Wondering Wednesday Q & A #22
What did Rudolf Steiner have to say about honeybees?
What did Rudolf Steiner have to say about honeybees?
Well, dear readers, when I put the call out for your questions, I received two votes to get into the esoteric world of Rudolf Steiner's indications about honey bees, so let's buckle up and dive in!
A warning that there is going to be some significant preamble ahead, as I find I haven't written much about Steiner's background, and, taken out of context, his words may appear rather ridiculous, or even childish. Steiner himself was often giving this same disclaimer when he spoke to more public, mixed audiences, trying to reassure his listeners that he wasn't a charlatan, nor a dilettante. I don’t believe he was either of these, but that doesn’t make him easy to understand!
If I had to put Steiner's life's work into one nutshell (impossible!), I'd call him in today's language a practicing anti-materialist. Steiner called himself a “spiritual scientist” and I think this is a pretty apt synonym. The word "spiritual" is loaded for lots of people these days, and it was in Steiner's time, too, in a different way. For our purposes, I think it's sufficient to sum up Steiner's approach like this: the materialistic approach to understanding the universe is false because it is one-sided and intentionally blind to whole areas of experience; non-material realities are just as much in play, and in fact underpin what we experimentally find in the physical sciences. These non-material realities we will call “spiritual”. And these spiritual realities can be investigated scientifically in the same way we investigate the physical world (although not with the same instruments), with focused attention, logic, repeatable demonstrable results, and even dependable rules and laws that can be found to govern the ways of spiritual working.
Easy peasy to understand, yes? Well, no. What Steiner spent his life doing was revolutionary, and it still is today. If you admit the existence of non-physical realities that are actually investigatable (as opposed to vague notions of spirit that come only through New-Agey or religious trappings or superstitions), then walls start tumbling down between concepts that we materialists like to keep separate. Things like the movement of the stars and our notions of time itself, or a flower blooming and the human capacity to love, or. . .honeybees and the Sun.
OK, preamble accomplished (although there is so, so much more to say about Steiner’s spiritual science, which he came to call “anthroposophy,” but let’s leave it there for now). Now, what did Steiner say about honeybees? Well, in characteristic Steiner style, he said a lot! In fact there is an entire lecture series that Steiner gave all about honeybees. In those lectures he gave highest priority to the task of saving and protecting the honeybee-human relationship. In his typical prescient way, years before it was confirmed by data, Steiner said that if the honeybee disappeared from the Earth, humans would suffer quick mass starvation. This intense dependence we have on honeybee and native bee pollination for our staple crops worldwide has been now pretty well demonstrated (so much so that there are "serious" scientific efforts to create robotic bees that can take the place of bees if we lose them forever. I put “serious” in quotes because I think such efforts are deeply misguided to the point of being laughable. We want to make bee robots instead of just deepening our relationship with the honeybees we have?! But this extreme hubris is a hallmark of materialism gone wild.)
Ok, now, let's actually begin to see what Steiner says then, shall we? I'm going to start with lecture 2 (if you’d like to read the lecture in full, here it is), and this is going to be a series of multiple posts, for sure (I think I’ll break it up with other questions, in the coming weeks, and give you little doses of Steiner’s honeybee lectures throughout this coming summer.). Steiner lectures are dense and weird to our modern ears in their progression and construction, for all the reasons outlined above. I'm convinced he did this quite intentionally, but it makes wrapping one's mind and heart around it awkward.
Here are Steiner's main points from the first half of lecture 2. Once I've listed them, we'll discuss!
He starts with a number of comments about the shape of the hexagonal cells, and how the form of these cells is very significant for the development of the bee. The form is more than just a convenient use of space (a hexagon mathematically is known to be the most efficient way to tile a plane without overlap, with a minimum of wasted space). The hexagonal cell shapes the life of the bees themselves. Significantly, queens are not formed in hexagonal cells, but in larger queen cells that are shaped more like a sac.
There is a deep and direct relationship between the time of development of each type of bee (queen, worker, drone) and the rotational period of the Sun (the time it takes the Sun to rotate on its axis, which is about 21 days). The worker develops in exactly one Sun rotation, the drone is more than one (24 days), and the queen in less than one (18 days). This has deep implications for how “sunny” or “earthy” each kind of bee is in the hive. In general, we should understand bees as “sun-beings,” or “sun-insects”. But the queen to some degree “stays in the sun” her whole life, having matured in less than one sun cycle, while the workers are saturated with "all the sun can give”. The drones take the longest to mature, more than one sun-cycle and so have the “earth element” in the hive.
The “earthiness” of the drone gives it the power to fertilize the queen, so fertilization is an earthly power, but the egg-making ability of the queen is a power of the sun. All the workers and the queen belong to the sun in a way that the drones do not, but they need the drones to fertilize the hive with earthly powers whenever there is a new queen in need of mating. So, they tolerate the drones for this important function, but regard the drones as somewhat “other” from the rest of the hive.
Honey bees have five eyes, two compound eyes, one on each side of the head, and three in the middle of their forehead. But, in truth, they use their eyes very little. To find nectar and pollen, they primarily use “something between a sense of taste and smell”. Their eyes come into usage only when a new queen is formed in preparation for swarming. Many workers then see the new queen as made of pure sunlight with their eyes and find the sight very uncomfortable. (This is probably where Steiner really departs from standard materialistic science and starts working in a way that science today would not like at all)
The poison that worker bees have inside them is what keeps them safe, contained and usually keeps them from seeing. But a new queen formed in the hive breaks through their safe enclosed world and shows them sights that they don’t like. This starts the swarming process.
A full quote from Steiner:
“If I were to describe to you in a pictorial form what the bee experiences when a new Queen slips out of her sack-like cell, I should have to say: “The bee lives always in the twilight, and finds its way about by means of a sense between taste and smell; it lives in a twilight congenial to it. But when the new Queen appears it is exactly like when we walk in the twilight of a June evening, and the little glow-worms are shining.” Even so does the new Queen shine for the swarm, because the poison does not work strongly enough to keep the bees in their twilight seclusion from the world. It keeps within it even when it flies out, because it is then able with its poison to keep within itself. It needs the poison when it fears something from outside may disturb it. The whole colony desires to be entirely within itself.”
Got all that? Phew! Taking a ride with Steiner is a trip. What can we make of all this? Steiner is presenting known facts about honey bee type, gestation periods, cell formation, poison, vision and swarming and then painting an anti-materialistic picture of what the real invisible connections are that explain honeybee behavior in a way that includes the whole context.
He makes much of the fact that when a new queen needs to mate (she only mates once at the beginning of her life), she flies up back toward the sun (her real home), while the earthly drones chase her to mate with her. The drones that mate then die, having served their purpose. Each mating flight is then a kind of re-marriage between earth and sun, and the hive lives in that tension. This strikes me as a very beautiful idea.
We are so accustomed to science describing the form, behavior and capabilities of living things as coming entirely from the atoms, molecules, enzymes, and proteins that make up their bodies. But Steiner, as he says above, is giving us a view of the honeybee in “pictorial form.” The listeners/readers are supposed to picture what is being described themselves, as actively and livingly as they can. It’s the process of picturing that gives you insight into the honeybee, not any particular attachment to the “scientific facts”.
So, spend some time with the paragraph above and picture it! What insights does it bring to you? I will do the same as I work with the bees. The first thought that comes to my mind is that I’ve always wondered why bees, when you pull their frames out to inspect them, largely ignore you. They just go about their business, they don’t want to be disturbed. It’s interesting for me to think that this has something to do with an intentional “congenial twilight” that is maintained by their inner poison! If this is true, then the drones would be able to see me better than the workers, as they have no stinger and no poison. I will have to put that up to experiment sometime soon! It’s also often fascinated me that bees forage in the sun, but spend nearly their entire lives in the dark!
Wow, that was only half of lecture 2! The second half deals with how everything that happens in the hive outwardly is a picture that we could use to imagine what happens inwardly in . . . human beings! But that will be for next time I write about Steiner’s honeybee lectures.
Thank you! Very interesting. Looking forward to future installments!
Brian- Thank you for sharing Rudolf Steiner’s wisdom on honeybees. You did a excellent job communicating key points from Steiner’s second lecture in an efficient, accessible, and engaging manner. Not an easy task! You are a wonderful teacher, thinker, and caring person.