Wondering Wednesday #25

What did Rudolf Steiner say about honeybees? (Part 2)

Wondering Wednesday Question and Answer #25

What Did Rudolf Steiner say about honeybees?

This is the second installment of trying to work through Rudolf Steiner’s series of lectures about honeybees, given in the winter of 1923.  There is a lot to work through.  Last time I only made it through the first half of Lecture 2!  This time I’ll try to add the next layer from that same lecture.  This is heady stuff, and not for everyone.  It was requested by a couple readers and is something that I’m very interested in, so I hope you find it engaging!

Last time, we explored the variable developmental times of the drones, workers and queen as compared to the rotational period of the sun.  The beehive is a biological superorganism that in Steiner’s view we could imagine as infused with “sun influence”.  The queen stays somewhat connected to the sun, while the drones are more connected to earth.  The workers (of which the hive is very largely composed) are the perfect balanced harmony between earth and sun.  We also started to create an imagination of the worker bees in the hive and the perhaps surprising fact that despite the fact that bees have five eyes of two different types, their sensory world is largely in “twilight” and their eyes are not used in the course of most of their usual activities.  There is some contemporary evidence for this view from ordinary scientific circles.  Recent evidence indicates that honeybees “turn off” their color vision when they are not using it to locate flowers! (I haven’t been able to find the article referencing this, I’ll need to keep searching).

We are still in Lecture 2, where Steiner uses the second portion of this talk to move from bees to humans.  This is a recurring theme of all of Steiner’s work, that of observing elements of nature and then relating them to complementary observations in humans.  This is a key to anthroposophical insight of all kinds, that the human being is not separate and cut off from nature, but entirely a product of it.  So, it shouldn’t be surprising that he does this.  However, Steiner makes an even stronger emphasis on the connection between humans and honeybees than he usually does on other topics. He goes so far as to say that the activity and structure of the human head mirrors that of . . . the structure of a beehive!

Steiner refers to three main types of cells in the human head: nerve cells, blood cells (surrounding and feeding the nerve cells but never in direct contact with them), and what Steiner calls “single free cells”.  I’m not sure what Steiner is directly referring to here.  Obviously, he was working (quite admirably I might add) with the available scientific evidence of his time.  Trying to figure out what cells Steiner was talking about led me to this fascinating Scientific American article about the efforts to catalog the various types of neurons found in the human brain.  Skimming this article, maybe Steiner was referring to what are now called ‘Betz cells”? Here’s a quotation from that SA article: “In humans, primary motor cortex is characterized by the presence of exceptionally large cells, named Betz cells after the Ukrainian anatomist who described them, cells that send their axons all the way down to the spinal cord.” 

(My friend Peter the biologist and fellow Waldorf teacher may want to weigh in here and let me know if I’m on the right track or not.)

Anyway Steiner goes on to set up this simple analogy between honeybees and the human head:

“ If the nerve-cells of the human head could develop in all directions, under the same conditions as those of the hive, then the nerve-cells would become drones.

The blood-cells which flow in the veins would become worker bees; and the single free cells which are, above all, in the centre of the head and go through the shortest period of development, may be compared with the Queen bees.”

This is another one of those times when Steiner’s way of working would make any self-respecting materialist scientist queasy.  Materialism admits no connections between disparate phenomena like bees and humans other than the ubiquitous atoms that everything is supposed to be completely made of.  Yet Steiner is drawing a direct analogy between certain cells that comprise the human head, and the types of bees that make a hive.

As evidence for this analogy, Steiner points out that the blood flows throughout the human body, bringing substances and transforming them for building to take place.  This is just like the activity of the worker bees. He points out that human bones are filled with the same hexagonal shape as honeycomb.  Looking it up, I was struck at how the structure of bone cells actually looks a lot like the comb of stingless bees, which are some of the oldest honeybees on earth!

Steiner then spends some time explaining how (good quality) honey is a wonderful healthy food to eat for older adults.  Then he gets to this summarizing paragraph.  I’m going to put in bold what I think were Steiner’s main points that he was driving at.

Still, it is well to be aware of the fact that by working mechanically we destroy what Nature has elaborated in so wonderful a way. You see bee-keeping has at all times been highly valued; in olden times especially, the bee was held to be a sacred animal. Why? It was so considered because in their whole activity, processes reveal themselves which also take place in man himself. If you take a piece of bees-wax in your hand you are in reality holding something between blood, muscle and bone, which in man's inner organisation passes through the stage of being wax. The wax does not however become solid, but remains fluidic till it is transformed into blood, or muscles, or into the cells of the bones. In the wax we have before us what we bear within us as forces, not as substance.

When men in olden times made candles of the bees-wax and lighted them, they knew that they performed a wonderful and sacred action: “This wax which we now burn we took from the hive; there it was hardened. When the fire melts it and it evaporates, then the wax passes into the same condition in which it is within our own bodies.”

In the melting wax of the candle men once apprehended something that rises up to the heavens, something that was also within their own bodies. This awoke a devotional mood in them, and this mood in its turn led them to look upon a bee as a specially sacred creature, because it prepares something which man must continually work out within himself. For this reason, the further back we go the more we find how men approached the bees with reverence.

Wow.  We’d better pause here, and I hope I’ve helped make some sense of Steiner’s wisdom.  Working with Steiner can feel dizzying because he does not conform at all to what we these days think of as “standard” ways to explain nature’s phenomena.  

And yet, perhaps we can all feel the reverence that still comes upon most people when a candle is lit.  That same reverence can be applied to the way we work with honeybees. . . and the way we work with each other and ourselves!

A picture of bone tissue on the microscopic level, and . . .

A close up of the comb of the ancient stingless bees. These are bees from Malaysia.