Nova: Tales from the Hive

The lowly bee, tireless builder and forager. Or greedy gigolo. Or sperm-bloated queen. It depends. But like any society, the hive has its hierarchies, and most of the thousands of bees toil for the comfort of the few, slaves to a will far greater than theirs.

In his inimitable, pseudo-mystical study of bees, Maurice Maeterlinck implored,

"Let it be enough that we note the persistent care with which nature preserves, and fixes in the evolving race, all that has been won from the hostile inertia of matter. She records each happy effort, and contrives we know not what special and benevolent laws to counteract the inevitable recoil. This progress, whose existence among the most intelligent species can scarcely be denied, has perhaps no aim beyond its initial impetus, and knows not whither it goes. But at least, in a world where nothing save a few facts of this kind indicate a precise will, it is significant enough that we should see certain creatures rising thus, slowly and continuously; and should the bees have revealed to us only this mysterious spiral of light in the overpowering darkness, that were enough to induce us not to regret the time we have given to their little gestures and humble habits, which seem so far away and are yet so nearly akin to our grand passions and arrogant destinies.

It may be that these things are all vain; and that our own spiral of light, no less than that of the bees, has been kindled for no other purpose save that of amusing the darkness."

In Molloy, Samuel Beckett also wrote about bees, having his studious watcher exclaim, upon examining the apiary shudder bees make to communicate the direction and distance to food for other bees,

"And in spite of all the pains I had lavished on these problems, I was more than ever stupefied by the complexity of this innumerable dance, involving doubtless other determinants of which I had not the slightest idea. And I said, with rapture, Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand."

Brilliant men have written about bees, and for good reason. Being largely ignorant of tiny stinging creatures, I can add little to the conversation, except this lone metaphysical stumper: bees are driven to gather food in excess of anything they, or their hive, or any imaginable number of other bees, can consume; they forage seemingly for some remote principle of Life too intangible to have any intellectual reality for the bees themselves. They have no idea why they do this, no notion beyond instinct of what compels them to return to the flowers when they no longer want or need food. In their unthinking way, they are conquering time, defying death, and accomplishing their little souls in a manner infinitely more powerful and mysterious than the queen's, or our, crudely practical innovation of new beings in her body. B for movie, A+ for the bees.