Paris Hilton = Blond + Balls . Who knew? And, sure, it's Obama in '08: but You GO Paris!
And speaking of the long history of American populist fronts: from the moment I heard the name, I wanted to be a Daughter of the American Revolution.
You see, I first heard about this radical fringe organization in one of Abbie Hoffman's later books. He and the girls were working together to save a historic bridge in Connecticut. His thing was stopping some development; theirs was preserving history. So you can understand why I formed a somewhat skewed perspective on the Ladies from his account. There they were: working with none other than Chicago Seven Hoffman! On the front lines of an anti-corporate battle. With a totally bitchin' gang name! Meet up with ya on the streets of Seattle, Ms. Abigail…
Yeah, they sounded hot.
Instead, yes—I am aware of the real story here—they are the well-established organization that requires you to prove that your ancestors were hanging around in 1776 and somehow participated in the severing of the nascent nation's moorings from our mothership across the pond. And then slavishly worshipped the totems of its culture from afar for the next Two Hundred.
In other words: no other immigrants need apply. But hey! That's why we've got the Portuguese Festa Hall, Las Guitarras and Finnegan's of Marin down on Grant Street. Gotta have some Nuevo Mundo spice in that Old World melting pot.
But the point I'm trying to make here, if anyone could claim to be a Daughter of the American Revolution, it's the honeybee. Not aboriginal at all, but early immigrant to the North American continent, crossing over on the Mayflower with John Alden and Priscilla Mullins and Captain Ahab and Pocahontas on her homebound afternoon commute and all. (And then there's me sweating out my hour's drive home with the two packages of starter bees from Sebastopol. Imagine: live bees on a four-month trans-Atlantic voyage. Now that's hard core. All respect to Myles Standish and Company.)
Indeed, the honeybee's manifest destiny to find these bountiful, virgin stores of California pollen earned it the bitter nickname of "white man's fly" from the Native Americans encountering its sting in conjunction with successive waves of European settlers' progress across their lands.
Which brings us to the rich, but problematic, world of the bee as political metaphor. The colony, the queen, the workers, royal jelly, and the drones. All of it redolent with class and caste and labor of the lowly in the service of the great. The Victorians, in particular, went absolutely crackers over the concept. (Or "Oh!" as several of my friends enthuse. "Have you read A.S. Byatt's Angels and Insects?" Yes, I have. Certainly. Years ago. But Possession was better. IMO. MHO of course.)
In particular, the concept of "queen" is a point of fascination for children stopping by to visit the garden hives and for the children we met during our shift at the observation hive at the County Fair. They all ask to see the hive's Queen. Perhaps they are imagining some delicate, bee-beautiful creature with a fairy's gossamer crown. A wing-born sister to that legendarily lovely and languid monarch of the Sea Monkeys (you'd know them as "brine shrimp") who once ruled over her underwater anthropomorphic court in the back ads of the Richie Rich comics of my childhood.
When, in point of fact, what you have here is a fat, slow, non-flying insect stuffed with more semen than a San Francisco bathhouse locker room on a Saturday night in a hot summer month of that morally bankrupt Bicentennial year of 1976.
Well yeah! Baby!! Let us now talk about Sex. Let's pop an amyl-nitrite and cue up the Grace Jones and: Let's. Get. Busy. Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. It's Friday night and the lights are low; lookin' out for a place to go.
There's a long, intricate history of wistful legend and hopeful lore of the King Bee in western culture. In Yemen, there's even the concept of a "Father Bee." And there are indeed male bees. They are bigger than the females and do (the technical term here is 'fuck all') little work in or around the hive. The ladies assiduously tend and feed them all spring and summer.
New drones come along, as needed, throughout the summer and I've already learned to look for the particular little brood cells that bulge out from the frames. For a bee, the drone leads a damned lazy and pampered life.
And then: he gets to mate with royalty.
According to the University of Florida Department of Entomology & Nematology, this is a "most spectacular" ritual. As it does involve "partial phallus detachment" (as you do) and death, I think we can all agree with that description. We know the start; we know the end. Masters of the scene:
Copulation occurs on the wing, within a drone congregation site 15-30 m above ground (Gary 1963). An aggregation of drones “lazily” fly within their congregation site awaiting the arrival of a queen, and once she appears a fast-paced chase commences where copulation is attempted (Winston 1987). The term “drone comets” visually describe the continual consolidation and disassembly of this following drone swarm (Winston 1987). Koeniger et al. (1979), utilizing a tethered queen, report that the drone clasps the queen in a dorso-ventral position and everts his endophallus directly into the queen’s sting chamber. The drone then becomes “paralysed” and falls backwards (Koeniger et al. 1979). Woyke and Ruttner (1958) state the eversion of the endophallus occurs from haemostatic pressure caused by abdominal muscles. Ejaculation occurs into the bulb portion of the drone’s endophallus prior to full eversion, and semen is discharged through a small opening in the bulb into the queen’s vagina during copulation (Woyke and Ruttner 1958). Winston (1987) figuratively asserts that the drones “explode” their semen into the queen’s copulatory orifice, and consequently toward her oviduct. Through subsequent pressure the bow of the bulb and chitinized plates, the “mating sign,” detaches from the endophallus of the drone and remains inside the queen (Woyke and Ruttner 1958). Winston (1987) concludes this may help thwart the flow of sperm from the queen’s vagina after copulation, and that it does not function as a “mating plug” used to discourage multiple matings. After the pair separate the endophallus is still fully everted with its associated strong pressure, and with loss of the “mating plug” the endophallus may burst at the tip (Woyke & Ruttner 1958). At the end of copulation, the drone falls to the ground and dies either in minutes or hours (Woyke and Ruttner 1958, Winston 1987).
La question cest voulez-vous!
And there's no luck for the celibate drone either – that smart boy who's figured out that hanging back at the tail of that suitors' comet might be the best way to avoid love's lethal embrace – sure, maybe he flies back home to the safety of his internet porn bookmarks, but the Mortality's Clock still ticks. Come September, after the last nectar flow, the ladies of the hive begin their winter downsizing and all drones are slowly, but firmly, hustled out the front door. They are now last season's boy-toys and, as no other hive will take them in and as they know ("Fuck all," remember?) little about collecting food for themselves, they're toast.
I imagine these drones of autumn meeting up with fellow exiles from other local hives. "Must be that time of the year, eh?" one jokes half-heartedly. "She's never been this mad before" another says in genuine perplexity. Then one of them suggests "Look guys. Let's just get a bouquet of flowers and a box of candy and go back and say 'I'm sorry.'" "What are we sorry for?" someone else asks. "Doesn't matter. We're just 'sorry.'" And indeed, they are.
As for Her Majesty (a pretty nice girl): consider the following. If, in the history of human affairs, many a lovely crowned head landed in the axeman's basket on the charges of adultery, the hive queen – and she can be deposed at any time when the workers decide she's not up to the task -- who enjoys the longest reign is a promiscuous, free-ranging slut.
From Science Daily:
To determine the effect mating has on honey bee queens, the scientists artificially inseminated queens. It's difficult to determine the number of times a queen mates under natural conditions. Some queens were inseminated with the semen from one drone, others with the semen from 10 drones. The scientists then put the queens in hives and observed them.
They found that worker bees paid more attention to the multiply inseminated queens. Worker bees demonstrate what is known as a "retinue response" to their queen; they lick her and rub their antennae on her. The retinue response to the multiply inseminated queens was more pronounced.
"This tells us the workers can tell how many drones the queen has mated with," said Grozinger.
Lick? Rub? Oh honey honey, touch me baby. The Science Daily article also makes clear that the queen may or may not be mating with the drones of her hive, which is why I can claim my small place in helping the world by providing it with strong, organically raised party boys wearing tight genes.
So: Gynocentric advocates of Free Love as well as caretakers of communal property derived from the shared labor of an empowered working class. "When in the course of hive events it becomes necessary for one swarm to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another…"
Can you hear the drums, Fernando?
"It's NOT a monarchy," I told the crowd watching me on April 26 as I was anchoring my rubber band tether around the marshmallow-stoppered queen cage of Grey Hive. "What we have here, as I see it, is a Radical Feminist Collective."
Til the next thrilling chapter,
Miss "They were shining there for you and me. For Liberty" Templeton
P.S. There were five ABBA [and one Beatle] songs referenced in this email. Did you spot them all?
P.P.S. Just to note: my particular breed of bees trace their ancestry back to another group of immigrants. They passed through Ellis Island alongside of Vito Corleone and family.
