Reading Material for the Road to Hellīees are by no means innocent representatives of nature. 4 Now, nothing could escape the scrutinizing gaze: what was ready to harvest, what was sick and needed to be culled, and what could be left in place to thrive on its own. They consisted of square wooden frames with identical dimensions that could be “opened” like the pages of a book. Not long after Jeremy Bentham had presented his first designs for a panopticon that modernized the visual surveillance of prison inmates, Huber’s rationalized beehives made it possible to inspect bees effortlessly. Langstroth had further developed the concept of modern, efficient beekeeping proposed by the Swiss beekeeper François Huber. As a rule, we are talking about breeding lines that are kept in rationalized Langstroth hives named after the American beekeeper and clergyman Lorenzo L. The honeybee has little to do with nature in the traditional sense. Nowadays bees are prized by an increasing number of newcomers to the field of beekeeping “as trendy urban pets to be nurtured and rescued.” 3 The honeybee is a darling animal of ecocapitalists not only because it links worry about survival on the planet with agricultural interests, but also because it carries substantial metaphorical baggage as a hardworking producer, organized on the basis of division of labor, of medically valuable luxury comestibles and nutritious foods, all while connecting big cities with global ecology. In the museum gift shops, the proverbial busyness of the bees combines with the creativity of the artists into the effective public relations of a creative industries appeal under the banner of commercialized sustainability and ecological diversity. The fruit of the labor of the industrious female insects can then usually be purchased onsite in containers smartly designed by local or international artists. Whereas French environmental activists who publicly placed a beehive on the roof of the Paris Opera were immediately arrested, today it seems there is hardly a major cultural institution in the big cities of the West that doesn’t point proudly to an urban beehive on its roof. The honeybee has recently risen to become the “insect mascot of environmental politics” 2 and has outstripped the save the whale and dolphin campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s.

So let us thank this small insect, the mosquito, which has preserved the land of our ancestors for us.

Beehive hat civil war