Charles Butler's the Feminine Monarchie, or the History of Bees (1634 Edition)

Summary

The first work of its kind published in English, The Feminine Monarchie, or the History of Bees (1609) by Charles Butler, a priest and logician, remained an influential handbook on apiculture for several centuries. Written six years after the death of Elizabeth I and dedicated to the Queen of England, the bee’s knees incarnate, his book buzzes with first-hand observations of the insects he kept at his Hampshire parsonage, whom he calls “the muses’ birds”. He reveres the creatures, and his suggested protocols for earning their respect could almost be mistaken for a religious purity code. Since bees are “most chaste and neat”, they “utterly abhor” eaters of leeks, onions, and garlic; since they are sober and hardworking, they will “violently defend” themselves if approached by drunken, surfeiting subjects. One gradually gets the sense that Butler longs to be a bee, or, at least, live in a bee-like colony. “Unto the industrious nature of bees nothing is more odious than sloth and idleness.” His only grudge is with the drone bee, who deviates from the Protestant work ethic, for “he worketh not at all, either at home or abroad, and yet spendeth as much as two labourers”.