Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  This is only partly a matter of different ideas of order. For the Nazis, of course, order required and enforced a savage and exemplary hierarchy. In the hive, however, hierarchy was profoundly ambiguous. Not only were the gender relations of the bee world drastically at odds with the ideals of National Socialism, but the nominal leader—the queen—was a figure of doubtful autonomy, subject in almost all respects to the workers who serviced her. Yet such inconvenient details of bee order were as nothing in light of the allegorical possibilities of formal orderliness: the disciplined subjection to the well-being of the greater good, the self-sacrificial altruism of the nonreproducing workers, the dissolution of the individual in the anonymity of collective purpose, the efficient disposal of lives not worth living, the dedication to a civilizational temporality. And perhaps what also drew Bergdolt to the hive was the brute visuality of that bounded world, self-sufficient and regimented despite its teeming energy, so evocative of totalitarian aesthetics.

  Unlike his Nobel co-laureate Konrad Lorenz, who was not only an active member of the Nazi Party but also a key figure in its Office for Race Policy, von Frisch—as Bergdolt realized—had little interest in the larger analogy.42 Where Lorenz explicitly established racial-hygiene correspondences between the degeneration of domesticated animals and the decline of the civilized human races, von Frisch most often restricted his own editorializing to remarks on the majesty of the bees’ senses. In this period, instinct for Lorenz had a particular meaning, in which “instinctive action”—common to humans and other animals—is directed to the preservation of the species and the category “species” is homologous to the Volk. Evolution, he maintained, is imbued with moral purpose, selection operates at the level of the community, the subordination of the individual is a social good, and further, the elimination of individuals of “inferior value” is a social necessity. These ideas were also promoted by Alfred Ploetz and the Nordic strand of German Rassenhygiene that underwrote Nazi race policy. And Lorenz drew them even more directly from Ernst Haeckel’s 1874 idiosyncratic Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen (The Evolution of Man), in which social insects in their hive are a model for the relationship between citizen and state.43 Lorenz’s eagerness to buttress such notions with the authority of science was appropriately rewarded.44

  It’s no wonder that Bergdolt was dissatisfied with von Frisch’s bees. Instinct, which could so easily be cast as the motor of racial progress, was decidedly muted in their hive. Only rarely does genetics escape mediation by consciousness.45 In contrast to Lorenz’s persistent diminution of animal capacity—what appears to be intentional action is revealed again and again as merely, if complexly, mechanical—von Frisch’s work, focused principally at the level of individual behavior, is motivated by a spirit of valorization, in which the dominant registers are affinity and wonder. (Could we call it a humanism generous enough to include the nonhuman?)

  Von Frisch’s status as a founder of ethology rests on his revelatory account of the sensory world of the animal. It was an account that called into question simplified stimulus-response models of animal behavior and reoriented debates on animal cognition toward sensory complexity.46 In contrast to his behaviorist antecedents, von Frisch directed attention to the mind of the animal, not merely to its external expression. His honeybees—“the most perfect insects with sheer incredible instincts”—are conscious, purposeful, able to learn, and capable of making decisions.47 His language of language is far from accidental. There is, he leaves little doubt, a species of subjectivity in this species. It’s a simple claim with complex implications. Perhaps the best way to follow them is through the famous research that von Frisch’s student Martin Lindauer carried out on honeybee nest selection.48

  When the population has grown and the hive is crowded, when nectar is abundant, stores are full, and the foragers are unable to pass off their loads, the bees prepare to swarm. The queen stops laying eggs, and workers tending the larvae begin feeding royal jelly to those they have selected to take her place. The foragers, for their part, stop collecting foodstuff and start searching abroad for cavities, inspecting holes in trees, buildings, and any other likely spots. Within days, the old queen exits the hive, escorted by about half the workers, perhaps 30,000 bees, leaving “house, honeycomb, and food supplies behind for her successors,” as Lindauer wrote. They settle, all one living cluster, often on the branch of a nearby tree.49

  The foraging workers fly missions from this temporary home, still scouring a huge area but looking now for potential nests that meet a set of precise criteria: appropriate size, small and well-positioned entrance, protection from wind, sufficient distance from the original colony, dry, dark, free of ants. And as they locate possible sites, they return to the cluster and—just as they do for food sources—they signal their discovery by dancing, though now they perform on the massed bodies of their assembled fellows.

  Lindauer observed this behavior and realized that the returning foragers were dancing but no longer exchanging nectar or pollen. He identified and marked them, interpreted their dances, mapped the coordinates they were pointing to, and on reaching the designated locations found that, instead of collecting from flowers, the bees were “busily inspect[ing] holes in the ground, hollows of trees, or a crack in an old wall.”50 These foragers, he realized, were now “house hunters.” This is his description of what happens as they return to the cluster:

  If one follows for some time the dances of the scouting bees in the cluster and records their announcements of location, one comes to a very surprising conclusion: not just one nesting place is reported, but rather announcements are given of different directions and distances, and this means that several possible dwellings are announced at the same time. For example: on 27 June 1952 I noticed a dance in a cluster, which reported a nesting place 300 meters to the south. A few minutes later, a second dance could be observed which announced another nesting site 1400 meters to the east. In the next 2 hours, five more announcements came in, from the northeast, north, and northwest, with varied reports of distance…. On the next day 14 new reports of locations of nesting sites were added, so that now there were 21 different possibilities to choose from. The scout bees showed at the first glance that they had inspected various quarters: some were powdered over with dried dirt, because they had burrowed in a hole in the ground; others came from a cave in a ruin and were covered with red brick dust; once these seekers of quarters were soiled with soot, having discovered a suitable nesting place in a narrow chimney that was not in use during the summer.51

  So how are these options weighed? With just one queen—a queen who may be old and weak and have difficulty flying—the swarm must hold together. To avoid disaster, it must reach not only decision but consensus. Yet this does not always happen. If a suitable site cannot be found, the bees may simply nest in the open, consigning themselves to certain death, victims of predators or the first frost. If, on the other hand, two cavities generate more or less equal interest, the swarm may split, each group following a different faction but only one containing a queen. Ultimately, the other will have no alternative but to end its secession and rejoin the swarm, often while both are still in flight to their new home.52

  At this moment of danger, the survival of the colony depends entirely on the scouts. Nest selection, Lindauer discovered, as well as location, is up to them. They are both dancers and followers. Yet how these scouts “elect themselves” from the other foragers and persuade the rest of the swarm to follow them is still not known.53

  Just as for nectar and pollen, the intensity of the dance corresponds to the appeal of the resource. A lively dance, a dance that indicates a nest of superior quality, can last for hours, its length and energy making it evident to a large number of scouts. The overall dancing in the swarm continues for days—up to two weeks even—and as it progresses, the number of cavities performed declines. Finally, if all is well, an overwhelming majority of the dancers will be proposing the same location, and an
y remaining “dissenters” are then disregarded.54 A general excitement seizes the colony. With the queen at its center, the swarm takes wing for its new home.

  But there is more. In the first place, as the debate unfolds, the scouts revisit and redescribe their cavities. And their opinions are likely to change. On return trips, they might find their site less appealing—it leaks in the rain, ants have moved in, a change in wind direction has made it vulnerable. If so, the enthusiasm of their dancing declines, and quite possibly they shift their support to a competing option.

  Observing marked house hunters, Lindauer realized that those bees that dance with relatively little energy for one site are likely to eventually transfer their allegiance to another, more popular location. Flexible and open to persuasion, scouts invest decision making with appropriate seriousness. Rather than taking their fellow dancers at their word, they visit a number of sites in person, making inspections for themselves. Nor do they restrict themselves to the most popular options. Scouts attend a variety of dances and visit a range of proposed cavities. Only then, armed with comparative evidence and eyewitness authority, do they make a final decision on how to cast their lot.55

  To James Gould and Carol Gould, this interaction illustrates “the basically democratic nature of certain colony activities.”56 For Donald Griffin, “These exchanges of dance communication resemble conversational exchanges.”57 They have the back-and-forth quality of a committee meeting, he suggests. And I, too, am impressed by the effectiveness and suitability of the process through which this life-or-death decision emerges, as well as by the mental subtlety it reveals. It is not easy to dismiss the insistence on determination and confirmation, the allowance for change, the hesitations and doubts, the willingness to reevaluate, the calculus of commitment and compromise, the comparative method.

  But what kind of language is this? And what types of conversations does it make possible? We know the scientists will gladly speak on the honeybees’ behalf. But can these tiny insects truly speak for themselves?

  5.

  Despite his eighty-seven years, von Frisch traveled to Oslo in the winter of 1973 to receive the Nobel Prize. In his lecture he recalled his life’s work—his science, his bees, his colleagues—but he said nothing about his language of language. It was only his title that offered a clue: “Decoding the Language of the Bee.”58

  This was characteristic reticence. Along with his wonder at the bees’ capacities was a reluctance to move from documentation—from the tooled-up natural history in which his new bees could be simply displayed for admiration—to a more reflectively theoretical mode in which those capacities could be assessed, evaluated, perhaps found wanting. In fact, it was through this reserve that the bees’ linguistic lives became self-evident in his work. And it was through this silence that his analogy gained its effective concreteness—even if, more often than not, he took particular care to cover that special word language within the uncertain shelter of quotation marks.

  So he is cautious. The bees have “language” but never speech. They do not talk (though he listens and understands). And when he describes Lindauer’s research in Asia and Africa on the evolutionary lineage of bee communication as a “comparative philology” of Apis “dialects,” he is pursuing the established plot. The terminology is descriptive, the comparisons will not reach beyond the honeybees, and the Latinate pretensions evince more than a little self-mockery.

  But, although sometimes he seems like a scientist from a different era, he is also accomplished in the registers of theoretical biology, so distinct in tone and ambition, and he can wield them to address a different set of abstractions. In 1965, for example, he completes The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees, the summary statement of his research. Forced by the occasion to confront the ontological question in its fullness, he uses the preface to affirm unequivocally the limits of analogy: “Many readers may wonder whether it is proper to call the communication system of insects a ‘language.’ The use that is made here of this word must not be misunderstood, as though what bees inform one another of were to be regarded as the equivalent of human speech. In its wealth of concepts and its articulate mode of expression the language of man stands on quite a different plane.” The language of the bees, he concludes in his clearest statement on the matter, though “unique in the whole animal kingdom,” is actually a “precise and highly differentiated sign language.”59

  But this may be less restrictive than it at first appears. Von Frisch was writing at a moment when sign language promised a key to the otherwise inaccessible nonverbal mind. In this spirit, he introduces to the hive a wooden bee—his own prosthesis—and manipulates its movements, hoping that if he speaks their language, his bees will respond. The object’s followers express curiosity, but they are not fooled. “The model,” von Frisch acknowledged, “evidently lacked some significant characteristic without which it could not be taken seriously.”60 The bees know it is an alien. They attack and sting it repeatedly.

  Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the psychologists R. Allen Gardner and Beatrix Gardner, preoccupied by the evolution of cognition, were preparing to welcome Washoe the chimpanzee into their Nevada home, to raise her as their human girl child and teach her American Sign Language. In an attempt to render vulnerable to empirical investigation Wittgenstein’s insight “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,” the Gardners reversed von Frisch’s procedure and set out to prove that nonverbal animals can acquire human language and use it to communicate with one another and with their trainers.61

  But Wittgenstein’s lion, as the animal philosopher and trainer Vicki Hearne pointed out, is not without language; he is just “not talking.”62 His muteness proposes an irreconcilable difference, an indifference that refuses to be tamed, a fullness, not a lack; a “consciousness that is beyond ours,” Hearne called it.63 And yet this phenomenological abyss is exactly what von Frisch dared to cross—though less by code breaking than by the projection of his (and Lindauer’s) most intimate longings. Because when forced to succumb to the language of science, to surrender the language of bees, he, too, was reduced to speaking in code.

  Honeybees, like Wittgenstein’s lion, don’t talk to us. Instead, von Frisch taught us how to eavesdrop on them. And—in a whisper—he told us, too, that even if their “dance language” exhibits the automatic quality of the code, we should not assume that those signals we can access encompass their communicative world.

  Of course this isn’t merely a struggle over what the animal means; it is a struggle over the meaning of the animals themselves. And it is a battle long fought on the terrain of language. Though no philosopher, von Frisch understood this only too well. Language—the absence of language—continues to define the subor-dination (rather than simply the difference) of the animal in post-Enlightenment Western philosophy, a tradition remarkably Cartesian on this question.64 Could von Frisch be clearer? This “dance language” is restitutive, an appeal to an ethic of mutuality and recognition, a call for respect for the nonhuman animal—for the animal in general and the astonishing honeybee in particular.

  “It took some ten years of patient observation,” wrote Jacques Lacan in the wake of the Brunnwinkl experiments, “for Karl von Frisch to decode … [the bees’] message, for it is certainly a code, or system of signaling, whose generic character alone forbids us to qualify it as conventional.”65 As code is to language, Lacan wants us to understand, so nature is to culture and animal is to human. Hardwired, hard-pressed, the bees stand for a programmed, mechanical nature in vivid contrast to the complex spontaneity of human culture.66 Indeed, they enable this line between animal and human, between nature and culture, to be drawn with some severity.

  The argument is not new: animals can sign, but they cannot lie. They can react, but they cannot respond.67 They can communicate, but they cannot participate in the second-order metacommunication so familiar to humans. They cannot signify about signifying, think about thinking, and nor, for that matter, can they “d
ance about dancing.”68

  It is a conventional claim, this humanist insistence on language lack in the animal. And its framing in such irreducibly human terms makes it impossible to disprove (though not to dispute: in the cooperative setting of the hive, for example, it is difficult to imagine why a bee should be moved to dissemble about the location of a feeding site, and, anyway, wasn’t it the bees’ “honesty” that so appealed to Lindauer?).

  But the point is not to make the bees speak, to have them tell us their secrets as the Gardners would have liked poor Washoe to tell them hers. Nor is it to imagine that the little honeybees are somehow just like us, that their world somehow corresponds to ours, that to be a bee is somehow equivalent to being a human equipped with a different sensory apparatus. That somehow our shared evolutionary origins, our intertwined deep histories, provide us also with a shared ontology.

  Instead, can it be enough to point out that the honeybees’ repertoire exceeds functional explanation and biochemical predictability, that the more researchers find out about honeybee cognition and behavior, the less appropriate and effective is the metaphor of the machine? In this instance, at least, it seems that language (or its absence) is an inadequate marker of interiority. And it seems that the assumption that language, human language, is “an unprecedented inferential engine” is itself a product of linguistic circularity—a product that tells us more about the making of the animal in language than about the living animal that is the ostensible subject of science.69