Abstract

This article engages with the bee as a social insect. The description of the hive in Book 4 of the Georgics persistently employs language suggestive of a human political community, but any sense of the autonomy of the bee-state is undermined by the external, controlling presence of the beekeeper. While Pliny the Elder treats the drones as the slave population of the bee community, Columella depicts the entire hive as enslaved to the beekeeper. Columella’s model suggests a division between worker bees and drones: the former equate to the good and willing slave; the latter to those slaves whom slaveholders ancient and modern demonize as growing fat through indolence and a refusal to work. When Vergil “erroneously” attributes the qualities of the drone and the robber-bee to what Aristotle presents as the worse sort of king bee, he holds up a mirror to the slaveholder who grows fat on the labor of the unfree.