Guide spirituel ou voleur de miel ? La figure de l’apiculteur dans la pensée occidentale

Abstract

The bee is not an animal like any other. Remaining wild even when it may have seemed domesticated by accepting to be housed by man, it seems to naturally have the appearance of the most elaborate cultures, whether in the spontaneous organization of the hive evoking sophisticated human societies, or in the geometric perfection of the hexagonal cells of the rays displaying astonishing architectural talents. Furthermore, the two main products produced in the hive are not like the others either. Honey and wax, naturally free from any process of putrefaction without having to undergo the slightest transformation, appeared not only as linking nature and culture, but also as symbols of immortality. The bee, which already through its way of life unified the plant and the animal, blurs the limits between the animal and the human, while linking the latter to a form of “beyond”. These particularities of the bee are the basis of a considerable symbolic production which could only permeate those who benefited from it and took care of it, a symbolic dimension which should make it possible to deepen and go beyond a first duality between two images of the beekeeper, that of the greedy predator and destroyer of nature or that of the carer, breeder and protector. The bee being at the heart of the great existential questions, the beekeeper could be perceived not only as a producer of honey or wax, but as a passer, as one who, initiated by his foragers, could transmit to other humans an understanding of the mysteries of the world, such as the transition from chaos to the harmony of the cosmos, from nature to culture, the link between humans and the divine, between the earth and the sky. One of the first myths dedicated to bees depicts this dual function of the beekeeper, productive and symbolic; it is the story of Aristaeus and the disappearance of the bees as told by Virgil in the IVth Georgic. We see the hero Aristaeus, initiator of beekeeping, having to resolve (already) the first disappearance of bees, caused by his confrontation with the fusional couple that constitutes Orpheus the poet and the nymph Eurydice. This myth allows us to go beyond the simple opposition between a "good person", the protector of bees, and a "bad person", the greedy predator, the ideal beekeeper being the one who manages to reconcile the productive bee and the symbolic bee, work and poetry, Aristaeus and Orpheus.