Chapter 21

Be the Bee

Learning to Live for Others

“The bee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others.”

❖

John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues, XII

Casey's case in this chapter is that no bee in a hive works for herself, and that the colony's flexibility (young bees stepping up to forage the moment the older foragers are gone, older bees returning to nursing when the nurses disappear) only works because none of them are running a separate agenda. A sick forager doesn't even wait to be told. She leaves early and doesn't come back, protecting a colony she'll never see benefit from it. Casey sets that alongside Civil War threads: Mary Safford, who paid for what the hospitals lacked and eventually needed care herself; Mother Bickerdyke, who ran or set up some three hundred field hospitals and rode at the head of Sherman's corps in the Grand Review having earned it with no rank at all, and the men of the 54th Massachusetts, who refused eighteen months of pay rather than accept less than white soldiers, fighting for a freedom most of them expected to belong to people not yet born. The hive's selflessness is partly enforced (workers eat each other's eggs, so the self never gets to hatch), and people have to choose it. The hardest example is Mary Greenhow Lee of Winchester, Virginia, who despised the Union soldiers, called helping them "a wearisome life," fed them anyway, and never wavered in defending slavery. The chapter names all of that plainly and sets her beside Mark 10:45. Acts 2:44-45 describes the early church selling what it had and giving to whoever needed it. Casey reads the hive's own economy (nectar into honey, a strong colony's frame handed to a weak one only because a beekeeper chooses to move it) the same way: nothing in the system hoards, and nothing in the system is required to. The generosity still has to come from somewhere. That's the point, not the flaw. Someone has to choose to move the frame.

Bee Science

A worker's life spent on needs beyond her own: from the moment she emerges, a worker cleans brood cells, feeds larvae, builds comb for the colony's stores, and helps guard the entrance; her work sustains the whole hive, including herself
Task flexibility on demand: remove a colony's foragers and young bees start foraging weeks early; remove its nurses and older bees go back to nursing — the colony reassigns labor to whatever the whole needs
Self-removal of sick foragers: health-compromised foragers leave the hive early and don't come back — a self-removal the researchers read as protecting the colony from whatever the sick bee is carrying
Beekeeper-assisted colony equalization: left alone, a strong colony and a weak one don't share — a weak or queenless hive is far more likely to get robbed by its stronger neighbors than helped by them; a beekeeper pulls a frame of capped honey and a frame of brood from the strong hive to even out what nature wouldn't
Worker policing of worker-laid eggs: workers forgo reproduction almost entirely but not quite. With the queen kept below a queen excluder and drone comb hung above it, Ratnieks found eggs at about one per sixteen thousand drone cells; 85 percent were gone within a day and only two in a hundred hatched, and about one in ten thousand workers dissected had a fully developed egg. In trials across twenty colonies, only nine of 1,340 worker-laid eggs were still there a day later, against 661 of the queen's 1,461. In eleven colonies Visscher checked, about one drone in eight hundred was a worker's son. In rare 'anarchic' colonies, workers get past the policing and lay large numbers of drones even with a queen present. Wenseleers and Ratnieks (2006) compared honeybees with nine species of wasps: where worker-laid eggs were more likely to be killed, fewer workers even began developing eggs

Cited research (6)

Michener, C.D., The Social Behavior of the Bees (1974): standard comparative survey of bee societies, cited for reproductive division of labor — not, as an earlier draft wrongly implied, for detecting when collective survival depends on particular behaviors
Robinson, G.E., Page, R.E., Strambi, C. & Strambi, A. (1992), "Colony integration in honey bees: mechanisms of behavioral reversion," Ethology 90: documents foragers reverting to nursing when a colony's nurses are removed
Huang, Z.-Y. & Robinson, G.E. (1996), "Regulation of honey bee division of labor by colony age demography," Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 39: documents young bees foraging precociously when a colony's foragers are removed
Rueppell, O., Hayworth, M.K. & Ross, N.P. (2010), "Altruistic self-removal of health-compromised honey bee workers from their hive," Journal of Evolutionary Biology 23: health-compromised foragers leave the hive early and don't return
Ratnieks, F.L.W. (1993), worker-laid eggs under a queen excluder; Ratnieks & Visscher (1989) and Foster & Ratnieks (2001), egg removal trials; Visscher (1989), worker sons among drones: as cited in manuscript ch.21 (worker policing); details not re-verified against the papers in the notes files
Barron, A.B., Oldroyd, B.P. & Ratnieks, F.L.W. (2001), review of worker reproduction; Wenseleers, T. & Ratnieks, F.L.W. (2006), "Enforced altruism in insect societies": as cited in manuscript ch.21; the review calls anarchic laying a "cheating" strategy, and the 2006 paper compares honeybees with nine species of wasps

Scripture

Anchor: Romans 1:20

Also touches

Acts 2:44-45Acts 20:351 John 3:17-18Mark 10:45

Civil War Recordcivil war

Mary Safford, Mother Bickerdyke, the 54th Massachusetts's pay protest, and Mary Greenhow Lee feeding Union wounded in Winchester

Mary Safford began nursing as soon as Union troops occupied Cairo, Illinois, in 1861 (Cairo sits where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi), in the same hospitals Mother Bickerdyke was scrubbing into shape, at a time when "there was no system, no organization, no knowledge what to do, and no means with which to work"; she bought what the hospitals lacked with her own money and her brother's, and after the battle of Belmont (November 1861, across the river in Missouri) was the first one out onto the field, under guns that "ploughed the ground around her," waving a handkerchief tied to a stick as a flag of truce. Livermore described her as "very frail, petite in figure as a girl of twelve summers, and utterly unaccustomed to hardship"; soldiers called her the Cairo angel; she paid a milk-woman herself so two men in a ward could keep their daily tumbler of milk; a captain of the 57th Illinois wounded at Shiloh (the two-day battle in Tennessee in April 1862) wrote that she "was everywhere, doing everything" and "seemed to live on air." She broke down completely before the war was two years old, spent months in a Paris hospital, then came home and trained as a doctor (Livermore, My Story of the War, 1889)
Mother Bickerdyke set up or ran roughly three hundred field hospitals over the course of the war, often arriving before the medical corps and staying after everyone else had left; she flagged down a steamboat to get a wagonload of potatoes aboard (Livermore, pp. 538-540, the 1865 Louisville episode) and is remembered moving among the wounded by lantern light for days after Shiloh; at the Grand Review of the Armies in Washington, May 1865 (the Union's victory parade), General Sherman had her ride at the head of the 15th Corps
The 54th Massachusetts, one of the first Black regiments organized in the North, protested unequal pay ($10/month versus white soldiers' $13) by refusing all pay for roughly eighteen months; Corporal James Henry Gooding wrote directly to Lincoln that September asking, "We have done a Soldier's Duty. Why can't we have a Soldier's pay?" — verified verbatim against the Freedmen and Southern Society Project's transcription (freedmen.umd.edu)
Frederick Douglass's own sons, Charles and Lewis, served in the 54th Massachusetts
Mary Greenhow Lee, a widow of forty-two in Winchester, Virginia (her husband, a lawyer, died in 1856; still in deep mourning in 1864), kept a journal of some nine hundred pages from March 11, 1862. By one count Winchester changed hands between the armies at least sixty-eight times, as many as four times in a day. She hated the occupiers ("Secesh lives here"; "such a thorough contempt for them that I do not realize they are human beings," March 25, 1862; "I know I can cow them") yet, after Kernstown (March 23, 1862), wrote of herself "down on the floor, by the Yankees, feeding them" and "I am trying to do good even to our enemies, but it is a wearisome life." For almost three years she carried food into Winchester's hospitals, went "armed" with a basket when challenged, won a pudding dispute ("came off conqueror & was left in undisputed possession of the field"), and was banished by General Sheridan (the Union commander who by then held the Shenandoah Valley) in February 1865 for, among other things, running Confederate mail. She was a slaveholder; two enslaved men, Hugh and Evans, freed themselves in the first months of the occupation, and she called Evans "ungrateful" for leaving (Sheila Phipps, the historian, 1996; notes/research/phipps-mary-greenhow-lee-1996.md)
On January 13, 1864, the Chicago Tribune ran an item headed "THE QUILTING BEE": more than 150 women had gathered at the War Committee Rooms the day before and made 51 comforters for soldiers, sent out that evening (Chicago Daily Tribune, January 13, 1864, p. 4; image-checked in notes/research/extraordinary-hive-customs-folklore-part2.md)
David Hunter Strother, a Union officer and magazine illustrator, found "two rooms filled with wounded and seven dead" in Winchester's Union Hotel on March 25, 1862 (Bierle, Emerging Civil War, 2022)

Primary sources (6)

Sheila R. Phipps, "As If I Were a Confederate Soldier": Mary Greenhow Lee and the Civil War She Waged in Winchester, Virginia (M.A. thesis, College of William & Mary, 1996), quoting Lee's journal (Handley Library typescript)
Sarah Kay Bierle, "Kernstown's Wounded in Winchester," Emerging Civil War, March 29, 2022 (Strother's March 25, 1862 entry)
Chicago Daily Tribune, January 13, 1864, p. 4, "The Quilting Bee"
Mary A. Livermore, My Story of the War (1889), Ch. VIII, pp. 206-215 (Mary Safford) and Chs. XXIV-XXVII (Mother Bickerdyke)
Freedmen and Southern Society Project, University of Maryland: Cpl. James Henry Gooding to Abraham Lincoln, Morris Island, S.C., Sept. 28, 1863 (freedmen.umd.edu/gooding.htm)
Library of Congress, "The Civil War in America" exhibition biography; National Museum of Civil War Medicine, "'She Ranks Me': The Story of Mother Bickerdyke"

verified

From the Book

Mary Livermore, the Chicago relief worker from the pollen chapter, described Mary Safford as "very frail, petite in figure as a girl of twelve summers, and utterly unaccustomed to hardship." Safford started nursing as soon as Union troops occupied Cairo, Illinois, in 1861. Cairo sits where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi. She worked in the same hospitals Mother Bickerdyke, the nurse from chapter 5, was scrubbing into shape. At the time, "there was no system, no organization, no knowledge what to do, and no means with which to work." She bought what the hospitals lacked with her own money and her brother's. After the battle of Belmont, across the river in Missouri, that November, she was the first one out onto the field. The guns "ploughed the ground around her." She tied her handkerchief to a stick and waved it over her head for a flag of truce. Then she went on with the wounded. The soldiers called her the Cairo angel. Livermore watched Safford find two men crying in a ward. Their surgeon had allowed them a tumbler of milk each morning and night. The hospital couldn't afford it. Safford went out and caught the milk-woman in the street. She paid for that day's milk and told her to keep bringing it. The bill could come to her. A captain of the 57th Illinois was wounded at Shiloh, the two-day battle in Tennessee in April 1862, and carried aboard the hospital boat where she worked. He wrote that she "was everywhere, doing everything, straightening out affairs, soothing and comforting, and sometimes praying, dressing wounds, cooking and nursing, and keeping the laggards at their work. For herself, she seemed to live on air." She broke down completely before the war was two years old. She spent months in a Paris hospital being treated for what the work had done to her. Then she came home and trained as a doctor.

Get the full book →