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The Bees of Knowledge is a 10,000-word novella by Barrington J. Bayley, about a man who is captured by a hive of giant bees. It was first published in 1975.
Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.
Plot
The narrator is the sole survivor of a starship disaster. He lands his escape pod on a planet called Handrea, and while making repairs to the homing beacon, he is whisked away by a swarm of giant bees, each one about twice the size of a man. They take him to their underground hive and drop him in a little ditch, where they examine his clothes, and then his body, before leaving him to himself. The chemicals on the hive walls are luminescent, so he can see, and he does some exploring. He finds piles of artifacts collected by bees, obviously artificial, indicating that there must be another intelligent species somewhere on this planet. He retrieves an object to use as a spear to defend himself, and uses it to fight off several giant insect-like creatures. He notices that the bees and some of the other insects don’t just collect objects—they take them apart and put them back together again, indicating they might be intelligent.
He builds a basic mathematical teaching device, and teaches one of the insects enough of his language to carry on a conversation. Finally, he asks the insect for help in building a homing beacon, and the insect ignores him from then on. He realizes that this insect was only interested in gathering knowledge; once he asked for something, it moved on to other things. The narrator decides he must now communicate not with an individual bee, but with the hive-mind, by burrowing deeper into the hive. He does, and starts eating the honey he finds there. He learns much about the bees and their hive-mind, but finally concludes that the hive-mind is merely a collector of knowledge; it never does anything practical with that knowledge, and is therefore not actually intelligent. When he realizes this, he knows he will have to stay on this planet for the rest of his life.
Reprints
This story is reprinted in Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1976 Annual World’s Best SF.
External Links
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