Stealing Sweetness: Science, Sex and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Bee

Beginning with John Evans’ epic, The Bees (1806–1813), this chapter shows how in the nineteenth century long-standing apian literary conceits came into conflict with emerging knowledge about the biology of European honeybees. This conflict would generate both new ways of representing and thinking about honeybees and new representative roles for honeybees in nineteenth-century literature and culture. The nineteenth century saw a dizzying acceleration in both specialist and wider public knowledge about the natural history of honeybees, including new understandings of their reproductive practices, their role in pollination and the methods by which they could be selectively bred to generate distinct “races”. This knowledge expanded the kinds of ideological work to which the figure of the honeybee could be put while also impacting on the actual lives of honeybees and the other constituents of the environments they inhabited. Ultimately, we argue, over the course of the nineteenth century, popular knowledge about European honeybees arose to colonise modern understandings of invertebrate life, its intellection, and its economic value to industrial society. This chapter outlines the literary and discursive mechanisms of this ascent.