The cliff face in the picture slopes vertiginously outwards. The man who has climbed near its apex has one arm stuck into a beehive in the rockface, and another clutching a bag, while a cloud of bees are gathering, tilted ominously in his direction. The image is not from Winnie the Pooh, or a nature documentary – it is a prehistoric line drawing on the wall of a cave near Valencia, Spain, estimated to date back 15,000 years.
Our relationship with bees, and the marvellous honey that they produce and we harvest, predates both agriculture and writing. The hunter-gatherer who stumbled across this golden liquid, who had the courage to dip his finger in it despite the furious buzzing insects around him, must have been amazed at the rush of sweetness and energy that followed.
In the millennia since, every civilisation has glorified bees, enshrining them in art, religion, medicine and mythology. The ancient Greeks believed that the god Zeus had been raised on honey, which accounted for his great wisdom; the ancient Egyptians offered up honey to their gods, while both the Mayans and Minoans had bee gods.
Bees have been loved not just for their honey, however, but for their culture – they're social insects living and working in a small community, with every member playing a vital role in the survival of the hive. In the wonderful book A World Without Bees, Alison Benjamin and Benjamin McCallum describe the way in which bees were adopted as symbols by the first US government and by the French Republic after the revolution. In 1819, the poet Shelley in his Song to the Men of England used the bee metaphor to urge ordinary men to seize their rightful share of power.
It was in the 19th and 20th centuries that scientists finally began to unpick some of the mysteries of how bees lived and communicated. Bees, it seems, have evolved from the wasp, although no one knows exactly why they stopped eating other insects (as wasps do) and began to live on nectar and pollen instead.
Notoriously, in 1934, one scientist said that the flight of the bee could not be explained by scientific models of the time. This has often been interpreted to mean that a bee's flight breaks the rules of physics. In fact, in 1996, Charlie Ellington at Cambridge University showed that it was all to do with a "vortex", a low pressure area above the wing that sucks the wing up. A bee's wing beats about 230 times a second.
A bee's life begins as a soft white egg, one of up to 2,000 a day laid by the queen bee, in the centre of the hive. After a few days, the egg hatches, and the larva is fed by the worker bees as it weaves a cocoon around itself and matures into a pupa, with eyes, legs and wings. About three weeks after the egg is laid, the adult bee chews its way out of its cell, and is now ready to take its part in the work of the hive.
Bees, and a handful of other flying insects, are responsible for pollinating about one in every three mouthfuls we eat. Without bees, the only way to produce apples, nuts, alfalfa, carrots, onions and many other crops would be by hand – using a brush to lift the pollen and apply it to the stigma of the female flowers. If insect pollination had to be replaced by hand pollination, it is estimated that it would cost the US alone $90m.
