Buzz About Honeybees and Pollination, an exhibition at the Iziko South African Museum runs until November 30th, and is reviewed by Lucinda Jolly.
“Sadly, we live in a world where if you do good things, there are no financial rewards. If you poison the earth, there is a fortune to be made, ” June Stoyer, environmental activist and educator.
While humans are wrapping up and slowing down to cope with the winter blues, bees are also keeping the cold at bay.
They aren’t exactly hibernating as previously believed. What they are doing is creating a “winter ecosystem”. When it’s too cold to fly, they “work their wings” at about 200 beats per second and fueled by stores of honey maintain warmth in the hive in a strongly civic minded collaborative approach.
I was told by a museum employee that she had noticed that many people just walk past this exhibition, “Buzz About Honeybees and Pollination” in their eagerness to get to the meat and potatoes displays in the museum. Perhaps believing that it’s not that important, that they don’t need to know about bees. It’s a rather arrogant response – or maybe ignorant approach -considering for starters bees pollinate a third of everything we eat and are vital in maintaining food security. And yet as environmental economist Pavan Sukhdev points out “Not a single bee has ever sent you an invoice. And that is part of the problem – because most of what comes to us from nature is free, because it is not invoiced, because it is not priced, because it is not traded in markets, we tend to ignore it.”
This exhibition may be small and simple, a little corridor display of bright yellow hexagrams but its content is hugely important. It showcases how important honeybees are to our survival, raises consciousness around the shrinkage of habitat and resources and provides information on how the viewer can protect and maintain bee friendly plants. Bees are at risk from stress, disease, loss of foraging and of course pesticides.
There is a quote incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein “if the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live”. It probably originates from Maurice Maeterlinck’s “The Life of the Bee”. Maeterlinck who had never seen a termite, won the Noble prize in literature for his “White Ant” in 1901 by allegedly plagiarising Eugene Marias’s “Soul of The White Ant”.
Contrary to the quote it’s not true that humans would die from the fallout of a Beepocalypse. We would survive but would certainly loose a varied diet considering that bees pollinate 70 of the 100 crop species that feed 90% of the world. But who we are is reflected in our relationship to bees. Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme wrote “Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature’s services in a world of close to 7 billion people”. This is illustrated by American company Wholefoods with before and after photographs of a fruit and veg store which is very telling in its emptiness. There would be no apples, onions, avo’s to name just a few losses. The role of the bee is no just limited to the production of food and medicines.
The bee has also been used in the accurate recognition of explosives and in understanding the movements of serial killers. In the same way that serial killers prefer to kill close to home but away from suspicious neighbours,bees collect pollen close to the hive but away from predators. The algorithms from research helped improve computer models used by police to locate criminals.
Bees apparently evolved from hunting wasps which developed a taste for nectar and became vegetarians at the same time as flowering plants 146 to 74 million years ago. George Poinar , a zoology professor found piece of amber containing a bee reputed to be 100 million years old in a Burmese valley while cave drawings dated at 20,000 years old show man honey gathering . Known as the White Man’s Fly to Native Americans, the bee was previously believed to have originated in Asia. Current research now regards our continent as the insect’s original home from which it spread to Europe and Asia.
The Cape honeybee is only found in the Western Cape and parts of the Eastern Cape in the Fynbos biome or region.
It is unique among honeybee subspecies because the workers can lay diploid female eggs or two complete sets of chromosomes, one from each parent, while workers of other subspecies can only lay haploid male eggs.
This little sesame seed sized brain that communicates via sent and waggling its tush is the only insect that provides food edible to humans and the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life features in the mythologies of most cultures as a symbol of fertility and sexuality. The honeycomb, a hexagon is a symbol of the human heart. In Hinduism, the bee relates to Vishnu, Krishna or Kama, the God of Love, in Ancient Greece the symbol of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Celts associated the bee with hidden wisdom and the Ancient Egyptians believed the sungod Ra created bees and humans from his tears.
Closer to home the San believe that the first human came from a seed planted by a dying bee in a Mantis’s body. For the Pedi culture, a swarm of bees in the yard is a symbol of the ancestors bringing luck to the family. In the Xhosa culture, in particular the Madiba clan of which the late Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a member, it is believed that if a swarm of bees enters a house it’s a message from the ancestors and requires the slaughter of a goat or brewing of umqomboth, African beer.
Which brings me to a delightful story which concerns Mandela, a journalist and bees. It was written by journalist and academic Pippa Green for The New Yorker and titled “Nelson Mandela and the Bees”. Mandela called Green to tell her that “a swarm of honey bees had attacked him in his bathroom, while he was getting out of the bath.” Although he made it clear that like a bee rights activist he believed that the bees had a right to a home in Qunu, at the time he didn’t make it clear as to why he had called Green. Ever the diplomatic strategist he banked on the ignorance of a uMlungu reporter not to recognise the cultural significance of such an event and therefore not to even mention it in her report and so quell the potential gossip around the incidents’ significance. For a swarm of bees in the Xhosa household can be interpreted to mean that the ancestors were angry.
The responses from various quarters to Green’s published story were interesting. The then cabinet member Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi’s mother in law was worried that because Mandela was stung inside a house that the ancestors were angry with him. An aide believed that the ancestors anger lay at the feet of poor Graca Machel (his fiancé at the time) for not being South African, let alone Xhosa.
Go see in sweetness and the co-operative spirit of the hive.
This review by Lucinda Jolly first appeared in the Cape Times
WHERE: IZIKO South African Museum 25 Queen Victoria St Cape Town 8001
INFO: T 021 481 3800
