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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'Popular science at its most accessible: fun, fascinating and full of engaging pen portraits of the scientists and bee enthusiasts he meets in the course of his research' Melissa Harrison, Guardian 'A smooth and accessible account of the insects that provide a significant amount of what we eat, introducing their fascinating diversity of behaviour. A reminder of why bees are wonders that we must protect.' Matt Shardlow, BBC Wildlife Bees are like oxygen: ubiquitous, essential, and, for the most part, unseen. While we might overlook them, they lie at the heart of relationships that bind the human and natural worlds. In Buzz, the award-winning author of Feathers and The Triumph of Seeds takes us on a journey that begins 125 million years ago, when a wasp first dared to feed pollen to its young. From honeybees and bumbles to lesser-known diggers, miners, leafcutters, and masons, bees have long been central to our harvests, our mythologies, and our very existence. They've given us sweetness and light, the beauty of flowers, and as much as a third of the foodstuffs we eat. And, alarmingly, they are at risk of disappearing. As informative and enchanting as the waggle dance of a honeybee, Buzz shows us why all bees are wonders to celebrate and protect. Read this book and you'll never overlook them again.
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Praise for Buzz
‘Thor Hanson writes with the infectious enthusiasm of one encountering wonders for the first time; less a teacher than a fellow traveller on a shared voyage of discovery. Surely among the finest nature writers of our time – whatever subject Hanson turns his hand to, the result is spellbinding.’
Katrina Van Grouw, author of The Unfeathered Bird and Unnatural Selection
‘Thor Hanson is a gifted story teller and naturalist. In Buzz, he takes us along on a wondrous, action-packed journey to discover the secret lives of bees, flowers, and the unconventional men and women who study them. This book really is the buzz about bees, and it’s destined to become a natural history classic.’
Stephen Buchmann, author of The Reason for Flowers
‘Thor Hanson is a magician at making entomology and taxonomy exciting, highlighting the fascinating world of bees. Buzz hums with science and history, exposing how bees have shaped our world. A delightful, buzzworthy must-read!’
Daniel Chamovitz, author of What a Plant Knows
‘This book is a joy. In it, Thor Hanson reminds us that the story of bees is the story of the origin of societies, of sweetness and collapse, of flowers and their sex, and of the humans who study all of these things. It is a story of evolution and biodiversity, a story that bears on much of the food we eat but also so very much else. Buy it. Read it. Read it again. And when you do, you will look out at the buzzing world anew.’
Rob Dunn, author of Never Home Alone and The Wild Life of Our Bodies
‘This beautifully written natural history book, brought to us by a graceful and talented author, packs surprise after surprise with every turn of the page. Who knew bees were just evolved wasps? Or that ancient Egyptians ferried bees up and down the Nile to pollinate their crops? Don’t pass this one up.’
Wendy Williams, author of The Horse
‘As he did for feathers and seeds, Thor Hanson has written a wonderfully engaging work of natural history that will delight readers with its elegant prose, surprising stories, and deep humanity. Bees, so important to life on earth, are fortunate to have someone as passionate and knowledgeable as Hanson tell the tale of their evolutionary past, turbulent present, and precarious future. After reading Buzz, you will look at bees with a profound mixture of awe and gratitude.’
Eric Jay Dolin, author of Black Flags, Blue Waters, and Leviathan
For Noah
Contents
Author’s Note
Although honeybees make many appearances in these pages, I want to state right up front that this book is not specifically about them. There will be no detailed descriptions of the waggle dance, swarming, or their many other unique and fascinating behaviors for the simple reason that those topics have been well covered elsewhere. Writers dating back as far as Virgil, and including at least two Nobel Prize winners, have produced hundreds of excellent volumes focused entirely on honeybees. This book, in contrast, celebrates bees in general, from leafcutters and bumbles to masons, miners, diggers, carpenters, wool-carders, and more. Honeybees feature as part of that panoply, but in this story, as in nature, they must share the stage.
Also, at the risk of vexing my entomologist friends, I’ve chosen to use certain words informally in this volume. Any insect might be referred to as a “bug,” for example, rather than just those found in the order Hemiptera. Technical terms that couldn’t be avoided are included in a glossary at the end, where readers will also find an illustrated guide to bee families, a bibliography of helpful references, and a collection of chapter notes. I heartily recommend the notes. They’re full of intriguing tidbits that fell just outside the flow of the narrative—things like nectar pirates, date honey, and how the fuzzy-horned bumblebee got its name.
Acknowledgments
While writing books may sound like a solitary affair, it can only happen with the help and support of many skilled people. As always, I am indebted to my fantastic agent and guide through the literary labyrinth, Laura Blake Peterson, and once again I’ve had the great fortune to work with T. J. Kelleher and his crack team at Basic Books, including Carrie Napolitano, Nicole Caputo, Isabelle Bleeker, Sandra Beris, Kathy Streckfus, Isadora Johnson, Betsy DeJesu, Trish Wilkinson, and no doubt many others behind the scenes. I’m grateful to all the scientists, farmers, orchardists, and other experts who shared their stories and explained their work to me—any mistakes in the descriptions herein are mine and mine alone.
I would also like to thank, in no particular order, the following generous people and organizations who have boosted this project along in various ways, with apologies to anyone inadvertently forgotten: Michael Engel, Robbin Thorp, Brian Griffin, Gretchen LeBuhn, Jerry Rasmussen, Jerry Rozen, Rigoberto Vargas, Laurence Packer, Sam Droege, Steve Buchmann, David Roubik, Connor Ginley, Butch Norden, Beth Norden, John Thompson, Seán Brady, Carla Dove, William Sutherland, Sophie Rouys, Patrick Kirby, Günter Gerlach, Gabriel Bernadello, Anne Bruce, Sue Tank, Graham Stone, Brian Brown, Alyssa Crittenden, Gaynor Hannan, George Ball, Mike Foxon, the Lyminge Historical Society, Martin Grimm, Robert Kajobe, Derek Keats, Jamie Strange, Diana Cox-Foster, Scott Hoffman Black, Ann Potter, the San Juan Preservation Trust, Dean Dougherty, Rob Roy McGregor, Larry Brewer, Uma Partap, Eric Lee-Mäder, Matthew Shepherd, Mace Vaughan, the San Juan Island Library, Heidi Lewis, the University of Idaho Library, Tim Wagoner, Mark Wagoner, Sharla Wagoner, Dave Goulson, Phil Green, Chris Looney, Jim Cane, Cameron Newell, Kitty Bolte, the Xerces Society, Bradley Baugher, Baugher Ranch Organics, Jonathan Koch, Steve Alboucq, and Chris Shields.
Finally, I am ever thankful for the unwavering support and patience of my wife, my son, my extended family, and a wonderful community of friends.
Preface
A Bee in the Hand
Full merrily the humble-bee doth sing, Till he hath lost his honey and his sting.
—William Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602)
The crossbow fired with a dull thwack and we watched its bolt disappear upward into the leaves and branches, trailing a length of monofilament fishing line that glinted in the scattered beams of sunlight. My field assistant looked up from the bow’s sight and nodded in satisfaction, feeding out more line from a spinning reel duct-taped to the front grip. For him, this was all in a day’s work, the standard procedure for helping biologists position ropes and research equipment high up in Costa Rica’s rainforest canopy. For me, it marked a turning point. Within minutes, a colleague and I had hoisted our insect trap into position, and for the first time in my career, I was officially studying bees. Or at least trying to.
The project didn’t exactly go as planned. Days of shooting arrows at trees and hauling up various contraptions produced only a handful of specimens, mostly from one exciting moment when a dangling trap knocked into a nest and the whole hive attacked. The situation was infuriating—not only for all the wasted time and effort, but because I knew the bees were up there. I could see them clearly in the reams of genetic data I’d collected on the very trees where we were setting our traps. By comparing DNA from the adult trees to that of their seeds, I knew that pollen was moving around all over the place—not just among neighboring individuals, but between trees nearly a mile and a half (2.3 kilometers) apart. And because those trees belonged to the pea family, I knew that their clusters of purple flowers were designed for bee pollination, just like the vetches, clovers, sweet peas, and other common varieties back home in Washington State. In the end, I had to admit defeat, but the experience sparked a fascination that wouldn’t rest. I immediately sought out courses on the taxonomy and behavior of bees, and I’ve looked for ways to chase after them—in my work and in daily life—ever since. Sometimes, I even catch a few.
Like anyone else interested in bees, I’ve followed recent trends with an increasing sense of worry. Since beekeepers first reported signs of “Colony Collapse Disorder” in 2006, millions of domestic honeybee hives have simply winked out. Investigators point to a variety of causes, from pesticides to parasites, and have also uncovered steep declines in many wild species. With news reports, documentaries, and even a presidential task force ringing the alarm bells, public awareness of the situation has perhaps never been higher. But what do we really know of bees? Even experts often stumble over the details. Once, while listening to the radio in my car, I heard a noted historian of science describing how early colonists arriving at Jamestown and Plymouth brought honeybees with them from Europe. If they hadn’t, he explained, there would have been nothing to pollinate their crops. I nearly drove off the road! What about the four thousand species of native bees already buzzing happily around North America? But that’s not the worst of it. On the bookshelf in my office, I keep a hardbound copy of the volume The Bees of the World. It was written by well-regarded entomologists and published by a good nonfiction press, and the cover features a lovely close-up photograph … of a fly.
It’s often said that bees provide every third bite of food in the human diet, but like so many of the natural wonders we rely on, they now fly mostly under the radar. In 1912, British entomologist Frederick William Lambert Sladen observed, “Everyone knows the burly, good-natured bumble-bee.” That may have been true in the English countryside of Sladen’s day, but a century later we find ourselves more familiar with the plight of bees than with the bees themselves. I once conducted a study in the patches of seaside prairie that lie just down the road from my house. I had a small grant to help answer one of biology’s most basic questions: What’s out there? Because, although I live within a day’s journey of six research universities in two countries, we still don’t have a good list of the local bees. The forty-five species I collected that season are just a start. Luckily for all of us, reconnecting with bees can be as easy as walking out our front doors on a summer day, wherever we happen to live. Filter out the commotion of modern life, and you can still hear them buzzing—those ubiquitous but overlooked visitors to every patch of open ground, from orchards, farms, and forests to city parks, vacant lots, highway verges, and backyard gardens. It’s also lucky that what we do know about bees makes for an irresistible story. It begins with ancient specimens trapped in amber and soon moves on to honey-loving birds, the origin of flowers, mimicry, cuckoos, scent plumes, impossible aerodynamics, and, quite possibly, a major step in our own evolution.
Bees today certainly need our help, but just as importantly, they need our curiosity. Exploring the history and biology of these essential creatures can transform anyone into an enthusiast, and that is the purpose of this book. But I hope you will do more than read it. I hope it makes you want to go straight outside on the next sunny day, find a bee on a flower, and settle down to watch. If you do, you might just find yourself daring to reach out and catch that bee the same way my young son has done since the age of three—bare-handed. Try this and you, too, can feel the tickle of tiny feet and the whispery rustle of wings on your palm before you slowly part your fingers, hold the bee up, and set it free.
INTRODUCTION
The Buzz About Bees
To lie and listen—till o’er-drowsed sense Sinks, hardly conscious of the influence— To the soft murmur of the vagrant Bee.
—William Wordsworth “Vernal Ode” (1817)
Nobody trusts an exoskeleton. The mere sight of insects and other arthropods can trigger a measurable fear reaction in the human brain. Often, synapses associated with disgust also light up. Psychologists believe these feelings are innate, an evolutionary response to something that might bite, sting, or transmit disease. But there is also a deep sense of otherness about those brittle, segmented bodies: even from a safe distance, we know that such creatures would give a sickening crunch if stepped upon. Mammals like us belong to the vertebrates, animals who all share the chaste trait of tucking their structural parts out of sight inside the body in the form of bones. Technically, putting the hard bits on the outside may be the better evolutionary strategy—arthropod species outnumber vertebrates by more than twenty to one. But the fact remains that people find exoskeletons creepy, particularly since they so often go along with faceted eyes, waving antennae, and multiple, scrabbling legs. Filmmakers understand this, which is why Ridley Scott based the terrifying monsters in Alien on insects and marine invertebrates rather than puppies, and why the scariest creature in The Lord of the Rings was not a pig-like orc or a cave troll, but Shelob, the giant spider. Even trained professionals sometimes fall prey to this squeamishness. In his book The Infested Mind, career entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood confessed to abandoning his research—and transferring to the philosophy department—after the grasshoppers he was studying suddenly overwhelmed him in a teeming swarm.
Too often, our interactions with arthropods end in a swatting motion, or even a call to the local exterminator. When we do make exceptions, they usually involve bugs that don’t really look like bugs—butterflies that dazzle us with brilliant, colorful wings; woolly-bear caterpillars trudging along cheerfully under their furry tiger stripes; or ladybird beetles, beloved for what can only be described as unmitigated cuteness. People like crickets, too, but probably because their musical chirps can be enjoyed from a distance on a summer evening, without ever having to actually see one. In economic terms, the silk moth is appreciated for its valuable fibers, and we owe the entire world production of shellac to a small Asian scale bug, but our attitude toward insects is probably best expressed by global spending on pesticides, which currently tops US$65 billion a year.
In the context of this general unease, the human connection to bees stands apart. With large, protruding eyes, two pairs of membranous wings, and prominent antennae, they do not hide their otherness. Young bees writhe like maggots, and when they mature, some species can swarm by the tens of thousands, each individual capable of delivering a painful, venomous sting. They look, in short, exactly like the insects we are meant to be afraid of. Yet, throughout history, in cultures around the world, people have overcome or set aside that fear to bond with bees: watching them, tracking them, taming them, studying them, writing poems and stories about them, even worshiping them. No other group of insects has grown so close to us, none is more essential, and none is more revered.
FIGURE 1.1. The human fear of arthropods features heavily in our storytelling, from biblical locusts to Kafka’s beetle to the horrors pictured on these pulp magazine covers from the 1920s. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
The human fascination with bees took root deep in our prehistory, when early hominins sought out the sugary blast of honey at every opportunity. As ancient peoples migrated around the globe, they continued searching for that sweetness, robbing the honeybees as well as scores of lesser-known species. Stone Age artists captured the practice in cave paintings from Africa to Europe to Australia, depicting hunts that sometimes involved tall ladders, flaming brands, and dangerous ascents. To our ancestors, the value of honey justified effort and risk far beyond the inconvenience of a few pesky stings.
FIGURE 1.2. Bees, hives, and people have appeared together in rock art for millennia, sometimes in literal depictions of honey hunting, but also in symbolic form, as in this ecstatic swarm and dance sequence from the San people, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. IMAGE © AFRICAN ROCK ART DIGITAL ARCHIVE.
From raiding wild colonies, the transition to organized beekeeping came as a logical next step nearly everywhere people settled down to farm. Potsherds laced with beeswax have been recovered from dozens of Neolithic agricultural sites across Europe, the Near East, and North Africa, some dating back more than 8,500 years. Exactly when and where the first beekeeper hived a swarm remains unclear, but Egyptians had certainly perfected the art by the third millennium BCE, tending their bees in long clay tubes, and eventually learning to ferry them up and down the Nile in concert with seasonal crops and wildflower blooms. People kept bees long before they tamed horses, camels, ducks, or turkeys, not to mention familiar crops like apples, oats, pears, peaches, peas, cucumbers, water melon, celery, onions, or coffee beans. Domestication occurred independently in places as far-flung as India, Indonesia, and the Yucatan Peninsula, where Mayan beekeepers had the good sense to tend “royal ladies,” a rainforest species with the agreeable trait of lacking a sting. By the time the Hittites ruled western Asia, beekeeping was enshrined in law, and anyone caught pilfering hives could expect a harsh fine of six silver shekels. The Greeks enacted honey taxes, required 300-foot-wide buffers between rival apiaries, and saw the trade become so lucrative that it inspired sophisticated counterfeiting. Herodotus described a convincingly syrupy substitute crafted from “wheat and the fruit of the tamarisk.” Over the centuries, sticky liquids boiled down from dates, figs, grapes, and various tree saps would provide cheaper alternatives, but honey remained the world’s ultimate measure of sweetness until the advent of refined sugars.
What began as an upshot of our primeval sweet tooth only grew stronger as people found other uses for the products of the hive. Mixed with water and fermented, honey soon provided the additional enticement of tasty and reliable intoxication. Scholars consider mead one of the oldest alcoholic beverages; it has been brewed and consumed in various iterations for at least 9,000 years, and perhaps far longer. Tipplers in ancient China quaffed a version laced with rice and hawthorn berries, while the Celts flavored theirs with hazelnuts and the Finns preferred the zest of lemons. In Ethiopia, people still favor a version doctored with the bitter leaves of buckthorn. But perhaps the most potent meads of all were those that arose in the rainforests of Central and South America, where the Mayans and various tribal shamans developed hallucinogenic varieties spiked with narcotic roots and bark. In fact, healers of all kinds have long recognized the benefits of bees, recommending honey, mead, waxy salves, propolis (or “bee glue,” a resinous substance collected from plant buds by some bees for use in hive construction), and even the venom from stings to treat all manner of ailments. When remedies from the ancient world were summarized in the twelfth-century Syriac volume The Book of Medicines, over 350 of its 1,000 prescriptions required bee products. The anonymous author went so far as to call honey water an essential daily tonic (when properly mixed with wine and one dram each of anise seed and crushed peppercorn).
The historian Hilda Ransome did not exaggerate when she wrote, of bees, “It is impossible to over-estimate their value to man in the past.” As if sweetness, inebriation, and healing weren’t enough, bees also provided nothing less than illumination. From prehistory through the dawn of the Industrial Age, most options for holding back the darkness involved no small amount of smoke and splutter—campfires, torches, or simple lamps and rushes that reeked of fish oil and animal fat. For all that time, only beeswax burned with a clean, steady, pleasant-smelling light. Temples, churches, and wealthy homes glowed with it night after night for millennia. Added to the many other uses for beeswax—from waterproofing to embalming to metallurgy—candle-making created an insatiable demand that often made wax the most valuable beekeeping product of all. When the Romans finalized their conquest of Corsica in the second century BCE, they spurned the island’s famous honey in favor of a tribute measured out in wax alone—an impressive 200,000 pounds of it every year. Fittingly, the scribes and officials who oversaw that levy almost certainly made their notes on yet another bee-dependent innovation: the world’s first conveniently erasable writing surface. Long before the invention of chalkboards, small tablets covered with wax could be inscribed with a stylus, easily stored or transported, and then heated, smoothed, and used again.
FIGURE 1.3. The pharmacist pictured in this thirteenth-century Arabic text is mixing a typical cure-all for weakness and lack of appetite from a recipe that called for honey, beeswax, and human tears. Abdullah ibn al-Fadl, Preparing Medicine from Honey (1224). IMAGE © THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART.
Bees have been with us from the start. As the source of so many commodities, some of them great luxuries, it’s no wonder these insects found their way into folktales, mythology, and even religion. Bees in legend often played the role of messengers from the gods, their gifts to us seen as glimpses of the divine. Egyptians viewed them as the tears of the sun god, Ra, while an old French tale credits bees to Christ, formed from a scattering of droplets that fell from his hands as he bathed in the Jordan River. Deities and saints from Dionysus to Valentine became patrons of bees and their keepers, while in India, bees made up the humming bowstring of Kama, the god of love. Swarms of bees often portended battles, droughts, floods, and other great events throughout the ancient world, symbolizing good luck in China, or bad luck in India and Rome. According to Cicero, a swarm of bees foretold the eloquence and wisdom of Plato by gathering and settling upon the lips of the philosopher when he was still a babe in arms. Bee-priestesses, known as melissae, Greek for “honeybees,” served in the temples of Artemis, Aphrodite, and Demeter; they played a role at Delphi as well, where the famed Oracle was sometimes called “The Delphic Bee.”
With its otherworldly sweetness, the syrupy diet of bees was also considered divine, appearing in legend nearly as often as the bees themselves. The mother of Zeus, for example, reportedly hid her infant son in a cave, where wild bees raised the young god to adulthood, passing sweet nectar and honey straight from their mouths to his. The Hindu deities Vishnu, Krishna, and Indra grew up on a similar diet and were known collectively as “the nectar-born ones,” while in Scandinavia, the baby Odin preferred his honey mixed with milk from a sacred goat. Whether found in divine sippy cups or baked into heavenly cakes, honey dominated menus from Valhalla to Mount Olympus and beyond—traditions everywhere linked the sweetness gathered by bees to the foods of the gods. For the faithful, it also featured in the prospect of a just reward. Sources as varied as the Koran, the Bible, Celtic legends, and Coptic codices all described Paradise as a place flowing with rivers of honey.
In symbolism and in daily life, the value of bees to people lies rooted in their biology. The modern bee is a marvel of engineering, with wraparound ultraviolet vision; flexible, interlocking wings; and a pair of hypersensitive antennae capable of sniffing out everything from rose blossoms to bombs to cancer. Bees evolved alongside the flowering plants, and their most remarkable traits all developed in the context of that relationship. Flowers provide bees with the ingredients for honey and wax as well as the impetus for navigation, communication, cooperation, and, in some cases, buzzing itself. In return, bees perform what is their most fundamental and essential service. Yet, oddly, it’s one that people didn’t begin to understand—let alone appreciate—until the seventeenth century.
FIGURE 1.4. According to one Greek and Roman myth, this is where it all began, with Dionysus (Bacchus) capturing the first swarm of bees in a hollow tree. Piero di Cosimo, The Discovery of Honey by Bacchus (c. 1499). WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
When German botanist Rudolf Jakob Camerarius first published his observations on pollination in 1694, most scientists found the whole notion of plant sex absurd, obscene, or both. Decades later, Philip Miller’s description of bees visiting tulip flowers was still deemed too racy for his best-selling The Gardeners Dictionary. After numerous complaints, the publisher deleted it completely from the third, fourth, and fifth editions. But the idea of pollination could be tested by anyone with access to a farm, a garden, or even a flowerpot. Eventually, the dance between bees and flowers came to fascinate some of the greatest thinkers in biology, including such luminaries (and beekeepers) as Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel. Today, pollination remains a vital field of study, because we know it is more than simply illuminating: it is irreplaceable. In the twenty-first century, sweetness comes to us from refined sugars, wax is a by-product of petroleum, and we get our light with the flick of a switch. But for the propagation of nearly every crop and wild plant not serviced by the wind, our reliance upon bees remains complete. When they falter, the repercussions make headline news.
Recently, the buzz about bees has often hummed louder than the bees themselves. Die-offs in the wild and in domestic hives threaten critical pollen and flower relationships that we’ve long taken for granted. But the story of bees is much more than a tale of plight or crisis. It leads us from the age of dinosaurs through an explosion of biodiversity that Darwin called an “abominable mystery.” Bees helped shape the natural world where our own species evolved, and their story often comingles with our own. The subtitle of this book guides its content: it’s an exploration of how the very nature of bees makes them so utterly necessary. To understand them, and ultimately to help them, we should appreciate not only where bees came from and how they work, but also why they’ve become one of the only insects to inspire more fondness than fear. The story of bees begins with biology, but it also tells us about ourselves. It explains why we’ve kept them close for so long, why advertisers turn to them to hawk everything from beer to breakfast cereal, and why our finest poets prefer their flowers “bee-studded,” their lips “bee-stung,” and their glades “bee-loud.” People study bees to better understand everything from collective decision-making to addiction, architecture, and efficient public transportation. As social animals recently adapted to living in large groups, we have a lot to learn from a group of creatures who, in part at least, have been doing it successfully for millions of years.
In the past, people around the world heard the buzzing of bees as voices of the departed, a murmured conveyance from the spirit world. This belief traces back to the cultures of Egypt and Greece, among others, where tradition held that a person’s soul appeared in bee form when it left the body, briefly visible (and audible) in its journey to the hereafter. While modern listeners perceive that living vibrato more prosaically, it remains a potent force, amplified by the unconscious urgency of a long and intimate bond. But the buzz about bees does not begin with pesticides, habitat loss, and the other challenges we’ve thrust upon them. It starts with their ascendance, an ancient lesson in hunger and innovation. Nobody knows the exact sequence of events that led to the beginning of bees, but everyone can agree on at least one thing: we know what it sounded like.
Notes
1measurable fear reaction: See Seligman 1971 for an explanation of the theory, Mobbs et al. 2010 for an experimental example, and Lockwood 2013 for an in-depth exploration of this topic.
2synapses associated with disgust: This reaction to insects appears early in life and is considered a “core” disgust. See Chapman and Anderson 2012 for a fascinating summary of disgust research.
3without ever having to actually see one: The Chinese express perhaps the greatest affection for crickets, keeping them as household pets and even staging elaborate chirping competitions. But while they might be transported or displayed temporarily in bamboo cages, most pet crickets live their lives tucked out of sight in gourds or clay pots (which also serve to amplify their song).
4dating back more than 8,500 years: See Roffet-Salque et al. 2015.
5long before they tamed horses: Pinpointing dates of domestication is tricky business, and often the subject of heated debate. The comparisons in this passage rely on a conservative estimate for beekeeping at 6,500 years ago, halfway between the first possible signs noted in Roffet-Salque et al. 2015 and the advanced techniques practiced by ancient Egyptians. Sources for the livestock and crop dates include Driscoll et al. 2009 and Meyer et al. 2012.
6“wheat and the fruit of the tamarisk”: Herodotus 1997, 524.
7at least 9,000 years: To date, the oldest physical evidence of mead or mead-like beverages comes from an analysis of residues found in ancient Chinese jars (McGovern et al. 2004). But honey occasionally ferments in the wild, raising the intriguing possibility that our ancestors stumbled across this idea much earlier.
8spiked with narcotic roots and bark: In addition to mead, honey itself can be intoxicating when bees forage on the nectar of particular narcotic plants. Reports of hallucinogenic honey come from the Mayans as well as from the Gurung people of Nepal and the Ishir of Paraguay, who call a particular class of their shamans “eaters of honey” (Escobar 2007, 217).
9over 350 of its 1,000 prescriptions: Relying on the Syriac Book of Medicines, a doctor could readily suggest honey for everything from a sore throat to hiccups, nausea, nosebleeds, heart pain, poor eyesight, or a low sperm count. Wax was a cure-all, too, finding its way into treatments for loose teeth and aching testicles as well as the wounds caused by “swords, spears, arrows, &c.” (Budge 1913, CVI).
10“… impossible to over-estimate their value …”: Ransome 2004, 19.
11an impressive 200,000 pounds: This figure comes to us from Livy’s report on a skirmish in 173 BCE, where troops of the Roman praetor C. Cicereius killed 7,000 Corsicans in battle and took another 1,700 prisoner. It marked a doubling of the previous wax tribute enacted after an uprising eight years earlier. Livy’s History of Rome makes no further mention of the Corsicans. Presumably, they were too busy harvesting wax from their hives to get into much trouble (Livy 1938).
12small tablets covered with wax: Etymologists trace the word “stylus” to the Latin root sti, meaning “to prick,” the same root that forms the basis of “sting.” This raises the charming idea that Roman scribes scribbled away on their beeswax tablets with the linguistic equivalent of “stingers.”
13Bee-priestesses, known as melissae: Melissa remains a popular woman’s name, as does the related Melina, Greek for “honey.” In Hebrew, the word for bee is d’vorah, source of another familiar name, Deborah.
Becoming Bees
Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works on what already exists …
—François Jacob, “Evolution and Tinkering” (1977)
CHAPTER ONE
A Vegetarian Wasp
You voluble,Velvety, Vehement fellows, That play on your Flying and Musical cellos …
Come out of my Foxglove; come Out of my roses, You bees with the Plushy and Plausible noses!
—Norman Rowland Gale, Bees (1895)
I could not ignore the buzzing. My destination lay across the floor of a wide gravel pit, where I could see the white flutter of the rare butterfly I’d been hired to find. I should have been running toward it, net and notebook at the ready. But the ground at my feet hummed with an earthy tremolo that demanded immediate attention. This is the trouble with studying natural history—how to focus on any specific task when the world abounds with wonders. Stay on target, I told myself. That advice came to me from Luke Skywalker, who, during the chaotic final battle of Star Wars, struggled to keep his aim on the one tiny exhaust vent that would blow up the Death Star. Unfortunately for my clients, I lacked the concentration of a Jedi knight. The butterfly would have to wait.
Crouching down, I found myself surrounded by wasps, thousands of them. Their sleek black and gold bodies darted and swerved in every direction like sparks over a bonfire. But unlike sparks, the wasps eventually came to ground with purpose, landing beside the tiny nest holes that made up their colony, the largest I’d ever seen. I felt a surge of adrenaline, not from the danger of stings but from the thrill of discovery. For someone interested in bees, finding the right wasp nest can be like stepping back in time. If I was correct, the tiny burrows in the earth around my feet held a critical clue about how and why bees evolved. Putting net, notebook, and all thought of butterflies aside, I lay down with my face at ground level and began to watch.
A wasp immediately landed in the pebbly soil several inches away, moving back and forth with jerky motions almost too fast for the eye to follow. Homing in on a particular patch of sand, she suddenly stopped, thrust her front legs forward, and began to dig, flinging the spoils back through her hind legs just like a dog, or a tiny American football player practicing the shotgun hike. Other wasps repeated this sequence all around me, their constant showers of flung sand making the ground appear to quiver. Some were tending old burrows, while others started afresh, but every individual worked apart. Unlike hornets, yellow jackets, and other more familiar wasps, these furious little diggers did not build elaborate paper nests or make pests of themselves at picnics. Nor did they live in large, organized communities led by a queen. They were solitary creatures, gathering en masse solely to exploit the benefits of a good patch of habitat. I recognized them as members of a diverse family still widely known by a name bestowed in 1802, the sphecid wasps.* This title comes straight from the word sphix, Greek for wasp, which means that to early entomologists, these insects embodied the wasp lifestyle so perfectly they deserved the formal description “waspy wasps.” But the aspect of sphecids that had me face down in the sand dates back much further than Linnaean taxonomy. Sometime in the mid-Cretaceous, near the peak of the age of dinosaurs, a bold group of sphecids gave up one of their waspiest habits. Soon after, they evolved into bees.
In front of me, the individual I was watching suddenly stopped digging and flew off. Looking closely, I saw that she’d uncovered part of a burrow, her own or somebody else’s I couldn’t know. I waited for a few moments, but the wasp didn’t return. So I reached out and began to brush away the sand myself, revealing a pencil-thin tunnel that angled slightly downward. Its walls began collapsing inward as I dug, so I inserted a long stem of dried grass to act as a guide. A few inches below the surface, grass and tunnel ended in a chamber that held just what I’d been hoping to find: the body of a fly. It was black and unremarkable, like something you might sweep off the windowsill on a summer day. But that one dead fly revealed something defining about the waspy wasps: they were hunters, constantly scouring the landscape for prey to feed their young. The species at hand, a type of sphecid called a sand wasp, concentrated on flies, but others took everything from aphids to butterflies to spiders, killing or paralyzing them with a sting and then depositing the bodies in a burrow to be devoured—dead or alive—by their growing larvae. The tactic is gruesome, but it’s highly effective, a basic wasp strategy for over 150 million years. Changing it, however, proved to be even more successful.
FIGURE 1.1. A colony of sphecid wasps in the genus Bembix, commonly known as sand wasps. Each female digs her own nest and brings prey to feed the growing brood within. Illustration by James H. Emerton, from George and Elizabeth Peckham, Wasps: Solitary and Social (1905).
Famous vegetarians from Leo Tolstoy to Paul McCartney have railed against slaughterhouses and promoted the various health and environmental benefits of a meat-free lifestyle. But campaigners continue to miss a great talking point when they omit the story of bees. For bees, vegetarianism did not simply alter their way of life, it created a new one. By making the dietary switch from animal parts to the sustenance provided by flowers, those first ancestral bees discovered an expanding and largely unexploited resource that was also extremely convenient. Where wasps typically needed to find one kind of food to feed themselves, and then track down something entirely different for their offspring, bees had the advantage of one-stop shopping. A good flower gave them sugary nectar for their own use, and protein-rich pollen that could be carried back home to nourish the young. And where flies, spiders, and other wily prey could be difficult or even dangerous to catch, flowers stayed put, and eventually began advertising their locations with alluring colors and scents. The exact details and timing of the transition from wasp to bee remain open to debate, but no one argues about how well it worked out. Bees now outnumber their sphecid relations by nearly three species to one.
After carefully refilling the burrow, I left the wasps behind and returned to my butterfly survey, spending the rest of the afternoon on a slope that glowed with blossoms—golden field mustard, red clover, and the purples of lupine and alfalfa. In the midst of such floral profusion, the idea of looking to flowers for sustenance seemed like a no-brainer. But in the world where bees evolved, it counted as nothing less than a chancy and pioneering adaptation. We think of the Cretaceous period for its dinosaurs, but reptilian profusion was hardly the only difference between that era and our own. The first bee to provision its young with pollen did so in a landscape where there were no wildflower meadows as we know them, at a time when flowers themselves were still developing their petals, colors, and other characteristic traits. Fossils tell us that early flowers were tiny, inconspicuous things, bit players in a flora otherwise dominated by conifers, seed ferns, and cycads. Putting bee evolution in context requires a clear picture of that world, but most re-creations focus on the big lizards, not the vegetation. When I did look past the roaring beasts in dinosaur books, I couldn’t find much of anything that looked like a flower, let alone a bee.
FIGURE 1.2. Look past the fighting dinosaurs, and this scene reveals a typical impression of the mid-Cretaceous landscape—mossy, fern-ridden forests with no flowers or bees in sight. Illustration by Édouard Riou from The World Before the Deluge (1865).
Struggling to visualize the where of bee evolution led me very quickly to questions about the how of it. If flowers were indeed small and rare in that world, then why would ancestral bees have sought them out? What sparked that vital vegetarian shift? What did the first bee look like? How long did it take to transition from wasp to bee? Whenever such questions arise about the evolution of insects, I’ve found it helps to call on the person who, quite literally, wrote the book.
“It’s an amazing untold story for which we don’t have much data,” Michael Engel said, when I asked him about bee evolution. “To be crude,” he went on, “the fossil record is piss-poor.”
Michael spoke to me from his office in a warehouse owned by the University of Kansas. The school’s insect collection (and its senior curator) moved there in 2006, when administrators decided that 5 million pinned specimens were taking up too much space in one of the grand old buildings on campus. He answered the phone with a curt “Engel,” sounding like someone wearily accustomed to interruption. It’s no wonder. In addition to his curatorial duties, he holds two university professorships, a research affiliation with the American Museum of Natural History, and editorial positions at nine different professional journals. His list of scientific publications includes more than 650 peer-reviewed articles as well as the credit that brought me to his doorstep, coauthorship of the definitive volume Evolution of the Insects. Within that wide-ranging topic, bees are his particular specialty. As soon as I reminded him that’s why I was calling, his voice brightened and all other demands seemed forgotten. We talked for nearly two hours.
“To look for the earliest proto-bees you have to go back in time about 125 million years,” Michael explained. Unfortunately, the oldest unequivocal bee doesn’t show up in the fossil record until 55 million years later, leaving a huge hole right in the middle of the story. On the bright side, such a glaring lack of evidence may at least say something about where bees evolved. Because when fossils are particularly scarce, there’s often a very good reason why.
“The sweet spot for the earliest bee is probably in the worst place for making fossils,” Michael said. Several lines of evidence suggest that bees, as well as many early flowers, evolved in a dry, hot environment. Even today, the richest communities of bees lie not in the hyper-diverse wet tropics but in arid regions like the Mediterranean Basin and the American Southwest. Large parts of the Cretaceous landscape probably looked similar, but we know very little about those places, or about what lived there, because the making of fossils requires exactly what they lacked: water. To be fossilized, a creature or plant generally needs to be covered up quickly by sediments, preferably in a site starved of oxygen where it won’t quickly succumb to rot. Such conditions occur primarily underwater, at the bottoms of swamps, lakes, rivers, and shallow seas. This means that our impression of the distant past, and our ability to study it, suffers from what paleontologists call “preservation bias.” We’re swayed by the flora and fauna from the wettest habitats, because, by and large, those are the things that turned into fossils. There are exceptions—fossils formed in dry places after flash floods or volcanic activity—but even these offer little help in sorting out the beginnings of bees.
“It’s a conundrum,” Michael told me. “You’re stuck trying to find a fossil with the characteristics of a bee. But if you do, now it’s a bee! You still don’t know anything about the transition from wasps. You’re damned either way.”
The trouble lies in the very nature of what defines a bee: vegetarianism. Eating pollen is a behavior, not a physical trait, and behaviors don’t make particularly good fossils. The tangible evidence for their new diet developed after the fact, with the evolution of distinctive hairs and other traits that helped them collect and carry pollen. (As long-haired, flower-loving vegetarians, bees have been jokingly referred to as “hippie wasps,” which is actually not a bad way to remember their key evolutionary traits!) But the earliest bees must have looked just like their wasp relations, and may have continued that way for some time, perhaps carrying pollen in their stomachs and regurgitating it in the nest, the way some bees still do. This makes it highly unlikely that anyone will ever find the actual “first bee” (or recognize it if they happen to stumble across it).
“To really be sure, you would need a fossil nest,” Michael mused. It would have to have pollen in it, preferably with the mama bee there, too, fossilized in the very act of provisioning. “And if anyone finds that,” he added with a chuckle, “I will cash in my savings, buy a plane ticket, and fly to wherever they are in the world to see it!”
As we talked, it was obvious that Michael had a scientist’s passion for data—and for making a clear distinction between ideas supported by evidence and those based on speculation. Bees are the vegetarian descendants of a sphecid wasp ancestor from the mid-Cretaceous. That much is known. Once we established that line, however, he obliged me by stepping across it and cheerfully entering the world of maybe, what if, and perhaps. As far as exploring the possibilities of early bee evolution, I could not have found a more qualified guide. “I’m one of the few people to waste serious time on it,” he said wryly, though it’s hard to call Michael’s prolific output a waste. In 2009, the Linnaean Society honored him with their Bicentenary Medal, the most prestigious award in biology for scientists under forty. But if it hadn’t been for a chance decision during his senior year of college, Michael Engel might never have looked twice at a bee in his life.
“I wasn’t a bug kid,” he recalled, though he’d always had an eye for detail. He liked to draw small things, and he’d drive his mother crazy insisting on expensive, extra-fine pens, so that he could get every feature exactly to scale. Later, he was firmly on the pre-med track at Kansas when a chemistry professor suggested he do something different for his honors thesis. “He said it would help my medical school applications stand out from the crowd,” Michael explained. On a tip from his adviser, he wandered into the lab of legendary bee expert Charles Michener† and, in a sense, never left. The world of bee taxonomy fit perfectly with his love for getting the small things right, and he relished the challenge of solving difficult evolutionary mysteries. When I asked about his research approach, he described it this way: “If nobody else is studying something, then I want to study it.” That contrary streak led him quickly to early bees, and insect evolution in general, when he heard a respected entomologist dismiss the entire insect fossil record as “not useful.” After graduate studies at Cornell and a stint at the American Museum of Natural History, he returned to Kansas as Michener’s handpicked successor, inheriting a tradition of bee science dating back to the 1940s. Although he has published papers on everything from springtails and ants to termites, spiders, and a booklouse, bees and their evolution remain a primary focus. It’s probably safe to say that Michael Engel has examined—and thought about—more bee fossils than pretty much anyone.
“My pet hypothesis,” he told me, still in speculation mode, “is that wasps started fueling up on nectar, getting pollen on themselves incidentally, and then transferring it to the nest.” It’s also likely they started capturing prey on flowers—flies or other insects whose bodies may have been dusted with pollen, too, or who may have been eating it themselves. Either way, once pollen began arriving in the nest on a regular basis, the opportunity existed for wasp larvae to include it with the meat in their diets. And once that accidental delivery system became deliberate, it was, in Michael’s words, a “run downhill” to the use of pollen exclusively.
“Suddenly, any female who spends more time on flowers avoids massive danger,” he pointed out, noting the relative safety of pollen gathering compared to the risks of hunting. “Predation is a dangerous game. Prey will defend themselves, and if you get a tear in your wing, or you damage a mouthpart, you’re in serious trouble.” Natural selection would have immediately favored the pollen collectors, whose peaceable way of life helped them live longer and produce more offspring. “The next thing you know,” he concluded, “you’ve got a bee.”
