(Featured image courtesy of USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab)
The enemy can be everywhere if we want it to be. This is even truer when the enemy is something unknown and ominous, more campfire nightmares told in hushed tones than an observable force. Legends usurp the truth and fear usurps logical thinking.
It’s easy to forget what the world was like before bees constituted our biggest societal concern. While we knew bees existed, they were more along the lines of dark matter or God or Christian Bale’s true form. We didn’t know what they looked like or what their behavior was like or what their purpose was (if they had any purpose at all). Bees were these entities science fiction writers would throw into their stories as a way to explain the mechanics of time travel or exceeding the speed of light.
Just look at this famous paragraph from HG Well’s The Time Machine:
“So it was the Psychologist himself who sent forth the model Time Machine on its interminable voyage. We all saw the lever turn. I am absolutely certain there was no trickery. We heard the buzzing of the scores of bees that powered the thing. There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame jumped…the little machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory; and it was gone – vanished! Save for the lamp, the table was bare.”
I’ve boldened the relevant line from this paragraph.
Indeed, most references to bees took on a mythical quality that would one day work against it, painting bees into a picture of The Other. According to all literature, bees were powerful and dangerous. And although this is not quite true, it allowed Howard Zieff to direct his magnum opus to hatred in 1991 with the film that would turn the masses against bees once and for all.
That film was My Girl.
Just look at this exchange about fifteen minutes into the film:
“Vada: Dad, would you ever fuck a bee?
Harry: Yeah, I’d fuck a bee… fucking kill a bee. Fuck bees.
Vada: That’s hate speech, Dad!
Harry: Vad, if I ever see you talking to a bee, I’ll kill you, too.
Vada: …
Harry: I mean it, honey. I love you. I really do. But I would rather see you dead than see you associating with any bees.”
The remainder of the movie devolves into a mess of anti-bee hate speech. Vada only provides weak arguments as to why bees are cool, the arguments are meant to be weak on purpose so the film can quickly brush away such arguments. The anti-bee fury culminates in Vada’s boyfriend Thomas being viciously attacked and murdered. Who attacked him? Bees.
Then, if only to really drive the point home, Zieff superimposes the words “Fuck Bees” at the top of the screen during one of the final scenes:
Only the most strident bee hater can feel anything but disgust at this rhetoric. But hate looks like this. Hateful people act like this. I would ask the question “to what end?” but we already know the answer – to the end of the existence of bees.
Since 1991, bees went from outnumbering every other organism on Earth by a ratio of 3:1 to coming upon the precipice of extinction. This extremely true fact is even more disturbing considering the following factors:
- Most people still don’t know what bees look like, and of those who could identify a bee if shown a picture, most have literally only seen bees in pictures. Part of what makes it so easy to villainize bees is the fact that they are an unknowable entity. It’s easy to hate bees when they seem more like a thing imagined than real, living things. This is what made bees so horrifying in My Girl. For most people, that movie was the first time they ever saw bees.
- Even scientists can’t agree on what bees are, how they came to be or from whence they came. And this is an important point because destroying something before we understand it can have unintended consequences. I’m reminded of another thing we almost destroyed before understanding it, which is gravity. Much like bees, gravity was close to extinction by the mid 17th century, and if Isaac Newton had not published his seminal paper Actually, Gravity is Pretty Fucking Cool in 1691, we may not have a world with gravity in it today. If we destroy bees before we fully understand them, our own Isaac Newton (but for bees) may not save them in time.
- Usefulness shouldn’t be a prerequisite for not exterminating an entire species. Look, maybe we research bees and they’re not the gravity of our time. Maybe they’re just these elusive flying monsters that sometimes manslaughter children but mostly keep to themselves without helping anything or doing anything cool. Bees don’t need to be useful to be worth saving. Compassion doesn’t pertain to useful things alone.
- At worst, bees are not as harmful as everyone says they are. A few swarms of bees killing some fucker named Thomas isn’t reason to villainize every single bee. Ted Bundy killed some people. We don’t kill every Ted to ever exist. I hate even talking about bees in these general terms. “Bees aren’t that bad” is a kind of racist thing for me to say because it removes bees as individuals and poses them as a single mass. But each bee is an individual, so we can’t say every bee ever is complicit in killing Thomas. I hate to talk about them as a homogenous group, but here we are because they are being murdered as a homogenous group. However, bees don’t kill that many people and never have. There’s a reason why we barely knew anything about bees until 1991. They aren’t doing anything wrong.
But these points probably won’t do much to convert those who are afraid of bees. The main issue when fighting hate is people make decisions based on their feelings, regardless of how those decisions line up (or don’t line up) with reality. Fear of The Other trumps any logic.
People don’t see bees as possible friends or lovers. They see a kill swarm if they see bees at all. Even a movie like 2006’s Akeelah and the Bee, a movie meant to be a celebration of all things bee, did not cast any actual bees to play Akeelah’s bee friend. That’s a step up from My Girl’s full on assault on bees, but that doesn’t make it good.
So let’s change that. Or more to the point, let’s examine a movie that has already provided evidence that bees can be and would be friends to all of humanity if given the opportunity. I am, of course, talking about Simon J. Smith and Steve Hicker’s seminal masterpiece, Bee Movie.
Much like My Girl, this movie takes on the subject of the tensions between humans and bees. But where Bee Movie differs is it actually lets us get to know bees. Instead of being an unstoppable force set to kill anything in their path, we get to know what the daily life of bees is like. And instead of only showing bees in isolation from humans and humans in isolation from bees, we actually get to see the two groups interact. What transpires is a friendship unlike any ever seen, the perfect partnership of human and bee. They talk, laugh, and yes, they love.
And because we see bees both in their natural habitat and interacting with humans in a positive manner, this documentary teaches us quite a few things about bees:
- Bees love jazz.
- Bees are kind of a tiny bird with wings and everything, which means they can fly. But what type of bird is still being debated among scientists, who cannot decide the precise nature of bees? Some scientists say they aren’t even birds but angels while others say angels are also a type of bird. A lot of debate surrounds this, but for now, we will consider bees birds. This is from where the phrase “the birds and the bees” comes.
- Inside the body of each bee is honey. In fact, bees don’t have blood or feces or urine or saliva. It’s all honey, and when they get too full of their honey juice, the honey comes out of every hole of their body. This is how we get honey, and it hints at the notion that bees might be useful after all even if we can’t decide what bees are or how they even create this magical golden plasma. The jury is still out on whether or not honey is good or bad, but if we prove honey to be good, this would be a huge boon for bees.
- Bees all serve a single queen who is also a bee. This is where things get tricky because it implies that part of our feud with bees actually goes to the highest reaches of world government. There is a queen, and we should be serving her. It’s very interesting that humans are attacking her most loyal subjects.
- Bees have swords they stick into their butts so the honey juice won’t leak out when they don’t want it to leak. They can use these as a form of defense, which is another reason bees have such a bad reputation.
- In 2007, bees sued the Honey Lobby over the right to their own product, which Big Honey had been stealing from bees for decades. Here we have another clue as to why those in power have waged an attack on bees.
The fact remains that despite being fiercely loyal friends, producing all the world’s honey and being the rightful rulers of our planet, we are trying to kill bees. We just may succeed in this genocide if we don’t wake up and help out our bee friends.
My suggestion is to get to know some bees. Think about how you feel about bees and ask yourself when and where you learned to feel that way. Chances are you actually know very little about bees or their way of life. You may not even be able to identify a bee if one were directly in front of you. If you do some honest to God research and still hate bees, well, at least I tried. I just want everyone else to say they tried, too. Maybe then we can admit we shouldn’t be killing bees.
Stop being assholes, people. Okay?