Eat the Beetles!: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects

by David Waltner-Toews

  Honey bees probably evolved alongside the first humans in the tropical landscapes of Africa and, later, Southeast Asia. At least one evolutionary narrative suggests that honey bees as we know them today are descendants of an ancient lineage of cavity-nesting bees that left Asia around 300,000 years ago and rapidly spread across Europe and Africa. Other evidence points to prehistoric hive-harvesting in Africa. This would probably have been seasonal, with bees nesting in trees broken by passing elephants, or in caves. Rock art going back forty thousand years in southern Africa, the central Sahara, Zimbabwe, Australia, India, and Spain depicts this harvesting. One of the most famous of these drawings is about eight thousand years old, in the Cuevas de la Araña in the municipality of Bicorp in Valencia, Spain. The androgynous figure in the drawing (called, by a man no doubt aspiring to take advantage of the Man of La Mancha’s PR machine, the Man of Bicorp), is climbing a liana (rope ladder) and reaching into what looks like a hive of wild bees. Although these early drawings are often described by non-insect-eating researchers in terms of harvesting honey, the people in the pictures were probably gathering a mash-up of larvae, adults, brood cells, honey cells, propolis, pollen, and wax.

  The close relationship between the greater honeyguide bird (Indicator indicator) and humans in southern Africa reflects a long evolutionary history. These birds feed on bee eggs, larvae, and pupae, as well as beeswax and waxworms (the caterpillar larvae of wax moths). Rather than quixotically — and perhaps suicidally — trying to raid active hives itself, a honeyguide peeps and pipes and flitters to get the attention of indigenous honey hunters. The bird then guides the humans to the colony, stopping periodically, chattering and spreading its white-spotted tail, to make sure the slow, earth-bound hunters don’t get lost or distracted. The hunters smoke out the bees, open the hive with a panga (a broad-bladed knife, like a machete), and raid the honey and brood. Once the hunters are gone, the birds swoop in to eat the leftovers.

  If this bird–human–bee coevolution is important for understanding the creation of modern humans, then paying more careful attention to the context and history of human–bee relations can offer insight into some of the characteristics that are important for sustainable human–insect relationships. An edible bug is not just a crunchy bit of protein. Bees produce, for their own use, honey, wax, and propolis. They also collect pollen and produce high-protein edible babies. As the archeological evidence makes clear, people have historically stolen many of these “products” (if baby bees can be called products), for multiple uses. The pre-Classical Greek poet Homer saw bees as wild warriors; in the Iliad, he describes the Achaeans as “like buzzing swarms of bees that come out in relays from a hollow rock.” People have used beehives as weapons of war, but honey also has a long history of use for wound dressing (the effectiveness of which was recently confirmed with experiments and clinical trials). The Greeks, from Homer to Hippocrates, extolled the various health and aphrodisiac properties of honey. It was, in retrospect, one of several insights into the natural world that they got just about right — although I’m thinking that the aphrodisiac part requires further research.

  Over several centuries during the Homeric age and later, humans learned to keep bees in human-devised hives rather than just raiding wild hives. Egyptian temple wall paintings dating back to at least 1450 BCE show stacked, horizontal hives made of clay or mud, and the use of smokers to calm bees, suggesting that bees were, by then, domesticated. Until 1851, however, when the Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth invented box hives with moveable frames, there was no easy or nondestructive way for beekeepers to harvest honey from the hives. That is to say, until the late nineteenth century, harvesting the honey would often have involved taking the bees, brood, wax, and all. Thus when people speak of the influence of honey bees on very early human evolution, the image that should come to mind is not the sipping of the sweet nectar of the gods, but the crushing and eating of stinging insects and the theft of their food stores.

  Although the nectar of the gods is of course important. Honey, which is the bees’ energy source, is produced from sweet but watery nectar; bees make millions of flower visits, suck up the nectar, process it from sucrose to fructose and glucose, spit it out, and fan it to reduce the water content. Finally, when the sugars have been processed and the water content has been reduced, the nectar becomes what people call honey, and the bees seal up the cell with a wax cap. The wax, every kilogram of which requires five to ten kilograms of energy from honey to produce, is used to construct their living quarters, including cells for eggs and larvae, honey, and pollen.

  If the nectar is insufficiently dehydrated, then the natural yeasts begin fermenting the sugars, creating mead, an alcoholic drink going back at least to old Egypt. Watery honey ferments naturally, so the drink was probably a serendipitous discovery early in human evolution — back in our hardscrabble cradle-of-life days — to ease the long trek out of Africa to the Far East, or into the frigid European lands of the Neanderthals. In describing drunkenness, the classical Greeks spoke of being “honey-intoxicated.” Incidentally, honey mead was the first alcoholic drink I ever tried, when my older sister bought me a bottle for my twenty-first birthday.

  In the twenty-first century, some mead brewers have given this heavenly drink a Paleo-dietary twist. To be true to the ancient traditions, they declare, one should create what they call “whole-hive mead.” This involves throwing the whole kit and caboodle — bees, brood, wax, pollen, propolis, venom, royal jelly, and honey — into a pot full of boiling water, mashing it, and letting it ferment. As apiarist William Bostwick declared on the Food Republic website: “What Odin drank, and Beowulf, and Vishnu (madhava, or honey-born) and Zeus (melissaios, one of the bees) . . . probably had chunks of comb and a few stray bees in it. Which is why I had to kill mine. Historical accuracy is a cruel mistress.”41

  Besides its uses as an ingredient in traditional mead, bee venom — based on “research-legitimated” folk practices — is used for cancer therapy and to treat arthritis; pollen, based on high hopes and good stories, is hailed as a superfood; and propolis, which the bees use to firmly stick stuff together, to plug up holes and cracks in hives, and to gum up spaces less than about a centimeter between frames and boxes (much to the frustration of beekeepers), is promoted for its alleged medicinal effects.

  People have used beeswax to wrap cheeses, to make lip balm, and for shoe polish. Its use in casting bronze statues goes back six thousand years, and its use in producing batik in Southeast Asia goes back a millennium or two. The Catholic Church reportedly uses 1,500 tons of beeswax every year for candles.42 Beeswax has enabled us, more recently, to track historical and prehistorical human–bee interactions. In 2015, Mélanie Roffet-Salque and a multinational flock of sixty-four other researchers reported in the journal Nature on the prehistorical use of bees by humans. By studying traces of Apis mellifera beeswax lipids used to seal ancient pottery, they demonstrated that, in Neolithic Europe, the Near East, and North Africa, bee products have been used continuously from the seventh millennium BCE (nine thousand years ago). In their study, the researchers found no evidence of the use of bees north of the 57th parallel (around what is today northern Denmark) during Neolithic times, which the authors attributed to climatic and ecological constraints. Nevertheless, the inclusion of “whole-hive” mead in Viking lore would indicate that northern Europeans had some familiarity with Apis species.

  This multiple-use and value-added strategy that we see reflected in the history of human–honey bee relations has been picked up and extended by some of the modern insect production companies. Ynsect, for instance, uses insects (in their case beetles) “to bioconvert organic substrates, such as cereal byproducts, and transform those insects into sustainable nutrient resource for agro-industries and bioactive compounds for green chemistry.” Ynsect’s CEO, Antoine Hubert, may see the company’s strategies to develop multiple-use insects and value-added products as new. In evolutionary terms, howe
ver, they are but the latest manifestation of a long agricultural tradition that started with, and builds on, human relationships to bees.

  From shambling primates, to Homo before-us, to Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome, insects have made us who we are and continue to teach us lessons on how to survive. Anthropologist Alyssa Crittenden, in her 2011 article on the importance of the consumption of bees and bee products in human evolution, declared that “the ability to find and exploit beehives with stone tools may have been an innovation that allowed early hominins to nutritionally outcompete other species and may have been a crucial energy source to help fuel the enlarging hominin brain.”43

  While human interaction with social insects such as bees offers insight into the promises and dangers of managing insects for our nutritional benefit, the influence of insects and insect-eating on human evolution — and how we might view them on the plate — is even more profound. In 2000, a vinegar and pomace fly, Drosophila melanogaster (commonly known as the fruit fly), was the first multicellular animal to have its genome sequenced. This was a year before scientists first sequenced the human genome. The choice of this fly was not an accident. Since 1909, when Thomas Hunt Morgan proposed that Drosophila be used for genetic studies, this diminutive insect — unfussy, happily reproducing every ten days — has been a mainstay of genetic studies the world over. It would be no exaggeration to say that all the astounding feats of genetic engineering by self-congratulatory scientists in the twenty-first century — from tomatoes that never rot, to therapies for congenital disorders, to malaria-resistant mosquitoes, to pesticide-resistant crops — would not have been possible without the hard work, relatively simple genome, and lack of rebellious instincts in fruit flies.

  In a curious way, all the hard work that Drosophila have done for us has resulted in a better understanding of just how much we owe to them. About 47 percent of the Drosophila gene also shows up in ours. This is similar to the overlap we share with honey bees (44 percent). We emerged from a common ancestor; they are part of who we are.

  What does this shared ancestry mean, in “real life”? Neuroscientists Nicholas Strausfeld and Frank Hirth recently compared the neurological decision-making centers of insects and mammals. They concluded that the brain circuitries that mediated behavior and choice in arthropods and vertebrates were so deeply homologous that they must have derived from a complex common ancestor. The insect–human similarities included everything from the ability to stand and walk, to attention deficit and affective disorders, to impaired memory formation. We are, at some very deep level, transcendent arthropods.

  Crittenden’s review of evolutionary history, as well as reports from the front lines of genomic studies, echo a more ancient narrative, told and retold for millennia in the African nursery where we humans first discovered our wiggling toes and identified them as belonging to us. The San people of the Kalahari tell the following tale of human origins: A bee was carrying a mantis — her enemy — across a river. Finally, exhausted, she left the other insect on a floating flower, but before she died, she planted a seed in the mantid. From this seed grew the first human. Infant humanity was nurtured in a woven womb of insects, flowering plants, and water.

  MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR

  How Insects Sustain the World

  Roll up (bugs have everything you need),

  roll up for the mystery tour

  Given our blundering and destructive historical record in managing human–environmental relationships, particularly with regard to provisioning ourselves with food, we would do well to be cautious and scientifically astute before mainstreaming insects as food and feed. The ways in which our foraging or farming activities disrupt the life-sustaining activities of insects in the nonhuman world may well determine whether entomophagy can fulfill its potential for good, or whether it turns out to be disastrous. Even from a purely technical standpoint, an understanding of these complex ecological relationships is important for determining appropriate feed composition for farmed insects, improving their nutritional quality, and informing the debates between foragers, farmers, and those working for biodiversity and ecological sustainability. Eating insects is never just about insects and their value as food. It is about the web of life-sustaining relationships among insects, other animals, and plants.

  Australian ecologist Tim Flannery, in his 2010 book Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, concludes that if “competition is evolution’s motive force, then the cooperative world is its legacy. And legacies are important, for they can endure long after the force that created them ceases to be.”44 We can approach this complex and cooperative legacy from a variety of angles, but it seems to me that all these approaches can be jostled into two broad categories. In the first is the question of what arthropods are doing — and what they were doing for the hundreds of millions of years before we humans got here for them to pester. In the second category is the question of how they are doing it.

  In exploring these relationships, the how of insects — the ways in which they “see” the world and communicate — is as important as their more obvious and visible characteristics. It took centuries for people to begin to understand the sensory and hormonal world of domestic livestock and pets and its implications for management and welfare. As we begin to discern the lyrics of their pheromones and songs, the sensory and magnetic grammar of their languages, we can perhaps begin to discern more deft ways to manage our interactions with those insects that we consider pests even as we encourage insects and plants whose services and tastes we value. If this attentive understanding is the legacy of postmodern entomophagy, then it will have been worth far more than just discovering another food source.

  Let’s begin by looking at what they are doing out there. Despite our concerns with transmission of diseases like malaria, typhus, chikungunya, and dengue fever, insects are mostly really good. They recycle minerals and nutrients. They help plants (pollinating, dispersing seeds, supplying food, and providing defence) and animals (giving sustenance and protection). They limit population growth of plants, other insects, and vertebrate populations so that none of the rest of us, with the exception of Homo moderna stultus,45 rampantly overpopulate the earth with reckless abandon; and they do the essential work of taking dead animals, dung, and plants and making them available for reuse by the living.

  The work of insects in sustaining the living world is embedded in their dynamic relationships with micronutrients in the soil, with microbiota such as fungi and bacteria, with other insects, and with plants. Let us consider each of these relationships in turn.

  The degree to which edible insects are sources of key micronutrients for humans is dependent in part on their roles in nutrient cycling in natural soil–plant systems.

  Selenium is an essential trace element for all animals, from the very beginning of life billions of years ago. In living organisms, including people, selenium-based proteins are integral to protecting cells against oxidative damage. Some research suggests that it has a role in preventing certain forms of cancer. Selenium is one of those trace elements, like zinc, copper, and manganese, that in small doses are absolutely essential for life but in higher doses are toxic. It’s an ingredient in shampoos to discourage dandruff and has other industrial uses. However, most of the selenium intake in human diets depends on the foods we eat and where they were grown. Its concentration and availability in plants depends on how it circulates in the soil and water. And in many parts of the world, this circulation depends, in turn, on insects. Like other animals, insects need selenium, and by eating plants and each other, they accumulate it in their bodies; furthermore, they appear to have a higher tolerance for it than other animals. There are, as we have already established, very large numbers of insects, and, as they move about in the soil, air, and water and are eaten by other animals, they carry selenium from the plants, which draw it out of the soil, into terrestrial and aquatic food webs. They’ve been doing this for millions of years, thus he
lping to provide protection against oxidative damage to all living things.

  Earlier, when I mentioned the major catastrophes at the end of the Permian and Cretaceous periods, I skipped over several lesser-known extinction “events” at the end of the Ordovician, Devonian, and Triassic periods. The events that ended the Permian (the biggest extinction of all time) and Cretaceous (when we lost the dinosaurs) periods lend themselves to our taste for heart-wrenching disaster, plus we have some reasonable ideas as to why they occurred (volcanoes, asteroids). Some of the other, smaller disasters have received less attention. In a 2015 article in the journal Gondwana Research, a team of researchers from Australia, Europe, and the United States reported that the three unexplained major extinction events on earth coincided with precipitous drops (in evolutionary terms) in selenium levels. The selenium levels they measured for these periods, which they took as an indicator of trace elements in general, were well below those thought to be critical for animals. Conversely, high levels of trace elements coincided with periods of high productivity, such as the Cambrian explosion. We don’t know what roles arthropods had in these extinctions — although I am skeptical of the rumor that they hoarded the trace elements so that they could watch us die and then take over the world. What this means for entomophagists is that when we consider the food value of insects, we will also need to consider where the insects grew up and what they were eating.

  The role of insects in the cycling and recycling of selenium gives us but a small hint as to their essential and multifarious role in sustaining life.

  Consider termites, for instance. In semi-arid ecosystems, termites are considered a “keystone species” (that is, very important) for maintaining the soil. When my son and I drove a tiny Toyota Yaris across the partially flooded desert outback from Darwin to Adelaide, we stopped periodically to wonder about those giant, red earth termite skyscrapers rising amid the scrubby trees, built no doubt as an affront to primitive European invaders. In parts of Australia, as in the savanna and deserts of Kenya, Senegal, and Mexico, those termites — as they have for millennia — gather 500 to 1,000 kilograms of soil per hectare per year to build their community housing. This soil is then redistributed through erosion to the surrounding land. In some tropical forests, termites are the top detritivores, and may account for 90 percent of the insect biomass; in some places, data suggest that in addition to gobbling up half the leaf and grass litter, they eat and recycle 50 percent of the dead wood. I can think of a few offices where they might be helpful.