To bee or not to bee (with regrets, wincing, and gnashing of teeth)

"The commons, like an angry hive of bees
That want their leader, scatter up and down,
And care not who they sting in his revenge."

                                                      Henry VI, Part 2        (III, ii)


As any number of Shakespearean scholars have pointed out over the centuries since the playwright lived, this was a man raised in a world that valued order. Chaos and disorder were regarded as forms of plague: just as deadly, just as fear-engendering and disruptive to the health of the state. As an earlier posting has mentioned, Shakespeare liked to use a well-tended garden as a metaphor for a well-ordered nation. Weeds were to be rooted out; troublemakers were taught to kick the oxygen habit at the end of a rope or the edge of a blade.

Shakespeare also used beehives as symbols of an ordered society, of a healthy body politic that becomes imperiled when any member of that corporate body is dysfunctional, seeks to climb above its station or vanishes altogether.

Regarding the quotation above, the Earl of Warwick has just reported that the King's uncle "good Duke Humphrey traitorously is murder'd" and that, like a hive that has just lost its queen bee, a swarm of malcontents will be out seeking vengeance.

Warwick's words prove prophetic: England had sustained some semblance of fragile order under Humphrey, who served as Protector to King Henry VI during the monarch's youth. But with the good Duke now out of the way, the stick has been poked in the hive, and the swarm is forthcoming.

Pictured above, in the Herb Garden at Agecroft Hall, are three bee skeps (they're called "skeps" if made by people, "hives" if made by bees). In Shakespeare's time, bee skeps were frequently placed in gardens to encourage the creation of good sources of honey, always in demand among the sweet-toothed English. Also, the bees helped with plant pollination.

Due to 21st century Virginia bee-keeping regulations, Agecroft's skeps do not actually house productive hives, but with their high-mounded form they do closely resemble skeps seen in any number of garden-related European woodcut illustrations made during Shakespeare's lifetime. His was an age that placed a greater value on self-sufficiency than we do today: like bread-baking and ale-making, the domestic production of honey helped make the English Tudor home in good times an all the more resourceful world unto itself.