by Paul Klemperer

If you had to choose, which would you rather be, a honeybee or a wasp? The honeybee is usually imagined as a busy bee, the bee that goes out and gathers the pollen. In other words, the worker drone bee. The hive of course is the collective residence, but it is also the idea of the community. Not just a residential community, but a productive one, making honey as a finished product out of the raw material of pollen.

We don't think of the swarm as the collective because it entails aspects of instability, crisis, aggression. As a metaphor for human society, especially urban society with its closely grouped buildings and dense population within relatively small areas, the hive fits nicely. However the swarm might be a better metaphor for many aspects of modern life: warfare (armies of defense or aggression), mob mentality, traffic patterns, shopping at peak times (supermarkets on Friday evening, shopping malls on weekends), sporting events...the list seems much larger than that for the hive.

The hive is of course the official metaphor for the mormons of Salt Lake. With it comes ancillary ideas of domesticity, productivity, the rational division of labor, and above all, knowing one's place in the social order. The mormons do not, as far as I can tell, extend the metaphor to include a queen bee. Who would this bee be? Jesus? John Smith? The current president of the U.S.? These would all be king bees in any case. Perhaps the queen bee could be the mormon female who lays the greatest number of eggs, that is, has the most offspring. There could be contests, pageants, to determine the reigning queen bee. I'm sure this is not a new thought; in fact the plan seems in some ways already to have been implemented.

In reaction to this Judeo-Christian idea of the beehive, we often like to position in our imaginations solitary insects, representing free-thinking individuals (the recent movie A Bug's Life delves into related issues). One tried and true approach is to attribute human social attributes to hive insects and human individual attributes to solitary insects. The most well-known example perhaps is the story of the grasshopper and the ant, the Aesopian fable which admonishes lazy and unworried children to do their chores or they will die horribly from hunger and cold when winter comes. A more contemporary version exists, in which the free-thinking grasshopper, realizing the ant has planned for the harsh scarcity of winter, eats the ant. The moral lesson in this revised tale is ambiguous to say the least.

We humans also like to compare hive species, which differ less drastically from each other, but still exhibit enough differences to reflect symbolically the heterogeneity of human culture. The wasp is an attractive metaphor in this regard. She doesn't collect pollen, but rather goes hunting for her own food. While this is true, she does share some of the domestic/social attributes of the honeybee. If she is a paper wasp, she constructs a nest, usually with other wasps; she brings food back to feed the young; and in general she is a member of a collective which organizes her life cycle. There are exceptions: mud dawbers build small cells in which they lay their eggs. Similar species also insert some stung prey as food for their offspring. These wasps operate more like itinerant single mothers than happy honeybee housewives bustling about in a middle class honeycomb.

In our imaginations, the wasp functions as an individual not so much by virtue of its living pattern, but by contrast with the smaller, more obviously productive honeybee. The bottom line may be that the wasp doesn't produce honey. Its social function is less obvious. Therefore it resonates in the human imagination as an individual who determines her own course of action.

Finally, there is the stinger. At first glance the metaphor seems simple enough. All the bees and wasps in our metaphorical spectrum have stingers, and the emotive attributes we attach apply across the board. The most common is anger. We think of "angry bees" and "angry wasps" (we won't even open the subject of "angry hornets" which as a subject is a hornet's nest). But is a bee's anger equivalent to a wasp's? Are you more afraid of an angry honeybee or an angry wasp? We will not digress into the subject of killer bees, as they occupy a singular position in our cultural imagination. Just imagine being chased by a bee. Now by a wasp. Under which duress did you run faster? Perhaps I am alone, but I was racking up a few more kilometers per hour under the wasp attack.

In my own mind that wasp chasing me, with its narrow dark wings, long sleek missile-like body, is a more malevolent aggressor than the slightly rotund, fuzzy honeybee, legs still pantalooned with pollen even as it curls its abdomen to aim the stinger. In the rearview mirror of my mind, the wasp is a tobacco-spitting, leather-booted state trooper, while the honeybee is one step up from a security guard in ill-fitting polyester. Both have guns, both can shoot you, but somehow you think (maybe irrationally) you can talk to the security guard, reason with him.

For those of you who consider the police to be your friend and protector, perhaps a different comparison is in order. The honeybee represents order, rationality. You disturbed the hive and/or the orderly collection and processing of pollen into honey. Order must be restored; you will have to be stung. You may not like it but at least you understand it. If you still have doubts, an ordained religious representative can be made available to you to spout soothing dogma to distract you from asking too many questions. Thank you and have a nice day.

The wasp in this scenario would be the criminal element. A single wasp is a lone culprit, jacked up on PCP perhaps, invading the sanctity of your home to steal your stereo. The wasp nest would of course be organized crime, mafia, yakuza or a drug ring that has set up a distribution center over the door to your potting shed. Well, that's a tidy metaphor for those of us who identify with safe middle-class aspirations. But there are some among us, and you know who you are, who actually find the criminal stinger dangerously attractive, far more exciting than the simple stinger in uniform. You ask yourself, Am I a bee or a wasp? You could have a nice life, making and eating honey, waving your attenae at the nice officer, doing your little bee dance for your co-workers. But no, some part of your imagination just won't go along with the program. In some small part of your antisocial mind you sprout long dark tapered wings, you pull on a shiny black and yellow latex body suit, you stroke your evil nine millimeter stinger, and you take off. Oh, you are bad, very bad.