Featured on PDR in the collection Charles Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie, or the History of Bees (1634 edition)

Since at least the time of Ancient Greece and Rome, beehives have served as foils for the polis — as their workers, drones, and queens can seem to reflect classical ideals of governance, such as Plato’s tripartite division of city-states into the worker, soldier, and guardian class. Aristotle called bees zoa politika (political animals); in the Georgics, Virgil finds a natural social order in the divided labor of apian colonies. As political systems dissolved and reformed, so too did the perception of bees. In the Elizabethan era, the hive became a monarchy, as described in Henry V: “So work the honey-bees / Creatures that by a rule in nature teach / The act of order to a peopled kingdom. / They have a king and…