Honeybees, humans and history

By Mike Bianco

Artist and beekeeper Mike Bianco.

In the late 19th century, cabinet maker and beekeeper Johannes Mehring made a bold declaration: The beehive is a single ‘being.’

Almost 200 years later, Professor Jürgen Tautz, at the University of Würzburg in Germany, has extended Mehring’s statement even further, suggesting in his book that the behaviour of the beehive is similar to that of a mammal. While this concept may seem a bit mind-bending at first, the more we get to know the behavior and physiology of the hive, the less abstract it seems.

For me as an artist – and beekeeper –  Professor Tautz’s assertion opens a line of inquiry which enables us to imagine the honeybee as an even closer relation to us. This was part of my thinking behind Hivecubator 2.0, an artwork in the SPARE PARTS season which explored the human relationship with bees.

The relationship between primates and honeybees likely dates back nearly 55 million years. During this period, our oldest primate ancestor, Archicebus Achilles, and the genus Apis (the first of the honeybees), emerged on the land mass now known as Eastern Asia. They evolved and spread around the globe over the course of millions of years and continued to live in close proximity. It is only relatively recently that humans and bees have evolved to have a more direct relationship.  

Primates hunted honey in some form or another for millions of years, as honey was one of the few sources of sweetness available. While there are numerous examples of ancient honey hunting practices, the earliest known record of the honeybee-primate/human relationship dates back to somewhere between 10,000 to 8,000 B.C.E, and to a series of paintings on the walls of the Cuevas de la Araña located in what is now southern Spain.

Drawing of a Mesolithic rock painting of a honey hunter harvesting honey and wax from a bees nest in a tree from Cuevas de la Araña in Spain. Credit: Wikimedia Commons, fr:Utilisateur:Achillea

The first known depictions of beekeeping, rather than honey-hunting, date back to Ancient Egypt, and a series of tablets from the 3rd century B.C.E. Depictions of bee worship, and the first record of beekeeping, were carved in stone adorning the walls of the sun temple of Niuserre at Abu Gurob, a sacred site dedicated to the worship of Re - the sun god of creation. 

The Ancient Egyptian Sun God, Ra. Credit: Jeff Dahl [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons.

For the Ancient Egyptians, bees and Re had a sacred and mystic relationship for the creation of life. As a Papyrus from 300 BCE recounts:

The god Re wept and the tears
From his eyes fell on the ground
And turned into a bee.
The bee made (her honeycomb)
And busied herself
With the flowers of every plant;
And so wax was made
And also honey
Out of the tears of Re.

The Ancient Egyptians understood that honeybees were important go-betweens between life on earth and life in the heavens. As a result, beekeeping went beyond a practice focused on food supply and extended into a deeply spiritual relationship of care for both the ecological-body of the planet, and human bodies transitioning into the afterlife.

Gathering Honey, Tomb of Rekhmire by Nina de Garis Davies. Credit:  Rogers Fund, 1930, via Wikimedia Commons 

The eminent 19th century Egyptologist Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge described in his book The Mummy: Chapters On Egyptian Funeral Archaeology:
“The Egyptians also preserved their dead in honey. 'Abd el-Latif relates that an Egyptian worthy of belief told him that once when he and several others were occupied in exploring the graves and seeking for treasure near the Pyramids, they came across a sealed jar, and having opened it and found that it contained honey, they began to eat it. Someone in the party remarked that a hair in the honey turned round one of the fingers of the man who was dipping his bread in it, and as they drew it out the body of a small child appeared with all its limbs complete and in a good state of preservation; it was well dressed, and had upon it numerous ornaments.” 

Though Budge’s account is based on hearsay, it does provide a provocative account to think about the sacred role of the beehive to care for human spare parts. 

Long after the fall of the ancient Egyptian empire, humans continued to worship honeybees around the globe as sacred beings. However, in more recent times, the hive has shifted away from being a divine body of worship, to that of a beast of burden used to support colonial and capitalistic endeavors. 

Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash.

As we now know, our pleasures of eating are highly dependent on the exploitable labor of honeybees. It is estimated that roughly one third of all the food consumed in the world is the direct result of honeybee pollination, and as the saying goes “No bees. No food.” But managed honeybee colonies are dying around the world at alarming rates. While fingers are often pointed in opposing directions, the reality is that honeybees are dying as a result of a combination of factors – from climate change to pesticide use -  which implicate us all.

Many may think of humans as the keepers of bees, but the reality is that bees are the ones often keeping us. Because of this, we have to radically rethink our relationship with honeybees. Mehring’s idea of the hive as a ‘being’ is a good starting point to begin thinking about the hive as a kindred body – a body which we both host and are hosted by.  

Installing Hivecubator 2.0 at Science Gallery London.

Hivecubator 2.0 in SPARE PARTS was designed to take this idea to an extreme, by exploiting the mammalian-like qualities of the hive (namely its ability to produce CO2 and heat) to care for human skin cells growing in vitro. It is an experiment in radical hospitality, one in which a gallery hosts a hive, a beekeeper cares for the bees, and if all goes well, research scientists and a beehive will collaborate to both care for and grow human tissue.

Hivecubator 2.0 is not an optimised system, but rather a representation of the fragility we encounter as a species hosted by the more than human world. The precarity the human cells face in the hive-supported environment, is similar to the precarity we all face in a world under tremendous environmental pressure. While alternatives to this precarious situation exist, it will likely take radical action by us all to see a change for the better. 

Michael Bianco is an artist, curator, researcher, activist, cook, and beekeeper. Bianco’s art practice is invested in socially engaged art, and focuses on issues of politics, environment, sustainability, community activism, energy decline, and the impending “century of crisis.” He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia working in the labs of SymboticA. He is the creator of Hivecubator 2.0 in SPARE PARTS: Rethinking human repair at Science Gallery London from 28 February - 12 May 2019.

March 19, 2019