Sweetness And Light Part 3

The guilds, including the Wax Chandlers, would partic.i.p.ate in big religious festivals, and doubtless provided the candles. The famous funeral procession of Henry V in 1422, an exercise in state showmans.h.i.+p of some proportions, was lit by fourteen hundred wax tapers along the 2-mile procession, and every fifth man held a torch.

The significant religious demand for beeswax meant it was dealt a great blow when the monasteries were closed by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century. Although there was a revival of candle use under the Roman Catholic Mary I, exemplified by the making of an enormous, 300-pound Paschal candle, such displays fell from favor in England. Oliver Cromwell later banned altar candles altogether.

Beeswax candles were an especially valued form of light; then in the eighteenth century, New England whalers discovered how to burn the oil found in the head of sperm whales, in a substance called spermaceti, which was refined into a hard, crystalline substance and made into candles that burned with a new brightness. The cheap, ma.s.s-produced paraffin candles of the nineteenth century were to further eclipse the light of the honeybee. You can, however, still find beeswax candles as a specialist product and enjoy their soft scent and beautiful s.h.i.+ne. The Wax Chandlers Guild continues and has links with contemporary beekeepers, offering an award if an entrant especially excels in the British Beekeepers a.s.sociation annual examinations.

IN MANY CULTURES around the world, honey was regarded as a magical, transforming substance, almost a potion. At the heart of this belief was mead. As a sweet intoxicating liquor, it was the main use of honey-more so than as food or medicine. The question arises, even, whether honey was more valued for its sweet taste or for its power as an alcoholic drink. around the world, honey was regarded as a magical, transforming substance, almost a potion. At the heart of this belief was mead. As a sweet intoxicating liquor, it was the main use of honey-more so than as food or medicine. The question arises, even, whether honey was more valued for its sweet taste or for its power as an alcoholic drink.

The sugars in honey naturally ferment when mixed with water and yeasts already present, or in the air; it is therefore one of our most ancient drinks. The Greeks had many honey-based drinks, some of them, like mead, made from fermented honey and some made from honey mixed with another drink, such as the common mulsum, a mixture of wine and honey. Rhodomel was made with roses and honey; omphacomel from grape juice and honey; thala.s.siomel used seawater; and there was even a meal-of-a-drink called kykeon, with oil, wine, cheese, and mead, that was drunk at the harvest feast. Dionysus, or the Roman Bacchus, was probably the G.o.d of mead as well as wine. But honey drinks were also a source of good health and not just baccha.n.a.lian excess. Pollio Romulus, aged one hundred, told Julius Caesar he had kept the vigor of mind and body by taking spiced mead inwardly and using oil on his outer body, an alcoholic variant on Democritus's prescription for long life: taking honey on the inside and oil on the outside.

The impact of mead on some Caucasian peasants.

Mead predates wine, perhaps by many thousands of years; but when the grape arrived, it eventually began to replace mead in southern countries. Mead continued as a fine tradition in northern climes. Pliny wrote of the British Celts that "these islanders consume great quant.i.ties of honey-brew." Mead was a drink of status, of royal courts, actual and literary. The Queen bears the mead that is given to Beowulf, and King Arthur downed gobletfuls of the stuff. Mead is much mentioned in Welsh poetry and laws. A free towns.h.i.+p had to pay its dues to the king by giving him a vat of mead big enough for the monarch and a companion to bathe in.

Great ceremonial communal drinking bowls were made of wood and precious metals, and known as mazers, from the word for one of the original materials, maple. One example of such a vessel is the Rochester Mazer, made in 1532, which is in the British Museum in London: the wide, shallow bowl would have been held with two hands and pa.s.sed between drinkers. (Admiring this renowned object, now sequestered in its gla.s.s museum case, I allowed myself the scurrilous thought that there might have been a term, in the ebullient vein of northern European drinking traditions, "to get mazered.") Beyond the British Isles, mead was the drink of G.o.ds and heroes. In Teutonic mythology, warriors reaching Valhalla quaffed sparkling mead offered by divine maidens. Odin stole the magic mead of the G.o.ds, made love to its guardian giant's daughter, drank the brew in three mouthfuls, and fled in the form of an eagle.

Some of the intoxicating stories connected to mead have come down to us, almost inevitably, with a lurching exaggeration. In the tenth century, Olga, widow of the Prince of Kiev, was said to have invited the murderous mourners to her husband's funeral, instructing them to bring plenty of mead. These five thousand incapacitated drinkers were then slain in vengeance. Meissen, in what is now southeast Germany, had so many breweries that mead was supposedly used instead of water to put out a fire in 1015. In 1489, Tartars attacking the Russians discovered a stash of Russian mead-perhaps put there as a deliberate trap-and drank the booty, to be easily overcome.

Mead was also an aphrodisiac that enhanced love, smoothed its way and powered its virility. The Scottish saying that mead drinkers had the strength of meat eaters probably did not refer to the bulk of their biceps. The alcoholic properties of this honey drink may well have enhanced honey's reputation as a love food. The term honeymoon honeymoon may originally come from the initial, sweet bout of postmarital pa.s.sion-though there is another theory that it stems from the relatives' monthlong mead drinking in celebration of the nuptials. may originally come from the initial, sweet bout of postmarital pa.s.sion-though there is another theory that it stems from the relatives' monthlong mead drinking in celebration of the nuptials.

The remnants of mead that you find now tend to be sweet, not unlike a fruit wine. Mead in its heyday had many strengths and flavors. It could be brewed strong and dry, distilled, or made to sparkle. It could be a weaker, quaffing drink or flavored with herbs and spices, in a drink that became known as metheglin. This aromatic, medium-strength drink sounds like an ancestor of today's grape-based aperitifs, such as vermouth.

Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) collected recipes that were published after his death in The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt, Opened The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt, Opened; he had more than a hundred recipes for mead and metheglin. The drinks he described could be kept for a few months or for up to three years. One reason such importance was placed on alcoholic drinks at that time was because they were a safe, as well as delicious, alternative to polluted water. Sir Kenelme Digbie's championing of mead also had a background of disquiet about imports. The deluge of wine coming into the county from the rest of Europe made native drinks seem out-of-date. Mead was made simply with honey, water, and yeast and was a good, honest, home-produced brew.

The romance of mead, with all its sophisticated variants, did not last. Today the drink seems faintly quaint and can be a touch cloying due to the preponderance of the sweeter meads, which capitalize on the honey flavor, rather than the drier styles of this versatile drink. There are some delicious brews still made commercially (as well as the home brews made by curious beekeepers who can spare the 4 pounds of honey it takes to make a gallon of mead). When well made, mead can give an initial impression of a sweet, honeyed roundness that turns into a mellow dryness similar to a fine sherry.

The superseding of mead by other drinks came with the rise in the price of honey. Sugar became more available (though it was still luxuriantly expensive until the advent of the sugar beet) and the Reformation meant fewer church candles and therefore fewer bees. But although the number of hives declined, the bee did not drop in status. If anything, these sacred insects were to become even greater objects of fascination in the scientific age that was to come.

CHAPTERSIX.

ENLIGHTENMENT.

The Reverend Charles Butler signaled a new phase in man's understanding of the honeybee. He used his own observations to challenge medieval beliefs, therefore pus.h.i.+ng back centuries of received wisdom. An era in which scientific thought became based on the direct study of the natural world was about to begin.

Butler was the vicar of Wootton St. Lawrence, near Basingstoke in Hamps.h.i.+re, in the early 1600s. As well as being a scholar, teacher, and inventor of a form of phonetic spelling, he wrote about logic, music, and theology, was an advocate for the legality of marriage between cousins, and was the great-great-grandfather of the eighteenth-century Hamps.h.i.+re naturalist Gilbert White. He is best known today as one in a line of humane, engagingly helpful authors on the subject of the honeybee; his book The Feminine Monarchie The Feminine Monarchie is still read by beekeepers with affection. is still read by beekeepers with affection.

The Feminine Monarchie, first published in 1609, was well received at court, and the third edition (1634) was even dedicated to Queen Henrietta Maria, the start of a fas.h.i.+on for presenting such books to the royal "queen bee." Butler starts with a note of admiration for the bee's moral rightness and practicality, depicting the relations.h.i.+p between bee and beekeeper as one of good, clean living. If the beekeeper approaches the hive drunk, puffing, blowing, hasty, and violent, he will be stung; if he behaves properly, all will be well: "[T]hou must be chaste, cleanly, sweet, sober, quiet and familiar; so will they love thee, and know thee from all others."

The righteous praise for such steadfast qualities is leavened by Butler's varied and idiosyncratic enthusiasms for his insects. The sound of a hive starting to swarm is well known to beekeepers. Butler, a music scholar, scored it in the first edition, later turning the notes into a madrigal with four parts. Another section of his book deals with such matters as sealing wax, drinks, and a syrup of violets and honey that "tempereth and purgeth hot and sharp humours, expels melancholy and effects-headache, waking, dreams, heaviness of heart," like a seventeenth-century liquid form of aromatherapy. It was Butler who recorded the flavorings of Queen Elizabeth I's favorite spiced mead: rosemary, bay leaves, sweet briar, and thyme.

Charles Butler's most significant advance was to trust his own eyes on the workings of the hive, rather than the words of cla.s.sical authors. He notes, for example, that drones were clearly part of the reproductive means of the hive, although exactly how, he did not know. He also observes the "s.h.i.+vering" bees that seemed to presage swarming. We now know this is one way bees communicate within the hive.

Much of the book is immediately recognizable. Nature, after all, barely changes, just our knowledge of it. Butler describes the poisoned spears of stings that you must quickly flick out to stop the pain being "greater and longer"; the late swarms, known as blackberry swarms, which start their new colony too late to store enough honey to survive the winter; the pa.s.sing of the year through the zodiac and its different flowers. Gemini brings us honeysuckle and bean blossom. Cancer brings the thyme that "yieldeth most and best honie." Then come knapweed and blackberry, and ivy during Scorpio. In this cla.s.sic of bee books, you walk through the past as if it were your back garden.

BUTLER'S WORK was just the first break from cla.s.sical tradition; in the seventeenth century, new technology would start to unravel many mysteries of the honeybee. People could now examine bees more closely in two ways: through observation hives, which opened up the internal workings of this city of insects, and through microscopes, which revealed the individual bee in minute detail. was just the first break from cla.s.sical tradition; in the seventeenth century, new technology would start to unravel many mysteries of the honeybee. People could now examine bees more closely in two ways: through observation hives, which opened up the internal workings of this city of insects, and through microscopes, which revealed the individual bee in minute detail.

One of the first observation hives in England was made by the Reverend William Mewe, rector of the parish of Eastington in Gloucesters.h.i.+re between 1635 and 1655. Although Mewe considered becoming a polemical writer, and took the republican side during the civil war, he ultimately retreated to the countryside, where he mused on such subjects as the honeybee.

Mewe's interest in bees was partly moral. His hive was inscribed in Latin, praising the insects' industriousness and harmonious community. For him, the bee's well-ordered colony was an example to mankind. Civil war and regicide had torn England in two; the country needed to find a cohesive social order, and what better example than the productive government of the hive? "When I saw G.o.d make good his Threat, and break the Reines of Government, I observed, that this pretty Bird [the bee] was true to that Government, wherein G.o.d and nature had set it to serve," wrote Mewe. As well as being able to look at the bees in their gla.s.s-paneled hive for moral instruction, he thought the bees also benefited: they produced more honey, he believed, from the very fact of being watched.

Mewe was a rural cleric who kept his observation hive in his garden; all the same, his ideas soon spread to the world beyond. Word of the hive may have reached Oxford through Samuel, one of his eight children, but it is just as likely that the design was sought out by others who took up the cause of beekeeping in the 1640s and 1650s.

The first known description of a windowed hive comes in John Evelyn's diary entry for July 13, 1654. He records dining with "that most obliging and universally Curious" Dr. Wilkins, at Wadham College, Oxford, where he saw transparent apiaries built like castles and palaces, adorned with dials, statues, and weather vanes. King Charles II later came especially to see these hives, which he contemplated "with much satisfaction." The design of this hive came from Mewe.

John Evelyn's drawing of his observation hive, with adornments, given to him by Dr. John Wilkins.

The "universally Curious" Dr. John Wilkins (1614-1672) was at the very center of seventeenth-century intellectual life. Whether as Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, as Bishop of Chester, or as joint first secretary of the prestigious new body for scientific discovery, the Royal Society, he was consistently in the midst of matters religious, scientific, and political, and deftly managed to remain so both during the Commonwealth-when he married Oliver Cromwell's sister, Robina-and under Charles the Second. He was also one of the most significant beekeepers of the century.

Wilkins's gallery and lodgings at Wadham, as described by Evelyn, sound rather like his hive, full of "dyals, perspectives ... and many other artificial, mathematical, Magical curiosities; a Way-Wiser, a Thermometer, a monstrous Magnet, a conic and other Sections, a balance on a demi Circle, most of them his owne and that prodigious young Scholar, Mr Chr[istopher] Wren." The rooms embody the mind of its polymath inhabitant; Wilkins's conversations and thoughts, his dreams and inquiries, can all be glimpsed in this intellectual toolshed. His projects included a sail-powered coach, a double-barreled wind gun, and a machine for weaving ribbons. He was part of a group whose conversations and experiments cross-pollinated and bore fruit. Christopher Wren came upon the idea of injecting animals with liquids after discussions with Wilkins and Robert Boyle, and these were later to become the famous experiments in blood transfusions carried out by the Royal Society.

The breadth of inquiry within this circle included a fascination with the honeybee. One of their quests was to collect honey without killing the bees. Straw skeps began to have extensions put on top, where the honey could collect and be removed without destroying the rest of the hive. These resembled a primitive version of the wooden box "supers" used by beekeepers today.

In the seventeenth century, the search for the perfect hive mirrored the contemporary preoccupations with science and architecture. The hive in Wilkins's garden, with its vanes and dials, displayed the abiding interest in meteorology. A drawing of one such hive, owned by John Evelyn, shows statues and other ornamentation, but its essential structure was octagonal, which was the cabinetmaker's approximation of the round nests of the honeybee. Stripped down, as it was in one of Christopher Wren's first architectural drawings, Evelyn's hive was a stack of boxes on top of one another, with holes between them so the bees could leave their honey in one box and crawl down to the next; the honey on top could then be removed-or at least this was the theory.

OF ALL THE seventeenth-century devotees of the honeybee, perhaps the most significant was the writer and collator Samuel Hartlib. Hartlib collected thoughts and experiences from an impressive network of contacts from England, Europe, and the New World with the purpose of bringing stability, prosperity, and healing to England through the scientific advance of agriculture and horticulture-motivated, also, by the starvation in the country following the disastrous harvests of the 1640s. seventeenth-century devotees of the honeybee, perhaps the most significant was the writer and collator Samuel Hartlib. Hartlib collected thoughts and experiences from an impressive network of contacts from England, Europe, and the New World with the purpose of bringing stability, prosperity, and healing to England through the scientific advance of agriculture and horticulture-motivated, also, by the starvation in the country following the disastrous harvests of the 1640s.

Of the twelve books Hartlib published on food production, The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees (1655) was typical in bringing together ideas and experiences from a range of sources. In the book, he published a number of letters on the insect, including those from William Mewe and Christopher Wren. Hartlib also exchanged scientific views with Dr. Wilkins from 1649 on, and the first recorded use of the English word (1655) was typical in bringing together ideas and experiences from a range of sources. In the book, he published a number of letters on the insect, including those from William Mewe and Christopher Wren. Hartlib also exchanged scientific views with Dr. Wilkins from 1649 on, and the first recorded use of the English word apiary apiary was by John Evelyn writing to Hartlib in 1650. was by John Evelyn writing to Hartlib in 1650.

The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees shows a belief in the economic possibilities of the honeybee. An estimated $177,500 worth of honey could be made if hives were put into every parish of the land. Eyes were cast toward France, where fine Bordeaux honey fetched more than ten times the price English honey could command. The sugar plantations in Barbados were becoming economically significant, but Hartlib showed a bias toward English produce; he also pondered the possibility of extracting sweetness from home-grown apples. shows a belief in the economic possibilities of the honeybee. An estimated $177,500 worth of honey could be made if hives were put into every parish of the land. Eyes were cast toward France, where fine Bordeaux honey fetched more than ten times the price English honey could command. The sugar plantations in Barbados were becoming economically significant, but Hartlib showed a bias toward English produce; he also pondered the possibility of extracting sweetness from home-grown apples.

So much for the theory. This group of seventeenth-century intellectuals did have practical beekeeping experience-for example, John Evelyn recommended in Sylva Sylva, published in 1664, particular trees that were good for bees, such as the oak, the black cherry, the poplar, the willow, and the buckthorn with its "honey-breathing blossom"-but how successful, ultimately, were their hives? These new boxed hives were not universally popular. One user wrote to Hartlib in 1658 saying it made no difference to the amount of honey collected, and that plain country traditions such as skep beekeeping produced more profit for less trouble. Perhaps these enlightened beekeepers set too much store by the rationality of the bee. Instead of crawling into the hive and going up to the top and building downward, the bees started their comb in the bottom box. The holes between the boxes did not allow a large number of insects to move easily into the upper layers. Furthermore, the elaborate, hexagonal wooden hive was too expensive and difficult to construct to be economical for commercial beekeepers.

For all their thoughts, inventions, and curiosity, these enlightened Englishmen were only at the beginning of the discovery of the bee. It was another two centuries before the problem that preoccupied them-how to remove the honey cleanly, without killing the bees-was finally resolved. Regarding the scientific study of bees, the early observation hives had just small panels of gla.s.s, offering only a partial view of the colony. Other scientists were to take matters much further.

ON THE CONTINENT, a young Dutch scientist devoted months to focusing entirely on the honeybee. By using observation hives and peering through the gla.s.s eye of a microscope, he went further than anyone else had in understanding the insect's mysteries. Jan Swammerdam was born in 1637. By the time he was thirty-two, he had written his Historia Generalis Insectorum Historia Generalis Insectorum. It was one of three books published within two years that marked the beginnings of entomology-the others were Marcello Malpighi's study of the silkworm and Francesco Redi's book on insects. The young Dutch scientist went on to become one of the pioneering students of the honeybee.

Swammerdam grew up in Amsterdam. His father was a noted collector, who kept a renowned cabinet of curiosities on display at his home. New objects, from Chinese porcelain to fossils, would arrive through the city's port, at the center of world trade. Visitors also came on the s.h.i.+ps, making their way to the house to study and admire the collection.

The young Swammerdam began to create a natural history collection, picking up insects and their eggs, food, and even their excrement on expeditions both in Amsterdam and in the towns and countryside beyond. He searched the air, land, water, meadows, cornfields, sand dunes, rivers, wells, trees, caves, ruins, and even privies in order to find his quarry. His findings were also put on display; by the age of twenty-four he had no fewer than twelve hundred items to show, a number that would eventually more than double.

There were now two collectors, of different generations, in the same family, sharing the same house. This must have created tensions. The relations.h.i.+p between father and son was to prove difficult on many levels. Conflict manifested itself, at first, in Jan Swammerdam's choice of profession. His father, a pharmacist, wanted his son to go into the church. Jan Swammerdam, although a deeply pious man, did not feel his temperament would suit a ministry. Following his own pa.s.sionate interest in nature, he decided to become a doctor instead, and went to study anatomy, surgery, and medicine at the celebrated University of Leyden.

The microscope was a new tool of discovery in the seventeenth century and was first used to make magnified drawings of the honeybee in 1625. These bees were presented as ill.u.s.trations of the Barberini family crest, rather than specifically scientific diagrams. Maffeo Barberini was Pope Urban VIII, and in a powerful position to influence the conflict between questioning scientists and the Roman Catholic Church. The drawings, viewing the honeybee from above, below, and the side, were therefore meant to flatter, and an engraving of the bees was presented to the pope at Christmas as a "token of everlasting devotion." The magnified bees were, however, next published in a literary work-a book of satires by Perseus-rather than an explicitly scientific book. Later in the century, Robert Hooke's Micrographia Micrographia (1665), famous for its ill.u.s.tration of a flea, included some drawings by Christopher Wren and detailed images of the honeybee's sting. (1665), famous for its ill.u.s.tration of a flea, included some drawings by Christopher Wren and detailed images of the honeybee's sting.

Jan Swammerdam, having studied human anatomy, turned his attention to that of insects, using a microscope. On a visit to France, he met Melchesedec Thevenot, a wealthy French gentleman and diplomat who traveled to pursue his interest in other countries and science. When Swammerdam came to stay at Thevenot's estate near Paris, servants went out to the Seine to collect insects for the young Dutch guest. It was Thevenot who invited Swammerdam to partic.i.p.ate in the august gathering of the new Academie Royale des Sciences. Swammerdam didn't say much at this meeting of scientific minds, but contributed by dissecting insects to show their entrails. Thevenot later accompanied Prince Cosimo de Medici to Amsterdam to see the cabinets of both father and son. On this occasion, Swammerdam cut up a caterpillar to show how the b.u.t.terfly could emerge from its larval anatomy. The prince offered a large sum to the Dutch scientist if he would bring the collection to his court. Swammerdam, a devout Protestant, declined the Catholic's offer.

The first drawings of bees (1625) based on observations through a microscope.

Swammerdam was by now deeply immersed in his insect explorations. His drawings of the honeybee were made from 1669 to 1673. For months of extraordinary devotion, he would rise with the light, starting at 6 a.m. to work for as long as possible. He worked with the sun beating down, peering at the bees through gla.s.s hives and his microscope. By noon, his straining eyes would start to fail. After that, he worked well into the night recording his observations and drawing until he could continue no longer. Despite these labors, Swammerdam still wished he had a year of never-ending light to work harder still. By the end of these studies of bees, the summit of his life's work, Swammerdam's body and mind were battered; some think he never recovered.

Swammerdam's drawings show the exquisite dexterity of his dissections. He used instruments so tiny that they had to be sharpened under the microscope. His favorite tools were tiny scissors with which he could separate out and cut minute parts of the bee's anatomy without tearing them. He would put a bristle into a bee's gut and inflate it by blowing down a tiny gla.s.s tube so he could inject a colored fluid and see the anatomical structure more clearly. The insects were punctured with a needle to drain their fluids, dried, and anointed with resin and oil to preserve them. When Swammerdam started his observations of an insect, he would first look at it through a weaker lens and move progressively closer and closer by turning to stronger and stronger lenses. Once he became familiar with the animal's general form, he could put each new detail in context as he perceived it. Using this approach, he was able to discover the ovaries of the queen bee, anatomically proving her role as egg layer.

Swammerdam's anatomical drawing of the honeybee's sting.

By this stage, the pressures of family life were impinging on Swammerdam's devotion to discovery. His father wanted him to earn a living as a doctor rather than wasting his time drawing insects. Financially dependent on his father, Swammerdam had to turn down an offer from his old friend Thevenot to live and study with him in France. His options at home were limited. He retired to the country, but there was surrounded by the insects of his studies. Thoughts swarmed in from every direction. Swammerdam also became plagued by a dilemma of vocation. He saw a conflict between his studies and his love of G.o.d. Should he study G.o.d alone, or G.o.d's works? At times, he had reconciled his studies and religion, writing in a letter to Thevenot: "Sir, I present you the omnipotent finger of G.o.d in the anatomy of the louse." But for now he turned away from the natural world and toward its maker.

He tried to sell his natural history collection and began a correspondence with Antoinette Bourignon, a guru known as The Light of the World. She had been left part of the island of Nordstrand, near Schleswig, and lived there surrounded by acolytes. When Swammerdam wrote to Bourignon for advice about his conflicts between belief and science, her reply allowed him to finish his study on bees but was nonetheless stern. Give up "the amus.e.m.e.nts of Satan," she wrote, and concentrate on Jesus. Swammerdam left his unpublished bee studies behind, as if carelessly, no longer believing they were the way to G.o.d, and traveled to join Mlle. Bourignon's community in September 1675.

The trip was not a success. There were problems both within the group and with the community outside. For a while, Swammerdam acted as secretary and translator for Antoinette Bourignon, but nine months later returned to Amsterdam to a less-than-conciliatory father. Still dependent, the son had to live with the father once again, until the latter gave up his house and went to live with his daughter, leaving Swammerdam even more isolated.

In 1678, Swammerdam's father died. Although his financial problems were eased, his sister took more than her share of their father's estate and his physical condition deteriorated further. By the end of 1679, he was very ill. Thevenot offered to send medicine to help his fever, and Swammerdam asked desperately for a palliative for his edema. But it was too late. The obsessional Dutch scientist died in his forty-third year, destroyed by fever and mental exhaustion: incessant study, anxiety, and illness had worn him out. He died like a worker bee, falling in the field, all energy spent. At a posthumous public auction, the cabinets of both father and son were sold together, though in lots, not as complete collections.

But on his deathbed, Swammerdam returned to his work on the honeybee. Bees displayed G.o.d's wisdom and power in a mathematical manner, he said; their minute exquisiteness made the glory of G.o.d all the greater. In his will, he asked that his work be published, in Dutch as well as Latin, so it would be more accessible. Even his final resolution was not without complications. Swammerdam had left the owners.h.i.+p of his unpublished engravings of bees to Thevenot; but he sent the engravings themselves to a publisher, who refused to relinquish them until forced to do so by legal action. The drawings were not published until 1737, more than sixty years after they were made, in a book whose t.i.tle, Biblia Naturae Biblia Naturae, or Bible of Nature Bible of Nature, combined Swammerdam's devotion to G.o.d and his creations. It became his most celebrated work.

Swammerdam's legacy was to pioneer microscopic work on the honeybee, and this helped to sweep away a blind belief in cla.s.sical learning. In 1880, a plaque was put on Swammerdam's house bearing the words: "His study of nature remains an example for all times." Observational inquiry, rather than the uncritical repet.i.tion of erudition, was the scientific path he helped establish.

IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, observation hives became popularized by the French scientist Rene Reaumur (16831757), who in his Memoires pour servir a l'histoire des insectes Memoires pour servir a l'histoire des insectes reproduced drawings showing his own gla.s.s hive. Such objects became something of an exhibit and were shown in public for a small fee as men and women studied bees for moral, technical, and philosophical enlightenment. reproduced drawings showing his own gla.s.s hive. Such objects became something of an exhibit and were shown in public for a small fee as men and women studied bees for moral, technical, and philosophical enlightenment.

It was another kind of observation hive, one that opened like the pages of a book, known as a leaf hive, that was to yield the greatest secrets of the bee to date; the hive had twelve frames, 12 inches high, each containing a single comb. The frames were joined together at the back, hinged as if on the spine of a book so that they could be opened out and examined on both sides. A small piece of comb was put in the top of each frame to help the bees get started. The hive was then closed for three days to encourage them to build further. After this, the frames could be opened like pages and "read" by the observer: it proved to be the best method yet of looking closely at bees.

Most remarkable of all, the leaf hive's Swiss inventor and reader, Francois Huber, was blind. Huber began to lose his sight when he was fifteen. Despite this, he still managed to marry the girl he loved, who stuck with him against her father's wishes, and to continue his pa.s.sion for nature. Huber was helped in his work by his servant, Francois Burnens, who read natural history texts, including those of Swammerdam, to his master, and in the process became absorbed in the subject himself. "This is not the first example of a man who, without education, without wealth, and in the most unfavourable circ.u.mstances, was called by nature alone to become a naturalist," wrote Huber.

Using the leaf observation hive, Burnens began to follow Huber's instructions to conduct simple experiments on honeybees. At first the two men carried out experiments that had been performed by others, such as Reaumur. They sought first to validate his findings; and then, by repeating the tests several times, to check their own methods and results. As this work progressed, a covert trial was being carried out by master on servant. Burnens conducted the simple experiments with skill and intelligence. He then went on to more complex ones, and his pa.s.sion for science grew. At the same time, Huber's belief in his servant's powers became stronger and stronger. It got to the point that the blind naturalist had total trust in Burnens: "I hesitated no longer to give him my entire confidence, feeling sure to see well when seeing through his eyes," he wrote.

Reaumur's gla.s.s observation hives.

By this stage, the relations.h.i.+p had evolved from master and servant to that of colleagues. Testing their theories with repeated experiments-the basis of the scientific method-the two men advanced together. Huber described their work in his book New Observations on Bees New Observations on Bees, printed in 1792. These two volumes are easy to understand today, even for the layperson, because the prose is the sum of two people talking to each other.

Huber and Burnens made many discoveries, but the mystery that absorbed them most was the mating of the queen. Swammerdam had proved through his anatomical dissections that the queen was both female and the mother of the hive. But how was she fertilized? The Dutch scientist believed the drone gave out a strong smell and that this was connected to how the queen was fertilized, through some sort of transference. An English naturalist, de Braw, had previously argued that male bees fertilized eggs externally, like fishes or frogs. Reaumur had already dismissed the first theory by reasoning. As for the second idea, Huber knew that eggs were hatched when drones were no longer in the colony, over the winter. They needed, however, to prove that fertilized eggs were laid without drones present in the hive. Burnens got rid of all the drones, and for four days checked through a gla.s.s tube at the hive's entrance that none returned. When eggs continued to hatch, they knew that the eggs the queen laid must already be fertilized within her.

Where and how, then, was the queen fertilized? The two men thought it must be connected to the time the drones left the hive for a midday flight. The key to the mystery was to see what happened when the queen also went out at this time.

On June 29, 1788, Huber and Burnens stationed themselves before the hive at eleven o'clock, when the sun had warmed the air. They watched some drones fly out, and then the young queen come to the entrance. "We saw her promenading on the stand of the hive for a few instants, brus.h.i.+ng her belly with her posterior legs: neither the bees nor the males that emerged from the hive appeared to bestow any attention upon her," wrote Huber, the fresh exactness of his reportage relaying how Burnens must have described the scene to him.

The queen took flight, moving in horizontal circles 12 or 15 feet above the hive. Then she disappeared for seven minutes. Upon her return, Burnens picked up the queen, examined her abdomen, and found no signs that she had mated. After fifteen minutes back in the hive, the queen emerged again, took off, and flew out of sight. Twenty-seven minutes later, she returned. "We found her then in a very different state from that in which she was after her first excursion," Huber recorded. "The posterior part of her body was filled with a whitish substance, thick and hard, the interior edges of her v.u.l.v.a were covered with it; the v.u.l.v.a itself was partly open and we could readily see that its interior was filled with the same substance."

This, Huber and Burnens reasoned, was the "fecundating liquid" they had seen in the seminal vesicles of the drones. When they opened the hive two days later, the queen's belly was enlarged and she had laid nearly a hundred eggs in the worker cells of the comb. They repeated their vigil several times, with the same results. They had proved that the queen had been fertilized on what we now call the virgin flight.

In the introduction to the first of two volumes of New Observations on Bees New Observations on Bees, Huber pays homage to his faithful servant. The extent of Burnens's work shows a devotion to the subject, as well as to his master; he was clearly compelled by the pursuit of knowledge. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work he did with Huber observing the egg-laying workers.

Francois Huber, blind explorer of the honeybee.

It had already been discovered that worker bees as well as the queen could lay eggs. But were they just small queens mistaken for workers, or were there really laying workers? And if so, what sort of bees did they produce? On August 5, 1788, Burnens and Huber found eggs and larvae of drones in two hives that had been without queens for some time. Standing intently in front of the hive, Burnens tried to spot bees laying, to see if it was workers or a small queen doing so. Burnens spent eleven days, with scarcely a break, taking every bee out of the hive individually and checking to see if it were a queen or a worker. He performed the task with what Huber calls inconceivable dexterity, taking "the strokes of the stings" as they came. When he actually saw a worker laying, Burnens seized her and discovered she had ovaries. They also found that such laying workers produced only drones. This, we now know, is because the eggs were unfertilized; an unfertilized queen will also lay only drone eggs, and the colony will die out.

For fifteen years, Burnens and Huber worked together on bees. The year after the first volume of New Observations on Bees New Observations on Bees was printed, they had no fewer than sixty-three hives to work on. By the time the second volume of the book was published, nineteen years later, Burnens had left. He had gone, as Huber put it, "to his own people," his rise in life marked by the honor of becoming a magistrate. was printed, they had no fewer than sixty-three hives to work on. By the time the second volume of the book was published, nineteen years later, Burnens had left. He had gone, as Huber put it, "to his own people," his rise in life marked by the honor of becoming a magistrate.

Huber's wife, Marie, and son, Pierre, an authority on ants, helped take the place of the servant. It was Pierre who encouraged his father to continue to publish. The second part of New Observations New Observations explains how wax was not produced from the pollen, as many believed, but was made by the bees themselves. explains how wax was not produced from the pollen, as many believed, but was made by the bees themselves.

All Huber's a.s.sistants helped him, as he put it, to "pierce the double veil which shrouds, for me, the natural sciences," but it is hard not to notice that he was never so fulsome in his praise of his later helpers as he had been of Burnens.

SCIENTISTS, ARISTOCRATS, FARMERS, and philosophers of the Enlightenment: all admired the insects for their rational, productive ways. Bees and their colonies were adopted as a symbol for the perfect society. The gender of the ruler bee, for example, seemed to change according to who was on the throne. In the court of Charles the Second, the royal beekeeper Moses Rusden argued that the ruling bee in the hive was a king. The frontispiece of his book A Further Discovery of Bees A Further Discovery of Bees (1679) shows a crowned bee, and he states that the "king bee" has the deadliest and most dexterous sting of the hive. Yet Charles Butler had already made it clear that he thought the bee was a queen by the very t.i.tle of his book (1679) shows a crowned bee, and he states that the "king bee" has the deadliest and most dexterous sting of the hive. Yet Charles Butler had already made it clear that he thought the bee was a queen by the very t.i.tle of his book The Feminine Monarchie The Feminine Monarchie.

Bees were recruited as a satirical symbol of a society in an anonymous sixpenny pamphlet, first published in England in 1705, called The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn'd Honest The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn'd Honest. This was the start of what is now known as The Fable of the Bees The Fable of the Bees, one of the most notorious poems of the eighteenth century.

The poem was written by a Dutch physician, Bernard de Mandeville, who had moved to London and worked as a specialist in nervous diseases. The work is a satire based loosely on the concept of the animal fable. De Mandeville had cut his literary teeth by translating fables, including those of La Fontaine. Fables, like allegories, allowed the writer to address human subjects at an oblique angle. In The Fable of the Bees The Fable of the Bees, de Mandeville pictures human society as a hive. Instead of being occupied by the most sociable and cooperative of creatures, the bee, the hive is filled with its opposite, the antisocial human.

The gist of the poem's argument is revealed by its subt.i.tle, "Private Vices, Publick Benefits." Vanity, luxury, pride, envy, and prodigality may be examples of man's failings, but they also, de Mandeville mischievously points out, create wealth and provide jobs. Crime keeps mult.i.tudes at work: lawyers, jailers, turnkeys, sergeants, bailiffs, locksmiths. There is a disastrous reversal of fortune when the bees turn honest: the hive is ruined. Those who had made money through the corrupt habits of society had now lost their living. "[M]ost writers are always teaching men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they really are," writes de Mandeville.

The poem was republished in 1714 in a longer edition. In 1723, it was expanded again, and the following year published in its final form amid considerable controversy, with a new succession of elucidations and reb.u.t.tals included in the text. The growth of the work, from pamphlet poem to a book of close argument and counterargument, shows the ferment of debate that words produced at this time. Such books and pamphlets were relatively new forms at a time when censors.h.i.+p of the written word had been loosened and the minds of the age were pus.h.i.+ng at the boundaries of debate.

The poem reads, as does the work of de Mandeville's contemporary Jonathan Swift, like a refres.h.i.+ng squirt of lemon to the intellect, challenging the reader with the sharp sting of its argument. Dr. Samuel Johnson, an English author, said it "opened my views into real life very much." The religious leader John Wesley wrote in his diary: "Til now I imagined there had never appeared in the world such a book as the works of Macheavel. But de Mandeville goes far beyond it." He was consequently seen by some as nothing less than an anti-Christ, and the controversy surrounding The Fable The Fable continued for the rest of the century. Five years after its publication, ten books had come out attacking it. There were sermons preached against the poem, and letters to the press denouncing its content. The Grand Jury of Middles.e.x put the book forward as a public nuisance. The controversy spread as it was translated into French and German. In France the book was ordered to be burned by the common hangman. Wherever the fable was read, the hive of society buzzed as if attacked by an intruder. continued for the rest of the century. Five years after its publication, ten books had come out attacking it. There were sermons preached against the poem, and letters to the press denouncing its content. The Grand Jury of Middles.e.x put the book forward as a public nuisance. The controversy spread as it was translated into French and German. In France the book was ordered to be burned by the common hangman. Wherever the fable was read, the hive of society buzzed as if attacked by an intruder.

BEES AND HIVES were also brought to an aristocratic audience through showmans.h.i.+p. Thomas Wildman (17341781) has been called the Barnum of Beekeepers for his show-stopping displays, which he took to the English court and beyond. In his insect spectaculars, Wildman was carried through London on a chair covered in bees; he enacted a battle between bees and three mastiffs; he got the bees to fly from one place to another, as if he were a conductor leading tens of thousands of flying half notes; and he trotted on a horse, followed by swarms that settled on him as he rode. were also brought to an aristocratic audience through showmans.h.i.+p. Thomas Wildman (17341781) has been called the Barnum of Beekeepers for his show-stopping displays, which he took to the English court and beyond. In his insect spectaculars, Wildman was carried through London on a chair covered in bees; he enacted a battle between bees and three mastiffs; he got the bees to fly from one place to another, as if he were a conductor leading tens of thousands of flying half notes; and he trotted on a horse, followed by swarms that settled on him as he rode.

These exuberant exhibitions were founded on a more serious knowledge of how bees worked. Wildman's methods for beekeeping were laid out in his book A Treatise on the Management of Bees A Treatise on the Management of Bees (1768). The book begins with a list of five hundred subscribers, showing how Wildman popularized the honeybee from King George III and his wife, Queen Charlotte, to whom the book is dedicated, to members of the Royal Society, dukes, and tradesmen. At the heart of his work was the same quest that still engaged the mind of many beekeepers: how to manage the bees without killing them. "Were we to kill the hen for her egg, the cow for her milk, or the sheep for the fleece it bears," he writes, "everyone would instantly see how much we should act contrary to our own interests: and yet this is practised every year, in our inhuman and impolitic slaughter of the bees." (1768). The book begins with a list of five hundred subscribers, showing how Wildman popularized the honeybee from King George III and his wife, Queen Charlotte, to whom the book is dedicated, to members of the Royal Society, dukes, and tradesmen. At the heart of his work was the same quest that still engaged the mind of many beekeepers: how to manage the bees without killing them. "Were we to kill the hen for her egg, the cow for her milk, or the sheep for the fleece it bears," he writes, "everyone would instantly see how much we should act contrary to our own interests: and yet this is practised every year, in our inhuman and impolitic slaughter of the bees."

Thomas Wildman was born in Devon, one of England's great beekeeping counties. Although he made and sold wooden hives, his main method of beekeeping was to use four or more flat-topped skeps piled on top of each other for one colony. He could take off the top skep and extract the honey, rather as a super is used in a modern system, rotating and removing the skeps in the tower as needed. He used some of the honey to make mead, which he preferred dry, fermenting the sweetness right out to get "a fine, racy flavour."

Wildman sold his bee expertise not just through his shows and book but by going around the country visiting people to advise them on their apiaries. He thought that the bees should be "near the mansion-house, on account of the convenience of watching them."

Wildman's nephew Daniel was operating at the same time in London, and was a professional bee-equipment maker with a shop at 326 Holborn. He kept bees on top of his house and, in order to see how far his bees were flying to forage, he marked some with flour and discovered that they were going right up to Hampstead Heath. Daniel Wildman, a good businessman like his uncle, also wrote a beekeeping manual, ent.i.tled A compleat guide for the management of bees A compleat guide for the management of bees, which came out in 1773 and went into many editions, including a French translation. He traveled around the continent giving exhibitions, and there are records of his nightly exhibitions of bees at the Jubilee Gardens, Islington, from June 20, 1772. An interest in bees had clearly spread from the court and countryside to the general urban public.

AS WELL AS BOOKS ON BEES, the eighteenth century has left us an early piece of writing specifically on honey by a Covent Garden apothecary, Sir John Hill. This delightful tract from 1759 begins with a theme that holds true today: "The slight regard at this time paid to the medicinal virtues of Honey," Hill writes, "is an instance of the neglect men shew to common objects, whatever be their value." In other words, we look down on that which is under our nose. Honey is a useful treatment for many ailments, he argues. It can, for example, help loosen tough phlegm, a common nuisance and easily cured. Keep honey by your bedside, Hill advises, and take a spoonful last thing at night "letting it go gently down." Use it again the next day, too, and continue this regime until the symptoms improve. He believed honey relieved hoa.r.s.eness, coughs, asthma, and to some degree (less plausibly) consumption, if caught early enough.

Hill is specific about the best honeys to use for medicinal problems: for English honey, the springtime harvest is best, because the bees are most vigorous and capture the full force of the first flowers. He also writes of imported French, Italian, and Swiss honeys, adding that honeys similar to those of Hymettus and Hybla could be found in England where the bees are foraging in the same plants. For example, he cites a dell on the left-hand side of the road heading from Denham to Rickmansworth, which is fragrant in the evening air because of its wild thyme. The honey from this source, he says, is "perfectly Hyblaean" in its delicate sweetness and quality.