2 of 5
The four writers whose books occupy us here are trying their darndest to shock us to our senses. As if they can't help themselves, as if seized by a spirit that's compelled them to go forth, they grope for ways to show us what they've been made to see, and what we, the bee-fearers and -ignorers, have somehow missed. They seek to shock us into encounter, encounter with who we are and what we on this planet are doing.
Stephen Buchmann, an entomologist writing from the Arizona desert, goes so far as to frame his meditation on the honey bee with a passage from Deuteronomy, in which an aged Moses, with a tired and acute sense of desperation, urges the nation of Israel to "choose life," to choose "blessing," so that "both thou and thy seed may live." "Bees and flowers are as vital a part of the intricate web of life as we ourselves are," Buchmann intones. "The question we must ask is: Do we love life enough to save it?"
It is, as ever, a live question. Buchmann harbors dark fears about our ability to answer it well. "Everywhere I've been, the story is the same—the once vast wilderness, from spectacular desert landscapes to lush, steaming rainforests, has been chopped up and reduced to isolated islands." All he knows tells him that this transnational chopping does not bode well for the sustaining of life, whether animal, insect, or plant. "Increasing environmental degradation is diminishing the quality of all our lives as well as our emotional and spiritual well-being," he warns.
Hattie Ellis' graceful and sensitive exploration of the intertwining fates of honey bees and human life begins and ends very much in the same place. A British food writer, Ellis notes that many suspect that pesticides have contaminated the thousands of bee colonies—billions of bees—that have mysteriously died in recent years. The fact that bees are now safer in the city than in the country she takes to be a telling indicator of our morally and ecologically dubious state of affairs. "No bees, no flowers," she reminds us. (And for that matter, no bees, less food: scientists estimate that about one-third of our food supply is dependent at some point on the pollinating services of bees. Pesticides, apparently, aren't always clear on who the pests are and who they aren't. A sobering thought.)
Ellis' warning reveals her deepening worry: "If we lose our respect for these miraculous and mysterious insects, it is at our peril. For life is all one: as big as the world, and as small as the honeybee."
Something is happening to us, these writers contend, something big, consequential, alarming. And that something can be traced by following the story of the honey bee. So they take us, briskly, into the joint journey of humans, honey, and bees through time.
They do so in a way that underscores how disconnected we've become from our long (and ongoing) history with the natural world. Ellis describes hunter-gatherers who undertook the quest for honey as "a kind of sacramental adventure." She notes that until the 17th century the forest's main economic value for Germans lay not just in hunting but also in honey and wax. In ancient Greece the presence of honey was pervasive: "Death, life, mythology, and love: honey slid into them all," she writes.
But no more. Buchmann is nowhere more powerful than when he describes one of his visits to Malaysia, where he accompanies native honey hunters on one of their thieving expeditions. The achievement of the technical feat itself is so deeply embedded in ritual, so intricately laced with ancient stories, that a Western reader is tempted to wonder if Buchmann has somehow traveled back in time, or perhaps landed on a different planet. Could this entwining of the material and spiritual, of taste and transcendence, possibly be happening now, in my lifetime?
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