To bee or not to bee

Why did three new books just come out about bees? Is the publishing world taking secret orders from the Discovery Channel? And should writers who refer to "my recommended daily allowance of magic and wonder" be stung to death?

By Gavin McNett

May 30, 2005 | First, we need to get this out of the way: There are three books on bees coming out at pretty much the same time. (A fourth, "Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee," by Hattie Ellis, made itself known later.) "Ha ha!" I said to myself and later to everyone else I knew. "Ha ha! I see there are three books on bees coming out at about the same time. Why," I said, "one might even say that there's a 'buzz'!" Rimshot, orchestral vamp, goofy xylophone music as the credits roll. (-- Gavin McNett writes on books and culture for a variety of publications.)

Indeed, you don't get them handed to you like that every day. (A "buzz"!) The last time was a year or two ago when my friend Doug and I were working in the garden, scooping soil from a wheelbarrow with an old mug. "Is there any coffee left?" Doug asked. "Here," I said, handing him the mug full of dirt. "It's fresh ground." He made a perfect "boing!" face like a cartoon character. You treasure each moment like that because in old age, those memories become your consolation for the fool you still are.

In any event, these three new books on bees give an encompassing, if not overwhelming, treatment of a creature that's so everyday-familiar to most of us that it's easy to forget how strange and unlikely, even wondrous, they are. If there were no such thing as bees, and if one were to invent an imaginary animal -- an insect -- that builds nests with identically hexagonal, waxen cells and upholds a rigid caste system of queens, drones and workers; that communicates with waggling dances; that collects flower nectar and concentrates it into a thick, ambrosial-sweet essence (and converts pollen into cakes of "bread"), laying up stores against the chill of winter; et cetera; people would think you were attempting some kind of broad, H.G. Wells-style metaphor for industrial civilization or socialism, or at least speaking in Aesopian parable about human thrift and duty. It certainly wouldn't seem like a plausibly real creature. And yet, this (and more) is the familiar honeybee -- and the closer you look at bees, the odder and more puzzling they can seem.

Which is also true with books, often enough. And here we have three different, even archetypical kinds of book, all mustered around the same topic as though for a controlled experiment -- which is interesting just in itself, give or take the infernal joy of "it's a buzz" and even worse temptations ("Now here's a honey of a book!") that would certainly be easy to wallow in if one were a fiend (or writing for Slate). In any case, it's a mystery why four books on bees would come out in such close succession -- although that seems to happen in publishing with a funny regularity. Some years back, for instance, seven books on masculinity, maleness and boys hit the stores in rapid fire for no apparent reason, while in '03 a book on the X chromosome dropped like a pair of shoes with a book on the Y chromosome. My own pet theory has been that there's some attractive guy out there, a gifted cocktail-party orator, who keeps going to publishing events and rhapsodizing about the latest fascinating thing he saw on the Discovery Channel -- and the next day a number of book editors go to their offices all charged up about the idea they had while talking to that cute guy at the party, and start ransacking the manuscript piles. His aria on bees must have been an especially fine one. (He also seems to watch a lot of those Hitler-in-the-bunker shows on the History Channel.)

"Letters From the Hive," by Stephen Buchmann, is a slenderish volume by a professor of entomology (at the University of Arizona at Tucson) who's spent his adult life studying bees. It's a pleasantly wonkish book, with writing shaped and colored in by co-author Banning Repplier, that features firsthand accounts of a traditional raid on a Malaysian bee tree, a search in Yucatán for keepers of the native (and increasingly scarce) stingless bee, and other such tales. It has a rootedness in what we usually, perhaps awkwardly, call biodiversity and traditional cultures, but for which a better term might be, simply, "the vanishing world." It's a bit of a shame to reduce "Letters From the Hive" to a type, but it represents a sort of elegant book, modest and evenly paced, that's dense-packed with information, but such a pleasure to read that you hardly notice how much you're assimilating, page by page. (Another of these is the X chromosome book, David Bainbridge's "The X of Sex.") Buchmann covers the world history of beekeeping and honey, culture by culture; the natural history of bees (an appendix features entries on such diverse entities as polyester bees, mining bees and honey-making wasps); makes frequent sharp turns into arcana such as Australian Aboriginal hive-robbing techniques; and throws in a section on honey recipes merely to -- if we were making all those bad, obvious jokes -- sweeten the pot.

This passage on "swarming," the behavior bees exhibit when abandoning a nest for a new one, or when one colony splits into two, gives a sense of the book's pleasant wonkishness:

"I've been lucky enough in my career as a bee researcher and part-time bee keeper to witness the swarming spectacle dozens of times. I've even experienced the adrenaline rush of running inside several swarms as they traveled to their new lodgings. It's called swarm running and I do it just for fun. The bees are gentle, their stomachs full of honey packed for the trip, and they are not in the mood to sting. As I run, bees swirl about me in all directions, but somehow the mass stays coherent, changing shape but not dispersing."

Next Page: "Robbing the Bees": Another ball of wax!

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