Hi all

I stumbled upon an interesting article, excerpts of which follow [I had to render the Greek words; Greek characters will not survive the emailing process].

 

King bees and queen bees



Most of our text-books tell us, directly or by implication, that the ancients were unaware that what we call the queen bee was a female. Although there are hints to the contrary scattered here and there in dictionaries and commentaries on Greek and Latin authors, I have never seen the material collected and estimated as a whole. Readers may like to have some of the evidence for both sides put together in a short compass. 



The first English example of queen seems to be: of the nature and properties of Bees, and of their Queene, C. Butler, Fem. Mon. (1609 A.D.)



Remarks of later commentators: 



Our superior knowledge of natural history has however enabled us to determine that the chief of the hive is always a female, not a male (rex) as was the general belief, Smiths Dict. Gk. Rom. Antiquities, 1890.



The error of the ancients in supposing the queen bee to be a king is well known, Conington on Virg. G. IV, 68. 



The fact that one queen is the mother of the colony (die Mutterbiene) was not known till the seventeenth century, Sargeaunt and Royds on Virg. G. IV, p. io6 (1904). 



Writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe her variously as a king or queen, but only in the sense of ruler of the hive .... The sex was discovered by Swammerdam, the great Dutch naturalist (1637-i680) : T. F. Royds, The Beasts, Birds and Bees of Virgil, p. 60 (3rd ed. 1930). 



The ancients from Aristotle downward commonly mistook the queen-bee for a king; but curiously enough the soldier Xenophon knew what escaped the naturalist Aristotle and the book-learned Pliny, that the head of the hive is a female: Sir James Frazer on Ov. Fast. III, 555-6. 



The Greeks regarded the queen-bee and queen-wasp as masculine, and Xenophon himself uses “o igemón” [the Governor] in Cyr. V, I, 24, and Hell. III, 2, 28 ... But here and elsewhere in this chapter the comparison between the queen-bee and the woman in the house is being emphasised: Sewell on Xen. Oec. VII, 17 (1925). Cf. 



The word chosen [in the I6th and I7th cent.] depended largely, according to Tickner Edwardes, on the sex of the reigning sovereign of the country: Royds l.c. p. 60. 



Arrian or Epictetus (c. 50-120 A.D.) called the ruling bee “vasílissa” [Queen]; the use of the word in context is remarkable, as the usual “vasiléas” [King] with its suggestion of a “tyrannos” [tyrant] with unlimited power would be more effective in driving the philosophers point home.



The Oxford translation has: These rulers are called by some "the mothers" from an idea that they bear or generate the bees. 



The procreation of bees was certainly a mystery to the ancients; but the above quotations are at any rate enough to prove that the head bee was occasionally called by names usually reserved for females; it would be rash to claim that the Greeks could give proof of her sex; but they had some inkling of the truth. 





Hudson-Williams, Thomas. "King bees and queen bees." The Classical Review 49.01 (1935): 2-4. 



posted by PLB





             ***********************************************

The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned

LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:

http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html