Books: The Bee Around Us

A HIVE OF BEES (180 pp.)—John Crompton—Doubleday ($3.75).

The busy little bee that improves each shining hour is a slouch compared to a great many natural-history writers. Such a one is Britain’s John Crompton, who has proved once again that a true passion—even a love of man for insect—is the substance of literature. Displaying a talent that recalls Rachel (The Sea Around Us) Carson, Apiarist Crompton has in the past written engagingly on the ant, the hunting wasp and the spider. But evidently the bee is his true poetic faith—and the bee in his bonnet is as good as a sonnet.

Unlike Maurice Maeterlinck, whose The Life of the Bee used the insects in part as a flight vehicle for his own soarings into the wild extramundane blue yonder, dedicated Beekeeper Crompton lets the bees buzz for themselves. He follows them, with cries of pride and lamentation, from their hexagonal cradles to their grave in the grass.

Boring Man. In a sense, A Hive of Bees is the story of a conversion, for Author Crompton records his emergence from the dark night of being a bee hater (he had been repeatedly stung). Although he adds little to the available scientific literature of the bees, he gives an exciting picture of what it must be for a man to have a hive and to know just what happens inside. The bees, says Crompton, are dedicated to Mom (who breeds incessantly), but they have solved certain Oedipal problems by permitting only one mother to exist within their waxen skyscrapers, and by keeping spare mothers in reserve in sealed closets.

Man bores bees, and bees will do much to keep this inept and sweaty creature away from the true business of production—honey. They will sting, and when they do, Author Crompton insists, the bees know that they give their lives for a good cause. The most successful career woman in the insect world converts her useless ovipositor into a weapon of aggression—and self-destruction. Only the queen bee has it made. Not for nothing did Napoleon have his robes embroidered with the bee symbol: that belated Beelzebub knew who was Lord of the Flies.

Social Security. Although it is about bees, this is a human book. The sensitive might almost weep as Crompton tells how he has been obliged to silence diseased hives with Cyanogas, and heard the orchestral voice of his insect friends shut off “as if a hand had been placed over an echoing string.” And he follows the worn old worker bee to her last rendezvous with social security. Her wings are torn; her last load of nectar is nothing much; she falls short of the hive. “Just at the time the youngsters at the hive are coming out for school, her grip relaxes and she falls into the wet grass below.”

No one, after reading this beautiful beeography, can again regard a spoonful of honey as merely a convenient way of disposing of a slice of toast. And only a captious reader will complain of sedulous Apiarist Crompton’s unholier-than-thou attitude toward the bee. The bee is better than me, seems to be his buzz.