Bee

'For so work the honey-bees / Creatures that by a rule in nature teach / The act of order to a peopled kingdom'. These well-known lines by Shakespeare encapsulate an enduring fascination with the bee: since ancient times this industrious animal has been admired for its productivity, unique architectural skills and remarkable social organization. This book opens up the natural and cultural world of the bee, relating its complex role in the art, politics and social thought of human cultures, and drawing on the large body of literature consequent on man's age-old search for honey. It is noteworthy that one recent shift - the traditional image of the beehive as the home of civic virtue now demonized into one of destruction, exemplified by the swarms of killer bees in Hollywood horror films - has happened just at a time when science warns us to consider our own technologies of destruction. With so many fascinating facts, fables and arcana from art, science, literature and apiculture, Bee offers a compelling meditation on the fortunes of nature's workaholic. Book jacket.

Claire Preston is Fellow and Lecturer in English, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.