Beekeeping and Governing

Thursday, October 2nd, 2014

James C. Scott draws an analogy between beekeeping and governing:

In premodern times the gathering of honey was a difficult affair. Even if bees were housed in straw hives, harvesting the honey usually meant driving off the bees and often destroying the colony. The arrangement of brood chambers and honey cells followed complex patterns that varied from hive to hive — patterns that did not allow for neat extractions. The modern beehive, in contrast, is designed to solve the beekeeper’s problem. With a device called a “queen excluder,” it separates the brood chambers below from the honey supplies above, preventing the queen from laying eggs above a certain level. Furthermore, the wax cells are arranged neatly in vertical frames, nine or ten to a box, which enable the easy extraction of honey, wax, and propolis. Extraction is made possible by observing “bee space — the precise distance between the frames that the bees will leave open as passages rather than bridging the frames by building intervening honeycomb. From the beekeeper’s point of view, the modern hive is an orderly, “legible” hive allowing the beekeeper to inspect the condition of the colony and the queen, judge its honey production (by weight), enlarge or contract the size of the hive by standard units, move it to a new location, and, above all, extract just enough honey (in temperate climates) to ensure that the colony will overwinter successfully.

I do not wish to push the analogy further than it will go, but much of early modern European statecraft seemed similarly devoted to rationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format. The social simplifications thus introduced not only permitted a more finely tuned system of taxation and conscription but also greatly enhanced state capacity. They made possible quite discriminating interventions of every kind, such as public-health measures, political surveillance, and relief for the poor.

Comments

  1. A Modern Beekeeper says:

    Ironically, there is a growing grassroots movement of beekeepers who are rejecting the intensive management of frames, and other ritualistic behaviour like regular treatments with chemicals or choosing which queens will breed with which drones to suit human criteria for the perfect bee.

    Unamanaged bees are demonstrably healthier, and happier (far fewer stings!) than the ones farmed intensively for honey and treated brutally as portable pollination machines. It turns out bees survived for millions of years without human oversight, and if you let them sort things out themselves they adapt rapidly to new stressors like varroa mites. “Conventional” beekeepers have a lot invested in the status quo so keep rubbishing this, but ‘eppur si muove’ as Galileo said.

    Analogies between human and bee societies have been made since at least the time of the Romans. They’re generally very stretched analogies and their spin reflects current political thinking (“absolute monarchs”, “perfect democracies” etc). We’re not insects, but to run with your own analogy, sometimes there can be too much control of a society.

  2. Some Random Guy says:

    Do you have any concerns about Africanisation? I’m interested in beekeeping and may take it up as retirement draws near. Being as I live in Lousiana I’m a bit concerned about the African influence as well as possible wet climate issues.

    Got any links you think would be helpful or just plain informative on beekeeping in general?

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