From: "James Fischer": " a new book positions beekeeping as one of the basic 
influences that turned a young German boy into Adolph  Hitler."

The antidote is Bee Wilson, The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us, John 
Murray 2004.  Wilson is a Research Fellow in the History of Ideas at 
Cambridge University UK. Goes on and on about the changing symbollism 
attached to bees according to the prevailing human morality.  Quotes Rev 
Chas Butler for example telling beekeepers 'Thou must be chaste, cleanly, 
sweet, sober, quiet and familiar, so they (the bees) love thee and know thee 
from all others'. And Rudolf Steiner's view that the sexual drive in worker 
bees was repressed in order to acheive a higher kind of love: 'The whole 
beehive is permeated with life based on love.  In manyways the bees renounce 
love , and thereby this love develops within the entire beehive. You'll 
begin to understand the life of bees once you're clear about the fact that 
the bee lives as if it were in an atmosphere pervaded thoroughly by love.' 
And on and on.  'Good'  or 'evil' are in men, not nature.

Thank goodness for scientific objectivity!

Robin

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