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By Root 330 0

actually should have known better, because the sex of the queen was ultimately determined in the late 1600s. Several writers and beekeepers had guessed at the truth, but Jan Swammerdam, a Dutch microscopist, is generally credited with demonstrating that the individual assumed to be the king had unmistakable ovaries and was responsible for generating the other bees in the colony. Swammerdam published two books with breathtakingly detailed drawings of the anatomy and life cycles of bees and ants, among other things, some of which were not equaled until the twentieth century. He had to manufacture his own miniature tools and adapt the primitive magnifiers of the day for his own use. He is said to have publicly dissected a purported king bee in 1668, an event I must confess I have a hard time imagining. Admittedly, learned men had a different means of spreading knowledge back then, but it is entertaining to picture the way in which news of the impending feat might have spread: "Hey, did you hear? Ol' Jan Swammerdam is cutting open a bee next Tuesday! Who knows what peculiar structures he will reveal! Let's go watch—I'll buy the mead." Do you suppose he sold tickets?

In any event, Swammerdam correctly distinguished the anatomical differences among the larvae, or young bees, and the drone, worker, and queen. The next puzzle was to determine how exactly the queen produced the other types, since no one had ever seen bees engaging in sex. Here he was not so prescient. He suggested that the sperm from the drones somehow wafted through the air and the odor then was powerful enough to impregnate the queen, a theory called aura seminalis. Swammerdam noted the distinctive smell of the drones in the colony and assumed that this stench was powerful enough to inseminate at a distance. Why he was content to speculate rather than test his theory is not clear, given his modern, experimental approach to the rest of his work. At one point he even suggested a possible test of the aura seminalis idea, in which one would determine "whether the female Bee, enclosed in a little net made of fine thread, or in a small glass vessel covered with a piece of fine linen, or in a box with holes in it, could be impregnated by the bare scent of the male."

In Swammerdam's defense, the mating process in honeybees was not clarified for a few hundred more years, although some eighteenth-century scientists had noticed that a queen bee sometimes returns to her hive with the genitalia of the drone still attached to her reproductive organs. Finally, in the mid-1900s, naturalists discovered drone swarms, groups of virgin male bees that congregate in small areas near hives. At the right time of year, if you know where to look, you can find the would-be suitors by listening for their humming. My college entomology professor took us to one such gathering, and although we could hear but not see the bees, when he flung a pebble into the air above our heads it was instantly pounced upon by the drones. The young queen flies into the swarm and is pursued by the males; as the queen flies faster and farther, she leaves behind all but the most ardent males. Finally she mates with one or more of the drones, who die immediately and fall to the ground while she carries their sperm back to the hive.

Sex and Honey

PARALLELS between bee and human society and gender roles—or lack thereof—have been popular for a long time. The bees' communal life, industry, and apparent self-sacrifice for the good of the colony were held up by many ancient civilizations as models to which humans would do well to aspire, and beehives have served as symbols for groups as disparate as Masons and Mormons. Once it was established that the worker bees did not mate, their chastity was also suggested as an inspiration to women. After the queen bee's sex was discovered, writers such as Charles Butler, author of The Feminine Monarchie, published in the early seventeenth century, began to shape their newfound knowledge into a form more acceptable for the social mores of the time. Butler approvingly noted