what did the writer observe about the. bees work ? what does he suggest modern society can learn from
Answers
Shakespeare was a beekeeper, though not, as far as I can tell, in the practical way of animal husbandry. Shakespeare kept bees in a literary sense. Honey bees are a part of the extraordinary figurative landscape that Shakespeare provides his audience. They are a link for him between the natural world and the human, and like many elements of nature in the early modern period, a glass reflecting and commenting on human society. As Charles Butler argues in the Preface to his 1609 treatise The Feminine Monarchie: Or a Treatise Concerning Bees and the Due Ordering of Them, “the worke and fruit of the little Bee is so great and wonderfull, so comely for order and beauty, so excellent for Art and wisdom, & so full of pleasure and profit; that the contemplation thereof may well beseeme an ingenious nature” (3–4).1 Butler believes that his readers can learn from bees, that bees are figures relevant to human society. This is true for us today as well. Because of recent bee colony die-offs (what has come to be called Colony Collapse Disorder, and other more general colony attritions), bees have become a rallying point for environmentalists who see them as canaries in our world-wide coalmine. We identify with bees because they mark the health of an environment for which we feel responsible, and of which we are a part.2 For Butler, and for Shakespeare, bees are a part of a long, classical tradition of treating the natural world as a metaphor for the human. They are models of political and social organization, and perhaps even more profoundly than for our time, political placeholders for humans themselves.