Bees and Their Keepers
Once more in my life, I am indebted to Wikipedia. Among the many delights to be found in this online encyclopedia, there is an entry which describes a story, The Three Princes of Serendip. This is the English version of the story Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo, the original of which was a Persian fairy tale written by Amir Khusrau, titled the Hasht-Bihishtin, in 1302.
The story is based on events in the Far Eastern country Serendippo, ruled by “a great and powerful king by the name of Giaffer. He had three sons who were very dear to him. And being a good father and very concerned about their education, he decided that he had to leave them endowed not only with great power, but also with all kinds of virtues of which princes are particularly in need” (this whole summary comes from Wikipedia). The father searches out the best possible tutors. “And to them he entrusted the training of his sons, with the understanding that the best they could do for him was to teach them in such a way that they could be immediately recognized as his very own.”
Well, in the nature of things (and in the nature of stories of this kind), although their tutors were pleased with the achievement of the three princes, the king had doubts. He explains to each son, separately, that he intends to retire and make them the new king. Each turns down this offer. He’s pleased, but the king remains concerned his sons’ education may have been too sheltered and privileged. Pretending to be angry, he sends them away from his kingdom. Once overseas, the three princes discover a set of clues that might help them to identify a camel, one they had never seen. They conclude that the camel is lame, blind in one eye, missing a tooth, carrying a pregnant woman, and bearing honey on one side and butter on the other. When they meet the merchant who had lost the camel, they report what they had concluded. As a result, he accuses them of stealing the camel and takes them to be punished by his lord, the Emperor Beramo.
Beramo wants to know how they were able to give such an accurate description of a camel when they had never been able to observe it. They explain they had drawn on various pieces of evidence. Grass had been eaten from the side of the road where it was less green, so the princes had concluded that the camel was blind on the other side. Because there were lumps of chewed grass on the road that were the size of a camel’s tooth, they inferred they had fallen through the gap left by a missing tooth. The tracks showed the prints of only three feet, the fourth being dragged, indicating that the animal was lame. That butter was carried on one side of the camel and honey on the other was evident because ants had been attracted to melted butter on one side of the road and flies to spilled honey on the other.
As for the woman, one of the princes said: “I guessed that the camel must have carried a woman, because I had noticed that near the tracks where the animal had knelt down the imprint of a foot was visible. Because some urine was nearby, I wet my fingers and as a reaction to its odour I … was convinced that the imprint was of a woman’s foot.” “I guessed that the same woman must have been pregnant”, said another prince, “because I had noticed nearby handprints which were indicative that the woman, being pregnant, had helped herself up with her hands while urinating.” It is at this point in the story a traveller enters to say that he had just found a missing camel wandering in the desert. Their lives spared, the three princes are rewarded and appointed the King’s advisors.
Serendipity is usually defined as ‘an unplanned fortunate discovery.’ In 1754 Horace Walpole coined the word to describe an amazing discovery as being “of that kind which I call Serendipity”. In a letter Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had made about lost painting by Giorgio Vasari, which he saw as linked to the Persian tale of The Three Princes of Serendip. The princes, he told his correspondent, were ‘always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.’ Nearly 200 years later Robert K Merton came upon the word in the 1930s in the Oxford English Dictionary, apparently coined by Walpole. Later, in 1946, Merton revealed his concept of the ‘serendipity pattern’ in empirical research, of observing an unanticipated, anomalous, and/or strategic datum, which becomes the occasion for developing a new theory. Merton explained it as ‘the discovery through chance by a theoretically prepared mind of valid findings which were not sought for’. I like that emphasis on the ‘prepared mind’.
At this point you might be wondering what this has to do with Bees and Their Keepers. To explain, this is a book by Lotte Möller, originally a Swedish publication dating from 2019, (with the translated version appearing in an English edition in 2020). As the subtitle explains, this is about bees and their keepers ‘Through the seasons and centuries, from waggle-dancing to killer bees, from Aristotle to Winnie the Pooh’. It was given to me by my youngest daughter. She knows me well. It is wonderful. How could it not be when the first page you read (the text on honey coloured paper) “The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams” (a quote from Henry Thoreau, written in the first half of the nineteenth century).
The structure of Lotte Möller’s book is like a commonplace book, a series of comments organised by calendar time, though in this case a series of chapters spread over twelve months, not days. Some commonplace books have 365 sections! In the Introduction she reminds us that bees aren’t just a source of honey and wax, “they also set an example in terms of hard work, , altruism and how to construct an efficient society”. However, Lotte Möller is disarmingly honest. It wasn’t because of honey, industry and efficiency. She was a beekeeper in the 1980s, and admired the few women beekeepers of the time, as well as tempted to write by a friend who had made a hive. It was those beekeepers who caught her interest, and the more she talked with them the more time she spent looking after her own hives, even though she was to lose swarms over the years. Her introduction concludes:
“But even though I had read only a fraction of 1 per cent or 1 per cent of everything that has been written about bees, I soon felt like a worker bee whose nectar sac is full. While she will fly home to the hive so that the results of her efforts can be transformed into honey, I sat down at the computer to write this book.”
And so we begin in January, where the topics are a ‘winter memory’ and a description of the enemies of bees. Who are these enemies? Birds? Apparently Great Tits are among those varieties who feast on bees when they can. Equally fascinating: if you see where they land on your hive to feast, attach a [piece of bright red cloth above the landing board, and none will alight there. Just in case you start thinking about birds as the great bee predators, there is one worse. It’s humans, of course. For a long time, it was believed that the only way to collect the honey was to kill all the bees in the hive, a practice only significantly abandoned in the 1950s. Once we gave up, the other thieves returned, ranging from mice to ants, some varieties of moths and even ‘robber bees’. Life for bees is tough.
Perhaps we should move forward to June. This, we learn is when bees swarm. Swarms occur after a new queen is hatched. Amazingly the process is that the old queen flies off with thousands of “her loyal retainers” to establish a new colony. Oh, and it’s a noisy process. At the same time, when a swarm departs, you are about to lose some honey production. Apiarists are anxious to keep the swarm in their area, and I read that in the past a vacant (and hence occupiable) hive would be infused with fragrant herbs: ‘how about staying here?’. Lotte Möller seems to believe this is no longer done.
The chapter headed June is full of great material. I particularly liked the section dealing with ‘Touchy neighbours have always been with us’ which opens with this story by Quintillian, writing in the first century AD:
“A poor man and a rich man were neighbours in the countryside. The rich man had flowers in his garden, the poor man had bees. The rich man complained that his flowers were being damaged by the visits of the pauper’s bees and demanded the latter be moved. Because the poor man did not move them, the rich man sprayed poison on his flowers. All the poor man’s bees died. The rich man was now being sued for the damage he had caused.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.
November takes us to mead. Apparently, mead was originally nothing more than water and honey left to ferment (from a recipe by Aristoteles in 350 BC). Although the basic ingredients remained the same, various rituals were developed over the years, although Möller doubts they made much difference. However, she was impressed by Chouchen, a variety of Mead made in Brittany, using buckwheat honey fermented with apple juice. I’m not certain why, but as I read that process, I began to feel thirsty: I wonder if I could find a glass of chouchen somewhere …
I suppose you won’t be surprised to learn that beekeepers can get violent. That was well illustrated later in her book when Lotte Möller gives an account of ‘The Bee War on Læso’. A small island off the northern coast of Denmark, part of the way across to Gothenberg, it is home to Apis Mellifera Mellifera, the original European bee, dark in colour, and carefully isolated from other varieties. This ‘war’ began in 1983, when a Læso local applied to the Danish government’s Bee Disease Committee (you didn’t know such committees existed!), to have the island declared a breeding sanctuary for this European brown bee. The application was approved, and the owners of the more familiar yellow bees were furious.
What was the issue at stake? Well, the problem was that yellow and brown bees might cohabit: there was no reason for them not to do so. This would lead to a situation where brown bee queens would allow yellow drones to mate with them, and the resulting situation would see increasing numbers of hybrid bees, and the valuable colony of brown bees would disappear! There was more. Yellow bees produce more honey than brown bees, and the yellow beekeepers were not about to lose income! Moreover, there were claims that hybrid colonies were ‘extra hardworking’ while it was claimed the brown bees were ‘sickly and produced less’. Tensions rose over the next ten years, and slowly the island became divided. Us versus them, once again! It seems humans are so predictable, always falling out with one another, even when it comes to bees!!
In 1993, the Danish Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries stepped into the increasingly tense situation. Using the Rio Convention goals on assuring diversity in fauna and flora, the only bee to be allowed on Læso was the brown bee. Naturally enough, that sparked more protests, especially from a tiny populist party, the Progress Party, well-known for advocating the rejection most forms of taxation. It always seems to be the case that regressive groups claim the name ‘progress’ for their organisation! Despite many other policies, including a ban on migrants, this was one form of integration the party supported. When the Danish Government passed a law to enforce the proposal to restrict the island to brown bees only, then life got exciting.
Where can you go next? To the European Court in Luxembourg. That court agreed the Danish government was putting a restraint on free trade, but considered it was justified by the threat to the future of the brown bees. No matter. The next argument before the EU court was a procedural one, and the matter should have decided by the European Court before it was voted on by the Danish Government. No one was happy. Eventually, the Danish Conservative Government signed an agreement the divided the island. Brown bees only to the east, a buffer zone next, and yellow bees and hybrida able to carry on producing honey on the western side of the island. And you thought the partitions in Cyprus and Ireland were contentious!
When Lotte Möller went to review how matters stood some years later, it seemed tensions remained. A leader on the ‘yellow side’ explained “We’re supposed to feel ashamed we don’t want to have brown bees, but we’re not.” Christian Juul added that “it’s where the bees get their nectar from that determines what the honey is like, not the species of bee.” You won’t be surprised to learn peace between the two sides remains unlikely. The brown beekeepers consider the yellows ‘a thorn in their side’. However, there has been progress. It turns out there is another island, Endelave, which is reserved for brown bees only, and there isn’t a yellow bee group there wanting to cause trouble
Möller’s book is full of fascinating stories like this one. She explains the evolution of hives, and the appearance of round hives, based on those many years earlier. However, like any group of experts, arguments still bedevil the beekeeping fraternity, and the more recent decisions centre around the view that the apiarists weren’t paying enough attention to the needs and instincts of the bees themselves. After all, a bee “follows and must follow the laws that nature and age-long experience have etched into its awareness”. Sounds good, but it seems bees in various places have rather different preferences. With a few changed words, this would be a discussion about racial purity, myths and other deeply held beliefs of humans.
By dwelling on the war over brown and yellow bees in Denmark, I am giving undue emphasis to just one section of Bees and Their Keepers. For example, a discussion on the differences between types of honey is quite fascinating. Apparently freshly extracted honey is always runny and clear, but then over a relatively short time it becomes cloudier and thicker. However, that ignores the differences in flavour, a consequence of the source of the honey. Believe it or not, there are terroir experts in the honey world, just as there are in assessing wines. There’s an agricultural research institute in Bologna which trains and graduates honey tasters – more than 300 had qualified when the book was written 2019.
Apparently honey experts get together to discuss colour, aroma, consistency and taste. It’s a practice that has been around for a long time, right back to Pliny the Elder in the first century, AD. One of the acknowledge experts and writers was John Milton, a nineteenth century connoisseur (not John Milton the poet!). He wrote beautifully on various honey samples he examined – I tempted to say with honeyed words! Perhaps my last word on this engaging book is one that comes from the beginning, a quote from Jacques Cousteau at the start of the Introduction: “The happiness of the bees and dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that, and wonder at it.”
