BY FERAL PRACTICE
Sexual Libertarianism and Reproductive Slavery in More Than Bee Worlds
Long before Homo sapiens evolved, bees pollinated the forests and meadows of what was eventually to become Britain. In Europe, bees are a forest species and tree hollows are their favoured nesting sites. Wild bee nests were once so plentiful that in summer you’d be rained on by honey oozing from the tree hives as you walked or rode through the forest.1 Long before beekeeping, people stole the honey from wild bees.
Being ancient creatures that moved easily between earth and sky, bringing sweetness, honeybees earned a reputation as spirit guides and psychopomps, messengers between this world and the next, and were thought by Christians to be sent by God directly from Paradise, leading to the edict that Mass must be celebrated in the light of their wax candles.2 Even in our more secular times, bees are consistently aligned with love, community and the sun. Seen with the eyes of patriarchy, the bee colony was long thought to be ruled by its King, but the Queen bee does not rule the hive. Honeybee communities practice an emergent democracy. Jacqueline Freeman describes a ‘honeybee as both an individual and a cell in a larger being. Each bee is both particle and wave in the physics of its world’3. The female worker bees control every aspect of life in the hive, including their queens.
Honeybees transmute plant materials into several distinct, complex substances through a combination of corporeal processes and basic ritual actions, like chewing and fanning. Wax is exuded from glands in their abdomen, and chewed into place to create extraordinary hexagonal architecture; nectar is mixed with saliva and reduced by fanning to create honey, while anti-microbial propolis is concocted from plant resins and fungal spores. Honeybees’ extended phenotype expresses itself through an intimate relation with flowering plants, most specifically in a sexuality that is productively queer. Worker bees outsource their sex life and fertility to a few overdeveloped siblings, but then repeatedly engage in a kind of incentivised asymmetric intercourse with beings of other species. Flowers are notoriously promiscuous, advertising themselves with displays of gaudy colour, pattern and scent, and paying for sexual services in sticky nectar or with more unusual kinks, such as being ‘thermogenic’, or exuding specialist resins and volatile chemicals (drugs, essentially). While honeybees feed, their vegetal collaborators are orgasmically fertilised.
The intra-action of insects and plants also plays a pivotal role in geology. Pollinators move minerals and nutrients from place to place by plant fertilisation, while all herbivores move minerals in and through their eating, shitting and dying. Or, as Karen Barad puts it:
“Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being.”4
Bees fly through and fructify a densely nuanced, thick tangle of animate matter, performing ‘the world’s worlding, the becoming of the world’5 .
Honeybees perform highly ritualised, orgiastic fertility rites. Male honeybees are made just for love, and are nurtured by their sisters to perform a single, ecstatic, sacrificial act. Once virile, drones spend each warm summer afternoon cruising in secret gathering places that have been visited by bees down the generations. How the knowledge of these love-zones is transmitted, or how they are found, is a mystery. One theory is that they are positioned where ley lines cross, places with heightened electromagnetic force, which bees are sensitive to. Virgin queens fly long distances to these zones, to be chased by a bevy of lustful drones. She flies up towards the sun, and will mate 10 to 20 times with different males before she is sated, so filled then with sperm that it will last for her lifetime. Drunkenly, she flies back to the nest to be received by her sisters as their new Queen. In contrast, the drone’s orgasm is so energetic that his testicles explode and he dies: an overwhelming petit mort.
The forest stimulates liberatory imaginaries and practices in more than bee worlds. Cruising spots for gay men are often conveniently wooded. Generations of men have enjoyed al fresco sex in many of Hampstead Heath’s more secluded woodland quarters. And when heterosexual premarital sex was less easily organised, forests were an important resource for all sexual persuasions. Trees and bushes protect lovers from prying eyes, but the eyes might not always be human. Forest creatures operate and relate outside of human domestic agendas. The wild of the woods offers space at the fringes of convention, eliciting boundary crossings and unusual minglings. As human bodies make love in the wildwood, their met flesh presses into a living world where, from a new materialist framework, the difference between humans and animals, or even between animate and inanimate, is one of degree more than of kind. In the midst of the wildwood, the copulatory human enters a space of disalienation from its animal (and perhaps mythic) status.
In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn relates how the Avila of Ecuador enter into a reciprocal semiotic relation with the animals of the forest in order to hunt them better. The hunters not only need to place themselves in the position of the creature in order to think what their next move would be, they also need to think how the animals perceive and interpret them, how humans are seen by the forest. Crucially, in regard to the forest jaguars, they must not turn away and show their backs, as this allows the jaguar to see them as ‘meat’, as prey. Instead, humans must stare back at jaguars, meet their gaze, to instil upon them that they are equals, if not lovers. Eye-to-eye communication is life-saving. This subjective reciprocity, even if practised for pragmatic reasons, folds into the Avila understanding of the diversity of lives that surround them as multiple centres of meaning and interpretation. “‘Self’, at its most basic level, is a product of semiosis. It is the locus – however rudimentary and ephemeral – of a living dynamic by which signs come to represent the world around them to a ‘someone’ who emerges as a result of this process.”6 Kohn proposes a forest that thinks, in which the human semiotic system forms an ‘open whole’ nesting inside and opening onto broader systems of iconic and indexical signage that all living things live into and become with.
In Kohn’s forest, hierarchies are embedded in relations between predators and prey that extend downwards from humans towards peccaries and monkeys, but also upwards towards colonial powers and estate managers, jaguars and anacondas. They are always potentially in flux. The hunter may become the hunted, the hunted may become meat. In the forest, the edges between species and subjectivities are not always clear. All are beings in the midst of beings.
In European ontology, informed by monotheistic religion, souls are seen as differentiated, with the human soul possessing unique status, whereas all flesh is seen as broadly the same. In Amerindian perspectivism, “the soul ‘is experienced as… a manifestation of the conventional order implicit in everything…’”.7 It is the body that defines and is peculiar to a species. Another way of putting this is that all animals are ‘human to themselves’. Each animal is human, or a person, at the centre of their own perspectival universe.
In a natural bee colony, the brood is nurtured deep inside the body of the hive, protected and tended assiduously by their sisters, cooled by the fanning of their wings, warmed by their collective vibration, fed on pollen and bee milk, guarded, cleaned and protected by propolis. Each year, a few queen cells are built, and these larvae feed only on royal jelly. As summer arrives, the mother Queen leads many of her daughters in a swarm to found a new colony. As they fly away, new virgin queens emerge to fight for the right to mate and return as mother.
Humans have manipulated and exploited honeybees, to their cost and our gain, for thousands of years, but their domestication was only partial until it was possible to override and manipulate their reproduction. Before the 19th century, every new bee was born of free sexuality, the fecund
mixing of the gene pool that drives evolution. With the invention of the moveable frame hive, beekeepers finally got access to the brood cells and the queen. Then, in the 1920s, Mr Watson invented an apparatus for the artificial insemination of a queen bee. She is pinioned between steel and glass as sperm is injected deep into her oviduct. Queen bees are big business. It has become standard practice to kill and replace a queen after a single season. They are traded globally, shipped in tiny wire cages. The male bees’ sperm is extracted by squeezing. It is a fatal strangulation.
Each reproductively enslaved queen is sold on the basis of her genetic docility, heavy honey production or resistance to specific human-perpetuated diseases: qualities that benefit humans and profit margins. Bees are shipped round the monocultures of the world on flatbed trucks and aeroplanes, exchanging increasingly fatal diseases across the globe. In many areas, wild and farmed bees are threatened with extinction. Conventional beekeeping websites advertise ever -more-sophisticated technical fixes. Better chemicals. More succinct genetic manipulation. More intervention. Better mastery.
Julietta Singh says that “to unthink mastery… requires either a radically different understanding of what it could mean to be human, or perhaps a thinking of the human that would not be human at all”8. She calls for ‘dehumanism’, which she sees as a practice of recuperation, of stripping away the violent foundations (always structural and ideological) of mastery that continue to render some beings more human than others.9 Nearness to the human extends outside the species’ boundary to determine – via tests of sentience or intelligence or self-recognition or some other skewed anthropocentric category – how we should treat gorillas differently to sheep, parrots differently to bees.
Singh’s formulation of dehumanism draws on ‘queer inhumanisms’, which articulate unconventional ways of performing humanity without using the oppositional and temporal form ‘posthumanism’. She says that “other genres of being human” that have been lived and will be lived by those subjected to imperial force can offer us alternative performances of the human.10 In swapping ‘in-’ for ‘de-’, Singh seeks to embed in the word’s utterance the generative role of mastery: its historical processes of dehumanisation and deconstruction.
In 2006, research entomologist Thomas D Seeley published a paper showing that feral forest honeybees living in upstate New York adapted resistance to Varroa mites in just five seasons.11 Wild sexuality outperforms human treatments. Seeley’s study of wild bees underpins his call to return to what he calls ‘Darwinian beekeeping’: stopping the chemical treatment of diseases, and allowing the bees to practice natural selection. Meanwhile in Germany, Torben Schiffer’s research into the impact on bee health of different man-made environments is informing a move towards better hive design, low-intervention beekeeping, and renewed interest in traditional beekeeping methodologies such as tree beekeeping and the use of log hives, which mimic natural nest conditions for bees. Natural beekeepers Bienenbotschaft suggest that they have “learned to see with the eyes of the bees”12. As we comprehend (or relearn) the complex warp and weft of ecological thinking, perhaps we can step back from our urge to mastery, exploitation and control, and understand landscapes and creatures alike as self-creating masterpieces, of which humans can never be masters.
1 Ransome, Hilda (2004), The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. London: Dover Publications,
p. 191.
2 Ibid. pp. 196–197.
3 Freeman, Jacqueline (2016), Song of Increase: Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World. Colorado: Sounds True, p. 12.
4 Barad, Karen (2013), On Touching: the inhuman that therefore I am, from a PDF subsequently published in Power of Material / Politics of Materiality (2013), edited by Susanne Witzgall. Chicago: Diaphanes.
5 Citing Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
6 Kohn, Eduardo (2013), How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 16.
7Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2014), Cannibal Metaphysics. Edited and translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, p. 53.
8 Singh, Julietta (2018), Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. USA: Duke University Press, p. 14.
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 Ibid., p. 14.
11 Seeley, Thomas D (2007), Honey bees of the Arnot Forest: a population of feral colonies persisting with Varroa destructor in the northeastern United States. Apidologie 38 (2007) 19–29
https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/pdf/2007/01/m6063.pdf
12 https://bienenbotschaft.de/en/who-we-are/
Essay originally published in Perry, C (ed.) (2022) Art and the Rural Imagination. More Than Ponies. 2021
Sexual Libertarianism and Reproductive Slavery in More Than Bee Worlds
Long before Homo sapiens evolved, bees pollinated the forests and meadows of what was eventually to become Britain. In Europe, bees are a forest species and tree hollows are their favoured nesting sites. Wild bee nests were once so plentiful that in summer you’d be rained on by honey oozing from the tree hives as you walked or rode through the forest.1 Long before beekeeping, people stole the honey from wild bees.
Being ancient creatures that moved easily between earth and sky, bringing sweetness, honeybees earned a reputation as spirit guides and psychopomps, messengers between this world and the next, and were thought by Christians to be sent by God directly from Paradise, leading to the edict that Mass must be celebrated in the light of their wax candles.2 Even in our more secular times, bees are consistently aligned with love, community and the sun. Seen with the eyes of patriarchy, the bee colony was long thought to be ruled by its King, but the Queen bee does not rule the hive. Honeybee communities practice an emergent democracy. Jacqueline Freeman describes a ‘honeybee as both an individual and a cell in a larger being. Each bee is both particle and wave in the physics of its world’3. The female worker bees control every aspect of life in the hive, including their queens.
Honeybees transmute plant materials into several distinct, complex substances through a combination of corporeal processes and basic ritual actions, like chewing and fanning. Wax is exuded from glands in their abdomen, and chewed into place to create extraordinary hexagonal architecture; nectar is mixed with saliva and reduced by fanning to create honey, while anti-microbial propolis is concocted from plant resins and fungal spores. Honeybees’ extended phenotype expresses itself through an intimate relation with flowering plants, most specifically in a sexuality that is productively queer. Worker bees outsource their sex life and fertility to a few overdeveloped siblings, but then repeatedly engage in a kind of incentivised asymmetric intercourse with beings of other species. Flowers are notoriously promiscuous, advertising themselves with displays of gaudy colour, pattern and scent, and paying for sexual services in sticky nectar or with more unusual kinks, such as being ‘thermogenic’, or exuding specialist resins and volatile chemicals (drugs, essentially). While honeybees feed, their vegetal collaborators are orgasmically fertilised.
The intra-action of insects and plants also plays a pivotal role in geology. Pollinators move minerals and nutrients from place to place by plant fertilisation, while all herbivores move minerals in and through their eating, shitting and dying. Or, as Karen Barad puts it:
“Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being.”4
Bees fly through and fructify a densely nuanced, thick tangle of animate matter, performing ‘the world’s worlding, the becoming of the world’5 .
Honeybees perform highly ritualised, orgiastic fertility rites. Male honeybees are made just for love, and are nurtured by their sisters to perform a single, ecstatic, sacrificial act. Once virile, drones spend each warm summer afternoon cruising in secret gathering places that have been visited by bees down the generations. How the knowledge of these love-zones is transmitted, or how they are found, is a mystery. One theory is that they are positioned where ley lines cross, places with heightened electromagnetic force, which bees are sensitive to. Virgin queens fly long distances to these zones, to be chased by a bevy of lustful drones. She flies up towards the sun, and will mate 10 to 20 times with different males before she is sated, so filled then with sperm that it will last for her lifetime. Drunkenly, she flies back to the nest to be received by her sisters as their new Queen. In contrast, the drone’s orgasm is so energetic that his testicles explode and he dies: an overwhelming petit mort.
The forest stimulates liberatory imaginaries and practices in more than bee worlds. Cruising spots for gay men are often conveniently wooded. Generations of men have enjoyed al fresco sex in many of Hampstead Heath’s more secluded woodland quarters. And when heterosexual premarital sex was less easily organised, forests were an important resource for all sexual persuasions. Trees and bushes protect lovers from prying eyes, but the eyes might not always be human. Forest creatures operate and relate outside of human domestic agendas. The wild of the woods offers space at the fringes of convention, eliciting boundary crossings and unusual minglings. As human bodies make love in the wildwood, their met flesh presses into a living world where, from a new materialist framework, the difference between humans and animals, or even between animate and inanimate, is one of degree more than of kind. In the midst of the wildwood, the copulatory human enters a space of disalienation from its animal (and perhaps mythic) status.
In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn relates how the Avila of Ecuador enter into a reciprocal semiotic relation with the animals of the forest in order to hunt them better. The hunters not only need to place themselves in the position of the creature in order to think what their next move would be, they also need to think how the animals perceive and interpret them, how humans are seen by the forest. Crucially, in regard to the forest jaguars, they must not turn away and show their backs, as this allows the jaguar to see them as ‘meat’, as prey. Instead, humans must stare back at jaguars, meet their gaze, to instil upon them that they are equals, if not lovers. Eye-to-eye communication is life-saving. This subjective reciprocity, even if practised for pragmatic reasons, folds into the Avila understanding of the diversity of lives that surround them as multiple centres of meaning and interpretation. “‘Self’, at its most basic level, is a product of semiosis. It is the locus – however rudimentary and ephemeral – of a living dynamic by which signs come to represent the world around them to a ‘someone’ who emerges as a result of this process.”6 Kohn proposes a forest that thinks, in which the human semiotic system forms an ‘open whole’ nesting inside and opening onto broader systems of iconic and indexical signage that all living things live into and become with.
In Kohn’s forest, hierarchies are embedded in relations between predators and prey that extend downwards from humans towards peccaries and monkeys, but also upwards towards colonial powers and estate managers, jaguars and anacondas. They are always potentially in flux. The hunter may become the hunted, the hunted may become meat. In the forest, the edges between species and subjectivities are not always clear. All are beings in the midst of beings.
In European ontology, informed by monotheistic religion, souls are seen as differentiated, with the human soul possessing unique status, whereas all flesh is seen as broadly the same. In Amerindian perspectivism, “the soul ‘is experienced as… a manifestation of the conventional order implicit in everything…’”.7 It is the body that defines and is peculiar to a species. Another way of putting this is that all animals are ‘human to themselves’. Each animal is human, or a person, at the centre of their own perspectival universe.
In a natural bee colony, the brood is nurtured deep inside the body of the hive, protected and tended assiduously by their sisters, cooled by the fanning of their wings, warmed by their collective vibration, fed on pollen and bee milk, guarded, cleaned and protected by propolis. Each year, a few queen cells are built, and these larvae feed only on royal jelly. As summer arrives, the mother Queen leads many of her daughters in a swarm to found a new colony. As they fly away, new virgin queens emerge to fight for the right to mate and return as mother.
Humans have manipulated and exploited honeybees, to their cost and our gain, for thousands of years, but their domestication was only partial until it was possible to override and manipulate their reproduction. Before the 19th century, every new bee was born of free sexuality, the fecund
mixing of the gene pool that drives evolution. With the invention of the moveable frame hive, beekeepers finally got access to the brood cells and the queen. Then, in the 1920s, Mr Watson invented an apparatus for the artificial insemination of a queen bee. She is pinioned between steel and glass as sperm is injected deep into her oviduct. Queen bees are big business. It has become standard practice to kill and replace a queen after a single season. They are traded globally, shipped in tiny wire cages. The male bees’ sperm is extracted by squeezing. It is a fatal strangulation.
Each reproductively enslaved queen is sold on the basis of her genetic docility, heavy honey production or resistance to specific human-perpetuated diseases: qualities that benefit humans and profit margins. Bees are shipped round the monocultures of the world on flatbed trucks and aeroplanes, exchanging increasingly fatal diseases across the globe. In many areas, wild and farmed bees are threatened with extinction. Conventional beekeeping websites advertise ever -more-sophisticated technical fixes. Better chemicals. More succinct genetic manipulation. More intervention. Better mastery.
Julietta Singh says that “to unthink mastery… requires either a radically different understanding of what it could mean to be human, or perhaps a thinking of the human that would not be human at all”8. She calls for ‘dehumanism’, which she sees as a practice of recuperation, of stripping away the violent foundations (always structural and ideological) of mastery that continue to render some beings more human than others.9 Nearness to the human extends outside the species’ boundary to determine – via tests of sentience or intelligence or self-recognition or some other skewed anthropocentric category – how we should treat gorillas differently to sheep, parrots differently to bees.
Singh’s formulation of dehumanism draws on ‘queer inhumanisms’, which articulate unconventional ways of performing humanity without using the oppositional and temporal form ‘posthumanism’. She says that “other genres of being human” that have been lived and will be lived by those subjected to imperial force can offer us alternative performances of the human.10 In swapping ‘in-’ for ‘de-’, Singh seeks to embed in the word’s utterance the generative role of mastery: its historical processes of dehumanisation and deconstruction.
In 2006, research entomologist Thomas D Seeley published a paper showing that feral forest honeybees living in upstate New York adapted resistance to Varroa mites in just five seasons.11 Wild sexuality outperforms human treatments. Seeley’s study of wild bees underpins his call to return to what he calls ‘Darwinian beekeeping’: stopping the chemical treatment of diseases, and allowing the bees to practice natural selection. Meanwhile in Germany, Torben Schiffer’s research into the impact on bee health of different man-made environments is informing a move towards better hive design, low-intervention beekeeping, and renewed interest in traditional beekeeping methodologies such as tree beekeeping and the use of log hives, which mimic natural nest conditions for bees. Natural beekeepers Bienenbotschaft suggest that they have “learned to see with the eyes of the bees”12. As we comprehend (or relearn) the complex warp and weft of ecological thinking, perhaps we can step back from our urge to mastery, exploitation and control, and understand landscapes and creatures alike as self-creating masterpieces, of which humans can never be masters.
1 Ransome, Hilda (2004), The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. London: Dover Publications,
p. 191.
2 Ibid. pp. 196–197.
3 Freeman, Jacqueline (2016), Song of Increase: Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World. Colorado: Sounds True, p. 12.
4 Barad, Karen (2013), On Touching: the inhuman that therefore I am, from a PDF subsequently published in Power of Material / Politics of Materiality (2013), edited by Susanne Witzgall. Chicago: Diaphanes.
5 Citing Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
6 Kohn, Eduardo (2013), How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 16.
7Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2014), Cannibal Metaphysics. Edited and translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, p. 53.
8 Singh, Julietta (2018), Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. USA: Duke University Press, p. 14.
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 Ibid., p. 14.
11 Seeley, Thomas D (2007), Honey bees of the Arnot Forest: a population of feral colonies persisting with Varroa destructor in the northeastern United States. Apidologie 38 (2007) 19–29
https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/pdf/2007/01/m6063.pdf
12 https://bienenbotschaft.de/en/who-we-are/
Essay originally published in Perry, C (ed.) (2022) Art and the Rural Imagination. More Than Ponies. 2021
Fiona MacDonald works with human and nonhuman beings as Feral Practice to create art projects and interdisciplinary events that develop ethical and imaginative relations across species boundaries. Often people set up divisions between species and between different categories of knowledge and understanding, Feral Practice collaborates and converses across these barriers.
Our vulnerable, speculative approach brings experimental art into spaces of care and attentiveness for and with real, situated beings. We explore diverse aesthetics and foreground distinctive creaturely subjectivities. Each project is materially and conceptually responsive to its participants, context and audience, often utilising augmenting digital technologies alongside diverse analogue media, participation and voice.
BY FERAL PRACTICE
Sexual Libertarianism and Reproductive Slavery in More Than Bee Worlds
Long before Homo sapiens evolved, bees pollinated the forests and meadows of what was eventually to become Britain. In Europe, bees are a forest species and tree hollows are their favoured nesting sites. Wild bee nests were once so plentiful that in summer you’d be rained on by honey oozing from the tree hives as you walked or rode through the forest.1 Long before beekeeping, people stole the honey from wild bees.
Being ancient creatures that moved easily between earth and sky, bringing sweetness, honeybees earned a reputation as spirit guides and psychopomps, messengers between this world and the next, and were thought by Christians to be sent by God directly from Paradise, leading to the edict that Mass must be celebrated in the light of their wax candles.2 Even in our more secular times, bees are consistently aligned with love, community and the sun. Seen with the eyes of patriarchy, the bee colony was long thought to be ruled by its King, but the Queen bee does not rule the hive. Honeybee communities practice an emergent democracy. Jacqueline Freeman describes a ‘honeybee as both an individual and a cell in a larger being. Each bee is both particle and wave in the physics of its world’3. The female worker bees control every aspect of life in the hive, including their queens.
Honeybees transmute plant materials into several distinct, complex substances through a combination of corporeal processes and basic ritual actions, like chewing and fanning. Wax is exuded from glands in their abdomen, and chewed into place to create extraordinary hexagonal architecture; nectar is mixed with saliva and reduced by fanning to create honey, while anti-microbial propolis is concocted from plant resins and fungal spores. Honeybees’ extended phenotype expresses itself through an intimate relation with flowering plants, most specifically in a sexuality that is productively queer. Worker bees outsource their sex life and fertility to a few overdeveloped siblings, but then repeatedly engage in a kind of incentivised asymmetric intercourse with beings of other species. Flowers are notoriously promiscuous, advertising themselves with displays of gaudy colour, pattern and scent, and paying for sexual services in sticky nectar or with more unusual kinks, such as being ‘thermogenic’, or exuding specialist resins and volatile chemicals (drugs, essentially). While honeybees feed, their vegetal collaborators are orgasmically fertilised.
The intra-action of insects and plants also plays a pivotal role in geology. Pollinators move minerals and nutrients from place to place by plant fertilisation, while all herbivores move minerals in and through their eating, shitting and dying. Or, as Karen Barad puts it:
“Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being.”4
Bees fly through and fructify a densely nuanced, thick tangle of animate matter, performing ‘the world’s worlding, the becoming of the world’5 .
Honeybees perform highly ritualised, orgiastic fertility rites. Male honeybees are made just for love, and are nurtured by their sisters to perform a single, ecstatic, sacrificial act. Once virile, drones spend each warm summer afternoon cruising in secret gathering places that have been visited by bees down the generations. How the knowledge of these love-zones is transmitted, or how they are found, is a mystery. One theory is that they are positioned where ley lines cross, places with heightened electromagnetic force, which bees are sensitive to. Virgin queens fly long distances to these zones, to be chased by a bevy of lustful drones. She flies up towards the sun, and will mate 10 to 20 times with different males before she is sated, so filled then with sperm that it will last for her lifetime. Drunkenly, she flies back to the nest to be received by her sisters as their new Queen. In contrast, the drone’s orgasm is so energetic that his testicles explode and he dies: an overwhelming petit mort.
The forest stimulates liberatory imaginaries and practices in more than bee worlds. Cruising spots for gay men are often conveniently wooded. Generations of men have enjoyed al fresco sex in many of Hampstead Heath’s more secluded woodland quarters. And when heterosexual premarital sex was less easily organised, forests were an important resource for all sexual persuasions. Trees and bushes protect lovers from prying eyes, but the eyes might not always be human. Forest creatures operate and relate outside of human domestic agendas. The wild of the woods offers space at the fringes of convention, eliciting boundary crossings and unusual minglings. As human bodies make love in the wildwood, their met flesh presses into a living world where, from a new materialist framework, the difference between humans and animals, or even between animate and inanimate, is one of degree more than of kind. In the midst of the wildwood, the copulatory human enters a space of disalienation from its animal (and perhaps mythic) status.
In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn relates how the Avila of Ecuador enter into a reciprocal semiotic relation with the animals of the forest in order to hunt them better. The hunters not only need to place themselves in the position of the creature in order to think what their next move would be, they also need to think how the animals perceive and interpret them, how humans are seen by the forest. Crucially, in regard to the forest jaguars, they must not turn away and show their backs, as this allows the jaguar to see them as ‘meat’, as prey. Instead, humans must stare back at jaguars, meet their gaze, to instil upon them that they are equals, if not lovers. Eye-to-eye communication is life-saving. This subjective reciprocity, even if practised for pragmatic reasons, folds into the Avila understanding of the diversity of lives that surround them as multiple centres of meaning and interpretation. “‘Self’, at its most basic level, is a product of semiosis. It is the locus – however rudimentary and ephemeral – of a living dynamic by which signs come to represent the world around them to a ‘someone’ who emerges as a result of this process.”6 Kohn proposes a forest that thinks, in which the human semiotic system forms an ‘open whole’ nesting inside and opening onto broader systems of iconic and indexical signage that all living things live into and become with.
In Kohn’s forest, hierarchies are embedded in relations between predators and prey that extend downwards from humans towards peccaries and monkeys, but also upwards towards colonial powers and estate managers, jaguars and anacondas. They are always potentially in flux. The hunter may become the hunted, the hunted may become meat. In the forest, the edges between species and subjectivities are not always clear. All are beings in the midst of beings.
In European ontology, informed by monotheistic religion, souls are seen as differentiated, with the human soul possessing unique status, whereas all flesh is seen as broadly the same. In Amerindian perspectivism, “the soul ‘is experienced as… a manifestation of the conventional order implicit in everything…’”.7 It is the body that defines and is peculiar to a species. Another way of putting this is that all animals are ‘human to themselves’. Each animal is human, or a person, at the centre of their own perspectival universe.
In a natural bee colony, the brood is nurtured deep inside the body of the hive, protected and tended assiduously by their sisters, cooled by the fanning of their wings, warmed by their collective vibration, fed on pollen and bee milk, guarded, cleaned and protected by propolis. Each year, a few queen cells are built, and these larvae feed only on royal jelly. As summer arrives, the mother Queen leads many of her daughters in a swarm to found a new colony. As they fly away, new virgin queens emerge to fight for the right to mate and return as mother.
Humans have manipulated and exploited honeybees, to their cost and our gain, for thousands of years, but their domestication was only partial until it was possible to override and manipulate their reproduction. Before the 19th century, every new bee was born of free sexuality, the fecund
mixing of the gene pool that drives evolution. With the invention of the moveable frame hive, beekeepers finally got access to the brood cells and the queen. Then, in the 1920s, Mr Watson invented an apparatus for the artificial insemination of a queen bee. She is pinioned between steel and glass as sperm is injected deep into her oviduct. Queen bees are big business. It has become standard practice to kill and replace a queen after a single season. They are traded globally, shipped in tiny wire cages. The male bees’ sperm is extracted by squeezing. It is a fatal strangulation.
Each reproductively enslaved queen is sold on the basis of her genetic docility, heavy honey production or resistance to specific human-perpetuated diseases: qualities that benefit humans and profit margins. Bees are shipped round the monocultures of the world on flatbed trucks and aeroplanes, exchanging increasingly fatal diseases across the globe. In many areas, wild and farmed bees are threatened with extinction. Conventional beekeeping websites advertise ever -more-sophisticated technical fixes. Better chemicals. More succinct genetic manipulation. More intervention. Better mastery.
Julietta Singh says that “to unthink mastery… requires either a radically different understanding of what it could mean to be human, or perhaps a thinking of the human that would not be human at all”8. She calls for ‘dehumanism’, which she sees as a practice of recuperation, of stripping away the violent foundations (always structural and ideological) of mastery that continue to render some beings more human than others.9 Nearness to the human extends outside the species’ boundary to determine – via tests of sentience or intelligence or self-recognition or some other skewed anthropocentric category – how we should treat gorillas differently to sheep, parrots differently to bees.
Singh’s formulation of dehumanism draws on ‘queer inhumanisms’, which articulate unconventional ways of performing humanity without using the oppositional and temporal form ‘posthumanism’. She says that “other genres of being human” that have been lived and will be lived by those subjected to imperial force can offer us alternative performances of the human.10 In swapping ‘in-’ for ‘de-’, Singh seeks to embed in the word’s utterance the generative role of mastery: its historical processes of dehumanisation and deconstruction.
In 2006, research entomologist Thomas D Seeley published a paper showing that feral forest honeybees living in upstate New York adapted resistance to Varroa mites in just five seasons.11 Wild sexuality outperforms human treatments. Seeley’s study of wild bees underpins his call to return to what he calls ‘Darwinian beekeeping’: stopping the chemical treatment of diseases, and allowing the bees to practice natural selection. Meanwhile in Germany, Torben Schiffer’s research into the impact on bee health of different man-made environments is informing a move towards better hive design, low-intervention beekeeping, and renewed interest in traditional beekeeping methodologies such as tree beekeeping and the use of log hives, which mimic natural nest conditions for bees. Natural beekeepers Bienenbotschaft suggest that they have “learned to see with the eyes of the bees”12. As we comprehend (or relearn) the complex warp and weft of ecological thinking, perhaps we can step back from our urge to mastery, exploitation and control, and understand landscapes and creatures alike as self-creating masterpieces, of which humans can never be masters.
1 Ransome, Hilda (2004), The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. London: Dover Publications,
p. 191.
2 Ibid. pp. 196–197.
3 Freeman, Jacqueline (2016), Song of Increase: Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World. Colorado: Sounds True, p. 12.
4 Barad, Karen (2013), On Touching: the inhuman that therefore I am, from a PDF subsequently published in Power of Material / Politics of Materiality (2013), edited by Susanne Witzgall. Chicago: Diaphanes.
5 Citing Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
6 Kohn, Eduardo (2013), How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 16.
7Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2014), Cannibal Metaphysics. Edited and translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, p. 53.
8 Singh, Julietta (2018), Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. USA: Duke University Press, p. 14.
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 Ibid., p. 14.
11 Seeley, Thomas D (2007), Honey bees of the Arnot Forest: a population of feral colonies persisting with Varroa destructor in the northeastern United States. Apidologie 38 (2007) 19–29
https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/pdf/2007/01/m6063.pdf
12 https://bienenbotschaft.de/en/who-we-are/
Essay originally published in Perry, C (ed.) (2022) Art and the Rural Imagination. More Than Ponies. 2021
Sexual Libertarianism and Reproductive Slavery in More Than Bee Worlds
Long before Homo sapiens evolved, bees pollinated the forests and meadows of what was eventually to become Britain. In Europe, bees are a forest species and tree hollows are their favoured nesting sites. Wild bee nests were once so plentiful that in summer you’d be rained on by honey oozing from the tree hives as you walked or rode through the forest.1 Long before beekeeping, people stole the honey from wild bees.
Being ancient creatures that moved easily between earth and sky, bringing sweetness, honeybees earned a reputation as spirit guides and psychopomps, messengers between this world and the next, and were thought by Christians to be sent by God directly from Paradise, leading to the edict that Mass must be celebrated in the light of their wax candles.2 Even in our more secular times, bees are consistently aligned with love, community and the sun. Seen with the eyes of patriarchy, the bee colony was long thought to be ruled by its King, but the Queen bee does not rule the hive. Honeybee communities practice an emergent democracy. Jacqueline Freeman describes a ‘honeybee as both an individual and a cell in a larger being. Each bee is both particle and wave in the physics of its world’3. The female worker bees control every aspect of life in the hive, including their queens.
Honeybees transmute plant materials into several distinct, complex substances through a combination of corporeal processes and basic ritual actions, like chewing and fanning. Wax is exuded from glands in their abdomen, and chewed into place to create extraordinary hexagonal architecture; nectar is mixed with saliva and reduced by fanning to create honey, while anti-microbial propolis is concocted from plant resins and fungal spores. Honeybees’ extended phenotype expresses itself through an intimate relation with flowering plants, most specifically in a sexuality that is productively queer. Worker bees outsource their sex life and fertility to a few overdeveloped siblings, but then repeatedly engage in a kind of incentivised asymmetric intercourse with beings of other species. Flowers are notoriously promiscuous, advertising themselves with displays of gaudy colour, pattern and scent, and paying for sexual services in sticky nectar or with more unusual kinks, such as being ‘thermogenic’, or exuding specialist resins and volatile chemicals (drugs, essentially). While honeybees feed, their vegetal collaborators are orgasmically fertilised.
The intra-action of insects and plants also plays a pivotal role in geology. Pollinators move minerals and nutrients from place to place by plant fertilisation, while all herbivores move minerals in and through their eating, shitting and dying. Or, as Karen Barad puts it:
“Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being.”4
Bees fly through and fructify a densely nuanced, thick tangle of animate matter, performing ‘the world’s worlding, the becoming of the world’5 .
Honeybees perform highly ritualised, orgiastic fertility rites. Male honeybees are made just for love, and are nurtured by their sisters to perform a single, ecstatic, sacrificial act. Once virile, drones spend each warm summer afternoon cruising in secret gathering places that have been visited by bees down the generations. How the knowledge of these love-zones is transmitted, or how they are found, is a mystery. One theory is that they are positioned where ley lines cross, places with heightened electromagnetic force, which bees are sensitive to. Virgin queens fly long distances to these zones, to be chased by a bevy of lustful drones. She flies up towards the sun, and will mate 10 to 20 times with different males before she is sated, so filled then with sperm that it will last for her lifetime. Drunkenly, she flies back to the nest to be received by her sisters as their new Queen. In contrast, the drone’s orgasm is so energetic that his testicles explode and he dies: an overwhelming petit mort.
The forest stimulates liberatory imaginaries and practices in more than bee worlds. Cruising spots for gay men are often conveniently wooded. Generations of men have enjoyed al fresco sex in many of Hampstead Heath’s more secluded woodland quarters. And when heterosexual premarital sex was less easily organised, forests were an important resource for all sexual persuasions. Trees and bushes protect lovers from prying eyes, but the eyes might not always be human. Forest creatures operate and relate outside of human domestic agendas. The wild of the woods offers space at the fringes of convention, eliciting boundary crossings and unusual minglings. As human bodies make love in the wildwood, their met flesh presses into a living world where, from a new materialist framework, the difference between humans and animals, or even between animate and inanimate, is one of degree more than of kind. In the midst of the wildwood, the copulatory human enters a space of disalienation from its animal (and perhaps mythic) status.
In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn relates how the Avila of Ecuador enter into a reciprocal semiotic relation with the animals of the forest in order to hunt them better. The hunters not only need to place themselves in the position of the creature in order to think what their next move would be, they also need to think how the animals perceive and interpret them, how humans are seen by the forest. Crucially, in regard to the forest jaguars, they must not turn away and show their backs, as this allows the jaguar to see them as ‘meat’, as prey. Instead, humans must stare back at jaguars, meet their gaze, to instil upon them that they are equals, if not lovers. Eye-to-eye communication is life-saving. This subjective reciprocity, even if practised for pragmatic reasons, folds into the Avila understanding of the diversity of lives that surround them as multiple centres of meaning and interpretation. “‘Self’, at its most basic level, is a product of semiosis. It is the locus – however rudimentary and ephemeral – of a living dynamic by which signs come to represent the world around them to a ‘someone’ who emerges as a result of this process.”6 Kohn proposes a forest that thinks, in which the human semiotic system forms an ‘open whole’ nesting inside and opening onto broader systems of iconic and indexical signage that all living things live into and become with.
In Kohn’s forest, hierarchies are embedded in relations between predators and prey that extend downwards from humans towards peccaries and monkeys, but also upwards towards colonial powers and estate managers, jaguars and anacondas. They are always potentially in flux. The hunter may become the hunted, the hunted may become meat. In the forest, the edges between species and subjectivities are not always clear. All are beings in the midst of beings.
In European ontology, informed by monotheistic religion, souls are seen as differentiated, with the human soul possessing unique status, whereas all flesh is seen as broadly the same. In Amerindian perspectivism, “the soul ‘is experienced as… a manifestation of the conventional order implicit in everything…’”.7 It is the body that defines and is peculiar to a species. Another way of putting this is that all animals are ‘human to themselves’. Each animal is human, or a person, at the centre of their own perspectival universe.
In a natural bee colony, the brood is nurtured deep inside the body of the hive, protected and tended assiduously by their sisters, cooled by the fanning of their wings, warmed by their collective vibration, fed on pollen and bee milk, guarded, cleaned and protected by propolis. Each year, a few queen cells are built, and these larvae feed only on royal jelly. As summer arrives, the mother Queen leads many of her daughters in a swarm to found a new colony. As they fly away, new virgin queens emerge to fight for the right to mate and return as mother.
Humans have manipulated and exploited honeybees, to their cost and our gain, for thousands of years, but their domestication was only partial until it was possible to override and manipulate their reproduction. Before the 19th century, every new bee was born of free sexuality, the fecund
mixing of the gene pool that drives evolution. With the invention of the moveable frame hive, beekeepers finally got access to the brood cells and the queen. Then, in the 1920s, Mr Watson invented an apparatus for the artificial insemination of a queen bee. She is pinioned between steel and glass as sperm is injected deep into her oviduct. Queen bees are big business. It has become standard practice to kill and replace a queen after a single season. They are traded globally, shipped in tiny wire cages. The male bees’ sperm is extracted by squeezing. It is a fatal strangulation.
Each reproductively enslaved queen is sold on the basis of her genetic docility, heavy honey production or resistance to specific human-perpetuated diseases: qualities that benefit humans and profit margins. Bees are shipped round the monocultures of the world on flatbed trucks and aeroplanes, exchanging increasingly fatal diseases across the globe. In many areas, wild and farmed bees are threatened with extinction. Conventional beekeeping websites advertise ever -more-sophisticated technical fixes. Better chemicals. More succinct genetic manipulation. More intervention. Better mastery.
Julietta Singh says that “to unthink mastery… requires either a radically different understanding of what it could mean to be human, or perhaps a thinking of the human that would not be human at all”8. She calls for ‘dehumanism’, which she sees as a practice of recuperation, of stripping away the violent foundations (always structural and ideological) of mastery that continue to render some beings more human than others.9 Nearness to the human extends outside the species’ boundary to determine – via tests of sentience or intelligence or self-recognition or some other skewed anthropocentric category – how we should treat gorillas differently to sheep, parrots differently to bees.
Singh’s formulation of dehumanism draws on ‘queer inhumanisms’, which articulate unconventional ways of performing humanity without using the oppositional and temporal form ‘posthumanism’. She says that “other genres of being human” that have been lived and will be lived by those subjected to imperial force can offer us alternative performances of the human.10 In swapping ‘in-’ for ‘de-’, Singh seeks to embed in the word’s utterance the generative role of mastery: its historical processes of dehumanisation and deconstruction.
In 2006, research entomologist Thomas D Seeley published a paper showing that feral forest honeybees living in upstate New York adapted resistance to Varroa mites in just five seasons.11 Wild sexuality outperforms human treatments. Seeley’s study of wild bees underpins his call to return to what he calls ‘Darwinian beekeeping’: stopping the chemical treatment of diseases, and allowing the bees to practice natural selection. Meanwhile in Germany, Torben Schiffer’s research into the impact on bee health of different man-made environments is informing a move towards better hive design, low-intervention beekeeping, and renewed interest in traditional beekeeping methodologies such as tree beekeeping and the use of log hives, which mimic natural nest conditions for bees. Natural beekeepers Bienenbotschaft suggest that they have “learned to see with the eyes of the bees”12. As we comprehend (or relearn) the complex warp and weft of ecological thinking, perhaps we can step back from our urge to mastery, exploitation and control, and understand landscapes and creatures alike as self-creating masterpieces, of which humans can never be masters.
1 Ransome, Hilda (2004), The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. London: Dover Publications,
p. 191.
2 Ibid. pp. 196–197.
3 Freeman, Jacqueline (2016), Song of Increase: Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World. Colorado: Sounds True, p. 12.
4 Barad, Karen (2013), On Touching: the inhuman that therefore I am, from a PDF subsequently published in Power of Material / Politics of Materiality (2013), edited by Susanne Witzgall. Chicago: Diaphanes.
5 Citing Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
6 Kohn, Eduardo (2013), How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 16.
7Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2014), Cannibal Metaphysics. Edited and translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, p. 53.
8 Singh, Julietta (2018), Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. USA: Duke University Press, p. 14.
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 Ibid., p. 14.
11 Seeley, Thomas D (2007), Honey bees of the Arnot Forest: a population of feral colonies persisting with Varroa destructor in the northeastern United States. Apidologie 38 (2007) 19–29
https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/pdf/2007/01/m6063.pdf
12 https://bienenbotschaft.de/en/who-we-are/
Essay originally published in Perry, C (ed.) (2022) Art and the Rural Imagination. More Than Ponies. 2021
Fiona MacDonald works with human and nonhuman beings as Feral Practice to create art projects and interdisciplinary events that develop ethical and imaginative relations across species boundaries. Often people set up divisions between species and between different categories of knowledge and understanding, Feral Practice collaborates and converses across these barriers.
Our vulnerable, speculative approach brings experimental art into spaces of care and attentiveness for and with real, situated beings. We explore diverse aesthetics and foreground distinctive creaturely subjectivities. Each project is materially and conceptually responsive to its participants, context and audience, often utilising augmenting digital technologies alongside diverse analogue media, participation and voice.
BY FERAL PRACTICE
Sexual Libertarianism and Reproductive Slavery in More Than Bee Worlds
Long before Homo sapiens evolved, bees pollinated the forests and meadows of what was eventually to become Britain. In Europe, bees are a forest species and tree hollows are their favoured nesting sites. Wild bee nests were once so plentiful that in summer you’d be rained on by honey oozing from the tree hives as you walked or rode through the forest.1 Long before beekeeping, people stole the honey from wild bees.
Being ancient creatures that moved easily between earth and sky, bringing sweetness, honeybees earned a reputation as spirit guides and psychopomps, messengers between this world and the next, and were thought by Christians to be sent by God directly from Paradise, leading to the edict that Mass must be celebrated in the light of their wax candles.2 Even in our more secular times, bees are consistently aligned with love, community and the sun. Seen with the eyes of patriarchy, the bee colony was long thought to be ruled by its King, but the Queen bee does not rule the hive. Honeybee communities practice an emergent democracy. Jacqueline Freeman describes a ‘honeybee as both an individual and a cell in a larger being. Each bee is both particle and wave in the physics of its world’3. The female worker bees control every aspect of life in the hive, including their queens.
Honeybees transmute plant materials into several distinct, complex substances through a combination of corporeal processes and basic ritual actions, like chewing and fanning. Wax is exuded from glands in their abdomen, and chewed into place to create extraordinary hexagonal architecture; nectar is mixed with saliva and reduced by fanning to create honey, while anti-microbial propolis is concocted from plant resins and fungal spores. Honeybees’ extended phenotype expresses itself through an intimate relation with flowering plants, most specifically in a sexuality that is productively queer. Worker bees outsource their sex life and fertility to a few overdeveloped siblings, but then repeatedly engage in a kind of incentivised asymmetric intercourse with beings of other species. Flowers are notoriously promiscuous, advertising themselves with displays of gaudy colour, pattern and scent, and paying for sexual services in sticky nectar or with more unusual kinks, such as being ‘thermogenic’, or exuding specialist resins and volatile chemicals (drugs, essentially). While honeybees feed, their vegetal collaborators are orgasmically fertilised.
The intra-action of insects and plants also plays a pivotal role in geology. Pollinators move minerals and nutrients from place to place by plant fertilisation, while all herbivores move minerals in and through their eating, shitting and dying. Or, as Karen Barad puts it:
“Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being.”4
Bees fly through and fructify a densely nuanced, thick tangle of animate matter, performing ‘the world’s worlding, the becoming of the world’5 .
Honeybees perform highly ritualised, orgiastic fertility rites. Male honeybees are made just for love, and are nurtured by their sisters to perform a single, ecstatic, sacrificial act. Once virile, drones spend each warm summer afternoon cruising in secret gathering places that have been visited by bees down the generations. How the knowledge of these love-zones is transmitted, or how they are found, is a mystery. One theory is that they are positioned where ley lines cross, places with heightened electromagnetic force, which bees are sensitive to. Virgin queens fly long distances to these zones, to be chased by a bevy of lustful drones. She flies up towards the sun, and will mate 10 to 20 times with different males before she is sated, so filled then with sperm that it will last for her lifetime. Drunkenly, she flies back to the nest to be received by her sisters as their new Queen. In contrast, the drone’s orgasm is so energetic that his testicles explode and he dies: an overwhelming petit mort.
The forest stimulates liberatory imaginaries and practices in more than bee worlds. Cruising spots for gay men are often conveniently wooded. Generations of men have enjoyed al fresco sex in many of Hampstead Heath’s more secluded woodland quarters. And when heterosexual premarital sex was less easily organised, forests were an important resource for all sexual persuasions. Trees and bushes protect lovers from prying eyes, but the eyes might not always be human. Forest creatures operate and relate outside of human domestic agendas. The wild of the woods offers space at the fringes of convention, eliciting boundary crossings and unusual minglings. As human bodies make love in the wildwood, their met flesh presses into a living world where, from a new materialist framework, the difference between humans and animals, or even between animate and inanimate, is one of degree more than of kind. In the midst of the wildwood, the copulatory human enters a space of disalienation from its animal (and perhaps mythic) status.
In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn relates how the Avila of Ecuador enter into a reciprocal semiotic relation with the animals of the forest in order to hunt them better. The hunters not only need to place themselves in the position of the creature in order to think what their next move would be, they also need to think how the animals perceive and interpret them, how humans are seen by the forest. Crucially, in regard to the forest jaguars, they must not turn away and show their backs, as this allows the jaguar to see them as ‘meat’, as prey. Instead, humans must stare back at jaguars, meet their gaze, to instil upon them that they are equals, if not lovers. Eye-to-eye communication is life-saving. This subjective reciprocity, even if practised for pragmatic reasons, folds into the Avila understanding of the diversity of lives that surround them as multiple centres of meaning and interpretation. “‘Self’, at its most basic level, is a product of semiosis. It is the locus – however rudimentary and ephemeral – of a living dynamic by which signs come to represent the world around them to a ‘someone’ who emerges as a result of this process.”6 Kohn proposes a forest that thinks, in which the human semiotic system forms an ‘open whole’ nesting inside and opening onto broader systems of iconic and indexical signage that all living things live into and become with.
In Kohn’s forest, hierarchies are embedded in relations between predators and prey that extend downwards from humans towards peccaries and monkeys, but also upwards towards colonial powers and estate managers, jaguars and anacondas. They are always potentially in flux. The hunter may become the hunted, the hunted may become meat. In the forest, the edges between species and subjectivities are not always clear. All are beings in the midst of beings.
In European ontology, informed by monotheistic religion, souls are seen as differentiated, with the human soul possessing unique status, whereas all flesh is seen as broadly the same. In Amerindian perspectivism, “the soul ‘is experienced as… a manifestation of the conventional order implicit in everything…’”.7 It is the body that defines and is peculiar to a species. Another way of putting this is that all animals are ‘human to themselves’. Each animal is human, or a person, at the centre of their own perspectival universe.
In a natural bee colony, the brood is nurtured deep inside the body of the hive, protected and tended assiduously by their sisters, cooled by the fanning of their wings, warmed by their collective vibration, fed on pollen and bee milk, guarded, cleaned and protected by propolis. Each year, a few queen cells are built, and these larvae feed only on royal jelly. As summer arrives, the mother Queen leads many of her daughters in a swarm to found a new colony. As they fly away, new virgin queens emerge to fight for the right to mate and return as mother.
Humans have manipulated and exploited honeybees, to their cost and our gain, for thousands of years, but their domestication was only partial until it was possible to override and manipulate their reproduction. Before the 19th century, every new bee was born of free sexuality, the fecund
mixing of the gene pool that drives evolution. With the invention of the moveable frame hive, beekeepers finally got access to the brood cells and the queen. Then, in the 1920s, Mr Watson invented an apparatus for the artificial insemination of a queen bee. She is pinioned between steel and glass as sperm is injected deep into her oviduct. Queen bees are big business. It has become standard practice to kill and replace a queen after a single season. They are traded globally, shipped in tiny wire cages. The male bees’ sperm is extracted by squeezing. It is a fatal strangulation.
Each reproductively enslaved queen is sold on the basis of her genetic docility, heavy honey production or resistance to specific human-perpetuated diseases: qualities that benefit humans and profit margins. Bees are shipped round the monocultures of the world on flatbed trucks and aeroplanes, exchanging increasingly fatal diseases across the globe. In many areas, wild and farmed bees are threatened with extinction. Conventional beekeeping websites advertise ever -more-sophisticated technical fixes. Better chemicals. More succinct genetic manipulation. More intervention. Better mastery.
Julietta Singh says that “to unthink mastery… requires either a radically different understanding of what it could mean to be human, or perhaps a thinking of the human that would not be human at all”8. She calls for ‘dehumanism’, which she sees as a practice of recuperation, of stripping away the violent foundations (always structural and ideological) of mastery that continue to render some beings more human than others.9 Nearness to the human extends outside the species’ boundary to determine – via tests of sentience or intelligence or self-recognition or some other skewed anthropocentric category – how we should treat gorillas differently to sheep, parrots differently to bees.
Singh’s formulation of dehumanism draws on ‘queer inhumanisms’, which articulate unconventional ways of performing humanity without using the oppositional and temporal form ‘posthumanism’. She says that “other genres of being human” that have been lived and will be lived by those subjected to imperial force can offer us alternative performances of the human.10 In swapping ‘in-’ for ‘de-’, Singh seeks to embed in the word’s utterance the generative role of mastery: its historical processes of dehumanisation and deconstruction.
In 2006, research entomologist Thomas D Seeley published a paper showing that feral forest honeybees living in upstate New York adapted resistance to Varroa mites in just five seasons.11 Wild sexuality outperforms human treatments. Seeley’s study of wild bees underpins his call to return to what he calls ‘Darwinian beekeeping’: stopping the chemical treatment of diseases, and allowing the bees to practice natural selection. Meanwhile in Germany, Torben Schiffer’s research into the impact on bee health of different man-made environments is informing a move towards better hive design, low-intervention beekeeping, and renewed interest in traditional beekeeping methodologies such as tree beekeeping and the use of log hives, which mimic natural nest conditions for bees. Natural beekeepers Bienenbotschaft suggest that they have “learned to see with the eyes of the bees”12. As we comprehend (or relearn) the complex warp and weft of ecological thinking, perhaps we can step back from our urge to mastery, exploitation and control, and understand landscapes and creatures alike as self-creating masterpieces, of which humans can never be masters.
1 Ransome, Hilda (2004), The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. London: Dover Publications,
p. 191.
2 Ibid. pp. 196–197.
3 Freeman, Jacqueline (2016), Song of Increase: Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World. Colorado: Sounds True, p. 12.
4 Barad, Karen (2013), On Touching: the inhuman that therefore I am, from a PDF subsequently published in Power of Material / Politics of Materiality (2013), edited by Susanne Witzgall. Chicago: Diaphanes.
5 Citing Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
6 Kohn, Eduardo (2013), How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 16.
7Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2014), Cannibal Metaphysics. Edited and translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, p. 53.
8 Singh, Julietta (2018), Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. USA: Duke University Press, p. 14.
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 Ibid., p. 14.
11 Seeley, Thomas D (2007), Honey bees of the Arnot Forest: a population of feral colonies persisting with Varroa destructor in the northeastern United States. Apidologie 38 (2007) 19–29
https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/pdf/2007/01/m6063.pdf
12 https://bienenbotschaft.de/en/who-we-are/
Essay originally published in Perry, C (ed.) (2022) Art and the Rural Imagination. More Than Ponies. 2021
Sexual Libertarianism and Reproductive Slavery in More Than Bee Worlds
Long before Homo sapiens evolved, bees pollinated the forests and meadows of what was eventually to become Britain. In Europe, bees are a forest species and tree hollows are their favoured nesting sites. Wild bee nests were once so plentiful that in summer you’d be rained on by honey oozing from the tree hives as you walked or rode through the forest.1 Long before beekeeping, people stole the honey from wild bees.
Being ancient creatures that moved easily between earth and sky, bringing sweetness, honeybees earned a reputation as spirit guides and psychopomps, messengers between this world and the next, and were thought by Christians to be sent by God directly from Paradise, leading to the edict that Mass must be celebrated in the light of their wax candles.2 Even in our more secular times, bees are consistently aligned with love, community and the sun. Seen with the eyes of patriarchy, the bee colony was long thought to be ruled by its King, but the Queen bee does not rule the hive. Honeybee communities practice an emergent democracy. Jacqueline Freeman describes a ‘honeybee as both an individual and a cell in a larger being. Each bee is both particle and wave in the physics of its world’3. The female worker bees control every aspect of life in the hive, including their queens.
Honeybees transmute plant materials into several distinct, complex substances through a combination of corporeal processes and basic ritual actions, like chewing and fanning. Wax is exuded from glands in their abdomen, and chewed into place to create extraordinary hexagonal architecture; nectar is mixed with saliva and reduced by fanning to create honey, while anti-microbial propolis is concocted from plant resins and fungal spores. Honeybees’ extended phenotype expresses itself through an intimate relation with flowering plants, most specifically in a sexuality that is productively queer. Worker bees outsource their sex life and fertility to a few overdeveloped siblings, but then repeatedly engage in a kind of incentivised asymmetric intercourse with beings of other species. Flowers are notoriously promiscuous, advertising themselves with displays of gaudy colour, pattern and scent, and paying for sexual services in sticky nectar or with more unusual kinks, such as being ‘thermogenic’, or exuding specialist resins and volatile chemicals (drugs, essentially). While honeybees feed, their vegetal collaborators are orgasmically fertilised.
The intra-action of insects and plants also plays a pivotal role in geology. Pollinators move minerals and nutrients from place to place by plant fertilisation, while all herbivores move minerals in and through their eating, shitting and dying. Or, as Karen Barad puts it:
“Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being.”4
Bees fly through and fructify a densely nuanced, thick tangle of animate matter, performing ‘the world’s worlding, the becoming of the world’5 .
Honeybees perform highly ritualised, orgiastic fertility rites. Male honeybees are made just for love, and are nurtured by their sisters to perform a single, ecstatic, sacrificial act. Once virile, drones spend each warm summer afternoon cruising in secret gathering places that have been visited by bees down the generations. How the knowledge of these love-zones is transmitted, or how they are found, is a mystery. One theory is that they are positioned where ley lines cross, places with heightened electromagnetic force, which bees are sensitive to. Virgin queens fly long distances to these zones, to be chased by a bevy of lustful drones. She flies up towards the sun, and will mate 10 to 20 times with different males before she is sated, so filled then with sperm that it will last for her lifetime. Drunkenly, she flies back to the nest to be received by her sisters as their new Queen. In contrast, the drone’s orgasm is so energetic that his testicles explode and he dies: an overwhelming petit mort.
The forest stimulates liberatory imaginaries and practices in more than bee worlds. Cruising spots for gay men are often conveniently wooded. Generations of men have enjoyed al fresco sex in many of Hampstead Heath’s more secluded woodland quarters. And when heterosexual premarital sex was less easily organised, forests were an important resource for all sexual persuasions. Trees and bushes protect lovers from prying eyes, but the eyes might not always be human. Forest creatures operate and relate outside of human domestic agendas. The wild of the woods offers space at the fringes of convention, eliciting boundary crossings and unusual minglings. As human bodies make love in the wildwood, their met flesh presses into a living world where, from a new materialist framework, the difference between humans and animals, or even between animate and inanimate, is one of degree more than of kind. In the midst of the wildwood, the copulatory human enters a space of disalienation from its animal (and perhaps mythic) status.
In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn relates how the Avila of Ecuador enter into a reciprocal semiotic relation with the animals of the forest in order to hunt them better. The hunters not only need to place themselves in the position of the creature in order to think what their next move would be, they also need to think how the animals perceive and interpret them, how humans are seen by the forest. Crucially, in regard to the forest jaguars, they must not turn away and show their backs, as this allows the jaguar to see them as ‘meat’, as prey. Instead, humans must stare back at jaguars, meet their gaze, to instil upon them that they are equals, if not lovers. Eye-to-eye communication is life-saving. This subjective reciprocity, even if practised for pragmatic reasons, folds into the Avila understanding of the diversity of lives that surround them as multiple centres of meaning and interpretation. “‘Self’, at its most basic level, is a product of semiosis. It is the locus – however rudimentary and ephemeral – of a living dynamic by which signs come to represent the world around them to a ‘someone’ who emerges as a result of this process.”6 Kohn proposes a forest that thinks, in which the human semiotic system forms an ‘open whole’ nesting inside and opening onto broader systems of iconic and indexical signage that all living things live into and become with.
In Kohn’s forest, hierarchies are embedded in relations between predators and prey that extend downwards from humans towards peccaries and monkeys, but also upwards towards colonial powers and estate managers, jaguars and anacondas. They are always potentially in flux. The hunter may become the hunted, the hunted may become meat. In the forest, the edges between species and subjectivities are not always clear. All are beings in the midst of beings.
In European ontology, informed by monotheistic religion, souls are seen as differentiated, with the human soul possessing unique status, whereas all flesh is seen as broadly the same. In Amerindian perspectivism, “the soul ‘is experienced as… a manifestation of the conventional order implicit in everything…’”.7 It is the body that defines and is peculiar to a species. Another way of putting this is that all animals are ‘human to themselves’. Each animal is human, or a person, at the centre of their own perspectival universe.
In a natural bee colony, the brood is nurtured deep inside the body of the hive, protected and tended assiduously by their sisters, cooled by the fanning of their wings, warmed by their collective vibration, fed on pollen and bee milk, guarded, cleaned and protected by propolis. Each year, a few queen cells are built, and these larvae feed only on royal jelly. As summer arrives, the mother Queen leads many of her daughters in a swarm to found a new colony. As they fly away, new virgin queens emerge to fight for the right to mate and return as mother.
Humans have manipulated and exploited honeybees, to their cost and our gain, for thousands of years, but their domestication was only partial until it was possible to override and manipulate their reproduction. Before the 19th century, every new bee was born of free sexuality, the fecund
mixing of the gene pool that drives evolution. With the invention of the moveable frame hive, beekeepers finally got access to the brood cells and the queen. Then, in the 1920s, Mr Watson invented an apparatus for the artificial insemination of a queen bee. She is pinioned between steel and glass as sperm is injected deep into her oviduct. Queen bees are big business. It has become standard practice to kill and replace a queen after a single season. They are traded globally, shipped in tiny wire cages. The male bees’ sperm is extracted by squeezing. It is a fatal strangulation.
Each reproductively enslaved queen is sold on the basis of her genetic docility, heavy honey production or resistance to specific human-perpetuated diseases: qualities that benefit humans and profit margins. Bees are shipped round the monocultures of the world on flatbed trucks and aeroplanes, exchanging increasingly fatal diseases across the globe. In many areas, wild and farmed bees are threatened with extinction. Conventional beekeeping websites advertise ever -more-sophisticated technical fixes. Better chemicals. More succinct genetic manipulation. More intervention. Better mastery.
Julietta Singh says that “to unthink mastery… requires either a radically different understanding of what it could mean to be human, or perhaps a thinking of the human that would not be human at all”8. She calls for ‘dehumanism’, which she sees as a practice of recuperation, of stripping away the violent foundations (always structural and ideological) of mastery that continue to render some beings more human than others.9 Nearness to the human extends outside the species’ boundary to determine – via tests of sentience or intelligence or self-recognition or some other skewed anthropocentric category – how we should treat gorillas differently to sheep, parrots differently to bees.
Singh’s formulation of dehumanism draws on ‘queer inhumanisms’, which articulate unconventional ways of performing humanity without using the oppositional and temporal form ‘posthumanism’. She says that “other genres of being human” that have been lived and will be lived by those subjected to imperial force can offer us alternative performances of the human.10 In swapping ‘in-’ for ‘de-’, Singh seeks to embed in the word’s utterance the generative role of mastery: its historical processes of dehumanisation and deconstruction.
In 2006, research entomologist Thomas D Seeley published a paper showing that feral forest honeybees living in upstate New York adapted resistance to Varroa mites in just five seasons.11 Wild sexuality outperforms human treatments. Seeley’s study of wild bees underpins his call to return to what he calls ‘Darwinian beekeeping’: stopping the chemical treatment of diseases, and allowing the bees to practice natural selection. Meanwhile in Germany, Torben Schiffer’s research into the impact on bee health of different man-made environments is informing a move towards better hive design, low-intervention beekeeping, and renewed interest in traditional beekeeping methodologies such as tree beekeeping and the use of log hives, which mimic natural nest conditions for bees. Natural beekeepers Bienenbotschaft suggest that they have “learned to see with the eyes of the bees”12. As we comprehend (or relearn) the complex warp and weft of ecological thinking, perhaps we can step back from our urge to mastery, exploitation and control, and understand landscapes and creatures alike as self-creating masterpieces, of which humans can never be masters.
1 Ransome, Hilda (2004), The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. London: Dover Publications,
p. 191.
2 Ibid. pp. 196–197.
3 Freeman, Jacqueline (2016), Song of Increase: Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World. Colorado: Sounds True, p. 12.
4 Barad, Karen (2013), On Touching: the inhuman that therefore I am, from a PDF subsequently published in Power of Material / Politics of Materiality (2013), edited by Susanne Witzgall. Chicago: Diaphanes.
5 Citing Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
6 Kohn, Eduardo (2013), How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 16.
7Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2014), Cannibal Metaphysics. Edited and translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, p. 53.
8 Singh, Julietta (2018), Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. USA: Duke University Press, p. 14.
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 Ibid., p. 14.
11 Seeley, Thomas D (2007), Honey bees of the Arnot Forest: a population of feral colonies persisting with Varroa destructor in the northeastern United States. Apidologie 38 (2007) 19–29
https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/pdf/2007/01/m6063.pdf
12 https://bienenbotschaft.de/en/who-we-are/
Essay originally published in Perry, C (ed.) (2022) Art and the Rural Imagination. More Than Ponies. 2021
Fiona MacDonald works with human and nonhuman beings as Feral Practice to create art projects and interdisciplinary events that develop ethical and imaginative relations across species boundaries. Often people set up divisions between species and between different categories of knowledge and understanding, Feral Practice collaborates and converses across these barriers.
Our vulnerable, speculative approach brings experimental art into spaces of care and attentiveness for and with real, situated beings. We explore diverse aesthetics and foreground distinctive creaturely subjectivities. Each project is materially and conceptually responsive to its participants, context and audience, often utilising augmenting digital technologies alongside diverse analogue media, participation and voice.
BY FERAL PRACTICE
Sexual Libertarianism and Reproductive Slavery in More Than Bee Worlds
Long before Homo sapiens evolved, bees pollinated the forests and meadows of what was eventually to become Britain. In Europe, bees are a forest species and tree hollows are their favoured nesting sites. Wild bee nests were once so plentiful that in summer you’d be rained on by honey oozing from the tree hives as you walked or rode through the forest.1 Long before beekeeping, people stole the honey from wild bees.
Being ancient creatures that moved easily between earth and sky, bringing sweetness, honeybees earned a reputation as spirit guides and psychopomps, messengers between this world and the next, and were thought by Christians to be sent by God directly from Paradise, leading to the edict that Mass must be celebrated in the light of their wax candles.2 Even in our more secular times, bees are consistently aligned with love, community and the sun. Seen with the eyes of patriarchy, the bee colony was long thought to be ruled by its King, but the Queen bee does not rule the hive. Honeybee communities practice an emergent democracy. Jacqueline Freeman describes a ‘honeybee as both an individual and a cell in a larger being. Each bee is both particle and wave in the physics of its world’3. The female worker bees control every aspect of life in the hive, including their queens.
Honeybees transmute plant materials into several distinct, complex substances through a combination of corporeal processes and basic ritual actions, like chewing and fanning. Wax is exuded from glands in their abdomen, and chewed into place to create extraordinary hexagonal architecture; nectar is mixed with saliva and reduced by fanning to create honey, while anti-microbial propolis is concocted from plant resins and fungal spores. Honeybees’ extended phenotype expresses itself through an intimate relation with flowering plants, most specifically in a sexuality that is productively queer. Worker bees outsource their sex life and fertility to a few overdeveloped siblings, but then repeatedly engage in a kind of incentivised asymmetric intercourse with beings of other species. Flowers are notoriously promiscuous, advertising themselves with displays of gaudy colour, pattern and scent, and paying for sexual services in sticky nectar or with more unusual kinks, such as being ‘thermogenic’, or exuding specialist resins and volatile chemicals (drugs, essentially). While honeybees feed, their vegetal collaborators are orgasmically fertilised.
The intra-action of insects and plants also plays a pivotal role in geology. Pollinators move minerals and nutrients from place to place by plant fertilisation, while all herbivores move minerals in and through their eating, shitting and dying. Or, as Karen Barad puts it:
“Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being.”4
Bees fly through and fructify a densely nuanced, thick tangle of animate matter, performing ‘the world’s worlding, the becoming of the world’5 .
Honeybees perform highly ritualised, orgiastic fertility rites. Male honeybees are made just for love, and are nurtured by their sisters to perform a single, ecstatic, sacrificial act. Once virile, drones spend each warm summer afternoon cruising in secret gathering places that have been visited by bees down the generations. How the knowledge of these love-zones is transmitted, or how they are found, is a mystery. One theory is that they are positioned where ley lines cross, places with heightened electromagnetic force, which bees are sensitive to. Virgin queens fly long distances to these zones, to be chased by a bevy of lustful drones. She flies up towards the sun, and will mate 10 to 20 times with different males before she is sated, so filled then with sperm that it will last for her lifetime. Drunkenly, she flies back to the nest to be received by her sisters as their new Queen. In contrast, the drone’s orgasm is so energetic that his testicles explode and he dies: an overwhelming petit mort.
The forest stimulates liberatory imaginaries and practices in more than bee worlds. Cruising spots for gay men are often conveniently wooded. Generations of men have enjoyed al fresco sex in many of Hampstead Heath’s more secluded woodland quarters. And when heterosexual premarital sex was less easily organised, forests were an important resource for all sexual persuasions. Trees and bushes protect lovers from prying eyes, but the eyes might not always be human. Forest creatures operate and relate outside of human domestic agendas. The wild of the woods offers space at the fringes of convention, eliciting boundary crossings and unusual minglings. As human bodies make love in the wildwood, their met flesh presses into a living world where, from a new materialist framework, the difference between humans and animals, or even between animate and inanimate, is one of degree more than of kind. In the midst of the wildwood, the copulatory human enters a space of disalienation from its animal (and perhaps mythic) status.
In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn relates how the Avila of Ecuador enter into a reciprocal semiotic relation with the animals of the forest in order to hunt them better. The hunters not only need to place themselves in the position of the creature in order to think what their next move would be, they also need to think how the animals perceive and interpret them, how humans are seen by the forest. Crucially, in regard to the forest jaguars, they must not turn away and show their backs, as this allows the jaguar to see them as ‘meat’, as prey. Instead, humans must stare back at jaguars, meet their gaze, to instil upon them that they are equals, if not lovers. Eye-to-eye communication is life-saving. This subjective reciprocity, even if practised for pragmatic reasons, folds into the Avila understanding of the diversity of lives that surround them as multiple centres of meaning and interpretation. “‘Self’, at its most basic level, is a product of semiosis. It is the locus – however rudimentary and ephemeral – of a living dynamic by which signs come to represent the world around them to a ‘someone’ who emerges as a result of this process.”6 Kohn proposes a forest that thinks, in which the human semiotic system forms an ‘open whole’ nesting inside and opening onto broader systems of iconic and indexical signage that all living things live into and become with.
In Kohn’s forest, hierarchies are embedded in relations between predators and prey that extend downwards from humans towards peccaries and monkeys, but also upwards towards colonial powers and estate managers, jaguars and anacondas. They are always potentially in flux. The hunter may become the hunted, the hunted may become meat. In the forest, the edges between species and subjectivities are not always clear. All are beings in the midst of beings.
In European ontology, informed by monotheistic religion, souls are seen as differentiated, with the human soul possessing unique status, whereas all flesh is seen as broadly the same. In Amerindian perspectivism, “the soul ‘is experienced as… a manifestation of the conventional order implicit in everything…’”.7 It is the body that defines and is peculiar to a species. Another way of putting this is that all animals are ‘human to themselves’. Each animal is human, or a person, at the centre of their own perspectival universe.
In a natural bee colony, the brood is nurtured deep inside the body of the hive, protected and tended assiduously by their sisters, cooled by the fanning of their wings, warmed by their collective vibration, fed on pollen and bee milk, guarded, cleaned and protected by propolis. Each year, a few queen cells are built, and these larvae feed only on royal jelly. As summer arrives, the mother Queen leads many of her daughters in a swarm to found a new colony. As they fly away, new virgin queens emerge to fight for the right to mate and return as mother.
Humans have manipulated and exploited honeybees, to their cost and our gain, for thousands of years, but their domestication was only partial until it was possible to override and manipulate their reproduction. Before the 19th century, every new bee was born of free sexuality, the fecund
mixing of the gene pool that drives evolution. With the invention of the moveable frame hive, beekeepers finally got access to the brood cells and the queen. Then, in the 1920s, Mr Watson invented an apparatus for the artificial insemination of a queen bee. She is pinioned between steel and glass as sperm is injected deep into her oviduct. Queen bees are big business. It has become standard practice to kill and replace a queen after a single season. They are traded globally, shipped in tiny wire cages. The male bees’ sperm is extracted by squeezing. It is a fatal strangulation.
Each reproductively enslaved queen is sold on the basis of her genetic docility, heavy honey production or resistance to specific human-perpetuated diseases: qualities that benefit humans and profit margins. Bees are shipped round the monocultures of the world on flatbed trucks and aeroplanes, exchanging increasingly fatal diseases across the globe. In many areas, wild and farmed bees are threatened with extinction. Conventional beekeeping websites advertise ever -more-sophisticated technical fixes. Better chemicals. More succinct genetic manipulation. More intervention. Better mastery.
Julietta Singh says that “to unthink mastery… requires either a radically different understanding of what it could mean to be human, or perhaps a thinking of the human that would not be human at all”8. She calls for ‘dehumanism’, which she sees as a practice of recuperation, of stripping away the violent foundations (always structural and ideological) of mastery that continue to render some beings more human than others.9 Nearness to the human extends outside the species’ boundary to determine – via tests of sentience or intelligence or self-recognition or some other skewed anthropocentric category – how we should treat gorillas differently to sheep, parrots differently to bees.
Singh’s formulation of dehumanism draws on ‘queer inhumanisms’, which articulate unconventional ways of performing humanity without using the oppositional and temporal form ‘posthumanism’. She says that “other genres of being human” that have been lived and will be lived by those subjected to imperial force can offer us alternative performances of the human.10 In swapping ‘in-’ for ‘de-’, Singh seeks to embed in the word’s utterance the generative role of mastery: its historical processes of dehumanisation and deconstruction.
In 2006, research entomologist Thomas D Seeley published a paper showing that feral forest honeybees living in upstate New York adapted resistance to Varroa mites in just five seasons.11 Wild sexuality outperforms human treatments. Seeley’s study of wild bees underpins his call to return to what he calls ‘Darwinian beekeeping’: stopping the chemical treatment of diseases, and allowing the bees to practice natural selection. Meanwhile in Germany, Torben Schiffer’s research into the impact on bee health of different man-made environments is informing a move towards better hive design, low-intervention beekeeping, and renewed interest in traditional beekeeping methodologies such as tree beekeeping and the use of log hives, which mimic natural nest conditions for bees. Natural beekeepers Bienenbotschaft suggest that they have “learned to see with the eyes of the bees”12. As we comprehend (or relearn) the complex warp and weft of ecological thinking, perhaps we can step back from our urge to mastery, exploitation and control, and understand landscapes and creatures alike as self-creating masterpieces, of which humans can never be masters.
1 Ransome, Hilda (2004), The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. London: Dover Publications,
p. 191.
2 Ibid. pp. 196–197.
3 Freeman, Jacqueline (2016), Song of Increase: Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World. Colorado: Sounds True, p. 12.
4 Barad, Karen (2013), On Touching: the inhuman that therefore I am, from a PDF subsequently published in Power of Material / Politics of Materiality (2013), edited by Susanne Witzgall. Chicago: Diaphanes.
5 Citing Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
6 Kohn, Eduardo (2013), How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 16.
7Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2014), Cannibal Metaphysics. Edited and translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, p. 53.
8 Singh, Julietta (2018), Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. USA: Duke University Press, p. 14.
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 Ibid., p. 14.
11 Seeley, Thomas D (2007), Honey bees of the Arnot Forest: a population of feral colonies persisting with Varroa destructor in the northeastern United States. Apidologie 38 (2007) 19–29
https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/pdf/2007/01/m6063.pdf
12 https://bienenbotschaft.de/en/who-we-are/
Essay originally published in Perry, C (ed.) (2022) Art and the Rural Imagination. More Than Ponies. 2021
Sexual Libertarianism and Reproductive Slavery in More Than Bee Worlds
Long before Homo sapiens evolved, bees pollinated the forests and meadows of what was eventually to become Britain. In Europe, bees are a forest species and tree hollows are their favoured nesting sites. Wild bee nests were once so plentiful that in summer you’d be rained on by honey oozing from the tree hives as you walked or rode through the forest.1 Long before beekeeping, people stole the honey from wild bees.
Being ancient creatures that moved easily between earth and sky, bringing sweetness, honeybees earned a reputation as spirit guides and psychopomps, messengers between this world and the next, and were thought by Christians to be sent by God directly from Paradise, leading to the edict that Mass must be celebrated in the light of their wax candles.2 Even in our more secular times, bees are consistently aligned with love, community and the sun. Seen with the eyes of patriarchy, the bee colony was long thought to be ruled by its King, but the Queen bee does not rule the hive. Honeybee communities practice an emergent democracy. Jacqueline Freeman describes a ‘honeybee as both an individual and a cell in a larger being. Each bee is both particle and wave in the physics of its world’3. The female worker bees control every aspect of life in the hive, including their queens.
Honeybees transmute plant materials into several distinct, complex substances through a combination of corporeal processes and basic ritual actions, like chewing and fanning. Wax is exuded from glands in their abdomen, and chewed into place to create extraordinary hexagonal architecture; nectar is mixed with saliva and reduced by fanning to create honey, while anti-microbial propolis is concocted from plant resins and fungal spores. Honeybees’ extended phenotype expresses itself through an intimate relation with flowering plants, most specifically in a sexuality that is productively queer. Worker bees outsource their sex life and fertility to a few overdeveloped siblings, but then repeatedly engage in a kind of incentivised asymmetric intercourse with beings of other species. Flowers are notoriously promiscuous, advertising themselves with displays of gaudy colour, pattern and scent, and paying for sexual services in sticky nectar or with more unusual kinks, such as being ‘thermogenic’, or exuding specialist resins and volatile chemicals (drugs, essentially). While honeybees feed, their vegetal collaborators are orgasmically fertilised.
The intra-action of insects and plants also plays a pivotal role in geology. Pollinators move minerals and nutrients from place to place by plant fertilisation, while all herbivores move minerals in and through their eating, shitting and dying. Or, as Karen Barad puts it:
“Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being.”4
Bees fly through and fructify a densely nuanced, thick tangle of animate matter, performing ‘the world’s worlding, the becoming of the world’5 .
Honeybees perform highly ritualised, orgiastic fertility rites. Male honeybees are made just for love, and are nurtured by their sisters to perform a single, ecstatic, sacrificial act. Once virile, drones spend each warm summer afternoon cruising in secret gathering places that have been visited by bees down the generations. How the knowledge of these love-zones is transmitted, or how they are found, is a mystery. One theory is that they are positioned where ley lines cross, places with heightened electromagnetic force, which bees are sensitive to. Virgin queens fly long distances to these zones, to be chased by a bevy of lustful drones. She flies up towards the sun, and will mate 10 to 20 times with different males before she is sated, so filled then with sperm that it will last for her lifetime. Drunkenly, she flies back to the nest to be received by her sisters as their new Queen. In contrast, the drone’s orgasm is so energetic that his testicles explode and he dies: an overwhelming petit mort.
The forest stimulates liberatory imaginaries and practices in more than bee worlds. Cruising spots for gay men are often conveniently wooded. Generations of men have enjoyed al fresco sex in many of Hampstead Heath’s more secluded woodland quarters. And when heterosexual premarital sex was less easily organised, forests were an important resource for all sexual persuasions. Trees and bushes protect lovers from prying eyes, but the eyes might not always be human. Forest creatures operate and relate outside of human domestic agendas. The wild of the woods offers space at the fringes of convention, eliciting boundary crossings and unusual minglings. As human bodies make love in the wildwood, their met flesh presses into a living world where, from a new materialist framework, the difference between humans and animals, or even between animate and inanimate, is one of degree more than of kind. In the midst of the wildwood, the copulatory human enters a space of disalienation from its animal (and perhaps mythic) status.
In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn relates how the Avila of Ecuador enter into a reciprocal semiotic relation with the animals of the forest in order to hunt them better. The hunters not only need to place themselves in the position of the creature in order to think what their next move would be, they also need to think how the animals perceive and interpret them, how humans are seen by the forest. Crucially, in regard to the forest jaguars, they must not turn away and show their backs, as this allows the jaguar to see them as ‘meat’, as prey. Instead, humans must stare back at jaguars, meet their gaze, to instil upon them that they are equals, if not lovers. Eye-to-eye communication is life-saving. This subjective reciprocity, even if practised for pragmatic reasons, folds into the Avila understanding of the diversity of lives that surround them as multiple centres of meaning and interpretation. “‘Self’, at its most basic level, is a product of semiosis. It is the locus – however rudimentary and ephemeral – of a living dynamic by which signs come to represent the world around them to a ‘someone’ who emerges as a result of this process.”6 Kohn proposes a forest that thinks, in which the human semiotic system forms an ‘open whole’ nesting inside and opening onto broader systems of iconic and indexical signage that all living things live into and become with.
In Kohn’s forest, hierarchies are embedded in relations between predators and prey that extend downwards from humans towards peccaries and monkeys, but also upwards towards colonial powers and estate managers, jaguars and anacondas. They are always potentially in flux. The hunter may become the hunted, the hunted may become meat. In the forest, the edges between species and subjectivities are not always clear. All are beings in the midst of beings.
In European ontology, informed by monotheistic religion, souls are seen as differentiated, with the human soul possessing unique status, whereas all flesh is seen as broadly the same. In Amerindian perspectivism, “the soul ‘is experienced as… a manifestation of the conventional order implicit in everything…’”.7 It is the body that defines and is peculiar to a species. Another way of putting this is that all animals are ‘human to themselves’. Each animal is human, or a person, at the centre of their own perspectival universe.
In a natural bee colony, the brood is nurtured deep inside the body of the hive, protected and tended assiduously by their sisters, cooled by the fanning of their wings, warmed by their collective vibration, fed on pollen and bee milk, guarded, cleaned and protected by propolis. Each year, a few queen cells are built, and these larvae feed only on royal jelly. As summer arrives, the mother Queen leads many of her daughters in a swarm to found a new colony. As they fly away, new virgin queens emerge to fight for the right to mate and return as mother.
Humans have manipulated and exploited honeybees, to their cost and our gain, for thousands of years, but their domestication was only partial until it was possible to override and manipulate their reproduction. Before the 19th century, every new bee was born of free sexuality, the fecund
mixing of the gene pool that drives evolution. With the invention of the moveable frame hive, beekeepers finally got access to the brood cells and the queen. Then, in the 1920s, Mr Watson invented an apparatus for the artificial insemination of a queen bee. She is pinioned between steel and glass as sperm is injected deep into her oviduct. Queen bees are big business. It has become standard practice to kill and replace a queen after a single season. They are traded globally, shipped in tiny wire cages. The male bees’ sperm is extracted by squeezing. It is a fatal strangulation.
Each reproductively enslaved queen is sold on the basis of her genetic docility, heavy honey production or resistance to specific human-perpetuated diseases: qualities that benefit humans and profit margins. Bees are shipped round the monocultures of the world on flatbed trucks and aeroplanes, exchanging increasingly fatal diseases across the globe. In many areas, wild and farmed bees are threatened with extinction. Conventional beekeeping websites advertise ever -more-sophisticated technical fixes. Better chemicals. More succinct genetic manipulation. More intervention. Better mastery.
Julietta Singh says that “to unthink mastery… requires either a radically different understanding of what it could mean to be human, or perhaps a thinking of the human that would not be human at all”8. She calls for ‘dehumanism’, which she sees as a practice of recuperation, of stripping away the violent foundations (always structural and ideological) of mastery that continue to render some beings more human than others.9 Nearness to the human extends outside the species’ boundary to determine – via tests of sentience or intelligence or self-recognition or some other skewed anthropocentric category – how we should treat gorillas differently to sheep, parrots differently to bees.
Singh’s formulation of dehumanism draws on ‘queer inhumanisms’, which articulate unconventional ways of performing humanity without using the oppositional and temporal form ‘posthumanism’. She says that “other genres of being human” that have been lived and will be lived by those subjected to imperial force can offer us alternative performances of the human.10 In swapping ‘in-’ for ‘de-’, Singh seeks to embed in the word’s utterance the generative role of mastery: its historical processes of dehumanisation and deconstruction.
In 2006, research entomologist Thomas D Seeley published a paper showing that feral forest honeybees living in upstate New York adapted resistance to Varroa mites in just five seasons.11 Wild sexuality outperforms human treatments. Seeley’s study of wild bees underpins his call to return to what he calls ‘Darwinian beekeeping’: stopping the chemical treatment of diseases, and allowing the bees to practice natural selection. Meanwhile in Germany, Torben Schiffer’s research into the impact on bee health of different man-made environments is informing a move towards better hive design, low-intervention beekeeping, and renewed interest in traditional beekeeping methodologies such as tree beekeeping and the use of log hives, which mimic natural nest conditions for bees. Natural beekeepers Bienenbotschaft suggest that they have “learned to see with the eyes of the bees”12. As we comprehend (or relearn) the complex warp and weft of ecological thinking, perhaps we can step back from our urge to mastery, exploitation and control, and understand landscapes and creatures alike as self-creating masterpieces, of which humans can never be masters.
1 Ransome, Hilda (2004), The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore. London: Dover Publications,
p. 191.
2 Ibid. pp. 196–197.
3 Freeman, Jacqueline (2016), Song of Increase: Listening to the Wisdom of Honeybees for Kinder Beekeeping and a Better World. Colorado: Sounds True, p. 12.
4 Barad, Karen (2013), On Touching: the inhuman that therefore I am, from a PDF subsequently published in Power of Material / Politics of Materiality (2013), edited by Susanne Witzgall. Chicago: Diaphanes.
5 Citing Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
6 Kohn, Eduardo (2013), How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. 16.
7Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2014), Cannibal Metaphysics. Edited and translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, p. 53.
8 Singh, Julietta (2018), Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. USA: Duke University Press, p. 14.
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 Ibid., p. 14.
11 Seeley, Thomas D (2007), Honey bees of the Arnot Forest: a population of feral colonies persisting with Varroa destructor in the northeastern United States. Apidologie 38 (2007) 19–29
https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/pdf/2007/01/m6063.pdf
12 https://bienenbotschaft.de/en/who-we-are/
Essay originally published in Perry, C (ed.) (2022) Art and the Rural Imagination. More Than Ponies. 2021
Fiona MacDonald works with human and nonhuman beings as Feral Practice to create art projects and interdisciplinary events that develop ethical and imaginative relations across species boundaries. Often people set up divisions between species and between different categories of knowledge and understanding, Feral Practice collaborates and converses across these barriers.
Our vulnerable, speculative approach brings experimental art into spaces of care and attentiveness for and with real, situated beings. We explore diverse aesthetics and foreground distinctive creaturely subjectivities. Each project is materially and conceptually responsive to its participants, context and audience, often utilising augmenting digital technologies alongside diverse analogue media, participation and voice.