Wondering Wednesday Question and Answer #37

What did Rudolf Steiner say about honey bees? Part 6 (Fig Wasps!?)

This week for Wondering Wednesday, we will return to the task of making sense of Rudolf Steiner’s honey bee lectures.  He gave these lectures once a week on Saturdays to a group of beekeepers in Dornach.  We have arrived at Lecture 6, which was given on December 12, 1923.  I began to write this post on December 13, 2023, so Happy 100th Anniversary to these lectures! (although I didn’t finish until December 26.  Happy Boxing Day!)   After this, there will be three more to go, and so it’s a fun thought to me that for one day I synced up exactly 100 years and one day later with Steiner.

We’ve come quite a ways, building imaginative pictures of the honeybees. These pictures are intended as restorative alternatives to the ordinary mechanistic ways in which we picture and work with nature and the plants and animals that proliferate on our good Earth.  This lecture takes yet another step, that of broadening one’s view from honey bees to their cousins, the wasps.  Steiner knew well that bees, wasps and ants were insects that were all closely related to each other.  Much of the power of Steiner’s way of working lies in analogous imaginative pictures.  This is by necessity: If one is committed to not explaining “how nature works” by always resorting to neo-Platonic microscopic abstractions such as molecules and atoms, one must employ a different kind of thinking altogether.  Since that thinking cannot refer to imagined “absolute building blocks” as the constant source of explanation, one must instead work through observation and analogy.

It might be helpful here to remind us all of the difference between analogy and homology.  Analogy in biology implies that two organs or limbs or other structures come from different beginnings, but serve similar functions. So, for instance, the wings of a honeybee and the wings of a bird serve roughly the same function, flight (although as I’ve written about before flight in honeybees is so different from bird flight that we might do better to call it something completely different!), but those wings do not originate from anything like similar developmental beginnings.  By contrast, homology in biology occurs in structures that have similar embryological or developmental origins, but differ in their final form and usage.  For example, the flippers of a whale and the human arm and hand are homologous structures that can be recognized as very similar in their embryological development, but end up looking quite different and serving different functions in the developed human or whale.

In this lecture, Steiner is using both analogy and homology.  He is sharing some really interesting wasp lore in order to shed even more light on the imaginative picture of the honeybee.  The ultimate goal here seems to be to build the imagination that what wasps do in their lifecycles in partnership with trees, bees do in a self-contained way, and therefore bees in a certain sense take over some of the functions of trees and even reproduce some aspects of tree-ness in order to live their lives.

Steiner begins with some comments about wasps in general, in particular the lifecycle practice of many wasps of laying eggs in tree leaves, which form galls.  The galls are a transformation of the leaf substance that creates a protective nurturing womb for the developing wasp.  So, wasps have this ability to activate or harness certain energies of trees to serve their own lifecycle, without usually harming the tree in the process, or in some cases helping the trees symbiotically.  

After these introductory comments about wasps, Steiner’s lecture hones in to tell the assembled beekeepers specifically about the fig wasp.  I knew absolutely nothing about fig wasps, and I must say, first of all: it’s so cool how they live!  And second, I am amazed that Steiner knew so much about it.  In my view, this is one of the most amazing things about Steiner: that he had such a breadth of knowledge, and that, furthermore, he could see analogous and homologous connections between observations that on the surface appear so different or disconnected to the modern mind.

You can click the above link to learn more about fig wasps and see some more cool photos, but in brief here is their amazing symbiotic life-cycle: Fig wasps are the pollinating species of the fig trees, and each type of fig tree has its own fig wasp.  Those that study fig wasps see them as a beautiful example of co-evolution of species.  The one cannot do without the other.  In fact, one could think of the fig tree and the fig wasp as two aspects of a single life form, really.  Fig wasps are really, really tiny.  When figs are flowering and it’s time to reproduce, the female wasp burrows into the flower. Fig flowers are also very tiny and numerous, and, get this: they open inward, rather than pointing outward.  Inside this self-enclosed flower, the female wasp lays her eggs.  She then dies inside the developing fruit (and the fig digests her body!), but in the process she has pollinated the fig flowers with pollen that she carried with her from the fruit she was born in.  Amazing! This new fig fruit develops and nurtures the eggs and larvae, which then hatch, burrow out of the fig (but don’t really damage the fruit), and then start the process over again.

This is amazing enough.  But then, Steiner take it further and describes an ancient practice that traditional fig growers use to make their cultivated figs even sweeter, by utilizing wild fig trees:

Now the grower of the figs is in his way a clever fellow; he lets the wasps lay their eggs in the wild figs which he cultivates just for this very purpose. Later this fellow gathers two of these figs, just at the moment when the wasp eggs are not quite fully developed, when the wasps are not yet ready to creep out, and he takes a reed and ties the two figs together so that they are held firmly. And now he goes to a fig tree that he wants to improve, and he hangs the two figs he has tied together, and within which are the eggs of the wasp not yet fully developed, and binds them on to the fig-tree which he wishes to sweeten. And now the following happens: the wasps within the figs feel that something has happened, for the figs which were gathered now begin to dry up, for they are no longer supplied with the sap of the tree, and get very dry. The immature wasp inside senses this, even the egg is aware of it, and the result is that the wasp is in a terrible hurry to come out of the fig. The grower always starts this process in the spring; he first lets the wasp lay its eggs, and in the month of May he quickly gathers the two figs and carries out his plan. The little creature inside thinks, now I must hurry up, now the time has come when the figs dry up. In a terrible hurry the wasp emerges much earlier than it would otherwise have done. If the fig had remained where it was before, it would only have crept out in the late summer; now it must creep out in the early summer with the result that there is a second brood. It lays eggs in the summer which would otherwise have been laid in the following spring. Now these late eggs which are deposited on the tree that is to be further cultivated, do not reach full maturity, they only develop to a certain stage. The result of this is, that those figs into which the second brood has been placed become twice as sweet as the wild figs. This is the method of improving the figs, of making them twice as sweet.

Wow! Things like this boggle the modern mind, don’t they? First, that ancient fig growers would have such a close working knowledge of the pollinators of their fig trees; and second that they would have worked out a way to induce the fig wasps, using their natural life cycle and in partnership with wild fig trees, to make their cultivated figs even sweeter!  In our modern day, obsessed with “scientific data-driven results,” we are clueless as to how humans might have worked this out.  The only conclusion I can make is that humans had certain direct abilities to perceive nature that we have largely lost today.

Steiner, again working by analogy, is saying that what the wasp does with the tree as its cousin, the honeybee can do on its own.

You see, gentlemen, we arrive here at something very interesting. It seems that these wasps have a body which is unable to gather the nectar, the honey-substance from Nature, and transform it into honey within itself. But man can bring it about that from one fig-tree to another a kind of honey-making takes place. The bee is therefore a creature that develops a wasp-like body so much further that it is able to accomplish this quite apart from the trees; in the case of the wasp the process must be left within the tree itself. So we must say: the bee retains within itself more of that force which the wasp only possesses at a very young stage, as long, that is, as it is in the egg, or larval state. When the wasp develops further it loses the power of producing honey; the bee retains it and can make use of it as a fully matured creature.

So we can say: when we study this special cultivation of the fig trees we discover a kind of honey production in Nature that has not yet appeared openly, for the honey remains within the figs. The bees, if I may so express it, bring out into the open what remains still within Nature in the sweetened figs.

Steiner then points out that the cultivated fig trees themselves actually create more wax than the wild trees.  Something about the “sweetening process” has made the tree more waxy, too.  This leads finally to the fully-formed imagination that Steiner is painting here (my emphasis below).

You have only to look at it gentlemen, and you will say to yourselves — the bees with their waxen combs really show us a kind of artistically formed tree-trunk with its many branches. The bee does not need to go to the tree to lay her eggs there, but they build for themselves a kind of picture of a tree, and in the place of the figs growing there, she puts honey into the finished cells. We find, as it were, a copy of the artificially cultivated fig tree which the bees have made.

I’ve known for a long time that honeybees were “tree creatures,” but this takes it to a new level.  Rather than simply living in trees, Steiner is saying that something about the honeybee is a recapitulation or a harnessing of what began as “tree powers” to make nature’s sweetness.  Honeybees, Steiner is saying, can be thought of as “cultivated wasps” that have taken within themselves some of the powers that trees have developed, and in the process make hives that in structure and substance reproduce certain tree qualities.  In fact, in one passage, Steiner seems to suggest that perhaps, long ago, this is exactly how humans brought about honeybees in the first place: through cultivating wasps and their host trees!  A fascinating possibility to imagine!

As always, I welcome your responses, curiosity and questioning.  Thank you!

A tiny fig wasp with her humongous ovipositor doing her thing. Photo taken from this website.

Honeycomb filling a hollow tree trunk. Taken from this website.