Thomas Hardy’s Bees, Sex, Domestication and Wildness

In his study of variation among domesticated animal and plant species, Charles Darwin would refer wryly to the ages-old domestication of honeybees—“if indeed their state can be considered one of domestication”. This chapter considers the significance of debates about honeybees’ domestication for figurative and literal exchanges between bees and human characters in three of Thomas Hardy’s novels, Far from the Madding Crowd, Return of the Native and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The proximity of honeybees to humans in Hardy’s novels brings into contact what were generally treated as entirely separate discussions: one concerning whether honeybees were domesticated or domesticable and the other concerning the extent to which human sexual instincts naturally corresponded with social mores. The bees of Hardy’s novels offer an example of a sexuality and reproductive impulse somewhere between wildness and domestication, along with a set of seemingly contradictory associations—sweetness and the sting, sociability and queenliness, the industry of the worker and the idleness of the drone. Tracking this theme across these three novels, this chapter shows how Hardy’s use of the honeybee changes over time alongside his novels’ deepening commitment to a simultaneously tragic and enchanted Darwinian vision.