1. From the Neolithic to the present day, this insect has accompanied and sometimes inspired the history of humanity through its way of life and its extraordinary gifts.

The oldest trace of the long shared journey between the bee and humankind is a five-thousand-year-old rock painting discovered exactly a century ago near Valencia, Spain. Balancing precariously at the top of a rope, a slight figure – perhaps a woman – surrounded by a cloud of bees, holds a basket. With the other hand she reaches into a small cavity in the middle of the colony. The honey gatherers of the early Neolithic must have possessed extraordinary courage.

  « Honeymoon »

Pharaonic Egypt invented hives made from clay or terracotta vessels stacked horizontally. In the lower Nile valley, the bee – said to have been born from the tears of the sun god Ra falling to earth – was a royal symbol. Its honey formed a drink that newlyweds were supposed to consume for thirty days (hence the famous "honeymoon"), and it was part of both the pharmacopoeia and the embalming rituals.

The Greeks sought to fathom the secrets of the highly ordered society of bees, whose dwelling was always perfectly clean and which were never seen mating. Aristotle elevated them to "divine" beings and confirmed that they were divided into three castes: workers, drones (the males), and a king. For him, it was out of the question that the hive should be governed by a queen! Only a king could rule at the head of the colony, for this larger bee, permanently surrounded by an entourage of workers, possessed a sting.

For, the Greek philosopher argued, "nature gives no female creature weapons for combat." But how then to explain that this king lays thousands of eggs? Reduced to conjecture, Aristotle eventually wondered whether the sovereign might be hermaphrodite. Without substantially advancing entomology, his work contributed to consolidating the mystique of the bee – an animal bound up with a vision of the world.

Three centuries later, Pliny the Elder marvelled at these insects, "the only ones made for the benefit of man." "Bees," he wrote in his Natural History, "collect honey, a most sweet, most wholesome, and most salutary juice; they produce wax, which has a thousand uses in life, perform labours, have a political society (…) common leaders, and, what is still more wonderful, a sense of morality."

In the Middle Ages, a hive was first and foremost an item of property. The Salic Law (the penal code of the Franks) stipulated that its theft be punished far more severely than that of a pig. The abeillage, a payment in kind levied by the lord of the manor or religious authorities, went hand in hand with a strict inventory of colonies, and in the coats of arms of the nobility, heraldry accorded great importance to the honey fly – as bees were most commonly called at the time – : a symbol of obedience and industry.

Yet the era remained imbued with reverence towards the bee. In illuminated manuscripts, "scenes of beekeeping give pride of place to episodes of swarm capture – a moment that remains magical to this day for every beekeeper," emphasises Catherine Mousinho, specialist in the history of beekeeping and doctoral candidate at the University of Rennes-II.

Until the sixteenth century, it was above all honey that counted. Thereafter, the more highly prized product became wax, used to make candles, writing tablets, and seals. The straw or wicker skep proved better suited than other techniques, such as housing bees in a hollowed-out section of tree trunk. It lent itself more readily to the cruel practice of drowning the colony or even asphyxiating it with a sulphur wick. "In his Bestiary," recalls Catherine Mousinho, "Leonardo da Vinci condemned this practice, which he considered barbaric, yet more than four centuries would pass before the sulphuring of hives was prohibited."

Thanks to the Enlightenment (and the invention of the microscope), Apis mellifera began to reveal its secrets. In 1669, the Dutch physician Jan Swammerdam established that a hive is organised around a female animal. The queen – mated during her mating flight – and her daughters, the workers, reign without division. When summer comes, the drones (male bees incapable of defending themselves, since they possess no sting) are expelled without ceremony. If the colony is a microcosm of human society, then it is not the one that had been imagined. Despite Voltaire, who as an assiduous beekeeper on his estates at Ferney (Ain) tended to mock these "fables" of a "so-called queen who has sixty to eighty thousand children made for her by her subjects."

An extra soul

Decoded, but not entirely desacralised, the bee retains its extra soul. Countless beliefs continue to feed popular folklore. In Brittany and Lorraine it is claimed that bees leave the hive when a quarrel breaks out in the household. In Germany, Scotland, or the Deux-Sèvres, they are said to preferentially sting unfaithful husbands and young women who have lost their virginity. In the Vienne, they draw their sting to remind the living to pray for the souls of the departed.

Despite the commitment of a few scholars – teachers, clergy, or intellectuals – modern beekeeping techniques, notably the movable-frame hive that allows honey to be harvested without jeopardising the survival of the colony, would not establish themselves until late in the nineteenth century. In the following century, beekeeping remained a secondary and often archaic activity. At the onset of the "Trente Glorieuses," the shock of confrontation with hyperproductive agriculture was severe. The mass poisoning of bees by DDT spraying on oilseed rape fields was long overlooked, but at the end of the 1990s, Maya the Bee became Apis mellifera once again.

Environmental concerns began to be taken seriously, and systemic insecticides (present in seed coatings) caused mass die-offs that could no longer remain under the radar. "This insect, to which little attention was paid in recent decades, has become such an emblematic species that its preservation now concerns everyone," observe Agnès Fortier, Lucie Dupré, and Pierre Alphandéry in the collective volume Apicultures (Études rurales no. 206).

From the former messenger of the gods, the bee has become the herald of harm to biodiversity. The culprits are agrochemistry and neonicotinoids – still partially authorised in France to this day – but also the impoverishment of landscapes, climatic disruptions, and the invasion of exotic predators such as the Asian hornet and the varroa mite Varroa destructor.

There is, however, no obligation to confine oneself to the sole vision of a bee condemned to make its honey from our bad environmental conscience, or – the cherry on the wax cake – to be accused of pulling the entire blanket of pathos towards itself by overshadowing the plight of other pollinators. "Not everything is going badly, but we are observing fewer phenomena of abrupt population collapse, while the number of hives worldwide is rather stable," argues Paul Fert, author of the book Abeilles, gardiennes de notre avenir (Rustica, 2017) and beekeeper in south-west France.

"As long as we know how to pay attention to them, bees will not disappear," Thierry Duroselle would like to believe, president of the Société centrale d'apiculture (SCA), who is pleased that the fascination with Apis mellifera persists. The beekeeping courses offered by the SCA at the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris – a venerable institution, founded in 1856 – continue to attract twice as many applicants each year as the 200 available places.

2. All religions, even the oldest, have celebrated the bee and the fruit of its labour, honey, more or less directly. It is true that both lend themselves admirably to parables

It would not be impossible that the gods have a weakness for the bee. No other animal has lent itself with such ardour to the delicate task of communicating with humanity. Apis mellifera appears so universal that no faith has attempted to claim exclusive ownership of its incomparable capacity to generate parables. Before the Eternal, no jealousy; all religions, monotheistic or otherwise, have gone foraging in the hive of the sacred.

A messenger with often spectacular manifestations, the bee can maintain kinship with the divine. Celtic legend tells that the mother goddess Henwen, who appears in the form of a sow, gives birth, among other things, to a grain of wheat and a bee, to place them at the service of humanity. In Greek mythology, the nymph Melissa (meaning "bee") discovers honey and hastens to nourish the infant Zeus with it. Later, he mixes the sweet substance with an emetic that forces his father Cronos to disgorge the children he had swallowed.

Since the honey insect also carries the souls of the dead, Plato, who concerned himself with reincarnation, was convinced that those who "had devoted themselves to social and civic virtue" would be reborn in this form. Among the Maya, several gods take the form of the stingless bee, that small Central American bee with blue eyes that does not sting and produces excellent honey.

Charisma

Honey itself, whose formation holds many mysteries, contributes greatly to the bee's charisma, even if, when God describes to Moses the promised land of Canaan as "a land flowing with milk and honey," it refers to honey (or rather syrup) from dates. In the Jewish religion, true honey – a substance derived from flower nectar and transformed by the insect – is considered kosher. Unless it is honeydew, produced by bees from a liquid excreted by aphids. In Hebrew, honey derives from the same root as the word "word," and the only woman among the judges of Israel, one of the few prophetesses of the Bible, is named Deborah – another name meaning "bee." In L'Âne et l'Abeille (Albin Michel, 2014), Gilles Lapouge recalls that "the Kabbalists teach that the humming of the hive is an echo of the creative word."

But the New Testament makes the bee disappear. "Examining the Gospels closely, one finds no mention of it whatsoever. Not the slightest allusion, not even the smallest symbolic use," note Pierre-Henri and François Tavoillot in L'Abeille (et le) Philosophe (Odile Jacob, 2015). The explanation: "The place of mediation [the function of intermediary between God and humankind] is occupied by Christ himself – and in such a way that he holds, as it were, a monopoly on it."

As early as the first centuries of Christianity, the bee would not long delay its return. This occurred under the aegis of the Church Fathers and with a new mission: that of a spiritual guide. Henceforth, its influence rested on its exemplary morality and its virtuous model of social organisation. "God in his immense goodness endowed this small insect with meaning, so that all – even the humblest, the illiterate, the poor in spirit – might recognise in it the path to salvation. The hive becomes a kind of devotional image, a Gospel for the unlettered…," summarise Pierre-Henri and François Tavoillot.

The Bishop of Milan, Saint Ambrose (339–397), of whom legend relates that bees filled his mouth at birth – a favour also bestowed on Plato, Homer, Virgil, and Saint Rita, as a portent of eloquence – established himself as the champion of beekeepers, whose patron saint he would become. Indeed, the energy of the hive, its spontaneous discipline, and its sense of hierarchy provided ample material for edifying metaphors.

Saint Ambrose made the bee a model for the organisation of monastic life (do not monks and bees alike live in cells?) and above all a eulogy of chastity. Apis mellifera thus appeared as a confirmation of the reality of the Immaculate Conception. "Virginity deserves indeed to be compared to the bees; like them: industrious, pure, chaste. The bee feeds on dew. The virgin too has her dew: the word of God, for the words of God fall like dew," taught Saint Ambrose in one of his sermons gathered under the title

On Virginity

The numerous parallels between the actual life of bees – or rather what was believed to be known about it at the time – and what the life of a good Christian should be could, however, go off the rails. For example, when they became entangled in swarming, the phenomenon whereby the old queen, supplanted by the birth of a young one, sometimes leaves the hive together with part of the workers who have remained loyal to her. With the rise of tensions within Christendom, this symbolism would express for some an exception to the rule of the infallibility of the bee, and for others a duty of emancipation.

Implicit allegory

The Inquisition indeed detected highly suspicious correlations between rebellious heretics and swarming bees. In The Beekeepers (c. 1568), one of his last etchings, Pieter Bruegel the Elder plays with this suspicion in order to deconstruct it. He shows men harvesting, wearing masks and protective clothing, thereby evoking inquisitors probing the souls of the faithful as one opens a hive with authority to extract wax and honey. In a tree, a child turns its back on them and looks towards a church without a cross.

This should probably be read as the discreet expression of sympathy on the part of the Catholic Bruegel for the Reformation, which was then suffering under the rigour of the Spanish Inquisition in Flanders. An implicit allegory of swarming – in its religious version.

Luther, for his part, reversed the charge of secession levelled by the Church, accusing it of straying from the original faith and thereby engaging in "Schwärmerei" (swarming). The term also designated certain groups that invoked his thought and with whom he was in conflict. The bee was no longer a gentle little creature of God, but a touchstone of religious rectitude. Perhaps it had not deserved that.

In the Quran it is less omnipresent, but appears at important moments. During the Hijra, the bees helped guide Mohammed and the first believers from Mecca to Medina. Zealous messengers, they also hum near the archangel Gabriel when he brings the divine message to the Prophet. According to one of his hadiths (words directly attributed to him), the Prophet declared that flying insects would burn in hell. With the sole exception of the bee, of course.

The Muslim religion likewise attributes great importance to honey, "a gift from heaven." In the paradise promised to the faithful flow "rivers of water (…), rivers of milk (…), and rivers of wine pleasant to drink, as well as rivers of purified honey." A sura entitled The Bees praises "a drink of diverse colours with healing properties for humankind," in which there is "a sign for people who reflect." The Prophet emphatically extolled its medicinal virtues. "For you there are two remedies: the Quran and honey," he told Muslims.

The hymenopteran (its insect order) has also found sacred connections with Buddha, who is sometimes depicted as composed entirely of bees, and in India with the god Prana, expression of the life force, often surrounded by a circle of honey-gathering insects.

Krishna and Vishnu, by contrast, can appear in the form of a blue bee resting on a lotus flower. According to the teachings transmitted to young monks, the wise man should live in harmony with the world around him, "like the bee which, without changing the colour or fragrance of flowers, flies away carrying their nectar." In Buddhism, the steady hum of a hive is nothing ordinary or banal. It is associated with the ascent of energy that leads to the ecstasy of nirvana.

3. Once elevated to a symbol of royalty or Empire, the bee fascinates through its social model, in which ideologues have always found food for thought

Were they really bees? Historians doubt it. Today they lean more towards cockchafers, cicadas, perhaps flies. In essence, it matters little. When in 1653, near Tournai (Belgium), thirty insects in gold and enamel were exhumed from the tomb of Childeric I, king of the Salian Franks and father of Clovis, they were collected with reverence and the bee was immediately elevated to the status of original emblem of the kings of France. The noble relics were presented to Louis XIV with great ceremony.

That was sufficient for the zealous supporters of the future Napoleon I, assembled in a special commission of the Council of State, to elevate the bee alongside the Roman eagle. One more attribute in the service of the new regime, on the eve of the coronation of 1804. The Emperor saw nothing but advantages in scattering golden bees across his purple velvet mantle.

This animal ignores frontiers, inspires fear and empathy in equal measure, and embodies an ideal of discipline and industriousness. In passing, it winked at rural France, which had not always embraced the Revolution in its heart. And then the storytelling around the insects discovered at Tournai allowed for a subliminal appropriation of the monarchical heritage. A stroke of luck.

Four decades later, Napoleon III, eager to invoke the imperial hymenopteran (the insect order of the bee), would discover that symbols can turn against the very person they are meant to serve. Orphée aux Enfers, the opéra-bouffe created by Offenbach in 1858 at the height of the Second Empire, had a Jupiter – alias the Emperor – dance in the guise of a fly rather than a bee. The subject of this jest laughed through gritted teeth.

Victor Hugo, from Jersey, called for insurrection in a poem entitled Le Manteau impérial: "Hurl yourselves upon the man, warriors! O generous workers / You who are duty, you who are virtue / Golden wings and flame-tipped arrows / Swirl above this scoundrel / Say to him: 'Who do you take us for?'"

Revolutionary by nature

The French Revolution had the bee in its sights. But not to the point of ennobling it. In October 1795, the former François-Antoine Daubermesnil, deputy for the Tarn in the National Convention, grew animated at the podium: why not decree that henceforth a hive should adorn the pediment of all public buildings? Industrious, proud, indifferent to privilege, and always ready to defend its home colony – the bee is revolutionary by nature. As early as the fourth century BCE, Plato wished to build cities resembling hives – a nightmare for urban planners, one would say today… – and drew inspiration from them for his Republic. The idea was appealing.

Jean-François Barailon, physician and deputy for the Creuse, then took the floor at the Convention. Amid laughter and applause, he reminded the assembly that the colony was led by a queen, "whom all the bees court." As a republican symbol, one could do better. He did not even need to mention that the people's representatives had sent the queen bee of France to the guillotine exactly two years earlier. The proposal to adorn all the pediments of public buildings with a buzzing hive was postponed indefinitely.

Branded as royalist, the bee struggled to shed this reputation – a resonance that reached across the Atlantic. Apis mellifera, introduced into the prairies of the New World by white colonists, "is not native to our continent," Thomas Jefferson tartly observed in 1782, thereby highlighting the ontologically republican nature of the constitution of the young United States.

The ideological ferment of the nineteenth century would ignore this polarisation and reinstate the bee in its status as a political animal, far from any sectarianism. Capable of insinuating itself into all religious epics, it would accommodate with equal ease the most diverse theories, illustrating with equal conviction the most varied – indeed contradictory – causes. It was in all camps, serving all causes, without ever changing sides. Anyone who observes the hive, if they are a thinker in search of a social model, is sure to find there material from which to make their honey.

To the strict royalist, who sees in the pyramidal structure of the bee collective the natural legitimation of absolute power, the partisan of constitutional monarchy can retort that the queen only reigns as long as the workers deem her fit to do so.

At the other end of the spectrum, Proudhon admired that "blind but convergent and harmonious instinct" which distributes tasks among the workers. In the ideal society of human-bees, he formulated in his anarchist manifesto Qu'est-ce que la propriété?: "Each person, without seeking the reason for their labour, without concerning themselves with doing more or less than their share (…) would bring their product, receive their wage, rest at the appointed hours, and all this without calculating, without envying anyone." Some entomologists describe this insect as "communist," in the literal sense, given its constant disposition to place the collective above the individual.

Egalitarian collectivity

Proudhon's view – that the bee encourages rejection of any superior authority, particularly when state-based – displeased Karl Marx. Admittedly, he conceded, no architect is skilled enough to build a cell as perfect as a bee does. But, he added, "what from the very first distinguishes the most incompetent architect from the best of bees is that the architect has built the cell in his head before building it in the hive." Human superiority rests on the consciousness of one's actions, whereas the bee does not preconceive the perfect hexagonal wax structure it produces.

Adolphe Thiers, leader of the Versaillais during the Commune and viscerally allergic to socialist theories, aligned with Marx when it came to putting the bee in its place. This egalitarian collectivity that so captivated the thinkers of the labour movement was for him a perfect deterrent example. The synonym of a humanity that was "slave to instinct," deprived of that "freedom which consists in being able to err, to suffer." Liberals and Marxists, whose conflict dominated the twentieth century, would forge an objective alliance to keep the bee off the battlefield of political ideas.

From those years in which Apis cradled nascent ideologies, the legacy of cooperative and mutualist economics – a great consumer of apian allegories – endures. In the mid-nineteenth century, the entrepreneur Jean-Baptiste André Godin, advocate of "cooperative association of capital and labour," built in Guise (Aisne) the "Familistère," an avant-garde residential complex designed to offer "dignity and wellbeing" to the workers of his foundry. The model was a hive, "whose queen is solidarity."

Numerous provident or insurance organisations continue to invoke the patronage of the bee, whose reputation for collective intelligence has always appealed to the Freemasons. They meet in lodges they call "hives" and accord the hymenopteran a place of honour in their bestiary.

The bee need not wait for humans to enthrone it in their power games for its nature as a political animal to become obvious. It suffices to observe it at work. Inside the hive, the workers choose future queens by deciding to feed several larvae exclusively on royal jelly. The firstborn will commit political murder by eliminating her rivals, then foment a coup d'état to force the outgoing queen to split off, taking with her the colony members who have remained loyal to her.

Once outside, the swarm must choose a new nesting site. The possible locations selected by the scout bees are submitted to collective approval in a kind of general assembly. The workers each favouring a particular site perform a dance to which others are invited to join to show their support. Until a general consensus emerges within the collectivity and it departs for its new home, without a single member defecting. A vital impulse framed by democratic centralism.

4. Deterioration in honey quality, mass bee poisoning… Beekeeping has never sat well with modern agriculture. Nor perhaps with agriculture in general

In 2013, the Botanical Garden of Neuchâtel in Switzerland hit upon the idea, on the occasion of its "Bees" exhibition, of asking visitors to bring along a jar of honey they had brought back from a trip abroad. Nearly 300 samples were thus collected and analysed by the university's laboratories. The verdict: three in four honeys contained at least one type of neonicotinoid, and 45% contained two or more. The highest concentrations of this pesticide – whose chemical structure is derived from nicotine and which attacks the nervous system of insects – came from North America, closely followed by Asia and Europe.

This simple sampling, a mirror of large-scale contamination – admittedly below the hazard thresholds for humans – sparked deep concern well beyond the beekeeping world. Since then, further bad news has accumulated, confirming the deterioration in honey quality. Among them, a 2019 survey by the Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes (DGCCRF) showing that 43% of nectars marketed in France can be considered "non-compliant." Misleading or even false labelling of geographical and floral origin, "adulterated" product through the addition of glucose syrup.

In short: we are partly importing honey that is not really honey, in order to meet national consumption of 40,000 tonnes per year, while the output of French apiaries (between 9,000 and 20,000 tonnes, depending on the year and the whims of spring) has halved over the past twenty-five years.

Ecosystem crisis

This qualitative deterioration mercilessly mirrors the crisis that has gripped the entire bee ecosystem. This malaise reveals the manifest and long-standing incompatibility between beekeeping and productivist logic. Apis mellifera, whose activity depends on necessarily variable weather conditions, fits poorly – or not at all – into the processes of generalised industrialisation that have reshaped its natural environment over recent decades.

In the special issue "Apicultures" of the journal Études rurales (no. 206, 2020), Agnès Fortier, Lucie Dupré, and Pierre Alphandéry describe a process of "rupture between agriculture and beekeeping," particularly pronounced in France and now openly apparent. "The mass mortality of bees acts as a revealer of profound changes linked to the modernisation of agriculture, the transformation of rural space, and the questioning of our relationship with living things," this trio of sociologists and anthropologists notes.

The first skirmishes between honey producers and promoters of a hyperproductive agricultural model predate the neonicotinoids. As early as 1947, the newly founded Union nationale de l'apiculture française (UNAF) was already denouncing the scale of the massacres caused by crop protection treatments on oilseed rape fields. Since then, beekeeping organisations – unable to unite under a single banner – and agricultural representatives have maintained a relationship of constant friction.

A recent example is the controversy sparked by a tribune published on 15 April in Le Monde, co-signed by Christiane Lambert, president of the FNSEA, and Éric Lelong, president of the apicultural interprofession Interapi, regarded as close to the majority agricultural union. The text called for "not fixating on the prohibition of certain treatments that our European neighbours will continue to use." In other words: not disadvantaging French farmers by forbidding them the use of such products. This plea in the name of the competitiveness of national agriculture prompted in return another tribune, signed by the main beekeeping unions, denouncing the "agrochemical dictatorship without a way out" propagated, in their view, by the FNSEA and its allies. A charged atmosphere.

While European beekeeping has remained faithful to a traditional form of organisation, North America and China have bet on intensive exploitation of the bee – at the risk of considerable mortality. From April 2020 to April 2021, 31% of American colonies are said to have perished. Yet every year, one and a half million hives pour into the fields of California, not to produce honey, but to pollinate almond crops, as well as apple, blueberry, and cranberry orchards.

In his book Abeilles gardiennes de notre avenir (Rustica, 2017), Paul Fert highlights the harmful effects of this system: "Even if they get some of their colonies back in poor condition, weakened by the lack of dietary diversity imposed by monoculture, as well as by pesticide treatments that are not interrupted during flowering, American beekeepers turn up every year – all the more so since they are drawn by the high fees paid by fruit growers, while honey prices in North America are very low." Making a hive available for a short period, sometimes having been transported thousands of kilometres, can be remunerated at more than 200 dollars (170 euros).

"Migratory beekeepers"

Regularly accused of flooding the market with honey of mediocre quality, or even adulterated with glucose syrup or various sweeteners, Chinese beekeeping for its part points to a little-known social reality. "The bulk of production comes from migratory beekeepers who exploit the diversity of the country's climates and landscapes to harvest for most of the year," emphasises Caroline Grillot.

This ethnologist, a member of the Institut d'Asie orientale in Lyon, accompanied a group of these transhumant beekeepers for six weeks across four provinces in north-east China. "Landless peasants, bankrupt entrepreneurs, rural unemployed with no vocational training, drawn against their will into a race for yield, having rarely chosen this profession – which keeps them on the margins of society – out of passion," she reports.

These "dominant beekeepers, convinced that nature is at the service of humans," put an Italian species, Apis ligustica, to work. Known for its productivity (it allows five to eight harvests per year on oilseed rape, acacia, heather, or vitex, also known as pepper tree), it tolerates well the different ecosystems into which it is successively transplanted. The downside: it is less resistant to diseases and parasites than Apis cerana, its Asian counterpart.

The need to maintain the pace of transhumance, as well as the pressure from the wholesalers to whom they sell their output, frequently leads these migratory beekeepers to harvest immature honeys whose moisture content exceeds the norm (18% to 20%). On their travels, they avoid certain areas, notably large orchards known for their massive crop protection treatments. "This explains why farmers, for lack of available bees, are sometimes forced to carry out pollination by hand," continues Caroline Grillot.

As the world's largest producer and exporter of honey, China is regarded as a counter-model. European authorities, fearing a race to the bottom, are concerned about Beijing's approaches to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to have an ISO standard drawn up that would define what honey is, specifying in particular the acceptable moisture content or the admissible dilution of sugar syrup.

Perhaps the defenders of a virtuous model should first sweep before their own door. Starting with the French authorities, who to this day have been unable to publish the implementing decree for the 2018 labelling law that ought – at minimum – to specify the countries of origin of the product. That specification will be superfluous on the jars of the "first truly vegan honey, made without bees," whose marketing is expected before the end of the year. A pure synthetic product, developed by a Californian start-up, MeliBio.

5. Regarded as a herald of "natural" beekeeping, this American scientist, with his singular research methods, takes the wild – rather than the "domesticated" – bee as his reference model

At international beekeeping congresses, you need to elbow your way in to attend his lectures, and his books, though fairly specialised, are bestsellers. The American scientist Thomas D. Seeley has unlocked more than one secret of honeybee society. A skilled populariser, convinced that these stories are too remarkable to be confined to a narrow circle of scientists, this professor of neurobiology at Cornell University in the State of New York has simultaneously become the spokesperson for a new beekeeping centred on Apis mellifera (the bee) rather than on Homo sapiens.

Thomas Seeley, aged 69, has never stopped roaming the deep forests surrounding Ithaca in the eastern part of New York State. It was here that, at the age of ten, while out on a walk, he came upon a buzzing swarm in the process of taking possession of a cavity at the top of a walnut tree. That first encounter shaped his relationship with the bee.

While others retreat to a laboratory to sequence a genome, or peer through the glass walls of an observation hive, he prefers to confront the state of the science with his field observations. Out of personal inclination, but also because he has built his aura as a "beewhisperer" on this ability to anchor himself in the sacrosanct reality of fieldwork in order to make the true life of bees visible.

Bait hives

Dressed in a lumberjack shirt, cloth trousers, hiking boots, and baseball cap firmly on his head, he has had to call on great ingenuity to follow the trails of forest bees to their quarters. Or to hang bait hives high between two trees so that bears cannot come to help themselves.

One of his early achievements was solving the riddle of the "trembling dance" of these insects. Since the work of the Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch (1886–1982), it has been known that bees communicate by performing dances. Back in the hive, a forager that has discovered a flowering acacia performs figure-of-eight loops in front of her nestmates, the speed and orientation of which indicate the location of the flowering area and its abundance.

Von Frisch, however, had always wondered why it sometimes happened that workers on the wax combs were not performing a waggle dance but a trembling one. The Austrian researcher, Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine in 1973, had offered a reward to whoever could solve this riddle.

In 1991, nine years after von Frisch's death, Thomas Seeley found the explanation: with this trembling dance, the forager is trying to induce more nestmates to receive the nectar or pollen she is bringing back from her foraging trips. Like a bank needing to reinforce its tellers when there is a sudden surge of deposits, he explains. Among bees too: queuing means losing time.

Seeley also distinguished himself by renewing the comparison, drawn since antiquity, between the functioning of a colony and human society. Behind his deliberately anthropomorphic title (Honeybee Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2010), he compares a hive to a "superorganism." A collective brain in which each individual forms a neuron, and which would decide, after deliberation, to rid itself of the old queen or to expand the brood nest (the larvae) rather than lay in honey stores.

"Swarm intelligence" – a principle also invoked when coordinating the flight of dozens or hundreds of drones – rests on a non-hierarchical organisation in which the queen functions more as a constitutional sovereign than as an absolute monarch. A society capable of adapting to complex situations, yet blind to individual dissent or escape routes. A model that is fortunately not replicable at the human scale.

Amid these sometimes dry analyses, Seeley's talent lies in allowing some of his precious field observations to surface. He thus claims to have deciphered the slightly shrill call the queen emits to rally the troops just before the swarm departs from the hive. A peculiar twittering that he imitates with visible pleasure.

Over the years, Thomas Seeley – who has given his name to a solitary bee of Central America (Neocorynurella seeleyi) – has emancipated himself from his role as scientific narrator to take on that of beekeeper and advocate for a different relationship between humans and hives. His most recent book, published in 2020, The Lives of Bees (Princeton University Press, 2019), proposes taking inspiration from the lifestyle of the wild bees he has observed for so many years. Their long-term observation, he asserts, allows one to conclude that they are more resilient and robust than their domesticated counterparts.

Great genetic diversity

These bees, which thrive far from humans, live in relatively small spaces (in 1975 the scientist and a colleague did not hesitate, in order to support this observation, to fell 21 trees to examine the colonies housed within them) and are thus better isolated than the large hives designed to artificially maximise harvests.

In his view, their great genetic diversity has contributed to producing strains that are more robust and resistant to the ravages of the varroa mite, a dreaded mite from Asia. He therefore recommends following the precepts of what he calls "Darwinian beekeeping," by allowing natural selection to prevail. This entails, among other things, choosing small hives spaced at least thirty metres apart, forgoing effective chemical varroa treatment, and not counteracting the swarming impulse in spring when part of the colony threatens to abscond, jeopardising the season's harvest.

This message is addressed to knowledgeable amateurs. "A small minority, more concerned with helping bees than exploiting them," Thomas Seeley acknowledges when interviewed by Le Monde. "I see them more as bee stewards than as beekeepers; the difference between the two groups is the same as between birdwatchers and chicken farmers." "In the United States," he objects, "large beekeeping operations know that they are imposing a wretched existence on bees, but they carry on because it is profitable."

Etienne Bruneau, delegated administrator of Cari, an influential Belgian association of researchers and ordinary beekeepers, welcomes this dichotomy, which he considers fruitful. "Seeley addresses animal welfare and goes against the grain of usual consensus. He is a pioneer who leaves the beaten track, and does so moreover with a scientific argument that respects natural balances," he enthuses.

More reserved is Yves Le Conte, research director at the Institut national de la recherche agronomique (Inrae), who is impressed by "the subtlety and common sense of the approach" of Thomas Seeley, yet stresses the gap between the scientist and a world little accustomed to such prompts. "His concept is a bit convoluted to handle for professionals, and I know some who are not at all enthusiastic about his theses," he says. "At bottom, Seeley is less interested in beekeepers than in the bee and its interactions."

Having cast the stone into the water of "Darwinian beekeeping," the very serene Thomas Seeley has returned to the heart of his swarms. "There is still so, so much to observe and discover about the lives of bees," he confides. For example? "How do drones (males) and queens find each other at aerial mating sites? By what mechanisms does a colony decide to rear a new queen? How is the specialisation of tasks organised among foragers in search of water, pollen, and nectar?"

6. In France, solitary species are threatened by an excess of urban hives, and the native black bee by the mass importation of foreign strains. Between them, competition is fierce.

Hives in Paris? The idea is not new. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were nearly 1,300, and the city's active market-garden belt helped ensure their supply of forage resources. The following century saw the decline of Parisian beekeeping, confined to the apiaries of the Jardin du Luxembourg and a few religious congregations, but since the 2000s a feverish passion for bees has seized Paris.

From the Opéra Garnier to the gardens of the Élysée Palace, there has been a race to roll out the green carpet for Apis mellifera. Between 1988 and 2018, the number of colonies rose by 96%; statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture count 2,223. A record, broken at 1,500.

Parisian bees are everywhere, but the spell has been broken. Too many hives; their density stands at 22 per square kilometre compared with three for the national average. Too many foragers competing for flowers that are becoming scarcer; in summer they are often seen licking soda droplets from discarded cans. These urban colonies must be regularly artificially fed and renewed due to their high mortality.

Too much business

Too much business too. Partly overseen by the Union nationale de l'apiculture française (UNAF), the proliferation of hives on the rooftops of various organisations and companies seeking a convenient ecological responsibility certificate is sending prices through the roof: some annual maintenance contracts can exceed 4,000 euros per hive; in upmarket boutiques, jars of "miel du Marais" or "miel de Paris" can be found at 5 euros per 30 g, or 150 euros per kilo.

This boom exerts such pressure on floral resources that less prominent pollinators (bumblebees and solitary bees such as mason bees) risk disappearing from urban spaces. Isabelle Dajoz, researcher at the Institut d'écologie et des sciences de l'environnement de Paris, expressed concern about this in a study published in 2019.

Over three years she observed the frequency of pollinator insects in several green spaces. "The more hives there are in the vicinity, the rarer the visits of other pollinators become," the researcher notes. "Parisian honeybees are so numerous that they skim off the floral resources. And Paris is, let us remember, not a vast field of flowers."

"Old news!" retorts Henri Clément, spokesperson for the UNAF. "There is still room, and cities are not suitable places for other pollinators in any case." Thierry Duroselle, president of the Société centrale d'apiculture (SCA), which manages, among others, the apiaries of the Luxembourg and the Parc Georges-Brassens, disagrees. "The saturation threshold has been exceeded," he says. "Multiplying hive installations in urban spaces is no longer fashionable. Some have had bad experiences, and projects are in free fall." In short: the enthusiasm of Parisian neo-beekeepers has cooled.

The city administration, which launched the "Paris, capitale des abeilles" plan in 2016, declined to comment on a subject from which it has begun an embarrassing retreat. In Lyon, by contrast, the matter is settled. For five years the city has no longer been granting permits to install a hive in a public space. In return, it is trying to re-green itself, including by "re-naturalising" its cemeteries in order to create new nectar and pollen sources for all pollinators.

"The bee in the city now appears to be a deceptively good idea, and it is worth welcoming the fact that awareness is emerging," assures Julie Pêcheur, spokesperson for Pollinis, an NGO for the protection of pollinators. "One does not promote biodiversity by favouring a single species without taking into account the state of available resources."

In Paris as elsewhere, most hives house colonies of the Buckfast strain, a slightly greyish bee whose abdomen bears two or three yellow bands and which feeds another controversial debate. Yet another story of competition within the Apis family.

This bee is a hybrid strain created by Karl Kehrle, known as Brother Adam (1898–1996), a Benedictine monk at the English abbey of Buckfast. Having observed that his bees derived from a cross with an Italian race resistant to Acarapis woodi, a mite that devastated English colonies between 1905 and 1919, he undertook to create, through successive hybridisations, a kind of ideal bee. From the research of this pioneer emerged a productive, low-swarming, fairly resistant, and remarkably gentle strain. The favourite of beekeepers.

Crop protection treatments

"The Buckfast? A toy bee! It is so gentle that it defends itself very poorly against predators," scoffs Lionel Garnery. This CNRS researcher prefers the black bee, the local species found in its various forms across western Europe. Frugal and robust, this hardy bee that survived two ice ages is threatened by the presence of other strains.

The black bee suffers from a reputation – vigorously contested by its defenders – of being somewhat temperamental and not always very productive. This is why, for decades, many beekeepers have relied on queens from other regions. Buckfast, but also the Italian bee, highly efficient on oilseed rape, or the Caucasian bee, whose long tongue enables foraging on clover.

Following the mortalities of the 1990s, caused in particular by the use of crop protection treatments, imports of foreign strains rose sharply. With the risk of accelerating the dilution of native species.

Concerned about a "genetic drift" that – contrary to the process of natural selection – would open the way to strains ill-adapted to their environment, volunteers are seeking to establish protected areas closed to other bee races.

In France, around ten black bee conservatories have been established on Groix, Ouessant, Belle-Île, but also in the Cévennes, in Île-de-France, in the Orne, and in the Auvergne. The aim: to create a genetic reservoir of 150 hives within a territory of at least three kilometres radius. "We need the law to give us the legal instruments to enforce this exclusion zone, because it only takes a single Buckfast hive to move in to ruin years of work," insists Lionel Garnery, who chairs the Fédération européenne des conservatoires de l'abeille noire (Fedcan).

"The black bee deserves to be protected, even if it is not threatened," objects Thomas Boulanger, co-president of the Association nationale des éleveurs de reines et des centres d'élevage apicole (Anercea), for whom "this battle for the purity of the local race makes him somewhat uneasy." Genetic selection, this amateur beekeeper who breeds Buckfast and Caucasian bees reminds us, consists in creating strains that are more resistant, gentler, more productive, and less prone to swarming. For him, the polyandry typical of the bee – during her mating flight a queen mates with approximately fifteen drones – makes it difficult to envisage strict protection of the black bee, which is already extensively crossed with other strains.

---

See also:

• Beeswax Has Been Used for 10,000 Years
• History and Uses of Honey, Mead and Hive Products
• Bees Living in the Wild
• Beekeeping in Harmony with the Bee
• Neonicotinoids
• Protecting Pollinators