Andy Martin

They work hard and they have a taste for the amber nectar. They dance when in the mood, they get 'demoralized', occasionally they 'collapse', they even (apologies to republicans) have a queen. I speak, of course, of bees.

The odd sting apart, and notwithstanding paranoid movies about giant killer bees, humans and bees have existed in proximity and some kind of harmony for thousands of years.

According to legend, Einstein said, 'If bees die out, we've got about four years left. No bees, no honey; no honey, no humans.' And if he didn't say it, he really should have done.

Idly flicking through my 'Encyclopedia of Unusual Sexual Practices', I gather that some guys have taken to luring a swarm of unwary bees over to their place and seducing them into stinging the penis, thus causing it to become abnormally enlarged (look it up under 'entomophilia'). I am guessing this was pre-Viagra, but it might still appeal to hardcore masochists.

But I am getting off the point here. My point being that there is a natural affinity between humans and bees (and, indeed, birds and bees).

Perhaps there is some deep etymological or entomological connection between the pathetic phallus and the 'pathetic fallacy', the term invented by literary analysts to describe Romantic poets who go about attributing human characteristics to the non-human.

But we really ought to get rid of the word 'fallacy' (and probably 'pathetic' too). With all due respect for diversity, it still seems entirely reasonable to me to make comparisons between us and other species.

One of the stupidest things I ever came across was a leaflet being distributed by a religious group which had a picture of a white guy in a suit and his white wife, standing by a nice car. The car was parked on the edge of a cliff, which seems unwise, but there it was. And on the far side of a seemingly unbridgeable abyss was a whole bunch of 'dumb' animals (goats, sheep, horse) looking back across the divide and apparently wishing (if they wished anything at all) that they could be human too.

If we have learned anything, it is that we (bees and beings) are interconnected and interdependent. So it is natural to say, like Muhammad Ali, 'float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.' Or, going in the abusive direction, to draw on the strangely metaphorical power of goat, sheep, cow, bitch, pig, ostrich. (I recall that one England football manager, having just lost to the Swedes, was once referred to as a 'turnip', but that was just being mean to root vegetables.)

When you see the 'varroa destructor' parasite marching all over the bee and sucking his or her blood, how can you not identify with the bee? (Anyone out there rooting for the parasite must be some kind of vampire.)

I naturally feel sorry for all those robust Australian bees (several billion apparently) who are being shipped out to California on a strictly one-way ticket, since they are doomed to become infected while there (I am holding back from using the phrase 'bee holocaust').

Papua New Guinea has recently succumbed. Australia is the last refuge on Earth of the healthy honeybee. Naturally it falls to Australians - like bee lifeguards - to get this bloodsucker off the bee's back and thus save the planet.

Without wanting to go as far as the bee-fetishists described above, I do think we need a fundamental feeling for bees, in other words a degree of trans-species empathy, otherwise the world as we know it really is doomed.