those robber barons of old, some railroad or steel magnate who paid workers enough to live through to the next day and made fortunes from the factories and industrial systems they built and worked. My bugs were willing workers and were making plenty of honey for me. I was just like the new breed of CEOs, those people that get a bazillion bucks a year and pay minimum wages to the people who make them rich. Sometimes, when I’d go poking around the hives on a cool cloudy rainy day, the bees would get feisty and mean, fly out, buzz me, and sting me if they could. Bee-keepers know to keep a smouldering fire going in a smoker and blow smoke at upset bees til they calm down.
The whole deal between beekeepers and bees depends on beekeepers figuring out the bees and giving them what they need to make more honey or how to keep them calm. The bees just do the work. They don’t have to figure us out — if they did, they’d likely cancel the whole deal.
Through the spring, summer, and fall, my bees filled the supers with honey. When it started to turn cold I asked an old beekeeper how to get the honey out. He said to just tear down the hives and mix up all the supers on the ground. The bees would all fly out and mix with the other bees. By the time they figured out what bees went with what hive, I could be gone with the honey. "Keep them confused, and you can do anything you want with them," he explained. Just like people. It’s a system that’s been working for a long time. He was right. It worked. I got lots of honey.
So while I am not an entomologist, my bugs illustrated all the basic principles of modern societies: Provide the basics and bugs and people will work for you; keep them confused and disorganised and you can make off with the product of their work; blow smoke at them and they’ll be docile. And the females do the work.
E. Paul Durrenberger, Ph.D., is professor of anthropology in the College of the Liberal Arts, 409 Carpenter Bldg., University Park, PA 16802; 814-863-2694; epd2@psu.edu.
