I’m interested in how we use bees to think about ourselves. One of Christopher Wren’s earliest known drawings is a design for a glass beehive which he hoped would allow people to understand how bees organized their lives. Like us, they are social animals, with complex societies, and he hoped that understanding their society would help us to understand and improve our own. For many of his contemporaries this was knowledge from God—written in the book of nature were clues about God’s intention for social life which augmented what could be learned from the book of scripture. Most of us don’t think of it that way any more, but we do still watch bees in part because by understanding them we can understand a bit more about ourselves.
Think About Bees ... 