Wondering Wednesday Q&A #28
What did Rudolf Steiner say about honey bees? Part 3
This week on Wondering Wednesdays we are going to take another meaty bite out of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on honeybees. Today we’ll dive into lecture 3.
I am finding it a pleasant challenge to try to work through Steiner’s honeybee lectures. In addition to just trying to understand the ideas more deeply, one can see Steiner’s mature thought borne of a lifetime of working anti-materialistically. Steiner gave these lectures in November and December of 1923, which turned out to be just a year and half away from his eventual death. By this time he had inspired or co-founded all manner of initiatives including Waldorf schools, biodynamic farming, Camphill communities, eurythmy and speech art forms, and more. The inspirational effect of Steiner’s work and writing are truly amazing, and worthy of our attention. Almost 100 years after his death, Steiner’s work still represents a body of knowledge that the mainstream world is largely ignorant of, and could deeply benefit from in order to counter the effects of deadened materialistic thinking. We literally need to think our way out of a dead universe into one that is, in fact, bursting with life to the farthest reaches!
In my previous two posts, I took you through the first and second halves of lecture 2. Part 1 was an imagination of the bees as sun-beings living in a healthy tension here on earth, yet living their lives largely in a state of twilight. Part 2 built up the idea that human beings have recognized a special connection to honeybees for thousands of years because they sensed that what honeybees did and created in the physical world, humans were making within themselves as forces. So, lighting a beeswax candle was a sacred experience of recognizing the inner world manifested in the outer: much more than just a way to see in the dark!
Lecture three is another whirlwind tour through a number of topics that would make a traditional scientist seasick, but a major focus is on the senses of the honeybee, and of insects in general. My last post about honeybee navigation was very much influenced by my reading of this lecture, and so if you read that one, that may help with understanding what's coming.
In this lecture, Steiner seems to be having a bit of fun being rather snarky about a particular scientific study that had been recently published in a science journal. The authors were claiming experiments with ants led them to conclude that ants could “see” in the ultraviolet spectrum. Steiner pulls the conclusion of this study apart and in the process teases out the scientific findings (which he says are generally valid) from what he sees as the wildly inaccurate conclusions. Here are a few selections to give you a flavor:
But [the ants] need to see [ultraviolet rays] just as little as the barium platino-cyanide needs to see in order to shine. All one can really say is, that given a certain substance it produces an effect on the ants. More than that one cannot assert. The scientists concerned are as thoughtless as it is possible to be and make statements that are pure phantasy. . . .
What this article is really concerned with is effects of a chemical nature. . .
The bee senses the warmth of red and the cold of blue, and then it can naturally distinguish between them. But one is not therefore justified in concluding that the bee sees with its eyes in the way man does. This of course is utter nonsense. But so it is with many other things that people think. . .
As to the facts, the experiments are correct, but one must be clear that one cannot draw conclusions such as Forel and Kühn have actually done. To do so is a totally thoughtless way of following up the experiments. Then people say: “this has been proved beyond contradiction.” Naturally, but only for those who ascribe a soul to the mouse-trap!
Steiner's main thrust of this lecture is the idea that just because bees or ants physically react to light of certain wavelengths in experiments, this does not mean that they can “see” those colors in any similar way to how we see them. By way of analogy, he introduces a fascinating discussion of how a chemical, barium platino-cyanide, shines in ultraviolet light. UV light in general causes a number of chemical reactions, whereas infrared does not. The story of barium platino-cyanide is an interesting historical one, some explanation of which can be found here. It was key to the initial discovery of x-rays! The idea here is that barium platino-cyanide is not a living thing, and yet reacts to UV light by glowing. So reacting alone is not an indication of “seeing”.
Another analogy Steiner makes is between a Venus flytrap plant and a mousetrap. The idea is the same. Just because a Venus flytrap plant can react to the presence of an insect and trap it, does not mean it “has a soul” as Steiner puts it, no more than a mousetrap does. Not long ago I came across an interesting TED Ed demonstration of Venus flytraps, and so the fascination with these plants continues, along with the speculative conclusions about what their abilities signify! However, this speaker also admits that the Venus flytrap “does not have a brain”. He spends a lot of time speaking about action potentials, which are electro-chemical in nature.
Steiner goes on to make two more analogies, one to a house cat that can sense a mouse even when it is asleep (because of its tremendously sensitive sense of smell), and another one about police dogs and their amazing smelling abilities. It all adds up to a picture of an animal world where we cannot make any assumptions about what they see, smell, hear by comparison with human senses. And, you might not be surprised to learn that Steiner wrote books about the nature of the human senses. He identified not five but twelve distinct human senses. Perhaps more on that another time.
Steiner has a nice description that I find to be very accurate about what actually happens when you open up a beehive. And, in characteristic style, it is in the form of an imagination:
Try to form a vivid picture of the bee receiving chemical reactions from the light which it feels terribly strongly. When you, as a human being, approach and let the light in, suddenly making it light everywhere, this affects the bee as a strong gust of air affects you; it is just as if you opened the window and a strong draught were to blow in. The bee senses the light, it does not feel that it becomes light all round it, but it senses the light as a concussion, it is quite shattered by it. One could almost say,. . . the bees become terribly nervous, inwardly restless. They are thrown into these chemical workings of the light and begin to fly hither and thither almost like little swallows. They dance up and down as a sign of how restless they feel within. The bees would not behave in such a highly nervous way if they could see the light; they would then try to hide away, to creep into a corner where the light could not thus affect them.
This description really matches my own experience of opening up a beehive. Upon opening and exposure to the light from outside, they really do run around “hither and thither”. Nothing about their behavior indicates that they “see” the light, or see me. But it is clearly an intensely stimulating experience for them.
All of this is pointing to what I hope will be an interesting through-line discussion that I’d like to begin now. It may continue across a number of posts: If honeybees can exhibit such amazingly complex behaviors, and yet individual honeybees really can’t “see” in anything like the way we think of seeing in humans; and if they have very tiny “brains” that really can’t be thought of as anything similar to human or mammalian brains, and so individual honey bees also can’t be said to be “thinking” either . . . then how is their highly complex behavior manifesting at all?
In a recent conversation with my fellow Steiner-enthusiast and biology teacher, Peter, I ran this question by him and we had a highly stimulating discussion about it, some of which I’d like to share below. Peter differentiated between thinking, which may be defined as something like “free action of an individual responding in an original manner to its conditions’, and what we ended up calling “wisdom,” which is more what honeybees, venus flytraps, cats and dogs exhibit. In my post about honeybee navigation, I wrote:
Rather, it seems to me much more likely that the sun, flowers, plants, sky and a host of other influences that are invisible to us are not only the stimuli but to a certain extent the drivers of the navigating bee. In a nutshell, one can take the bee out of the field, but one can’t take the field out of the bee.
This means that one has to take seriously that the honey bee hive’s wisdom comes from the surroundings themselves. And by “surroundings” I mean all the surroundings, including the air, soil, trees, plants, flowers, sun, moon, stars, and many influences which are invisible to us . . . everything. In these materialistic times, we are so accustomed to assuming that such “distant objects” as the sun, moon and stars can’t affect things here on earth directly. Yet our modern conceptions of the distance of those objects does not change the fact that those very heavens are immediately accessible to the honeybee and to all living things on earth, that they have evolved under the influence of all of these surroundings, and that those surroundings seem to be the most likely source of the honey bee hives’ wisdom or abilities . . . as well as that of the Venus flytrap, house cat and police dog!
Entertaining this idea, that the wisdom of nature resides not in the “stuff” (subatomic particles and forces etc) but in the surroundings (often called by Steiner the periphery) is a great first step to opening oneself up to anti-materialistic working. There is a rich vein here that I’d like to write about someday, hopefully with my friends Peter and Jeremy. It involves, among other things, studying a fascinating field of mathematics called Projective Geometry, which can give you a feel for just how exact (and yet at the same time mind-bending) the working of the periphery can be.
Materialists here would have a pat answer something like this: “Random selection brought about by the interactions of living things (which are themselves just random self-organizations of molecules) over millennia has made a variety of organisms that have a number of complex behaviors. These behaviors achieve what we perceive to be meaningful actions, but that’s just our anthropomorphizing of what is really an entirely meaningless process that only perpetuates itself because of natural selection for desirable traits.” Phew. It’s exhausting even trying to express this convoluted point of view. It’s a wonder to me that it’s so prevalent! Isn’t it much easier and more direct to say that the wisdom of nature’s workings is infused everywhere and comes streaming into all living things, giving them all of their incredible varieties of behaviors and qualities? Easier, but perhaps harder to picture, since so few of us have practice with this way of thinking.
OK, enough for one post. Working with Steiner is a workout! I hope you can spend some time considering the wisdom that permeates your entire surroundings, directing everything, including the Venus flytrap and the honeybees.
Photo by Juliana Barquero on Unsplash