The social order of bees and ants

The social order of bees and ants is both a practical reality of Sergey Sergeyich’s beekeeping and a standard by which he judges human society. Their warmth, labor, and defenses are collective achievements; in Sergeyich’s reflections, those same arrangements expose the disorder and inequality he observes among people. The comparison is vivid, but it remains his interpretation of animal life, not a claim that insect society and human politics are identical.

Winter Life and Collective Labor

Sergeyich explains that the hives remain warm without a heated shed: inside, the temperature is thirty-seven degrees, maintained by the bees themselves. In winter they cannot sleep for long, since they must keep generating heat or freeze. The colony’s survival thus rests on constant collective activity, an arrangement he relates to his own need to keep the stove supplied with coal.

The bees’ independence also limits the beekeeper’s authority. Sergeyich watches over their health, clears wasps from the hives, uncaps combs to collect honey, and gathers wax and pollen; the bees do not ask for his advice or permission. Their essential interest, as he understands it, is gathering nectar and pollen. He sees the queens live, reproduce, and die according to nature, with replacements born in the same hives, while his own responsibility is to protect the colony’s conditions of life.

Order, Guards, and Exclusion

Sergeyich’s comparison becomes explicit when he passes the Berkut officers stationed outside Aisylu’s home. He thinks of bees and ants as having guards who preserve order and defend their families from incursions. People, by contrast, possess neither order nor equality, he concludes, and the policemen seem useless to him as they stand by the fence. He imagines bees as having achieved communism through orderly labor, while ants have reached a natural socialism of order and equality without production. This is a deliberately human political vocabulary applied to insect societies, and the sharpness of the contrast belongs to Sergeyich’s way of reading the world.

A close observation at the hive complicates any idealized account of that order. In autumn, guard bees drive drones from the entrance after restricting their access to food. The weakened drones tumble onto the grass, unable to resist; the workers’ removal of them conserves honey and syrup before the cold arrives. Sergeyich accepts this exclusion without much pity, reasoning that workers labor throughout their lives while drones consume. The colony’s discipline sustains it, but it does so through a harsh distinction between productive workers and expendable dependants.

Work, Survival, and Human Measures

For Sergeyich, the bees’ activity is not merely a metaphor: its sound confirms both their health and his own presence. He regards himself as representing their legitimate interests, yet leaves the internal relations among workers and drones to the colony. His beekeeping joins his work to his sense of purpose, even though the bees perform most of the labor and need neither his counsel nor his permission.

Human survival, meanwhile, depends on a patchwork of practical labor and exchange. During the village’s Postal Ceasefire, Sergeyich sorts and delivers letters himself, arranging them by house number and imagining that he is greeting absent neighbours. Later, as he prepares to move his hives, he treats jars of honey as money because their value holds steady. Galya sells the honey and pays him in groceries, then in cash; the commercial arrangement remains warm and friendly. These acts place ordinary care and mutual dependence beside Sergeyich’s broad judgments about human society: people may fail the standards he finds in the hives, yet their lives are also sustained through work, food, communication, and relationships.

The Comparison’s Limits and Meaning

The insects are not simply emblems in Sergeyich’s reflections. Their warmth must be maintained, their entrances guarded, their honey gathered, and their swarms recovered when they threaten to fly away. When a swarm settles on a pear tree, he sprays it with water to weigh down its wings, then carefully sweeps it into a trap and watches the last bees descend. The particularity of this labor makes the colony a community with needs and behavior of its own, even as Sergeyich turns its organization into a lens for human affairs.

That lens is revealing but not neutral. He sees nature’s wisdom wherever it is comprehensible to him and compares it with human life, usually to humanity’s disadvantage. His account of bee communism and ant socialism expresses his longing for order and equality, while the expelled drones show that the order he admires also entails exclusion. The social order of bees and ants therefore holds together two aspects of his outlook: respect for the bees as living partners whose survival depends on their own activity, and a pointed, sometimes severe critique of the people among whom he lives.