The Leader of the Hive Part 6 – Luis Mendez de Torres and the prostitute bee
Today we think of the leader of the Hive as a Queen Bee, but in past times the Queen's sex and identity has been heavily debated. In part 6 we focus on a 16th century Spanish beekeeping book.
These essays on the leader of the Hive have thus far explored the scholarly beliefs that the Queen Bee is male and should be called a King. We looked at ideas in antiquity first framed by Aristotle that the leader bee was a King (Part 2) and saw how these ideas transmitted into the Medieval era (Part 3). There is more to tell on that story, but in Part 4 and Part 5 we looked at counter-claims that the leader bee was actually female, and more a wife or mother figure.
This alternative idea wouldn’t be accepted until Charles Butler made the claim in his The Feminine Monarchie, published in 1609. However, there is an exception. In Spain, in the late sixteenth century, Luis Mendez de Torres independently wrote his own beekeeping manual, describing the leader bee as a female. De Torres work did not transmit very far. Butler didn’t know about it and neither did any other writers who would add to understanding in the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, here we have an alternative belief about the leader bee put into print.
In Part 6, therefore, we take a break from looking at a variety of works and hone in on this single example to understand more about how the counter-belief that the leader was female took form in the late sixteenth century.
Spain. Specifically Madrid. The late sixteenth century. There, we find a man named Luis Mendez de Torres who decided to write a handbook on beekeeping. This work, published in 1586 was entitled Tratado breve de la cultivación y cura de las colmenas (The Brief Treatise on the Cultivation and Cure of Hives). There is no indication that Charles Butler, or anyone else in England for that matter, knew of this work or that it particularly made much of an impact outside of Madrid and Saville. Nonetheless, here, in this short text of around 13,500 words (in 20 chapters), Luis Mendez de Torres put down in print evidence that the leader bee was female.
I have been unable to access an original copy of this text, but luckily it did receive a reprint in the late eighteenth-century by Alonso de Herrera in Agricultura General (1790) [available from Archive.org]. In this edition, Mendez de Torres clearly argues that the leader bee is female and ‘casts from itself a seed from which three kinds of bees are engendered’. These, Mendez de Torres state, are the leaders, the drones, and the worker bees (Herrera, 1790, ch. 2 72). Mendez de Torres is clear that the Queen is created without the process of copulation and he blames the different sized cells in the honeycomb for the decision on weather a bee becomes a Queen, Drone, or worker bee.
Thus, Mendez de Torres was the first to correctly state that the Queen was female in print and that she laid all the eggs in the colony, which can become Queens, workers, or drones, depending on which type of cell they are placed.
Eva Crane believed that Spain, at this time, may have had more knowledge about honeybees than many other European countries (Crane, 1999, 215). The reason was one of history. From around 700 AD large parts of Spain were under the control of Muslims hailing from northern Africa, and their scholar’s retained knowledge and beliefs about bees from ancient Greece, that had otherwise been largely lost in the west. They also added to this knowledge themselves. The result was a clearer understanding of bee sex: they knew that the drones were male, and that the worker bees were female, although the leader bee was still, generally, referred to as a king.
Mendez de Torres was therefore suggesting something new, or at least unearthed from a somewhat suppressed ancient knowledge, but did so from an alternative basis of knowledge than other European writers or beekeepers of this period. Sadly his work did not influence beekeepers or scholars outside of Spain. Herrera blames the inclusion (as a separate but connected work) of ancient ordinances relating to beekeeping in Savelle, which convinced other scholars that his work was nothing more than of perocial interest to Savelle (Herrera, 1790, 17). It was therefore ignored and forgotten. A footnote to an untrodden path in the development of knowledge about honeybees.
Beyond the eighteenth century reproduction, the next significant moment for Mendez’ book might well be its focus as a lecture given to the Central Association of Bee-Keepers by the British historical writer H. Malcolm Fraser. The lecture was given in 11 October 1956. There, Fraser outlined in detail the contents of the book and although he gives little away in terms of analysis he does mention that he was pleased to find that the Queen was identified as female and as the only one that lays eggs. He was less happy when Mendez referred to ancient writers such as Columella and admitted to feeling bored as he read some of the chapters!
The Queen Bee as a prostitute
By now you are probably wondering why the title of this essay referred to the Queen Bee as a type of prostitute. This is not my idea, but one posited in 2020 by Emily Kuffner when she compared Mendez’ use of the term maessa de enjambre in his beekeeping book to several erotic Spanish texts from the same era.
Enjambre simply means a swarm of bees, while maessa referred to a type of female master (similar to maese meaning master or teacher). Thus, Mendez is not calling the leader bee a ‘Queen’ but more the mistress of the swarm. The exact same wording was used in the 1528 novel La Lozana andaluza in which the main protagonist was a Spanish prostitute living in Rome.
Now, for the most part, bees were overwhelmingly depicted in a positive light in the medieval and early modern eras. Bees were not only viewed as valuable, but were also exemplary models for society but also for morals, theology, their working ethos, and much more. Indeed, Kuffner argues that a lot of Spanish authors from this time encouraged their readers to use the bee as a model to overcome ‘worldly temptations’ and that the recent Counter-Reformation had empahsised bee colonies as an example of divine order. Colonies were often compared to monasteries as chaste and orderly communal societies (much like the ideal monastery).
However, the erotic traditions in Spain also picked up on some alternative meanings. Kuffner argues that the medieval bestiaries (compendiums of animals – some real, some imagined) often presented animals as exemplary models to imitate (such as the lion, who represented courage) or as warnings for negative behaviour (such as the siren – a half-woman, half-bird or fish – which lured sailors to their death by playing on their lusts). Bees did well in such places as it was often claimed that they reproduced asexually through spontaneous generation. Thus, bees were believed to be untroubled by sexual desire and could therefore take a moral high ground.
However, poetry sometimes added another layer to the metaphor. Classical myth told how Cupid was stung by a bee and how his mother, Aphrodite, suggested to him that the bees sting is not all that different to his arrows; arrows which Cupid is well-known to use to initiate love between two people. According to Kuffner, Spanish and Italian versions of this tale told in the sixteenth century highlighted the duality of love as ‘sweet yet painful’ and how Cupids arrow (in being similar to a bees sting) causes a small wound and severe pain, as well as its intended purpose of exciting lust and love. Thus, as Kuffner argues, the bee’s sting reminds the reader that worldly pleasure can cause spiritual harm – sweet yet painful – and that the bee’s purity and chastity is a reminder to not give in to carnal temptations (if the bee uses its sting it dies).
So, if we consider the idea that the pain of love can be compared to a bee sting or that the sting can be suggested as a metaphor for giving in to carnal lusts, the idea that the leader bee is a form of prostitute becomes clearer. In these cases the prostitutes are the worker bees who takes advantage of the passive male (drone) who is preyed upon by female greed. The leader bee is a type of procuress, controlling the other prostitutes, and gaining economically in her role as ‘mediator’. This is how La Lozana andaluza described it – using the apiary as a type of whore house and the leader bee as the procuress of the prostitutes. As Kuffner explains:
“By relying on apiary metaphors La Lozana andaluza, La Celestina, and related works invert the normative gendering of bees, and in doing so, reveal masculine fear that the economy of prostitution allows women to usurp an unnautral autonomy by negotiating the sale of other women’s bodies.”
Summary
It is difficult to tell if Mendez was dipping into erotic literature of his era when he described the leader bee as a mistress of the swarm. Yet the simple idea that the leader bee commanded a workforce of women and that the drones were less consequential (and indeed were forced out of the hive at certain times of the year), brought with it connotations which were challenging in a male-dominated society, which often saw honeybees as an ideal community.
At the very least, Mendez struggled with the often used metaphors of his day, due to his relabelling of the leader bee. The next person to do so, however, avoided any possible parallel to prostitution, but could only do so because he had just lived through the extremely successful reign of a female monarch. That person is Charles Butler, and his queen was Elizabeth I. This is where real progress in the relabelling of the leader bee began, and it is the topic we shall turn to in the next part of this occasional series.
Sources
Fraser, H. Malcolm, ‘Luis Mendez de Torres: A Lecture given to the Central Association by Dr. H. Malcolm Fraser’, Central Association of Bee-keepers (February 1957). Pamphlet T4 894, University of Reading Archives.
Herrera, Gabriel Alonso de, Agricultura general: que trata de la labranza del campo y sus particularidades, Crianza de animals, propriedades de las plantas que en ella se contienen, y virtudes provechosas a la salud humana (Madrid, 1790).
Kuffner, Emily, ‘Eros in the Apiary: Bees and Beehives in Early Modern Spanish Erotic Literature’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos, 44:3 (2020), pp. 641-665. DOI: 10.18192/rceh.v44i3.6360