Ask An Entomologist

This book was published in 350, and discussed honeybees in quite some detail...and is a good reflection on what was known at the time. You can read it here: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.html …

The section on honeybees can be found here: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.5.v.html … I'd recommend reading the whole thing...it's really interesting for a number of reasons.

Well it turns out that Aristotle, frankly, had some *opinions* about women. He was...uh, a little sexist. Which was, like, common at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle's_views_on_women …

Without going into all of his views on the topic, it's apparent his views on women pretty heavily influenced what he saw was going on in the beehive. He thought of reproduction as a masculine activity, and thought of women as property. He...just wasn't very objective about this

So, when he saw a society led almost entirely of women...it actually makes a lot of sense as to why he saw the 'queen' bees as male and called them kings. These ideas of women in his circle were so ingrained that a female ruler literally wouldn't compute.

Moving on through the middle ages, the name 'king' kind of stuck because biological sciences were stuck on Aristotle's ideas for a very long time. Beekeepers *knew* the queens were female; they were observed laying eggs...but their exact role was controversial outside of them.

In fact, in most circles, it was commonly accepted that the workers gathered the larvae which grew on plants. Again, this is from Aristotle's work.

So...today it's completely and 100% accepted that queen bees are, in fact, female...and that the honeybee society is led by women. What changed in Western Society to get this idea accepted?

The woman in the picture above is Queen Elizabeth, who ruled England from 1558 until her death in 1603. Charles Butler (1560-1647) published The Feminine Monarchy in 1609, and had lived under Queen Elizabeth's reign for most of his life.

This is largely a 'right place, right time' situation. At this point, there was a lot of science that was just up and starting. There had been female rulers before, but not at the exact point where people were rethinking their assumptions.

The fact that Charles Butler was interested in bees, *and* lived under a female monarch for most of his life, I think played a major role in his decision to substitute one simple word in his book. That substitution? He called 'king bees' 'queen bees'...and it stuck.

At this point in Europe's history, there had been several female monarchs so the idea of a female leader didn't seem so odd. Society was simply primed to accept the idea of a female ruler.

...but this thread isn't just about words, it's also about *sex*. So...the term 'queen' actually had to be popularized, but we also had to *prove* that queens were female, that drones were males of the same species...and that the two bumped uglies. How did *that* happen?

Butler was not the first to think of the queen as a female. Various cultures before him, even in Europe, had noted this. The Anglo-Saxons called her 'the bee mother' 500 years prior, and Luis Mendez de Torres pointed this out 20 years before Butler.

However, nobody actually knew how bees reproduced. In fact, Charles Butler reiterated a lot of ideas about honeybee reproduction. Just a few examples of the misconceptions...

1.) The Anglo-Saxxons thought bees were formed from dead oxen 2.) Aristotle thought that drones were parasitic bees of another species because he never observed them working 3.) Aristotle thought that bees collected their larvae which grew on trees These ideas were hotly debated

Although he did all of this work shortly before his death, due to legal shenanigans, his work discussing the reproduction of the honeybee wasn't published until 1737. So from 350 BC to 1737, we had *no idea* how bees actually did the nasty.

The book in which he published this information, Byel derr Nature (The Bible of Nature) isn't online, as far as I know. If you can find a digitized copy, tag us, and we'll happily retweet/incorporate it here.

Queen Elizabeth was known as the 'virgin queen', and this idea also influenced Charles Butler...who couldn't reconcile the idea of a queen giving birth with what he observed in a beehive.

Swammerdam wasn't actually influenced by Butler; he never called this bee a 'queen'. Instead, he viewed the hive as a sort of fraternity which was more consistent with his religious beliefs.

Huber wasn't convinced that bees didn't have sex, so he and his assistant sought to watch bees mating. He kept virgin queens and drones in a container, and his assistant observed them mating but never laying eggs.