1. From the Neolithic to the present day, this insect, with its highly distinctive way of life and gifts, has accompanied—and sometimes inspired—the history of humanity.

The oldest trace of the long companionship between the bee and humans is a rock painting dating back five thousand years, discovered exactly a century ago near Valencia, Spain. Perched precariously at the top of a rope, a frail figure—perhaps a woman—surrounded by a cloud of bees holds a basket. The other hand is plunged into a small cavity, right in the middle of the colony. Early Neolithic honey gatherers had to have strong nerves.

  “Honeymoon”

Pharaonic Egypt invented hives made of clay pottery or terracotta, stacked horizontally. In the lower Nile valley, the bee—born from the tears of the sun god Ra as they fell to the earth—is the royal symbol. Its honey forms a drink that newlyweds must consume for thirty days (hence the famous “honeymoon”) and also features in the pharmacopeia as well as in embalming rites.

The Greeks sought to unravel the secrets of the bees’ highly orderly society, whose habitat is always perfectly clean and which one never sees copulating. Aristotle consecrated them as “divine” and affirmed that they are divided into three castes: workers, drones (males) and a king. For him, there was no question of imagining that the hive might be governed by a queen! Only a king could reign at the head of the colony, since this bee—larger than the others and constantly surrounded by a retinue of workers—possesses a sting.

Yet, the Greek philosopher argues, “nature gives no female any weapons for combat.” But then, how can this king lay thousands of eggs? Reduced to conjecture, Aristotle ends up wondering whether the sovereign might be hermaphroditic. If his work did not advance entomology, it did reinforce the mystique of the bee—an animal associated with a worldview.

Three centuries later, Pliny the Elder marvels at these insects, “the only ones made for man.” “Bees,” he writes in his Natural History, “extract honey, a very sweet, very light and very wholesome juice; they produce wax, which has a thousand uses in life; they carry out works; they have a political society (…) common leaders and, more wonderful still, they have morality.”

In the Middle Ages, a hive first represents an element of property. Salic law (the penal code of the Franks) provides that its theft be punished far more severely than that of a pig. “Abeillage,” a levy in kind collected by the lord or religious authorities, is subject to a strict census of colonies, and on the coats of arms of the nobility, heraldry makes much of the “honey fly,” as bees were most commonly called at the time, a symbol of obedience and toil.

Nonetheless, the era remains steeped in deference toward the bee. In illuminated manuscripts, “scenes of beekeeping give pride of place to episodes of capturing a swarm, a moment that, even today, remains magical for any beekeeper,” notes Catherine Mousinho, a specialist in the history of beekeeping and a doctoral candidate at Rennes-II University.

Up to the 16th century, it is above all honey that matters. Then, the most valued product becomes wax, used to make candles, writing tablets and seals. The straw or wicker hive appears better suited than other techniques which consist, for example, of providing shelter for bees in a hollowed-out section of tree trunk. It also lends itself more easily to the cruel practice of drowning the colony, or even asphyxiating it by using a sulphur wick. “In his bestiary,” Catherine Mousinho recalls, “Leonardo da Vinci condemns this practice, which he considers barbaric, but more than four centuries will pass before the suffocation of hives is banned.”

Thanks to the Enlightenment (and the invention of the microscope), Apis mellifera begins to reveal its secrets. In 1669, the Dutch physician Jan Swammerdam establishes that a hive is organized around a female. The queen—fertilized during her nuptial flight—and her daughters, the workers, rule unchallenged. When summer comes, the drones (male bees incapable of defending themselves because they lack a sting) are expelled manu militari. If the colony is a microcosm of human society, then it is not the one people thought it was. Much to the displeasure of Voltaire—an assiduous beekeeper on his estate in Ferney (Ain)—who was inclined to mock these “fables” about a “supposed queen who has sixty to eighty thousand children made by her subjects.”

An extra soul

Decoded—but not entirely desacralized—the bee retains an “extra soul.” Countless beliefs continue to nourish popular folklore. In Brittany and Lorraine, people claim that bees leave the hive if a quarrel breaks out in the household. In Germany, Scotland or Deux-Sèvres, they will preferentially sting unfaithful husbands and young girls who have lost their virginity. In Vienne, they brandish their sting to remind the living to pray for the salvation of the dead.

Despite the activism of a few scholars—schoolteachers, clergymen or intellectuals—modern breeding techniques, in particular the movable-frame hive that makes it possible to harvest honey without jeopardizing the colony’s survival, would only take hold late, at the end of the 19th century. In the following century, beekeeping remained a minor and often archaic activity. At the dawn of the “Thirty Glorious Years,” the shock of confrontation with hyperproductive agriculture was harsh. Bee poisonings from DDT spraying on rapeseed fields were written off, but at the end of the 1990s, Maya the Bee once again became Apis mellifera.

Environmental concerns began to be taken seriously, and systemic insecticides (contained in seed coatings) caused massive excess mortality that could no longer go unnoticed. “This insect, which attracted little attention over recent decades, has become such an emblematic species that its preservation now seems to concern everyone,” note Agnès Fortier, Lucie Dupré and Pierre Alphandéry in the collective volume Apicultures (Études rurales no. 206).

The former emissary of the gods has become the messenger of damage to biodiversity. The blame lies with agrochemicals and neonicotinoids—still partly authorized in France today—but also with the impoverishment of landscapes, climatic disruptions and the invasion of exotic predators such as the Asian hornet and the mite Varroa destructor.

Yet nothing obliges us to adhere solely to the vision of a bee reduced to extracting honey from our environmental bad conscience—or, to add the cherry on the wax cake, accused of monopolizing pathos by eclipsing the plight of other pollinators. “Not everything is going well, but we see fewer phenomena of sudden population collapse, while globally the number of hives is rather stable,” argues Paul Fert, author of Bees, Guardians of Our Future (Rustica, 2017) and a beekeeper in the south-west.

“As long as we know how to look after them, bees will not disappear,” believes Thierry Duroselle, president of the Société centrale d’apiculture (SCA), pleased to see the fascination exerted by Apis mellifera endure. The beekeeping courses given by the SCA at the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris—an venerable institution founded in 1856—continue to attract every year twice as many applicants as the 200 places available.

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

It would not be impossible that the gods have a soft spot for the bee. No other animal has lent itself with such zeal to the delicate exercise of communicating between them and humans. Apis mellifera appears so universal that no belief system has tried to claim exclusively for itself its incomparable ability to inspire parable. Before the Eternal, there is no room for jealousy: all religions, monotheistic or not, have gone to forage in the hive of the sacred.

A messenger whose manifestations are often spectacular, the bee can maintain filial ties 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 humans. In Greek mythology, the nymph Melissa (meaning “bee”) discovers honey and hastens to feed it to the very young Zeus. Later, he will mix this sweet substance with an emetic that forces his father Cronos to regurgitate the children he had devoured.

Since the honey-bearing insect also carries the souls of the dead, Plato—who reflects on reincarnation—is convinced that those who “devoted themselves to social and physical virtue” will be reborn in this form. Among the Maya, several gods take the form of the melipona, that small Central American bee with blue eyes that does not sting and produces excellent honey.

Charisma

Honey, precisely—whose production contains many mysteries—contributes greatly to the bee’s charisma, even if, when God reveals to Moses the promised land of Canaan by designating “a land flowing with milk and honey,” it is honey (or rather syrup) of dates. In the Jewish religion, true honey—produced from flower nectar transformed by the insect—is considered kosher. Except when it is honeydew honey, produced by bees from a liquid exuded by aphids. In Hebrew, honey derives from the same root as the word “speech,” and the only woman among the Judges of Israel, one of the Bible’s rare prophetesses, is named Deborah—another name meaning bee. In The Donkey and the Bee (Albin Michel, 2014), Gilles Lapouge recalls that “kabbalists teach that the murmur of the hive is an echo of the creative Word.”

Yet the New Testament makes the bee disappear. “On close examination of the Gospels, one finds no mention of it. Not the slightest allusion, not even the smallest symbolic use,” observe Pierre-Henri and François Tavoillot in The Bee (and the) Philosopher (Odile Jacob, 2015). The explanation: “The place of mediation [the function of intermediary between God and humans] is occupied—and well occupied—by Christ himself, who holds, so to speak, the monopoly.”

From the earliest centuries of Christianity, the bee will soon make its return. It will be under the aegis of the Fathers of the Church and with a new mission: that of spiritual guide. Henceforth, its aura stems from its exemplary morality and its virtuous model of social organization. “God in his immense goodness has filled this little insect with meaning so that all— even the humblest, the illiterate, the poor in spirit—can see in it the path to salvation. The hive becomes a kind of pious image, a Gospel for dummies…,” summarize Pierre-Henri and François Tavoillot.

Bishop of Milan, Saint Ambrose (339–397)—whose legend says that bees came to fill his mouth when he was a newborn (Plato, Homer, Virgil and Saint Rita were granted the same favor, a promise of eloquence)—establishes himself as a laudator of beekeepers, of whom he will become the patron saint. Indeed, the hive’s energy, its spontaneous discipline and its sense of hierarchy offer ample material for edifying metaphors.

Saint Ambrose makes it a model for organizing monastic life (do not monks and bees dwell in cells?) and above all a praise of chastity. Apis mellifera thus appears as confirmation of the reality of the Immaculate Conception. “Virginity indeed deserves to be compared to bees; like them, diligent, pure, chaste. The bee feeds on dew. The virgin too has her dew: the word of God, for the words of God descend like dew,” professes Saint Ambrose in one of his sermons transcribed under the title

On virginity

The flourishing parallels between the true life of bees—or rather what people believed they knew at the time—and what that of a good Christian should be can nevertheless go off the rails. For instance, when stumbling over swarming: the phenomenon in which the old queen, sometimes driven out by the birth of a young one, leaves the hive accompanied by a portion of the workers who remain loyal. As tensions arise within Christendom, this symbolism will, for some, express an exception to the rule of the bee’s infallibility, and for others impose a duty of emancipation.

Implicit allegory

The Inquisition, indeed, suspects highly dubious correlations between rebellious heretics and swarming bees. In The Beekeepers (c. 1568), one of his last engravings, Pieter Bruegel the Elder plays on this suspicion—but to dismantle it. He depicts men harvesting while wearing masks and protective clothing, evoking inquisitors exploring the souls of the faithful as one opens a hive by authority in order to seize wax and honey. Perched in a tree, a child turns his back on them; he looks toward a church without a cross.

One must probably see in this the discreet expression of Catholic Bruegel’s sympathy toward the Reformation, which was then suffering the rigors of the Spanish Inquisition in Flanders—an implicit allegory of swarming in religious form.

Luther, for his part, turns the Church’s secessionist accusation back on it, accusing it of moving away from the original faith and thus practicing “swarming” (“Schwärmerei”). The term also designates certain groups claiming his thought with whom he disagrees. The bee is no longer a kindly creature of God, but a lever for assessing religious rectitude. It may not have deserved that.

In the Koran, it is less omnipresent, but appears at key moments. During the Hegira, bees help guide Muhammad and the first believers from Mecca to Medina. Fervent emissaries, they still buzz near the archangel Gabriel when he comes to bring the divine message to the Prophet. According to one of his hadiths (sayings directly attributed to him), the latter states that flying insects will burn in hell—except the bee, of course.

The Muslim religion also makes much of honey, “a blessing from heaven.” In the paradise promised to the pious flow “rivers of water (…), rivers of milk (…), rivers of delicious wine to drink, and rivers of purified honey.” A surah entitled The Bees celebrates “a liquor of diverse colors and with salutary effects for men” in which one should perceive “a sign for people who reflect.” The Prophet insistently praises its medicinal virtues. “For you, there are two remedies: the Koran and honey,” he tells Muslims.

The hymenopteran (its insect order) has also found sacred affinities with Buddha, sometimes represented as entirely made up of bees, and in India with the god Prana, an expression of vital force, often surrounded by a circle of honey-bearing insects.

Krishna and Vishnu, for their part, may appear in the form of a blue bee perched on a lotus flower. According to the precepts taught to young monks, the wise person must live among his own in harmony with the world around him, “like the bee which, without altering the color and fragrance of the flowers, flies away carrying their juice.” In Buddhism, the regular humming of a hive is nothing ordinary or banal: it is associated with the rise of energy that leads to the ecstasy of nirvana.

3. Once elevated as a symbol of royalty or the Empire, the bee fascinates through its model of society, in which ideologues always find material for reflection

Were they really bees? Historians doubt it. Today, they lean rather toward cockchafers, cicadas, perhaps flies. At bottom, it hardly matters. When, in 1653, thirty insects of gold and enamel are unearthed near Tournai (Belgium) from the tomb of Childeric I, king of the Salian Franks and father of Clovis, they are piously collected and the bee is immediately elevated to the rank of the primitive emblem of the kings of France. The noble relics are presented with great pomp to Louis XIV.

That was all it took for the supporters of the future Napoleon I—gathered within a special commission of the Council of State—to hoist the bee alongside the Roman eagle, adding one more attribute in service of the new regime on the eve of the 1804 coronation. The emperor saw only advantages in scattering golden bees over his purple velvet mantle.

This animal ignores borders, inspires fear as much as empathy, embodies an ideal of discipline and ardor for work. Incidentally, it winks at rural France, which had not always embraced the Revolution. And the storytelling around the insects discovered at Tournai makes it possible to subsume, subliminally, the monarchical heritage. A windfall.

Four decades later, Napoleon III—quick to summon the imperial hymenopteran—would discover that in politics symbols can turn against the one they are meant to serve. Orpheus in the Underworld, the operetta created in 1858 by Offenbach at the height of the Second Empire, has Jupiter—i.e., the emperor—dance disguised as a fly rather than as a bee. The man in question laughs through gritted teeth.

As for Victor Hugo, from Jersey he issues a call to rebellion in a poem titled The Imperial Mantle: “Rush upon the man, warrior! O generous workers / You duty, you virtue / Golden wings and arrows of flame / Swirl around this vile one / Tell him: ‘Who do you take us for?’”

Revolutionary by nature

The French Revolution had brooded over the bee—but not to the point of adopting it. In October 1795, the former François-Antoine Daubermesnil, deputy of Tarn to the Convention, thunders from the rostrum: why not decide that henceforth a hive should appear on the frontispiece of all public buildings? Hard-working, proud, ignoring privileges and always ready to defend its hive-homeland, the bee is revolutionary by nature. Besides, in the 4th century BCE Plato wanted to build cities like hives—a town-planner’s nightmare, one might say today—and drew on it to imagine his Republic. The idea is tempting.

Jean-François Barailon, physician and deputy of Creuse, then takes the floor before the Convention. Amid laughter and applause, he recalls that the colony is led by a queen “to whom all the bees pay court.” One can do better as a republican symbol. He does not even have to mention that, exactly two years earlier, the people’s representatives had sent to the guillotine the sovereign of France’s bees. The proposal to adorn every public pediment with a buzzing apiary was shelved sine die.

Stamped as royalist, the bee struggles to rid itself of this reputation—an echo that reaches across the Atlantic. Apis mellifera, introduced into the prairies of the New World by white settlers, “is not native to our continent,” Thomas Jefferson quips in 1782, highlighting the ontologically republican nature of the Constitution of the young United States.

The ideological ferment of the 19th century would brush aside this polarization and restore the bee to its status as a political animal, far from any sectarianism. Able to slip into all religious epics, it would embrace with equal ease the most diverse theories, illustrate with equal conviction the most varied and even contradictory causes. It belongs to all parties, to all sides—without ever changing its coat. By observing the hive, the thinker in search of a model of society is certain to find something from which to draw honey.

To the strict royalist who sees in the pyramid structure of the bee collective the natural legitimation of absolute power, the supporter of a constitutional monarchy can retort that the queen rules only if the workers deem her fit to do so.

At the other end of the spectrum, Proudhon admires that “blind instinct, yet convergent and harmonious” which distributes tasks among the workers. In the ideal society of human-bees, he writes in his anarchist manifesto What Is Property?: “Each, without seeking the reason for his work, without worrying whether he does more or less than his task (…) would bring his product, receive his wage, rest at the hours, and all of that without counting, without envying anyone.” Some entomologists describe this insect as “communist,” in the literal sense of the term, always inclined to place the collective before the individual.

Egalitarian collectivity

Proudhon’s vision—that the bee incites us to reject any superior authority, especially if it is state authority—displeases Karl Marx. Certainly, he admits, no architect is skillful enough to create a cell as perfect as that of a bee. But, he adds, “what distinguishes at the outset the worst architect from the most expert bee is that he has built the cell in his head before building it in the hive.” Man’s superiority lies in his awareness of his actions, whereas the bee does not conceive the perfect wax hexagon it produces.

Adolphe Thiers, leader of the Versailles forces during the Commune and viscerally allergic to socialist theories, joins Marx in putting the bee back in its place. This egalitarian collectivity that so seduces thinkers of the labor movement is for him a perfect deterrent—the synonym of a humanity “enslaved to instinct,” deprived of that “freedom which consists in being able to err, to be able to suffer.” Liberals and Marxists, whose confrontation dominated the 20th century, would form an objective alliance to remove the bee from the battlefield of political ideas.

From those years when Apis carried nascent ideologies to the font remains the legacy of cooperative and mutualist economics, a great consumer of bee allegories. In the mid-19th century, the entrepreneur Jean-Baptiste André Godin, an advocate of “the cooperative association of capital and labor,” built at Guise (Aisne) the “familistère,” an avant-garde housing complex intended to provide “dignity and well-being” for the workers of his foundry. Its model was a hive “whose queen is solidarity.”

Many provident institutions and mutual insurance organizations still claim the bee’s patronage, its reputation for collective intelligence having always appealed to Freemasons. They meet in lodges they call “hives” and grant the hymenopteran a place of honor in their bestiary.

Yet the bee does not need humans to enthrone it in their power games for its nature as a political animal to be obvious. One merely has to watch it at work. Inside the hive, it is the workers who choose future queens by deciding to feed several larvae exclusively with royal jelly. The first to emerge will commit political assassination by eliminating her rivals, then foment a coup d’état to force the outgoing queen to split off with the members of the colony who remain loyal to her.

Once outside, the escaped swarm must choose a new nest. The various sites selected by scout bees are submitted to collective approval in a kind of general assembly. Workers in favor of each destination perform a dance that invites others to join in to signal their support—until a general consensus emerges within the collective, which then flies to its new home without any member defecting. A vital impulse framed by democratic centralism.

4. Degraded honey quality, massive bee poisonings… Beekeeping has never mixed well with modern agriculture—indeed, perhaps with agriculture as such

In 2013, on the occasion of the exhibition “Bees,” the Botanical Garden of Neuchâtel in Switzerland had the idea of inviting visitors to deposit a jar of honey brought back from a trip abroad. Nearly 300 samples were collected and analyzed by the city university’s services. The verdict: three honeys out of four 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, followed closely by Asia and Europe.

This simple snapshot, reflecting large-scale contamination—albeit below thresholds of danger for humans—provoked strong concern far beyond the beekeeping world. Since then, other bad news has accumulated, confirming the deterioration of honey quality. Such as the 2019 investigation by the Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF), which found that 43% of nectars marketed in France can be considered “non-compliant”: misleading, even deceptive labeling regarding geographic and botanical origin, and “adulterated” product with added glucose syrup.

In short, we partly import honey that is not really honey in order to satisfy a national consumption of 40,000 tonnes per year, while production from French apiaries (between 9,000 and 20,000 tonnes depending on the year and the vagaries of spring) has been halved over the past twenty-five years.

Ecosystem crisis

This qualitative degradation starkly reflects the crisis that has seized the entire bee ecosystem. The malaise expresses the clear and long-standing incompatibility between beekeeping and productivist logic. Apis mellifera, whose activity depends on necessarily changeable weather conditions, integrates poorly—if at all—into the generalized industrialization processes that have transformed 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” that is particularly marked in France and has now come fully into the open. “The massive mortality of bees acts as a revealer of profound changes linked to agricultural modernization, transformations of rural space, and the questioning of our relationship with living beings,” note the trio of sociologists and anthropologists.

The first skirmishes between honey producers and promoters of a hyperproductive agricultural model do not date back to neonicotinoids. In 1947, the newly formed National Union of French Beekeeping (UNAF) was already denouncing the scale of the hecatombs caused by phytosanitary spraying on rapeseed fields. Since then, beekeeping organizations—unable to federate under a single banner—and agricultural unionism have never ceased to maintain stormy relations.

The latest example is the controversy sparked by an op-ed published on 15 April in Le Monde, co-signed by Christiane Lambert, president of the FNSEA, and Eric Lelong, president of the beekeeping interprofessional body Interapi and considered close to the majority agricultural union. The text called for “not focusing on the ban of certain treatment products that our European neighbors will continue to use.” In other words, not penalizing French farmers by prohibiting them from resorting to such products. This plea, delivered in the name of national agricultural competitiveness, in turn prompted another op-ed signed by the main beekeeping unions denouncing the “agrochemical dictatorship with no way out” allegedly advocated by the FNSEA and its allies. The atmosphere was tense.

While European beekeeping has remained faithful to a traditional form of organization, North America and China have opted for intensive exploitation of the bee, at the risk of incurring significant mortality. From April 2020 to April 2021, 31% of American bee colonies are said to have perished. Yet one and a half million hives converge every year on California’s fields not to produce honey, but to pollinate almond orchards as well as apples, blueberries and cranberries.

In his book Bees, Guardians of Our Future (Rustica, 2017), Paul Fert highlights the harmful effects of this system: “Although they recover some of their colonies in poor condition, weakened by the lack of dietary diversity imposed by monoculture, and also by pesticide spraying that is not interrupted during flowering, American beekeepers return every year— all the more attracted by the significant payments offered by orchardists given that honey prices are very low in North America.” Making a hive available for a short period—sometimes after transporting it thousands of kilometers—can be paid at more than 200 dollars (170 euros).

“Migratory beekeepers”

Regularly accused of flooding the market with mediocre-quality honey, even mixed with glucose syrup or various sweeteners, Chinese beekeeping, for its part, covers a little-known social reality. “Most of the production comes from migratory beekeepers who take advantage of the diversity of the country’s climates and landscapes to harvest for most of the year,” notes Caroline Grillot.

This ethnologist, a member of the Institute of East Asian Studies in Lyon, followed for six weeks, across four provinces in northeastern China, a group of these transhumants. “Landless peasants, bankrupt entrepreneurs, untrained rural unemployed people—dragged despite themselves into a race for yield and who have rarely chosen this trade out of passion, a trade that makes them live on the margins of society,” she says.

These “dominant beekeepers convinced that nature is at the service of humans” have an Italian-origin species forage: Apis ligustica. Known for its productivity (it allows five to eight harvests per year on rapeseed, acacia, heather or vitex—also called the chaste tree), it tolerates well the various ecosystems into which it is successively plunged. 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 exerted by wholesalers to whom they sell their production, often encourages these migratory beekeepers to harvest immature honeys whose moisture content exceeds the standard (from 18% to 20%). In the course of their wanderings, they avoid certain areas, in particular large orchards known for heavy phytosanitary treatments. “This explains why farmers, for lack of available bees, are sometimes forced to carry out pollination by hand,” Caroline Grillot continues.

The world’s leading producer and exporter of honey, China stands as a counter-model. European authorities, fearing a race to the bottom, are concerned about the approach undertaken by Beijing at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to develop an ISO standard defining what honey is, specifying in particular the tolerated moisture level or the acceptable dilution of sugar syrup.

Perhaps defenders of a virtuous model should first sweep in front of their own hive—starting with the French authorities. To this day, they have still not been able to publish the implementing decree for the 2018 labeling law specifying—what should nevertheless be the bare minimum—the countries of origin of the product. This detail will be irrelevant on jars of the “first truly vegan honey made without bees,” whose marketing is expected at the end of the year: a purely synthetic product developed by a Californian start-up, MeliBio.

5. A herald of “natural” beekeeping, this American academic with singular research methods considers that the model to follow is the wild bee rather than the “domesticated” one

At international beekeeping conferences, one has to elbow one’s way in to attend his lectures, and his books—though technical—are best-sellers. The American academic Thomas D. Seeley has uncovered more than one secret of the society of honey insects. A skilled popularizer, convinced that these stories are too beautiful to remain the preserve of a small circle of scientists, this professor of neurobiology at Cornell University in New York State has also become the advocate of a new beekeeping centered on Apis mellifera (the bee) rather than on Homo sapiens.

Thomas Seeley, 69, has never stopped roaming the deep forests around Ithaca in eastern New York State. It was here that, at the age of 10, he encountered during a walk a buzzing swarm about to take possession of a cavity hollowed out at the top of a walnut tree. That first encounter shaped his relationship with the bee.

Where others lock themselves in a laboratory to sequence a genome, or scrutinize the glass walls of an experimental hive, he prefers to confront the state of science with his observations made in situ. By personal inclination, but also because he built his aura as a “beewhisperer” (“the man who whispers in bees’ ears”) on this ability to anchor himself in the sacrosanct reality of the field in order to show the real life of bees.

Test hives

Dressed in a lumberjack shirt, canvas trousers, hiking shoes, his baseball cap pulled low, he had to deploy treasures of ingenuity to track forest bees back to their home—or hang test hives high between two trees to keep bears from helping themselves.

One of Professor Seeley’s first feats was to solve the enigma of the “shaking dance” of these insects. Since the work of the Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch (1886–1982), we know that bees communicate by performing dances. Back at the hive, a scout that has found a blooming acacia performs, in front of her congeners, figure-eight loops whose speed and orientation define the location of the flowering area as well as its abundance.

By contrast, von Frisch always wondered why, back on the wax combs, it sometimes happens that workers no longer dance by waggling but by trembling. The Austrian researcher, Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, had offered a reward to anyone who would solve this enigma.

In 1991, nine years after von Frisch’s death, Thomas Seeley found the explanation: by shivering in this way, the forager seeks to encourage more congeners to come and take delivery of the nectar or pollen she brings back from her wanderings—like a bank needing extra tellers in the face of a sudden surge of deposits, he explains. Among bees too, waiting in line is time wasted.

Seeley also distinguished himself by renewing the parallel drawn since Antiquity between the functioning of a colony and human society. Behind his deliberately anthropomorphic title (Democracy among the Bees, Quæ editions, 2017), he compares a hive to a “superorganism”: a collective brain in which each individual is a neuron, deciding after deliberation to get rid of the old queen or to expand the brood nest (larvae) rather than to build up honey reserves.

“Swarm intelligence”—a principle also invoked for coordinating the flight of dozens or even hundreds of drones—arises from a non-hierarchical organization in which the queen acts as a constitutional sovereign rather than an absolute monarch: a society able to adapt to complex situations, but unaware of dissent or individual escape routes. Fortunately, a model not reproducible at the human scale.

Amid these sometimes arid analyses, Seeley’s talent lies in letting some of his precious field observations emerge. He thus claims to have decoded the slightly strident call emitted by the queen to rally the troops just before the swarm’s takeoff from the hive: a curious chirping sound that he takes mischievous pleasure in imitating.

Over the years, Thomas Seeley—who has lent his name to a solitary Central American bee (Neocorynurella seeleyi)—has freed himself from his status as a scientific storyteller to don the garb of a beekeeper and become the advocate of a different relationship between humans and their hives. Published in 2020, his latest book, The Honey Bee (Biotope éditions), suggests taking inspiration from the lifestyle of wild bees he has watched for so many years. Long-term observation, he asserts, leads to the conclusion that they are more resilient and more resistant than their domesticated counterparts.

Great genetic diversity

These bees that thrive away from humans live in relatively small spaces (in 1975, to support this observation, the academic and a colleague did not hesitate to fell 21 trees to examine the colonies they housed) and are therefore better isolated than the overly large hives designed to artificially maximize harvests.

According to him, their great genetic diversity has made it possible to generate more robust species more resistant to the ravages of varroa, a formidable mite from Asia. He therefore advocates following the precepts of what he calls “Darwinian beekeeping” by letting natural selection prevail. This entails, among other things, choosing small hives spaced at least thirty meters apart, renouncing effective chemical anti-varroa treatment, or not preventing the spring swarming fever—when part of the colony may escape, compromising the season’s harvest.

This message is aimed at informed amateurs. “A small minority, more concerned with helping bees than exploiting them,” Thomas Seeley admits in an interview with Le Monde. “I see them as bee stewards rather than beekeepers; the difference between the two groups being the same as between birdwatchers and chicken farmers.” “In the United States,” he fumes, “large beekeeping operations know they impose a miserable existence on bees, but they persist because it is profitable.”

Etienne Bruneau, managing director of Cari, an influential Belgian association bringing together researchers and ordinary beekeepers, welcomes this dichotomy, which he considers fruitful. “Seeley addresses animal welfare and runs counter to the usual consensuses. He is a pioneer who steps off the beaten path, with a scientific argument that respects natural balances,” he enthuses.

More measured, Yves Le Conte, research director at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (Inrae), says he is impressed by “the subtlety and common sense of Thomas Seeley’s approach,” but underlines the gap separating the academic from a community not accustomed to this kind of challenge. “His concept is a bit crazy for professionals to handle, and I know some who are not at all enthusiastic about his theses,” he says. “In fact, Seeley is less interested in beekeepers than in the bee and its interactions.”

After throwing the stone into the pond of “Darwinian beekeeping,” the very phlegmatic Thomas Seeley plunged back into the heart of his swarms. “There is still so much, so much to observe and discover about the life of bees,” he confides. For example? “How do drones (males) and queens find each other in aerial mating sites? By what mechanisms does a colony decide to raise a new queen? How is task specialization organized among foragers searching for water, pollen and nectar?”

6. In France, solitary species are threatened by the overabundance of urban hives, and the native black bee by massive imports of foreign strains. Between them, competition is intense.

Hives in Paris? The idea is not new. At the end of the 19th century, there were nearly 1,300, and the capital’s active market-gardening belt helped ensure their supply of nectar 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 frenetic passion for bees has taken hold of Paris.

From the Opéra Garnier to the gardens of the Élysée Palace, it is a matter of who will roll out the green carpet for Apis mellifera. Between 1988 and 2018, the number of colonies jumped; agriculture ministry statistics count 2,223. Record broken at 1,500.

Parisian bees are everywhere, but the charm has worn off. Too many hives: their density is 22 per square kilometer, compared with three for the national average. Too many foragers competing for blossoms that are becoming scarce; in summer, they are often seen licking droplets of soda from abandoned cans. These urban colonies must be regularly fed artificially and renewed due to their high mortality.

Too much business

Too much business, too. Partly supervised by the National Union of French Beekeeping (UNAF), the proliferation of hives on the roofs of various organizations and companies seeking a convenient badge of eco-responsibility has driven prices up: some annual maintenance contracts can exceed 4,000 euros per hive; in chic boutiques, one finds jars of “Marais honey” or “Paris honey” for 5 euros per 30 g—150 euros per kilo.

This rush exerts such pressure on floral resources that less visible pollinators (bumblebees and solitary bees such as mason bees) may be on the verge of disappearing from urban space. Isabelle Dajoz, a researcher at the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences of Paris, raised this concern in a study published in 2019.

Over three years, she observed pollinator visits in several green spaces. “The more hives there are in the surroundings, the less frequent are visits by other pollinators,” the academic notes. “Parisian domestic bees are so numerous that they capture the floral resources. And Paris, it should be remembered, is not a vast field of flowers.”

“A cliché!” retorts Henri Clément, spokesperson for UNAF. “There is room, and cities are not places conducive to other pollinators anyway.” Thierry Duroselle, president of the Société centrale d’apiculture (SCA), which manages in particular the apiaries of the Luxembourg Gardens and Georges-Brassens Park, does not share that view. “The saturation threshold has been exceeded,” he states. “Multiplying hive installations in urban areas has gone out of fashion. Some have had bad experiences and projects are in free fall.” In short, the ardor of Parisian neo-beekeepers has cooled.

The City Hall, which launched the 2016 plan “Paris, capital of bees,” did not wish to comment on a topic on which it has begun an embarrassing backpedal. In Lyon, by contrast, the issue has been settled: for five years the city has no longer issued authorizations to install a hive in a public space. In return, it is trying to become greener—for example by “re-naturing” its cemeteries to create new sources of nectar and pollen for all pollinators.

“From now on, the bee in the city looks like a false good idea, and we should welcome the emergence of awareness,” says Julie Pêcheur, spokesperson for Pollinis, an NGO defending pollinators. “You do not promote biodiversity by privileging a single species and without taking into account the state of available resources.”

In Paris as elsewhere, most hives house colonies belonging to the Buckfast strain—a slightly grey bee with two or even three yellow bands on its abdomen—which feeds another controversy. Yet another story of competition within the Apis family.

This bee is a hybrid species created by Karl Kehrle, known as Brother Adam (1898–1996), a Benedictine monk at Buckfast Abbey in England. After observing that his bees—born from a cross with an Italian race resistant to Acarapis woodi, a mite that ravaged English colonies between 1905 and 1919—held up better, he undertook to create, through successive hybridizations, a kind of ideal bee. From the work of this pioneer emerged a productive line, not very prone to swarming, fairly resistant, and surprisingly gentle: beekeepers’ darling.

Phytosanitary treatments

“Buckfast? A toy bee! It is so gentle that it defends itself very poorly against predators,” sneers Lionel Garnery. This CNRS researcher prefers the black bee, the local species found in its various forms across Western Europe. Frugal and hardy, this tough survivor that has lived through two glaciations is threatened by the presence of other species.

The black bee suffers from a reputation—energetically rejected by its defenders—of being somewhat temperamental and not always very productive. That is why, for decades, many beekeepers have relied on queens from other horizons: Buckfast, but also the Italian, very effective on rapeseed, or the Caucasian, whose long tongue allows it to forage clover.

Under the effect of the mortalities of the 1990s—caused notably by the use of phytosanitary treatments—imports of foreign strains have soared, at the risk of accentuating the dilution of native strains.

Fearing a “genetic drift” that, contrary to the process of natural selection, would leave the field open to species unsuited to their environment, volunteers are trying to set up sanctuaries closed to other bee races.

In France, about ten conservatories of the black bee have been established on Groix, Ouessant, Belle-Île, as well as in the Cévennes, Île-de-France, Orne and Auvergne. The goal is to create a genetic reservoir of 150 hives within a territory of at least three kilometers in radius. “The law must give us the legal tools to enforce this exclusion zone, because it only takes a single Buckfast hive to settle to ruin years of work,” insists Lionel Garnery, who chairs the European Federation of Black Bee Conservatories (Fedcan).

“The black bee deserves to be protected even if it is not threatened,” objects Thomas Boulanger, co-president of the National Association of Queen Breeders and Beekeeping Breeding Centers (Anercea), who says that “this fight for the purity of the local race makes me a bit uncomfortable.” Genetic selection, this amateur beekeeper who raises Buckfast and Caucasian bees recalls, consists in creating strains that are more resistant, gentler, more productive and less prone to swarming. For him, the polyandry characteristic of the bee—during her nuptial flight, a queen mates with about fifteen drones—makes strict protection of the black bee difficult to envisage, already largely crossbred with other strains.

Sunday beekeepers and professionals are, for the time being, keeping their distance from the controversy. D’aut

See also:

• Beeswax has been used for 10,000 years
• History and uses of honey, mead and hive products.
• These bees that live in freedom
• Beekeeping management in synergy with the bee