RICHARD GRINNELL
Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees
Shakespeare was a beekeeper, though not, as far as I can tell, in the
practical way of animal husbandry. Shakespeare kept bees in a literary
sense. Honey bees are a part of the extraordinary figurative landscape
that Shakespeare provides his audience. They are a link for him between the natural world and the human, and like many elements of nature in the early modern period, a glass reflecting and commenting on
human society. As Charles Butler argues in the Preface to his 1609 treatise The Feminine Monarchie: Or a Treatise Concerning Bees and the Due
Ordering of Them, “the worke and fruit of the little Bee is so great and
wonderfull, so comely for order and beauty, so excellent for Art and
wisdom, & so full of pleasure and profit; that the contemplation thereof
may well beseeme an ingenious nature” (3–4).1 Butler believes that his
readers can learn from bees, that bees are figures relevant to human society. This is true for us today as well. Because of recent bee colony dieoffs (what has come to be called Colony Collapse Disorder, and other
more general colony attritions), bees have become a rallying point for
environmentalists who see them as canaries in our world-wide coalmine. We identify with bees because they mark the health of an environment for which we feel responsible, and of which we are a part.2 For
Butler, and for Shakespeare, bees are a part of a long, classical tradition
of treating the natural world as a metaphor for the human. They are
models of political and social organization, and perhaps even more
profoundly than for our time, political placeholders for humans
themselves.
Shakespeare’s use of honey bee lore in his plays suggests a variety
of sources, both practical and textual. In practical terms, beekeeping
was an important industry in early modern England. Generally a
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 23.4 (Autumn 2016), pp. 835–854
Advance Access publication December 27, 2016 doi:10.1093/isle/isw069
C The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the
V
Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved.
For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
836
I S L E
cottage industry, it was widely practiced and provided important national products. Honey was the most accessible sweetener available to
most people during this period,3 a staple in much cooking and brewing, and beeswax, as Hattie Ellis notes in her history Sweetness and
Light, could be worth eight times as much as honey (86).4
During Shakespeare’s lifetime, honey and wax were plentiful. The
“Acte for the true melting, making and working of Waxe,” which became law in 1580, notes:
By the goodness of God this Land doth yield great
plenty of Honye and Waxe, as not onlye dothe suffice
the necessarye uses of the Queenes Majestie and her
Subjects to be spent within this Realme, but also a great
quantitie to be spared to be transported unto other
Realmes and Countreys beyond the Seas by way of
Merchaundize, to the great Benefite of her Majestie and
the Realme. (Quoted in Ransome 199)
This plenty occurred naturally in the forests, where wild hives could be
found and the wax and honey harvested, and in home-yards, where
bees were kept domestically in hives.5 Yard hives were husbanded like
other livestock, and beekeeping was often described in sixteenthcentury estate management treatises.6 As William Lawson notes in his
best-selling The Country House-Wives Garden (1618): “I will not account
her any of my good House wives, that wanteth either Bees, or skilfulnesse about them” (85).7 This all goes to suggest that bees and beekeeping were familiar to a boy from a market town in rural Warwickshire.
Shakespeare also had access to a variety of textual sources that describe bees: classical writers such as Virgil, Aristotle, and Pliny the
Elder, and early modern writers such as Thomas Hyll, Edmund
Southerne, and Charles Butler. What did Shakespeare know about
bees, how did he know it, and how do bees function for him in his
poetry? To answer these questions necessitates resolving the tension
between actual bees—what was being said about them in
Shakespeare’s day and what we know today—and the powerful influence of the early modern bee metaphor.
“For So Work the Honey-Bees”
So what did Shakespeare know about bees? In 1894, a reviewer writing in The Quarterly Review used Canterbury’s speech to the young
King in Henry V to answer that question.
As poetry, it is a most beautiful passage; as a description
of a hive, it is utter nonsense, with an error of fact in
Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees
837
every other line, and instinct throughout with a total
misconception of the great bee-parable. (349)
This may seem a clear answer to my question, but Mary Berenbaum reminds us in “On the Lives of Insects in Literature,” that “while it is undoubtedly true that poets have for centuries taken liberties with insect
biology to make a metaphorical point, entomologists would be missing
the point to raise technical objections to such poetic license” (11). Any
attempt to read early modern entomology in Shakespeare’s work, in
other words, must take the needs of his poetry into consideration.
At the beginning of Henry V is Shakespeare’s most famous and most
extensive apicultural metaphor. In this scene, the Archbishop of
Canterbury attempts to convince the young king that he has the right
to the throne of France and that his country can support a military venture to take that throne while also protecting security at home. An important part of Canterbury’s argument hinges on the beehive as a
metaphor for a rightly ordered kingdom.
For so work the honey-bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home,
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad,
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds,
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold,
The civil citizens kneading up the honey,
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate,
The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone. (1. 2. 183–204)8
When such a natural order is in place, a kingdom can simultaneously
fight a war and maintain peace and security at home.
What do Canterbury’s assumptions about the hive suggest about
what Shakespeare knew about bees? We know that in their writings
the Elizabethans followed classical sources in reading bees in political
terms. Andrew Gurr argues that “the first known use of the parallel between human society and the beehive was in Virgil’s Georgics IV, where
838
I S L E
of course it was readily available to Shakespeare” (61). In introducing
bees in The Georgics, Virgil calls the hive “a small society comprising
systems worthy of your high esteem” (3, 4); Pliny the Elder in his
Natural History notes that “bees have a government; they pursue individual schemes but have collective leaders” (149). Even Charles Butler,
who in writing his Feminine Monarchie claims to base his conclusions
upon strict observation, cannot resist the political argument implicit in
the bees’ organization. “The Bees abhorre as well Polyarchie, as
Anarchie, God having shewed in them unto men, an expresse patterne
of A PERFECT MONARCHIE, THE MOST NATURAL AND
ABSOLUTE FORME OF GOVERNMENT” (Butler B2).9 Butler’s sentiment was typical of apicultural writers of his time, as the science historian Frederick Prete notes:
This model of society was strongly hierarchical in its essence, recognized monarchy as the most natural form of
government, and was concordant with a political ideology that emphasized order, stability, and the interest of
the state above those of the individual. (119)
For Canterbury, as for most Elizabethans, bees demonstrate order, particularly the right natural order of monarchy.
The ordered hive that Canterbury describes is organized like
Elizabethan society; bees have a king and officers, magistrates, merchants, and soldiers. Like us they pillage, making war on the “summer’s velvet buds” and bring the spoils back to their emperor. The king
is in the field with his soldiers, and the spoils are brought first to him,
before being passed on to the hive in general.10 Canterbury posits a
whole economy and social network of bees, ultimately driven by war.
Though initially it seems that the soldier is only one piece of the
larger economy, as the description progresses, it becomes clear that all
other classes of bees are dependent on the work done by the soldiers
and the spoils they bring back to the king. The soldiers’ spoils are
turned into glorious profit, obvious to the king as he watches his
“singing masons building roofs of gold.” Civil citizens turn the spoils
into profitable honey, and the mechanic porters crowd around, carrying the pillaged goods into the hive. Justices and executors are also on
hand to deal with those who do no work: the lazy, yawning drones. As
Alexander Leggatt points out, “the emphasis on action is characteristic
of the play; everyone is doing something, and the penalty for doing
nothing is death” (119). More significantly though, industry is driven
by soldiering, which is at the root of the economy. All in all, the explication of the beehive serves Canterbury well, emphasizing the profit to
Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees
839
be made in war, the roles that each citizen can play in the war effort,
and implying that war is economically beneficial, as a rule of nature.
This passage also serves Shakespeare well, foreshadowing Henry
and his soldiers in France. Henry will be, like the king bee, in the field
with his soldiers where they will return to him the ultimate prize, the
world’s best garden, France. By its end, the play will also show us justice done on the drones in Canterbury’s commonwealth. Pistol,
Bardolph, and Nim do no work and are punished—two of them with
death. Men who do no work also become an issue for Warwick just before the battle of Agincourt. “O that we now had here/But one ten thousand of those men in England/That do no work today!” he says (4. 3.
16–18). They, too, like the drones in Canterbury’s metaphor, are unproductive and, implicitly, culpable. The men who do no work in England,
though, will be punished in their own way, as Henry points out in his
famous Crispin day speech. They will be left out of history, with no
honor and no right to speak (4. 3. 64–67).
Canterbury’s metaphor sets up the play nicely, but it does not tell us
much about what Shakespeare actually knew about bees. For example,
Canterbury posits a king in charge of the hive, rather than a queen. The
historian Keith Thomas tells us that the sex of the bees’ monarch remained a point of contention into the 1740s (62). However, in both his
classical sources and in the English folk tradition, Shakespeare might
have gotten hints that the monarch is a queen. T. Hudson-Williams has
collected evidence from classical writers to suggest that “the head bee
was occasionally called by names usually reserved for females . . . [and
so ancient Greeks and Romans] had some inkling of the truth” (4).
Similarly, the Anglo-Saxon folk tradition had charms against the
swarming of bees that describe the bees as “victory dames” and that
tradition might have made its way down to rural Stratford and thence
to Shakespeare (Grendon 169).11 However, Danielle Allen notes that
Aristotle’s
triad of king, worker-soldier, and feminine/effeminate
drones held until 1586, when a Spanish scientist, Luys
Médez de Torres, identified the single large bee as the female egg-layer in the colony, thus turning the age-old
king into the now proverbial queen bee. His arguments
did not themselves have any influence in England. (95)
The upshot is that Shakespeare’s culture generally assumed the leader
was male, but the female queen was potentially present in elements of
educated and folk culture.
If Shakespeare had known the leader of the bees was a queen,
though, would not Canterbury have indicated it? After all, a queen
840
I S L E
would be appropriate for the political reality of Shakespeare’s time.
Elizabeth I was on the throne and had been since before Shakespeare
was born. It would be natural for him, had he understood the dynamics of the hive, to put a queen in charge.
But here is where Berenbaum’s caution must be acknowledged. The
king bee works better for Canterbury than a queen bee would.
Canterbury is speaking to a king and making a particular argument to
the king. For Canterbury’s argument to succeed, the bees have to stand
in for Henry’s own kingdom, and the bee-king for Henry. The king bee
is also consistent with classical authors’ descriptions of bees. Virgil,
Pliny, Aristotle, and their descendants all describe the head bee as a
king bee. Colin Burrow has convincingly argued in Shakespeare and
Classical Antiquity that Shakespeare was in a continual negotiation
with his competitors over his use of the classics. Burrow notes,
Shakespeare lived “in a society which was highly stratified, and in
which learning was one of the means of social stratification” (45). One’s
ability to use the classics in sophisticated ways contributed to one’s status as a writer. As Burrow says, “a provincial grammar-school boy in
this period was desperate to use the knowledge he had acquired at
school, but had to do so in ways that did not make him sound like a
provincial grammar-school boy” (47). Competing for intellectual and
professional status with university educated playwrights, Shakespeare
had no reason to present practical beekeeping knowledge—accurate or
not—and every reason to show off his reading of the classics.12
Regardless what he knew or did not know about real bees, then, his
needs as a writer, the needs of his play, and the authority of his sources
conspired to make Shakespeare’s bee-queen into a king.
What else can we say about the accuracy of Canterbury’s claims for
the hive? Canterbury claims that there is differentiation of labor, with
different bees doing different kinds of work, and he provides the king
with officers, divided into three classes, (1) magistrates, (2) merchants,
and (3) soldiers. The idea that different bees have different roles in the
hive was common in the sixteenth century, largely because of classical
sources that used this differentiation as evidence of the bees’ perfect social organization. Virgil begins book Four of The Georgics by telling us
that the bees’ differentiation of labor is what contributes to the perfection of their commonwealth:
Some are responsible for food and by a fixed agreement
keep busy in the fields, others stay within the walls
and lay down as the first foundation of the comb the
tear of the narcissus.
... .
Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees
841
Others are appointed to bring up the young, the future
of the race,
while others still pack the honey. (Georgics 4: 158–60,
162–63)
Pliny, too, tells us that “duties in the hive are allocated: some build,
others polish, others bring up material, yet others prepare food from
what is brought up to them” (151). That bees exist in an organization
that allocates labor to different classes of individuals was a common
idea in Shakespeare’s time.
It also turns out to be true in ours. The biologist Thomas Seeley,
who has worked extensively with honey bees, tells us that bees work
through a serial progression of different jobs. When a bee is born, she
becomes a house bee, a worker within the hive, first cleaning her own
birth cell, then cleaning other cells, preparing them for new eggs to be
laid. As she ages, she becomes a nurse bee, feeding the larval young
and ultimately sealing them into their cells to pupate (a small group of
these nurse bees become the queen’s retinue, feeding and caring for
her). The nurse bee matures into a comb builder, (Shakespeare’s singing mason), and then a carrier bee or food storer (the mechanic porter
and the civil citizen), meeting the field bees at the hive entrance and
taking the nectar and pollen gathered by the foraging field bees and
transferring it deeper into the hive to be packed into cells. As they age,
these bees become guard bees, moving closer to the outside world,
standing guard in the hive entrance to repel intruders. These guards
can rightly be called soldier bees because their direct responsibility is
to protect the hive, and often they die in the execution of their duties.
Finally, the guard bee becomes a field bee, a forager, who spends her
daylight hours flying to search out and harvest flower nectar and pollen to bring back for the sustenance of the hive. Field bees work themselves to death, foraging until, one day, they do not return from their
foray. They do not actually fight with either flowers or other bees as
they forage, but they do, in metaphoric terms, pillage the flowers
they visit and so are soldiers of a sort. In all of the bees’ complex social organization, there is division of labor with different bees taking
on different roles depending on their maturity (Seeley, Wisdom of the
Hive 29–31).
Though Canterbury posits a variety of economic actors in this
commonwealth, as soon as he describes them he quickly conflates the
merchants with the soldiers. What they bring back are not bought or
traded, but pillaged goods delivered to the sovereign and to “the singing masons building roofs of gold.” This divine unity of labor and joy,
represented by the masons, reflects Henry’s England (Empson 113),
842
I S L E
and is reinforced by the gold of the comb-city of the bees, which figuratively casts a golden-age aura of order and obedience over Henry’s
commonwealth. The gold also implies the wealth of the king whose
soldiers “make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds.”
Bees build their combs from the top of the hive to the bottom.
Shakespeare’s masons are therefore behaving like actual bees in building the roof. Humans build up: floor, walls, and then roof.
Shakespeare’s bees, like real bees, build from the top down. Though
Virgil notes that the bees lay a foundation “and then suspend the clinging honey cells” (Georgics 4. 161), it is Pliny who gives Shakespeare a
more direct textual source for his masons. Pliny says “bees begin by
building the vaulting of the hive: they bring down a web, as it were,
from the top of a loom” (151). Shakespeare may know something about
how bees build from personal observation, or he may have gotten his
roofs of gold from Virgil and Pliny. Either way, he is right about how
bees build.
Canterbury also imagines that the bees have law, judges, and a system of justice, and he uses the hive’s treatment of drones to support his
claim. Beekeepers today are taught that there is a moment at the end of
the year in northern climates when the drones are forcibly evicted from
the hive. For example, Howland Blackiston, author of the second edition of Beekeeping for Dummies, notes “in cooler climates at the end of
the nectar-producing season, you will see the worker bees systematically expelling the drones from the hive” (35). That drones are periodically expelled from the hive was common knowledge for beekeepers in
Shakespeare’s day as well. Edmund Southerne writes in A Treatise
Concerning the right Use and Ordering of Bees (1593) that
when there are too many Drones in a hive, and that the
Bees perceive (as by nature they know) that they are hindered by them, then the Bees of themselves will kill so
many as they thinke good, so that I have seene at least a
pint lye dead under a hive at once. (27)13
It is true, as Shakespeare implies, that drones do no work in the hive.
They are big, good fliers, designed for one task (though Shakespeare
did not know it)—catching and mating with a flying queen. Most of
the year they live in the hive and are fed by the house bees (often not
even feeding themselves), and when they are not in the hive, they are
in “drone congregating areas,” where drones from different hives
gather and wait for the sign of a queen (Seeley, Honeybee Ecology 67–
70). Drones are larger than worker bees, probably because their one job
is to fly faster than other drones and get to the queen first. They also
have no sting, which makes them seem good-natured. All these
Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees
843
elements have contributed to the belief that drones are gentle, dimwitted, and lazy.
In northern climates such as Shakespeare’s, bees stop their work in
the coldest winter months. The queen ceases egg-laying, often in midDecember, beginning again at the end of February. During this time,
the bees cluster around the queen keeping her warm, with the colder
bees on the outside of the cluster slowly working their way into the
warm interior of the cluster, and the warm bees on the inside working
their way to the outside, then back again. This keeps the center of the
cluster, where the queen is, at a constant 68 degrees Fahrenheit, even in
the coldest weather (Winston 118).
Drones could, if left in the hive in the fall, keep the queen warm, but
they are incapable of doing the work in the early spring that is necessary to bring the hive back into production. The bees left in the hive in
the fall are workers, capable of cleaning cells, raising young, guarding
the hive, collecting nectar and pollen, and ripening that nectar into
honey. Drones are not necessary until much later in the spring when
new queens hatch. In evolutionary terms, it is less costly for the hive to
evict the drones in the fall and raise new ones in the spring than to feed
them all winter and maintain them until they are next needed.14
Drones are expelled because they are not essential to the winter or
early spring activity of the hive. As the biologist Mark L. Winston notes
in The Biology of the Honey Bee, “drones generally are driven out of colonies in the fall or when resources are scarce, both times when colonies
cannot afford the energy required for their maintenance” (202).
Thomas Hyll, in his 1579 A Profitable Instruction of the Perfite Ordering of
Bees, says more or less the same thing. If honey is scarce, “at anye time,
then doe they eyther kill, or drive quite away the drone Bees” (6).15
Drones are connected, in both Winston and Hyll, to the availability and
scarcity of honey.
For Canterbury, too, the punishing of the drones is about the allocation of resources, though in his telling of it, the drones are punished
particularly for their refusal to contribute to the economic and military
wellbeing of the hive. Reading the expulsion of the drones as a punishment for laziness is a logical interpretation of the events that actually
unfold at the hive entrance each fall and during times of crisis. It suggests knowledge of these events.
The hive is ordered very carefully, different bees taking on different
jobs and roles depending on their seniority, and the queen holds it all
together.16 This is order, as Canterbury tells us, based upon natural
obedience, with justice a natural corollary. If Shakespeare is reacting
directly to knowledge of the hive, he is interpreting the removal from
the hive of sick and dying bees, and the drones in the fall or during
844
I S L E
moments of crisis, as evidence of justice. That, with the division of
labor that Canterbury describes in human terms, brings Shakespeare
very close to the beehive as we know it today. The whole description is
loaded to make the most powerful argument possible for King Henry
to attack France, but if we remove the argumentative necessity of the
passage, we see that Shakespeare is working with descriptions of the
hive that seem familiar, even to us. Canterbury’s grand description of
the ordered hive suggests that Shakespeare knows something about
bees.
“Drones Hive Not with Me”
Drone bees confused both classical and early modern writers and
there was considerable disagreement about what the drone actually
was. Shakespeare reflects this variety of interpretation in a number of
plays. For example, Shylock draws upon drone assumptions as he justifies getting rid of his servant Lancelot in Shakespeare’s Merchant of
Venice:
The patch is kind enough, but a huge feeder;
Snail slow in profit, and he sleeps by day
More than the wild-cat: drones hive not with me;
Therefore I part with him, and part with him
To one that would have him help to waste
His borrowed purse. (Merchant 2. 5. 894–99)
As we saw earlier with Canterbury’s commonwealth, labor is again the
issue. Lancelot is not a good worker. But other elements of early modern bee-lore are on display in Shylock’s words as well. Lancelot is a big
eater. Like the drones in many classical and contemporary sources,
consumption is almost as important as laziness. As Master Fitzherbert
says in his 1537 The Book of Husbandry, the drone “will eate the honny
and gather nothynge” (76). Edmund Southerne, arguing against the
wholesale destruction of drones by beekeepers notes: “mary I denie
not but [the drones] be great eaters and devourers, but in requital of
that they doe wonderfull good service” (27). For Shylock, Lancelot’s
laziness and his eating are both issues. That Lancelot is Shylock’s (and
later Bassanio’s) servant, is also consistent with contemporary writings
about drones. Thomas Hyll notes in 1579, that the drones “doe the services and travells of the true Bees, although the right and perfect Bees
doe rule and governe them, yea and put them foremost in their
laboures, so that if they happen to be slow in their doings, then doe the
right Bees punish them without pitie” (4). Lancelot is functioning
Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees
845
within the parameters of the drone as they were understood in the
early modern period: he is a servant, he eats a lot, and he works little.
Shylock, like a beehive in the fall, evicts Lancelot from the hive. For
Canterbury, the eviction of the drones serves to indicate law and justice
in the bees’ commonwealth. For Shylock, the expulsion of the drone is
a financial move. Shylock not only kicks the drone out, but transfers
him to another hive, the hive of his enemy, where he will continue to inordinately eat, and “help to waste/[Bassanio’s] borrowed purse.” The
eviction of Lancelot serves both to right his own hive and to attack
Bassanio’s.
The drone’s reputation for ravenous consumption enables
Shakespeare to use it to characterize another whole segment of society
as well. For the fishermen who Pericles overhears talking in Pericles,
the ravenous drone describes not the servant, but the rich.
Third Fisherman.
First Fisherman.
...
Third Fisherman.
Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the
sea.
Why, as men do aland: the great ones eat up
the little ones. I can compare our rich misers
to nothing so fitly as to a whale: ‘a plays and
tumbles, driving the poor fry before him,
and at last devours them all at a mouthful.
Such whales have I heard on o’ the land,
who never leave gaping till they swallowed
the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and
all.
We would purge the land of these drones
that rob the bee of her honey. (2. 1. 27–34,
45–46)
For the Third Fisherman, the drones are the wealthy—the gentry and
the merchants—who buy up and devour all they can. They are the
enemy of the workers, contributing nothing. For the fishermen, the
hive is full of productive workers and unproductive drones. The misers
and the wealthy consumers are drones.
The class argument that rises out of this characterization of the
drone is echoed in Charles Butler’s description of the drone in The
Feminine Monarchie: “Howsoever he brave it with his round velvet cap,
his side gowne, his full panch, and his lowd voice; yet is he but an idle
companion, living by the sweat of others brows. For hee worketh not at
all, either at home or abroad, and yet spendeth as much as two labourers” (C4). For Butler, the typical drone is a young gentleman who
846
I S L E
speaks loudly, dresses well, and lives off of the labor of others. Though
Butler is a scientist and is looking at a physical drone as he imagines
this—the cap, the belly, the loud voice are all true of the drone bee he
has in his hand—Butler interprets the drone in early-seventeenthcentury class terms, much as Shakespeare has the fishermen do in Pericles.
The drone works in a similar yet more complicated way in The
Second Part of King Henry VI, when the Duke of Suffolk, sentenced to
death by a ship’s captain for his crimes against England, refuses to accept his fate.
Suffolk.
Small things make base men proud. This villain here,
Being captain of a pinnace, threatens more
Than Bargulus, the strong Illyrian pirate.
Drones suck not eagles’ blood, but rob beehives.
It is impossible that I should die
By such a lowly vassal as thyself. (4. 1. 104–111)
Suffolk tells us that Whitmore, his projected killer, is only a drone and
therefore, in a properly ordered world, could not kill him. Suffolk is a
duke, an eagle. Drones are fit to suck honey out of beehives but not to
draw blood from an eagle of the court. Suffolk draws upon the identification of the drone as a robber—a pirate—who preys upon the bees.
Though there is still an echo of England as the beehive, Suffolk is also
arguing for a class hierarchy that puts him beyond the hive, beyond
the depredations of drones, and beyond the commonwealth order of
the bees. Suffolk’s rhetoric, however, fails him, not least of all because
he represents exactly the sort of person identified as a drone by the fishermen in Pericles. Suffolk stands upon his rank rather than his utility or
his labor. His attempt to save his life by reminding his captor of this is
doomed to failure. The sailors are not drones; they have specific jobs to
do within Henry VI’s commonwealth, and more importantly, they
have stings. Suffolk is dragged out of the hive and executed like a
drone.
Early modern and classical writers were generally confused about
the role of the drone in the hive, and Charles Butler sums up the arguments about drones as follows:
The general opinion anent the Drone is, that he is made
of a hony-Bee, that hath lost hir sting: which is even as
likelie, as that a dwarfe having his guts pulled out,
should become a gyant. Others seeing the fondnesse of
this opinion, have thought and taught that the Drone is
a different species, and that as Bees breed Bees, so
Drones breed Drones: which conceit (if the Author had
Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees
847
observed, that at the time of their breeding and many
moneths before, there is not a Drone left alive to breed
them) hee would have liked as well as the former. These
opinions then, being one as likely as another, let them
goe together. The truth is, they are of the same species
with the hony-Bee, but of a different sex. (C4)
While acknowledging that the nature of the drone has been a subject of
some controversy, Butler actually gets it right. Just a few years later,
though, William Lawson gives advice about beekeeping in The Country
House-Wives Garden, and ignores Butler’s insight:
After casting Time, you shall benefit your stocks much, if
you help them to kill their Droans, which by all probability and judgement, are an idle kind of bees, and
wastfull. Some say they breed, and have seen young
Droans in taking their honey, which I know is true. But I
am of opinion that there are also Bees which have lost
their stings, and so being as it were gelded, become idle
and great. (114)
This suggests that knowledge of bees was unstable and the sources to
which writers defaulted were the classics, where the drone debates
began.
The idea that drones are imperfect bees, or bees that have lost their
stings and so become drones, descends from Pliny the Elder and is echoed in a number of commentators contemporary with Shakespeare.
Pliny himself writes that “drones have no stings, being, as it were, imperfect bees: they are the latest offspring of those bees who are exhausted and now have served their time” (152). In 1579 Hyll echoes
Pliny, saying that “the Drone Bees (as writeth Plinie) are unperfect
Bees, without sting” (4). This sense of the drone informs Shakespeare’s
use of the drone image in The Rape of Lucrece.
After her rape by Tarquin, Lucrece rhetorically addresses her husband Collatine:
If, Collatine, thine honor lay in me,
From me by strong assault it is bereft;
My honey lost, and I, a dronelike bee,
Have no perfection of my summer left,
But robbed and ransacked by injurious theft.
In thy weak hive a wandering wasp hath crept
And sucked the honey which thy chaste bee kept. (834–40)
848
I S L E
Lucrece does not here characterize herself as a lazy worker or a rapacious consumer. Instead, she uses “drone” in Pliny’s sense of the imperfect bee. Her rape has rendered her drone-like, no longer perfect. The
perfection of her summer, her beauty, her youth, and her time for gathering honey for Collatine, have all been blasted by Tarquin. In Hyll’s
terms, she is no longer a “true bee” (4).
For Shakespeare, Lucrece’s plight also engages with early modern
beliefs in the chastity of bees. Charles Butler notes that the bees’ “chastity is to be admired,” and “for cleanlinesse and neatnesse, they may be
a Mirror to the finest Dames. . . . For neither will they suffer any slutterie within, . . . neither can they endure any unsavorinesse without
nigh unto them” (C1). In fact, bees care enough about chastity that the
beekeeper himself/herself must be chaste. Thomas Hyll tells us that
bees prefer a beekeeper who “delighteth to be chaste of body, and free
from filthinesse” (14), and Butler that “if thou wilt have the favour of
thy Bees that they sting thee not, thou must avoid such things as offend
them: thou must not be (1) unchaste or (2) uncleanely: for impuritie
and sluttishnesse (themselves being most chaste and neat,) they utterly
abhorre” (Butler C2). Having been violated by Tarquin, Lucrece can no
longer claim the requisite chastity to be a true bee.17
Shakespeare uses a wide but conventional set of drone associations
in his plays and poetry. Drones are idle. Sometimes that makes them
servants, sometimes it makes them gentlemen, but always idleness is a
punishable offense. Drones are wasters of resources, and imperfect or
damaged bees. All of the characteristics of drones with which
Shakespeare works were available to him in classical sources, and in
contemporary beekeeping treatises and manuals. Even more than the
organization of the hive itself, the definition of the drone was variable.
Lancelot can be a drone for being a lazy, hungry, servant; Suffolk for
being a rapacious and non-working gentleman; Lucrece for having
been raped. All are consistent with how drones are described in the
beekeeping literature of the period.
“Murdered for Our Pains”
In 2 Henry IV a dying Henry IV awakes to find that while he has
slept his son has taken his crown from off his pillow. Seeing this as a
direct attack on him, Henry invokes beekeeping in his complaint
against his son.
See sons, what things you are!
How quickly nature falls into revolt
When gold becomes her object!
For this the foolish over-careful fathers
Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees
849
Have broke their sleep with thoughts,
Their brains with care, their bones with industry;
For this they have engrossed and pil’d up
The cank’red heaps of strange-achieved gold;
For this they have been thoughtful to invest
Their sons with arts and martial exercises;
When, like the bee, tolling from every flower
The virtuous sweets,
Our thighs with wax, our mouths with honey pack’d,
We bring it to the hive, and, like the bees,
Are murd’red for our pains. (4. 5. 64–78).
For Henry, fathers are like bees, broken with thoughts, care, and industry, all in service to their sons. The piling up of “strange-achieved gold”
echoes the golden comb and honey made by the foraging bees.
Shakespeare steps outside of the metaphor of the hive here, to invoke actual beekeeping practice. As Charles Butler says, “the most usuall, and generaly most usefull manner of taking the Combes, is by
killing the Bees” (C10). The injustice that Henry IV is feeling is amplified by his association with the bees, who labor all their lives, only to
be killed when the beekeeper comes to harvest. The fact that it is the
son who kills the father adds another layer to Henry’s sense of injustice.
This is not natural succession between fathers and sons, but exploitation of laborers by non-laborers. For King Henry, the labor of the
father is privileged and ultimately betrayed by his non-working beekeeper-son.
Shakespeare conflates the beekeeper with the drone, both predatory, neither laboring. In the eyes of his father, Prince Hal is Butler’s
well-dressed, loudly talking, consumer of resources. The young prince
hangs out with other drones, drones who will ultimately be punished
in later plays (I cannot help but think here of Seeley’s “drone congregating areas,” a real element of bee biology as we understand it today. See
page 13 above). Prince Hal’s betrayal of his father, at least in the king’s
perception, is about his refusal to labor as a king’s son should. He neglects his honor and the expectations of his class and position. He takes
the crown without deserving it. Henry IV sees his own work going to
benefit one who he believes is interested only in the golden treasure.
For the dying king this has implications for the commonwealth as well.
His identification of Prince Hal as the beekeeper suggests the destruction of England at the hands of one interested only in the honey.
Prince Hal, however, is not a drone or a beekeeper and in the next
scene he redefines himself to become the son and ultimately the king.
At the death of his father he distances himself from the other drones
850
I S L E
and becomes the king bee of Canterbury’s description. He is no longer
the lazy, imperfect bee, or the destructive beekeeper, but the laboring
king himself.
“What Shakespeare Knew about Bees”
Shakespeare used a wide variety of bee-lore in his plays and poems
indicating a familiarity with bees and beekeeping that extends through
the classics to the beekeeping treatises of his own day. He knew the
conventional techniques for keeping bees and may have had access to
contemporary beekeeping treatises like Thomas Hyll’s A Profitable
Instruction of the Perfite ordering of Bees (1579) and Edmund Southerne’s
A Treatise Concerning the Right Use and Ordering of Bees (1593). Hyll’s
opening Epistle to “The Worshipfull Maister M.,” for example, anticipates Canterbury’s argument to Henry V in both language and tone.
Heerein may you see, first the marvelous government of
the Bees, through the onely instincte of nature, as in
theyr obedience to their King, and other officers, in punishing the ydle loyterers, in cherishing the true labourers
in theyr manner of fighting, with suche like a greate
many, as it is wonderfull to reade, and almost uncredible
to beleeve. (Epistle 1)
Though Hyll’s rhetoric is based upon the classical sources he uses (as
he notes, “I have not given thee anye labour of mine owne, but rather
have collected the sayings and writings of manye aunciente authours”
[Preface 1]), and Shakespeare will have had access to many of the same
sources, Hyll’s emphasis on the bees’ government based upon “instinct
of nature,” anticipates directly Canterbury’s insistence on the bees’ example “by a rule in nature.” Hyll also emphasizes the bees’ King and
officers, and the punishment of the idle, all in anticipation of
Canterbury’s presentation to Henry V.
Shakespeare’s beekeeping, like Hyll’s, is ultimately a compendium
of the literary resources available to him. Shakespeare keeps bees the
way any well-read and urbane writer might have been able to—
building his metaphors and analogies from books at hand. Even when
he moves beyond the classics, for example, in his description of Hal as
a beekeeper willing to kill the bees to get the honey, he is clearly working with material that was common knowledge in his day. His plays
provide us with no evidence that Shakespeare himself was a
beekeeper.
For us, Shakespeare provides further evidence of the close relationship between human society and honey bees. Today, we tend to see
Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees
851
bees as an important part of the environment, of our food supply, of a
world that we value but with which we have little association. As Eric
Brown notes in “Reading the Insect,” insects (and even honey bees) are
for us “a kind of Other” (ix). Following Virgil, Pliny, Aristotle and other
classical writers, however, Shakespeare finds bees valuable because of
the long established and useful symbolism they provide for the politics
of human society. The Art Historian Juan Antonio Ramirez goes so far as
to argue in The Beehive Metaphor “that apiculture lies at the very heart of
the ideology that justifies the modern State” (18). Bees help Shakespeare
comment on that state, and on the human relations underlying it.
Certainly, Shakespeare found bees already well developed as symbols of labor and order, and in their organization they were already
closely connected to the nation state itself. In all of his uses of bees in his
plays and poetry, the society’s order and the individual’s utility within
that order are important subtexts. Whether we are looking at the fishermen in Pericles, the pirates in Henry VI, or the Goths following Lucius in
an assault on Rome “like stinging bees in hottest summer’s day/Led by
their master to the flowered fields” (Titus Andronicus 5. 1. 14–15), the invocation of bees comments on obedience, leadership, labor, and the state
of the commonwealth. This is a demonstration of the way bees came to
reflect early modern political realities. The striking thing about
Shakespeare’s use of honey bees, however, is that even in the face of this
powerful metaphor, he gets a lot of the beekeeping right. The story of
Shakespeare and the bees is the story of classical sources leavened and
seasoned with practical cultural knowledge, and it serves to give us a
clear sense of the important relationship that early modern writers, and
early modern English culture, had with the honey bee.
NOTES
1. I have regularized the typography but retained the spelling of the original.
2. Over the past ten years, beekeepers have lost from 30-45% of their managed bee colonies every year (BeeInformed Partnership). For recent analyses
of the environmental consequences of the bee die-offs, see Rowan Jacobsen’s
Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis or
Michael Schacker’s A Spring Without Bees: How Colony Collapse Disorder Has
Endangered Our Food Supply, among others.
3. Sidney Mintz notes that through the seventeenth century sugar remained a costly import (87–88).
4. Today, beeswax and honey are roughly equivalent in value (measured
by weight).
5. Much of what we know about Anglo-Saxon and Medieval beekeeping
comes from the law codes designed to adjudicate who gets what from wild
852
I S L E
hives discovered on public and private land. See Fraser, History of Beekeeping
in Britain (11–21).
6. See, for example, Master Fitzherbert’s The Book of Husbandry (1534),
Thomas Hyll’s A Profitable Instruction of the Perfite Ordering of Bees (1579),
Edmund Southern’s A Treatise Concerning the Right Use and Ordering of Bees
(1593), or William Lawson’s The Country House-wifes Garden (1618) among
others.
7. I have regularized the typography of Lawson’s text without changing
the spelling. That women were often the keepers of a household’s bees is evident from early modern beekeeping treatises.
8. All references to Shakespeare are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare
edited by David Bevington.
9. Capitals are provided by Butler.
10. John Betts notes that “Shakespeare’s ‘tent-royal of their emperor’ seems
to pick up the Latin word praetorium which is apparently referred to the bees
only by Virgil” (152).
11. Danielle Allen, H. Malcolm Fraser, and Hilda M. Ransome all cite this
Anglo-Saxon charm as evidence that the Anglo-Saxons understood bees to be
“dames.” Recent work on these charms by Philip Purser suggests that the
“victor-dames” are a reference to the Valkyries, who like the bees are “virulent, flying females” (90).
12. Andrew Gurr argues that Erasmus’ Institutio principis Christiani is an
important source for Henry V and Erasmus also uses the metaphor of the beehive, and makes the monarch a king (61).
13. I have regularized the typography but retained the spelling of the
original.
14. For a full description of the role of drones in the hive and the factors
that influence their population and their eviction, see Winston, The Biology of
the Honey Bee (199–207).
15. I have regularized the typography but retained the spelling of the
original.
16. In biological terms, this is done primarily by the queen’s pheromones,
which biologists believe control much of the activity of the hive. See Winston
(136–47).
17. For the importance of the link between chastity and Lucrece to this
poem, see also Sarah Plant’s “Shakespeare’s Lucrece As Chaste Bee.”
WORKS
CITED
Allen, Danielle. “Burning the Fable of the Bees: The Incendiary Authority of
Nature.” The Moral Authority of Nature. Eds. Lorraine Daston and
Fernando Vidal. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. 74–99. Print.
Anonymous, William Gifford et al. “Shakespeare’s Birds and Beasts.” The
Quarterly Review. Vol. 178. London: John Murray, 1894. 340–62. Print.
Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees
853
Baldwin, T. W. William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. Urbana, IL,
1944. Print.
BeeInformed Partnership. “Nation’s Beekeepers Lost 44 Percent of Bees in
2015-16.” beeinformed.org/2016/05/10/nations-beekeepers-lost-44-percentof-bees-in-2015-16/.
Berenbaum, May. “On the Lives of Insects in Literature.” Insect Poetics. Ed.
Eric C. Brown. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2006. 3–12. Print.
Betts, John H. “Classical Allusions in Shakespeare’s Henry V with Special
Reference to Virgil.” Greece & Rome. 15.2 (1968): 147–63. Print.
Bishop, Holley. Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey—The Sweet Liquid Gold
that Seduced the World. New York: Free P, 2005. Print.
Blackiston, Howland. Beekeeping for Dummies. 2nd ed. Hobokan, NJ: Wiley,
2009. Print.
Brown, Eric C. “Introduction: Reading the Insect.” Insect Poetics. Ed. Eric C.
Brown. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2006. ix–xxiii. Print.
Burrow, Colin. Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity: Oxford Shakespeare Topics.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.
Butler, Charles. The Feminine Monarchie or a Treatise Concerning Bees, and the
Due Ordering of Them. Oxford, Joseph Barnes, 1609. Print.
Davies, Andrew. Beekeeping: Inspiration and Practical Advice for Would-Be
Smallholders. The National Trust. London: Collins and Brown, 2007. Print.
Egan, Gabriel. Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism: Accents on
Shakespeare. Ed. Terence Hawkes. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Ellis, Hattie. Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee. New
York: Harmony, 2004. Print.
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: Meridian, 1963. Print.
Fitzherbert, Master. The Book of Husbandry. [1534]. Ed. Rev. Walter W. Skeat.
London: English Dialect Society, 1882. Print.
Fraser, H. Malcolm. History of Beekeeping in Britain. London: Bee Research
Association, 1958. Print.
Grendon, Felix. “The Anglo-Saxon Charms.” The Journal of American Folklore.
22.84 (1909): 105–237. Print.
Gurr, Andrew. “‘Henry V’ and the Bees’ Commonwealth.” Shakespeare Survey.
30 (1977): 61–72. Print.
Thomas Hudson-Williams. “King Bees and Queen Bees.” The Classical Review.
49.1 (1935): 2–4. Print.
Hyll, Thomas. A Profitable Instruction of the Perfite Ordering of Bees. London.
Henrie Bynneman, 1579. Print.
Jacobsen, Rowan. Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming
Agricultural Crisis. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. Print.
Lawson, William. A New Orchard and Garden, with the Country Housewifes
Garden. (1618). Facsimile edition with Introduction by Malcolm Thick.
Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 2003. Print.
Leggatt, Alexander. Shakespeare’s Political Drama. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Print.
854
I S L E
Martindale, Charles and Anthony Brian Taylor, eds. Shakespeare and the
Classics. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print.
Martindale, Charles and Michelle Martindale. Shakespeare and the Uses of
Antiquity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.
Matsuda, Misako. “The Bee Emblem in The Rape of Lucrece.” Hot Questrists
after the English Renaissance: Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries.
Ed. Yasunari Takahashi. New York: AMS, 2000. 131–44. Print.
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.
New York: Penguin, 1985. Print.
Plant, Sarah. “Shakespeare’s Lucrece as Chaste Bee.” Cahiers Elisabethains: Late
Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 49 (1996): 51–57. Print.
Pliny the Elder. Natural History: A Selection. Trans. John Healy. Penguin
Classics. London: Penguin, 1991. Print.
Prete, Frederick R. “Can Females Rule the Hive? The Controversy over
Honey Bee Gender Roles in British Beekeeping Texts of the Sixteenth—
Eighteenth Centuries.” Journal of the History of Biology. 24.1 (1991): 113–44.
Print.
Purser, Philip A., “Her Syndan Wælcyrian: Illuminating the Form and
Function of the Valkyrie-Figure in the Literature, Mythology, and Social
Consciousness of Anglo-Saxon England.” Dissertation, Georgia State
University, 2013, http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/104. Web.
Ramırez, Juan Antonio. The Beehive Metaphor: From Gaudı to Le Corbusier.
London: Reaktion, 2000. Print.
Ransome, Hilda M. The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. London: Allen
and Unwin, 1937. Print.
Seeley, Thomas. Honeybee Ecology: A Study of Adaptation in Social Life.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985. Print.
———. The Wisdom of the Hive: The Social Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.
Schacker, Michael. A Spring without Bees: How Colony Collapse Disorder Has
Endangered Our Food Supply. Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2009. Print.
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 4th ed. Ed. David
Bevington. HarperCollins, 1992. Print.
Southerne, Edmund. A Treatise Concerning the Right Use and Ordering of Bees.
London. Thomas Woodcocke, 1593. Print.
Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 15001800. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Print.
Virgil. Georgics. Trans. Peter Fallon. Oxford World Classics. New York: Oxford
UP, 2006. Print.
Wilson, Bee. The Hive: the Story of the Honeybee and Us. New York: St. Martin’s,
2004. Print.
Winston, Mark L. The Biology of the Honey Bee. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1987. Print.