The Worker-Bee: On the Argument from Generation

by Edward Carpenter, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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In June, when the broad beans are in flower, you cannot stand at the end of a row for a minute without a bee going past your ear. They work the beans from first light until the dew comes down again, and a man hoeing between the rows soon stops noticing them, as he stops noticing the lark. It took me some years at Millthorpe to remember that nearly every bee I saw there had a deficiency, if Dr. Moll of Berlin is to be believed. I do not mean a defect of wing or of eye. I mean that, by the reasoning of one of the most careful men who have written on the subject I care most about, each of them was a pathological specimen.

I said so once, in a single sentence, in the middle of a long chapter. Nobody took much notice of it, and I think now that I let it go too lightly. It deserves to be followed out. It is a small joke, but it opens on to the largest question in the whole matter, which is not whether a certain kind of love is diseased, but what any love is for. And it opens also, as I shall show before the end, on a weakness in my own case that I did not see when I wrote the sentence.

I. Where a careful man retreats to

The thing to watch in a scientific controversy is not what the authorities say. It is which way they are moving, and what each of them falls back upon when the ground he first stood on gives way.

Arrange the doctors by date and read them as a series, not as a chorus. The earlier writers on what they call inversion took it for granted that it was a disease, and a disease of degeneration, and they found the proof of it in the company it kept: the nervous patient, the hysteric, the epileptic, the inmate of the asylum. The later writers keep finding that the company is not always kept. Dr. Moll is the clearest case, and I set down what I wrote of him because I still think it exact. Though he speaks of the instinct as morbid, "feeling perhaps in duty bound to do so", it is very noticeable "that he abandons the ground of its association with other morbid symptoms—as this association, he says, is by no means always to be observed; and is fain to rest his judgment on the dictum that the mere failure of the sexual instinct to propagate the species is itself pathological."

He is an honest man, and he gives up the first ground because the facts will not hold it. Most of us do not give up our grounds so readily. But it is worth noticing what he retreats to. He does not find some new symptom. He goes back to a definition. He no longer says that the instinct is diseased because it goes with other diseases. He says that it is diseased because it does not lead to generation, and generation is what the instinct is for.

That is a different kind of claim, and of course a much stronger position, since no observation can now touch it. If you show him a hundred healthy, able and contented men of this temperament, he need not dispute one of them, for by his definition their health is beside the point. The instinct fails of its object, and failure of its object is pathology. A definition of this sort cannot be embarrassed by a case.

Yet it can be embarrassed by an analogy, and that is where the bee comes in.

II. The bee on the beans

I wrote that the dictum "in its turn obviously springs from that pre-judgment of scientists that generation is the sole object of love, and which if pressed would involve the good doctor in awkward dilemmas, as for instance that every worker-bee is a pathological specimen."

Let us press it, then, since nobody else seems inclined to.

The worker-bee, as every bee-keeper knows, is a female. Her organs of generation are there, but they remain undeveloped. She will never mate, and in the ordinary life of the hive she will never lay. The apiarists have known for a long while that the difference between her and the queen is not one of kind of egg but of the food and the cell in which the grub is raised, so that, given the royal treatment in time, a worker grub becomes a queen. Nature has made the two from the same material and turned one of them away from generation altogether. And yet she is no rare sport. She is the great majority of the hive, many thousands of her to one queen, and she does nearly all of its work: the wax, the comb, the nursing of the brood, the guarding of the door, the fanning of the air in hot weather, the gathering from every flower within a couple of miles. If the hive were to judge itself by Dr. Moll's dictum, it would have to pronounce nearly the whole of its population diseased, and those the very ones that keep it alive.

I know what will be said: a bee is not a man, and an analogy from the hive proves nothing about the human heart. I agree that it proves nothing about the heart. But it was not offered as a proof of anything about the heart. It was offered against a definition. The definition says that an instinct of love which does not issue in generation is pathological. If the definition is a principle of natural history, as it claims to be, it must hold in natural history. In the most orderly society in the garden it does not hold, and so it is not a principle of natural history. It is a prejudice that has been put into the form of a principle.

Nor do we need to go to the hive to find it failing. Take the old married couple at the end of the lane, past bearing these thirty years, who still sit together by the fire of an evening and are still, as anyone can see, in love. Their love does not propagate the species and never will again. Is it pathological? Nobody would say so, and the doctor who did would be laughed out of the parish. Take the widower who marries again at seventy. Take the wife who has borne no children, and the husband who is still devoted to her. In every one of these cases the sentiment fails of what Dr. Moll calls its object, and in every one of them we call it by its honest name and think none the worse of it. We do not apply the dictum there, because we do not believe it there. We apply it only in the one case where we had already made up our minds.

That is the mark of a prejudgment. It is put forward as a general law, but it is used against only one case.

III. What, then, is love for?

If generation is not the sole object of love, the question is what else love is for. And here I want to leave the doctors, who have been asking only whether a thing is diseased, and ask a question they never ask, which is what it does.

It has been the way of those who defend the homogenic attachment to defend it as harmless. It hurts nobody, they say; it is a private matter; let it alone. I understand why this is said, and in a country where the law stands as ours stands it is often the only thing that can safely be said. But it is a poor ground to stand on, because it asks only for tolerance, and tolerance is what is granted to a thing that would be better absent. Nobody pleads that marriage is harmless. Nobody asks that mother-love be tolerated. We know what those things are for, and we have said so, and the saying of it is half their dignity.

Set out what has been granted to the neighbours. I put it in this way in my chapter on the attachment, and I do not think I can put it better: "In one form, as the mere semi-conscious Sex-love, which runs through creation and is common to the lowest animals and plants, it appears as a kind of organic basis for the unity of all creatures; in another, as the love of the mother for her offspring—which may also be termed a passion—it seems to pledge itself to the care and guardianship of the future race; in another, as the marriage of man and woman, it becomes the very foundation of human society. And so we can hardly believe that in its homogenic form, with which we are here concerned, it has not also a deep significance, and social uses and functions which will become clearer to us, the more we study it."

When every other form has been granted a work in the world, the one that has been granted none stands out, and the omission calls for some explanation. The explanation given is that it has none: that it is a blind alley of Nature, a mistake in the wiring, a love that leads nowhere. But the bee has already told us that a creature turned away from generation may be the one that does the work. So the question is what work this love does.

I can only answer from what is already happening, for I am no prophet, and I have no clinic from which to bring cases. What is happening is this. There is a great deal of work in any society that cannot well be done by people who are tied to a household. The campaigns that take a lifetime; the building of new forms of association and new orders of thought, which meet opposition, ridicule, hatred, and sometimes violence; the long labour of the reformer, the agitator, the artist, the nurse, the lecturer who goes out into the north on winter evenings to talk to tired men in a cold hall. All this needs people who can give themselves to it, and it needs, too, a kind of force to keep them at it through the years of being laughed at. A man and wife with a family about them have their work cut out, and it is honourable work, but it is not this work. A comradeship of two who are free of the household, and who hold each other up, is very well fitted to it.

And there is a second kind of offspring. Bodily generation is not the only generation. Ideas are conceived and brought forth too, and they are reared with labour, and they go out into the world and change it. We say so freely of the celibate scholar and the dedicated artist; we say that his books were his children, and nobody thinks it a strained figure. I say only that the same is true of a union of two people who are not married, and that it is, if anything, truer. Such a love also generates. It does not propagate the species. It propagates other things.

Whitman saw this, and it was he who first taught me to look for it. "It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it), that I look for the counterbalance and offset of materialistic and vulgar American Democracy, and for the spiritualisation thereof." The idea, which I have never been able to shake off, is that a democracy which is all buying and selling will come apart unless something holds its citizens together across the lines of class and trade. The household holds people together within the family. Something else must hold them together beyond it, and Whitman thought that this was the work of comradeship.

The thing can be seen, too, without any appeal to Whitman. I noticed long ago, and wrote, "that the movement among women towards their own liberation and emancipation, which is taking place all over the civilised world, has been accompanied by a marked development of the homogenic passion among the female sex", and that comrade-alliances, "and of quite devoted kind", were becoming increasingly common, "especially perhaps among the more cultured classes of women, who are working out the great cause of their sex's liberation." I do not say that every woman in that cause is of the temperament. I do say that the cause has been carried a long way by pairs of women who lived and worked together, and that its enemies have known it, and have used it against them. Here is the work, being done, in the present day, by just the bond which the dictum would pronounce a failure of instinct.

IV. The concession made in the same breath

Now I must say at once the thing an opponent will say if I do not.

There are many of this temperament who do no useful work for society at all, just as there are many of the ordinary sort who do none. There are the idle, the frivolous, the self-absorbed, and some who are worse than these. I said in my book that "as in any other class of human beings, there will be among these too, good and bad, high and low, worthy and unworthy", and I meant it. The existence of the idle does not touch the fact of the others whose work is of importance, any more than the idle husband disproves the use of marriage.

But I must also say something more, which I did not say clearly enough before. When I speak of work, I am answering a definition. I am not setting a test which any man or woman must pass before being let alone. The use I have described is my answer to Dr. Moll's premise, that love is for generation and nothing else. It is not a price of admission. The idle Uranian has exactly the same claim to be left in peace in his private life as the idle husband, and that claim does not depend upon his writing a single pamphlet or nursing a single invalid. If I let my argument about function become a demand that each person justify himself by it, I should have made something worse than the thing I was arguing against. Dr. Moll at least pronounced his verdict on the whole class at once; he did not ask each member to earn an exemption.

V. Where the bee turns round and stings

So far I have used the bee against the doctor, and I think the use is fair. But I have been looking at her again this summer, and I must tell you that she turns round on me.

Consider what the worker's labour is actually for. All of it, the wax, the honey, the nursing, the guarding of the door, serves one end, and that end is the queen's brood. The worker does not propagate, but she lives wholly for the propagation of the hive. Her value, in the economy of the colony, is that she makes it possible for one female to lay many thousands of eggs. When I set her against Dr. Moll I seemed to defeat his premise. In fact I only shifted it, from the single creature to the colony. I granted that the creature might be turned from generation, so long as the society as a whole went on generating, and the creature spent itself in its service.

Is that what I believe of my own people? I had better look honestly at it. It is very easy to slip from saying that the comrade can do work which the household cannot, into saying that the comrade is justified because he serves the household's world: that he nurses its sick, keeps its accounts, carries its causes, and so earns his keep. That would be the hive over again. It would make of the Uranian a kind of neuter caste, valued because it frees the breeding majority from labour. And the hive, let us remember, is the most rigid society in the whole of Nature, with no movement between its classes once the grub has been fed. It is a strange model for a man who calls himself a socialist and a democrat to take up.

And there is a second sting, which goes deeper still. The worker fits my theory almost too well. She is made from the same material as the queen and is turned aside early into a different form: an intermediate, if you like, between the full female and something else. That is just the picture I gave of my intermediate types, a mixture of male and female elements in one person, and I built a good deal upon it. Yet in the same book I said that we need not accept Ulrichs's account of the matter, since his words were vague and indefinite. I disclaimed the mechanism and went on building on it. The bee tempts me to do so again, because the analogy is so tidy. And a tidy analogy from the hive is no better evidence about the human constitution than Dr. Moll's tidy definition was about the human instinct. If there is a mixture of male and female elements in every one of us, as some have argued, and not only in a minority, then my middle region is not a separate class at all, and the special work which I gave it may not belong to any class either.

I will not settle these two difficulties now, and I do not think they can be settled by a pamphleteer on a summer afternoon. But I can say which part of the argument stands up once the bee has stung. It is not the hive, and it is not the mixture of elements. It is only the original objection, which is a negative one. Dr. Moll's dictum does not hold as a law of Nature, because Nature is full of creatures and of loves that do not generate and are not diseased. That much the bee proves and the old couple by the fire proves, and neither of them requires anything more of me. What I built on top of it, the function, the second progeny, the comrade fitted for heroic work, I still believe. But I believe it as an observation of what I have seen men and women actually doing, and not as a deduction from the hive. And it is a claim about what this love can do. It is not a claim that the people who feel it are finer than their neighbours. I have been tempted to make that claim too, and more than once I have made it. I have praised the temperament in terms that, read coldly, ask not for an equal place but for a better one. A bid for a better place in the same ranking is not a defence of equality, and the bee, who is neither better nor worse than the queen, but only differently made, is a reproach to me on that account as well.

VI. A note on method

The method in all this is worth setting down, because it is not about bees, nor about doctors either. When an authority gives up the ground of observation and retreats to a definition, follow him there and press the definition until it breaks. It will usually break on something ordinary, an old couple or a worker-bee, which the definer had not thought to look at because he had already decided what he was looking for. That is worth doing, and I have done it.

Then turn the same instrument on yourself. Take the analogy that broke your opponent's definition and ask what else it carries in with it. An analogy from Nature is a cart: it will bear what you load on it, and also whatever was lying in the bottom of it when you borrowed it. I borrowed the hive to carry a single objection, and I found it had brought the whole order of the hive along too, and the mixture of the sexes into the bargain. Before the facts of Nature we have to keep a certain humility, and not rush in with our own preconceived and obstinate assumptions. Mine were assumptions too.

It is October as I finish this, and the beans are long cleared. Over the wall, at my neighbour's hives, the bees are still going in and out on the last warm afternoons, heavy, low, keeping a straight line in spite of the wind. Not one of them will leave a descendant. When the beans flower again in June the hive will be there, full, and hardly one of these will be in it.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem octāvum Kalendās Novembrēs (25 October 2026), ab Eduardō Carpentāriō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Edward Carpenter, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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