Spelling Bees
Have you ever noticed that the standard euphemism for sex is “the birds and the bees.” Birds, as we have begun to see, have longstanding mythical links to writing technologies. All ancient mythical systems map out carefully worked-through correspondences between birds and human communication, written and oral. Homer always refers to words as “winged words,” and for much of history since the introduction of parchment codexes, scribes used pens made out of bird quills for all writing. We’ll see more clearly why birds are associated with writing as we move back in time to Mesopotamia. But in Greek myth Hermes, the son of Zeus, is often associated with communication and the interpretation of writing. Hermes is always depicted as wearing winged sandals and a winged cap. He is chiefly the messenger of Zeus, both because he is very fast and because he was considered very loyal to his FATHER. Our current term for the interpretation of written works, “hermeneutics,” is derived from Hermes.
Interestingly, birds (and reptiles such as snakes/serpents) don’t have sex in the way that other animals do, inasmuch as there is no differentiation of sex organs and no penetration. Rather, male and female birds and reptiles both have cloacae, an opening through which eggs, sperm, and wastes pass. Intercourse is performed by pressing the lips of the cloacae together, during which time the male transfers his sperm to the female. So no 0 and 1. Male bees, on the other hand, do have external male genitals that are used to penetrate female bees during sex.
What we rarely think about is that the various species of honey bee are the only invertebrates (and indeed one of the few non-human groups) to have evolved a system of abstract symbolic communication. Indeed, Lacan talks about bee communication when he explains how the mirror stage works. Indeed, Lacan is quite taken by the various symbolic patterns that Bees perform. Male bees have external genitals, and interestingly enough communicate — as do humans — using abstract symbols. As such, both the birds and the bees are deeply integrated into the history of writing. I’m pasting below an article from the NYT today about bee behavior. Bee culture, as human culture once was, is matriarchal, with a queen in power, and no male equivalent. Life is pretty cruel for male bees, as it once must have been for human males — one of the reasons why myths almost always depict mothers as cruel and monstrous — and I think it could be argued that the history of the oppression of women is a kind of revenge for an earlier phase of history.
Now that the digital age is here, and we are living in a world utterly saturated in the symbolic, the one non-human group that also has a symbolic realm, bees, is mysteriously disappearing. Hmmmmm. Must be a coincidence.
November 9, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
The Real Life of Bees
By SUSAN BRACKNEY
THE walking, talking, sneaker-wearing honeybees in Jerry Seinfeld’s animated film certainly are cute. But if a beekeeper like me had been in the director’s chair, “Bee Movie” would have looked quite a bit different.
In Hollywood’s version, there are more than three times the number of male roles than female ones, but a cartoon of my own hive would have thousands of leading ladies and only a handful of male extras.
The nurses that tend the young and the workers that forage for pollen; the guards that keep predators like skunks away and the undertaker bees that unceremoniously haul out the dead: they’re all female. And whereas the movie’s protagonist is repeatedly told he must choose just one job and stick with it, my honeybees rotate through all of the available duties.
“Bee Movie” makes only passing mention of the queen. But she’s the life of the hive, too busy producing perhaps a million eggs during her two-to-three-year existence even to feed herself (she has attendants for that). Were my Russian queen drawn for the big screen (think Natasha from “Rocky & Bullwinkle”), she would make quick work of the macho pollen jocks in “Bee Movie.”
That’s because non-animated drones don’t collect pollen, or make beeswax, or even have stingers. If Mr. Seinfeld wanted realism (and an R rating), his male bees would be sex workers who do little more than mate with the queen — after which their genitals snap off. Worse: when winter comes, worker bees shove the freeloading males out into the cold. If drones are required in the spring, the queen will simply make more of them.
Apiarists haven’t had much reason to laugh this year, because bees have been ravaged by colony collapse disorder, a mysterious malady that’s caused some beekeepers to lose 90 percent of their hives.
But one of every three or four bites of food we eat is thanks to bees; we truck bees many miles to pollinate about 90 different crops, from apples and oranges to almonds and blueberries, a punishing circuit that overtaxes the few colonies left. Of course, in “Bee Movie,” pollen jocks merely buzz past and barren landscapes bloom instantaneously into Technicolor glory.
But all these apiarian inaccuracies will be easy to forgive if wise-cracking animated honeybees finally get people to care about the rapidly disappearing real thing.
Susan Brackney is the author of “The Insatiable Gardener’s Guide.”