The state insect of Utah is the honey bee. This is, perhaps, a trivial fact, and one that only an entomologist like me might care to remember. But even though other states (15 to be precise) have chosen the same insect, the story in Utah is unique. We care about these bees as others do. We enjoy eating their honey and benefitting from their pollinating services. But here, the honey bee also looms large as a symbol of a hard-working community surviving in a desert landscape.
Other places typically decided on their state insects by committee and legislative processes many years after they became states. In Utah, the beehive was a symbol long before statehood was granted. In fact it was a symbol long before there were any state insects at all. The evidence suggests that in Utah it wasn’t a committee that made the decision either. Brigham Young may have come up with the idea himself sometime between July 24, 1847 and July 24, 1848 - the first year that the pioneers lived in the Salt Lake Valley.
The odd thing about this story is that Utah and her people are not all that interested in honey bees. We certainly have beekeepers and apiaries, and we gather and sell a variety of honeys. We even have a bee lab in Logan where over a million bees are kept in small white unit trays within glass-topped drawers. But these bees are mostly native bees of the Western US. Less than 1% are honey bees. If you ask the majority of Utahns if they know the difference between a honey bee and native Anthophora bee, they would only shrug their shoulders. I know because I do this sort of experiment on a regular basis (not to be cruel, but to make a point).
And as far as the honey is concerned, we produce less than other states that have never recognized the honey bee as a state insect. My copy of the 2002 Agricultural Statistics has Utah ranked number 23 in the nation in the number of honey producing hives. A skeptical Utahn might say that the low ranking is due to the small population of the state. But the numbers don't follow. Of the five states bordering Utah, only Nevada has fewer hives than Utah. Even sparsely populated Wyoming has more than we do.
The modern entomologist might find these conflicting points confusing. More so because the beehive symbol shows up all over our state. The proper noun Deseret is perhaps the most obvious example. It was the name of our state before Utah was officially accepted into the Union (as the State of Deseret). It is the name given to bees in the Book of Mormon. The reference comes in the Book of Ether (3:2) where a group of Old World emigrants are traveling to the Americas. The account briefly mentions the conveyance of honey bees to the New World.
But this reference is a mere sentence in a sacred text consisting of over 500 pages. There is nothing here that would lead anyone to assume an elevated iconic status for an insect. And yet the iconic status persists. We don’t call our state Deseret anymore (at least not very often). And since becoming the 45th state of the Union (in 1896) we are no longer known as the Utah Territory. But Utah is still very much the Beehive State and our flag proudly flies with the image of an old-fashioned hive (a straw skep) front and center.
In his master's thesis, Michael Hunter argues that the beehive symbol has a long history that begins in monarchical Europe and develops through republican revolutions, and Masonic ritual. In Utah this evolution also included theocratic renewal. It isn’t the insect that matters, he argues, it is the old symbol of an ordered society, of hard work, and of selfless service that impressed itself upon Brigham Young and the Utah Saints. What I find so interesting is that the beehive symbol itself has endured even though our understanding of honey bee biology has changed a great deal in the last 500 years.
A few hundred years ago we thought that a colony of bees was ruled by a benevolent king bee (Crane, 1999). A king bee was like a divine ruler, wrote Thomas Aquinas: “Among the bees there is one king bee and in the whole universe there is One God, Maker and Ruler of all things.” “The king does not sting,” was an important bee motto of the Renaissance (“Rex Spicula Nescit”, literally translated, the phrase means: “the king does not know how to sting”).
Even before Aquinas there is a long history of assuming queen bees to be kings. Bees were the symbol of kingship in Lower Egypt. And in Ephesus the officials of Artemis were called Essenes (not to be confused with the Jewish sect of Essenes) - a name that is said to refer specifically to the king bee (Hunter, 2004). Some ancient cultures (including Egypt) believed that souls took the form of bees and were watched over by a benevolent male ruler that was partially divine.
By 1609, it had been established that the large bee in the center of beehive activity was actually female. But instead of losing the royal symbol, Europeans just changed the sex of the ruler. He wasn’t a king. She was a queen. Charles Butler, an English rector, wrote that “The Bee-state is an Amazonian or feminine kingdom.” Even so, comparisons continued to be made between bees and kings.
When the Anglo-Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville wrote his Fable of the Bees in 1714, he was not worried about whether bees had kings or queens. Bees were a symbol of social mores writ broadly and his purpose was to show that republican individualism should be the basis of a good society - kings were a burden. The real work of society was performed by the workers, and without the worker bees, the queen would die.
The ideally functioning hive with its dedicated working class made its way into freemasonry as a symbol of fraternity. For the Shakers it was a symbol of religious community. For the Catholics the beehive was a symbol of a formal church with its well-functioning parts.
As 19th-Century members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were pushed out of Ohio, Missouri and finally Illinois, their views of American republicanism developed along different lines than those of either the northern or the southern states. On one occasion Joseph Smith referred to the restored church as a theodemocracy. Joseph’s successor Brigham Young believed that a theocratic community could exist within the American republic. And it was Brighma Young who established the beehive as Utah’s foremost symbol even as the rest of the country recognized the same insect in different ways.
Val Brinkerhoff argues that the beehive in Utah represented the Kingdom of God. And it was usually depicted underneath the protected talons of our national bird - the bald eagle. These combined symbols (of raptor and hymenopteran) are consistently portrayed together in wood carvings, public monuments and even in church conferences during the administration of Brigham Young.
The truly remarkable part of this history (at least for me) is that the beehive remains a very visible and public symbol in Utah even though it no longer works symbolically as it used to. Our knowledge of bee biology has made some of the earlier symbolic notions unworkable. That said, we are still concerned about bees, at least symbolically. The recent pandemic of colony collapse disorder has been an interesting contrast. The disorder certainly worried the world. Utahns, however, weren't unduly concerned for the bees. It was always the beehive as a symbol that was important and not the bees themselves.
But the modern interest in honeybees worldwide has to do with their biology and not with their social structure (and its symbolic history). In Utah, however, the symbolism remains. We don’t think of honeybees as ruling monarchs nor as harbingers of a future theocracy. But we do continue to see them as examples of industry, of selfless service, and of an ordered society. It is convenient (and probably proper) to ignore the fact that honeybees, for all their social adaptations, also maintain a caste system.
I only bring this up because my ancestors were an independent group of tough desert farmers and ranchers. They knew first hand the importance of community but they were also individualists and trusted their own judgment before that of anyone else. They would never have submitted to a caste system, nor was it a part of their faith. I know this from a lifetime of experience belonging to an extended family that hails from very rural and independently-minded sagebrush communities in Utah.
The Great Plains and the American Midwest may have experienced long periods of conflict between farmers and ranchers. But out here in Utah, by the end of the 19th Century, existence depended on a hardscrabble determination to raise food in whatever way was possible. My ancestors farmed and ranched. And they contracted out their services to locals and governmental employers whenever opportunities presented themselves.
This combination of pluck and community does have a counterpart among honeybees. Individual worker bees may seem to go about their various jobs as subservient automatons while maintaining the hive, but when they set out on their own to build a new hive, they work very democratically indeed.
This happens when the old queen can no longer keep new queens from developing within the hive. She becomes restless and gathers a few thousand worker bees to follow her away from the old home and swarm to a nearby branch or other available outpost. Then over the next several hours or days, scout bees go in different directions looking for a suitable place to start over. The decision on the best location is made by the hive as a group. It isn’t a decision made by the old queen nor by a select committee. It truly is a democratic decision (Seeley, 2010).
The so-called caste system of bees comes from the 20th Century definition of eusociality which states that eusocial organisms: 1) cooperate in rearing young, 2) that there exist overlapping generations within the hive, and 3) that there is a division of labor between reproductive and nonreproductive groups (sometimes called castes). A few authors (including the well-known entomologist E. O. Wilson) have argued that humans display a weak form of eusociality as well. And this might imply that the Utah fascination with honeybees stems from a deeper willingness to accept a sociality of castes.
Such claims are historically uninformed and misunderstand the self-reliance that is a deep part of our Utah psyche. It was Suzanne Batra (in 1966) who introduced the word “eusocial” in her work on nesting behavior in some sweat bees (very distant relatives of honeybees). And a few years later, the well-known bee taxonomist Charles Michener used the term for other bees (including honeybees) generally. Overlaying this recent understanding of bee biology onto the Utah admiration of bees (stemming from a century earlier) makes no sense.
Neither should this argument be used for our many modern neologisms like Beehive Credit Union, Beehive Brick, Beehive Pizza; or Deseret Book, Deseret Industries, etc. Utah culture past and present, sacred and secular, biologically informed and otherwise, is perfused with this symbol.
Armand Mauss, in his 1994 study of Mormon assimilation, has argued that the beehive symbolism is thematically more important than just traditional industry and hard work. He contrasts the beehive with the symbol of the Angel Moroni that rises with a trumpet on top of many temples. The angel represents the spiritual and revelatory other-worldliness of the restored gospel. The beehive, in contrast, is somewhat of an excuse to be pursue wealth. It is primarily “a symbol of worldly enterprise throughout the Mormon heartland.”
My own take on this contrast is somewhat skewed, yet also informed, by an entomological sensitivity. The bees themselves should not be ignored, and they are tougher than we might expect. The ones that we have kept caged in our wooden hives are struggling to survive the many introduced pathogens and toxic chemicals that modern society continues to generate. The ones that have escaped into the wild and keep themselves in tree holes and rock cavities are doing much better. These are the ones that seem to resist our imposed “assimilation.”
I think there is a lot to be gained by the right kinds of symbols. Beehives and the social insects that live in them must certainly be counted as one of these - both for Utahns and the long apian history of many other lands. But symbols that we inherit, and hardly think about, usually fail. They can only be taken so far. The industrial behemoth that is choking our world (and that is loved by too many Utahns) seems to be looking all too favorably on our many symbolic hives. Somewhere along the way we should stop and pay more attention to the insects themselves and to their preferred wild landscapes. We have exploited them both for far too long.
References
Batra, S. W. (1968). Behavior of some social and solitary halictine bees within their nests: a comparative study (Hymenoptera: Halictidae). Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society, 120-133.
Brinkerhoff, V. (2013). The Symbolism of the Beehive in Latter-day Saint Tradition. BYU Studies Quarterly, 52(2), 9.
Butler, Charles and John Owen. (2017). The feminine monarchie or the history of bees. Northern Bee Books, Hebden Bridge (prepared from the 1623 edition).
Crane, Eva (1999). The world history of beekeeping and honey hunting. Routledge, New York.
Hunter, Michael J. (2004). The Mormon hive: a study of the bee and beehive symbols in Nineteenth Century Mormon culture. Brigham Young University BYU Scholars Archive.
Mauss, Armand L. (1994). The angel and the beehive, the Mormon struggle with assimilation. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.
Michener, C. D. (1969). Comparative social behavior of bees. Annual review of entomology, 14(1), 299-342.
National Agricultural Statistics Service (2002). Agricultural Statistics 2002. United States Government Printing Office, Washington.
Seeley, Thomas D. (2010). Honeybee democracy. Princeton University Press.
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