Beehives come in all shapes and sizes.¹See Crane, Eva. The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting. Routledge, 1999. In the Netherlands, the most common is the simplex hive, a wooden, moveable-comb hive which is easily accessible, well-suited for inspection, and permits harvest without colony culling. Inside any such hive live tens of thousands of bees, each a minuscule architect. Together, they coax wax structures from the ceiling, measure out cells, build for ventilation and traffic. At the hive's outer perimeter, propolis is plastered over any gaps or weaknesses in the woodwork, fending off cold as well as illness. Now warm and protected, the colony buzzes with activity. Larvae are raised, honey stored, clumps of pollen stamped together and fermented. To each of its hardworking members, the hive offers security and sustenance.
But the colony's products are not for them alone. Like steam from a pressure cooker, some of the beehive's treasures—and wastes—seep out at the edges. Isopods, snails, and springtails gather below the colony, feeding on bits of pollen and bee droppings. Some moths, imitating the call and scent of a queen bee, sneak into the hive for a few drops of fresh honey.²The death's head hawkmoth, specifically. For more information, see Kitching's "Phylogeny of the death's head hawkmoths [...]." Systematic Entomology, vol. 25 nr. 3, 2019, pp. 71-88. And beneath the hive's lid, where its rising warmth gathers, spiders hide their egg sacs and miniature ant kingdoms rise and fall. So the bee colony, in its furious passion, draws other species to share in its bounty. Humans too are lured. Like the thieving moths—although in more elaborate disguise—beekeepers drink deeply from the bees' treasury. If clusmy, they earn the bees' ire. If careful, they are warily tolerated.
Bees and beekeepers so coexist in an ambivalent relationship. Acts of harm and care are complicatedly entangled; the same hand that accidentally crushes a bee during inspection also provides sugar dough in times of famine, or space for larvae when the nectar supply overflows. Bee and beekeeper find common ground in their love of honey, even if they are conflicted on who it belongs to. Messily, their bodies intersect and touch, sometimes painfully. But I want to draw attention not to the liquid gold that bees produce and defend so fiercely, but to the other productivities of the hive. Bees make more than honey. They build, they dance, they engage their surroundings in muscular dialogue. And so too do they produce text. Each time the beekeeper visits the hive, they jot down their observations in a little notebook hidden beneath the lid. These texts are significant. They narrate the activities of the colony, the moments where bee and beekeeper brush one another. They describe changes, affects and observations. Plentiful and lean times alike, or hive emergencies, or the meticulous preparation ahead of winter. If a colony collapses, one of the things they leave behind is text. My goal is to shed light on bee-writing. To bridge the gap between the bee and the human hand that is spurred to write them. And, in doing so, to disturb our anthropocentric notion of authorship. Bee texts emphasize the agency of non-humans so often treated as objects of study rather than co-authors in their own right.
What kind of texts does a beehive co-author? How are they rendered intelligible, and how do they affect us?
