SSHRC Insight Development Grant: ““Bees as Symbols of Climate Change in the Renaissance and Today”

Honey bees are fantastic creatures, renowned for their social organization, sense of direction, and role in pollination. Yet they are fantastic also in another sense; as the object of myth, legend, and story. Their current plight is by now well known: bees are disappearing, and the cause of their loss is not yet fully understood, but it seems related to all matter of environmental damage, including climate change. David Suzuki writes grimly, "If bees start to disappear, the effects will cascade throughout ecosystems, affecting
all life, including humans. We must do everything we can to ensure that bees thrive and flourish. Our own survival depends on it." Perhaps because of their immense value, bees have become a sort of story or symbol—a harbinger of environmental doom. Douglas Coupland already wrote about a world without bees in his 2009 novel Generation A, and the dystopian television series Black Mirror more recently aired an episode about robot bees pollinating England's plants. Yet such literary attention to bees is hardly new, nor
is the link between bees and climate change. Honey bees have been affected by global climate change before, particularly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the world experienced the coldest temperatures of what is known as “the little ice age.” Many beekeeping treatises appeared in England during that time, advising their readers how best to tend and protect their hives. Simultaneously, bees were a prevalent literary symbol representing such things as the ideal commonwealth, the nature of women, the allure and perils of sex, and the value of labour, in texts as diverse as broadside ballads, John Bunyan's poems for children, Margaret Cavendish's scientific and political writings, and William Shakespeare's Henry V. Indeed, bees were used as a way of understanding nature and the human condition, just as they are today. How apropos, then, to compare today's bee-centric
literature to literature written about bees in Renaissance England, which Robert Markley calls a "volatile era in climatological history that, in some ways, offers an inverted, but potentially instructive, image of our own twenty-first century descent into global warming” (131). “Bees as Symbols of Climate Change in the Renaissance and Today” analyzes honey bees as literary and cultural symbols of concern and hope during two periods of climate change, and argues that the stories people tell themselves and others about bees help them understand the natural world and its changes.