Apparently some scientists believe that the patterns in which bumblebees search for food — ‘geographic profiling’ is the technical term — could help detectives hunt down serial killers. The ancients would not have been surprised.
It is largely to Virgil in the final book of his ‘farming-manual’ Georgics (c. 29 bc) that we owe our understanding of the extent to which the ancients saw in bees a model for human life. ‘I will set out in order for your admiration,’ Virgil explains, ‘the spectacle of a tiny world, with its great-hearted leaders, its customs and pursuits, its people and battles.’ It is as if bees alone shared in the divine logos (‘reason’) that raised humans above the level of animals.
Virgil describes how bees live in towns and cities in the ultimate communal state, sharing their progeny and housing and appreciating the sanctity of the home.
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