Bee boy showed how nature explains itself

Bee boy showed how nature explains itself

Photo by Mauro Tandoi on Unsplash

Originally published 23 May 2000

Gilbert White’s The Nat­ur­al His­to­ry of Sel­borne was pub­lished in the year of the French Rev­o­lu­tion and not long after Britain lost her 13 colonies in Amer­i­ca. You’ll find none of these earth­shak­ing events in the book. What you will find are the geol­o­gy, weath­er, flo­ra, fau­na, and domes­tic economies of a tiny vil­lage in the south­east of England.

White was a pas­sion­ate and metic­u­lous observ­er. Not much hap­pened in Sel­borne that escaped his eye. And the rea­son the book remains in print today, two cen­turies lat­er, is the way he saw it all hang­ing together.

He might rea­son­ably be called the first ecol­o­gist. He rec­og­nized, for exam­ple, that low­ly earth­worms were essen­tial to the fer­til­i­ty of the soil. He observed cat­tle stand­ing in ponds on warm after­noons and under­stood that the insects in cow dung sup­plied food for fish. Nature is the “great econ­o­mist,” he said, who shares its resources.

Gilbert White taught us how to see our­selves as part of a web of shared resources.

Not many of the human inhab­i­tants of Sel­borne mer­it spe­cial notice in White’s book. But one char­ac­ter gets a chap­ter all to him­self. The bee boy.

White calls him the vil­lage idiot. We would not use so pejo­ra­tive a term today. We have learned that the men­tal­ly dis­ad­van­taged can have their own kinds of wis­dom and per­cep­tu­al acuity.

The bee boy was lean and sal­low — of a “cadav­er­ous” com­plex­ion, White wrote. He had but one inter­est — hon­ey bees, bum­ble bees, and wasps. They were “his food, his amuse­ment, his sole object.”

He sought out bees wher­ev­er he could find them, and nev­er gave a thought to their stings. He grasped them bare­hand­ed, plucked out their stingers, and sucked their bod­ies for their hon­ey. Some­times he would stuff swarms of bees beneath his shirt, against his bare skin, and thus remove them to his home.

To the annoy­ance of local bee­keep­ers, the bee boy would slip into their gar­dens, rap with his fin­gers on the hives, and grasp the bees as they came out. Some­times he tipped over hives to get the hon­ey, of which he was pas­sion­ate­ly fond. Wher­ev­er men made mead from hon­ey, he hung about, beg­ging for a drink of what he called “bee wine.”

As he ran about the vil­lage, he made a hum­ming noise with his lips, resem­bling the buzzing of bees.

In the win­ter, when bees kept to their hives, the bee boy dozed away his time by the fire­side of his father’s house, in a tor­pid state, wait­ing until the spring and sum­mer when once again he hummed about the fields and gar­dens in search of his prey.

A psy­chol­o­gist might try to explain the bee boy’s curi­ous fix­a­tion. But who will fault the boy his pas­sion, equaled in all that vil­lage per­haps only by the pas­sion of Gilbert White him­self. The boy dumped his fierce atten­tion upon a sin­gle object; White dis­bursed his atten­tion wide­ly, anoint­ing every stone, bird, insect, and blos­som with his study.

Most of us live out our lives some­where between the bee boy’s obses­sive sin­gle-mind­ed­ness and White’s ency­clo­pe­dic inter­est. When White cuts open snakes and birds and hedge­hog dung to see what is inside, we flinch and won­der if curios­i­ty real­ly requires such atten­tion to detail. But we pity the bee boy, too, for his uni­verse of lost appre­ci­a­tions — but­ter­flies unseen and nightin­gales unheard.

The bee boy car­ried to a patho­log­i­cal extreme a nat­ur­al ten­den­cy to lose one­self in the par­tic­u­lars of nature. In a short poem called Begin­ning My Stud­ies, Walt Whit­man speaks of the temp­ta­tion to nev­er go beyond the first object of his study, what­ev­er it is — “the least insect or ani­mal” — and sub­merge him­self in its intri­ca­cies, to “stop and loi­ter all the time to sing it in ecsta­t­ic songs.” Sci­ence, too, is full of researchers who spend entire careers sequestered in a lab with bot­tles of fruit flies, say, or a sin­gle species of bac­te­ria. And, if truth be told, there is much that can be learned about the world by relent­less­ly nar­row­ing one’s field of view.

In Song of Myself, Whit­man pro­claims that “the near­est gnat is an expla­na­tion.” He knows that there is a sense in which the least thing con­tains the all. If the plan of the world is sim­ple and uni­ver­sal, it will show itself as well in a sin­gle bee as in a land­scape full of plants and animals.

Which is why the mad bee boy kneel­ing at the hive is as close to divin­i­ty as the sane nat­u­ral­ist who takes the whole vil­lage as his ken. Sci­ence, espe­cial­ly, needs both its Dar­wins and its Mendels — the gen­er­al­ists who range across con­ti­nents and oceans of expe­ri­ence, and the spe­cial­ists who are con­tent to spend their lives in a patch of peas. The uni­verse reveals its secrets at every lev­el of complexity.

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