“Through the Agency of Bees”: Charles Darwin, John Lubbock, and the Secret Lives of Plants and People

The 1860s into the 1880s were auspicious decades for the bee in British science, and Charles Darwin and John Lubbock, Darwin’s neighbor and fellow scientific naturalist, were the figures most responsible. Darwin’s studies of plant fertilization showed how plants had evolved to secure the services of bees and other pollinators. Lubbock in turn played a key role in popularizing and extending Darwin’s work. Darwin’s books on orchids and on flowers with multiple sexual forms had particular scientific and popular impact, and Darwin reveled in the elaborate structures and reproductive possibilities of these species. At the same time, Darwin used the discourse of bourgeois Anglican marriage to describe the relationship between bees and flowers, and he avoided the more controversial implications of this work for humans. His reasons were partly personal, but also partly related to his theory of sexual selection, which was central to his view of the human races and intersected with Lubbock’s other major scientific interest, prehistoric archaeology. For both men, natural selection was the key to understanding human history, but we can chart Darwin’s anxieties about what the agency of bees in the sex lives of plants might mean for himself, his family, and the evolution of human sexuality.