225Speaker B: That’s its name—the honne -fl ower-bee.
Speaker A: When this bee works on the honne fl owers, that tree will produce lots of
fruit.
Speaker B: Oh! You should see the masses of honne fruit! Ohohoho! So numerous are
the fruit—the bees don’t leave a single fl ower untouched!
The lively account in the above extract is not precisely a description of plant
sexuality per se —the role of pollen in the fertilization process is not mentioned, and
the speakers seem to agree that there is no male counterpart of the fruitful fl ower.
Still, the conclusion that visitations by insects represent the transfer of some kind of
male element to the fl ower (Speaker B makes the unambiguous analogy of the act
of copulation between a man and a woman resulting in a child) is an impressive one,
given that the Solega regard this principle as applying to all pollinating insects and
all fl owering plants. In contrast, although Aristotle and his student Theophrastus
were aware of a correlation between bees visiting olive trees and heavy crops of
olives, the artifi cial pollination of date palms and the role of fi g wasps in the produc-
tion of edible fi gs [ 225 ], their conception of ‘male’ and ‘female’ plants was actually
based largely on non-sexual utilitarian factors, and in the vast majority of cases was
quite different from modern biological notions of the term [ 226 ]. In the case of the
date palm, Theophrastus likens the process of pollination to the fertilization of eggs
by the milt of a male fi sh, but adds that this case is exceptional, taking place in two
plant species at most.
7.6 Conclusion
The Aristotelian conception of honeybee natural history consisted of accurate
insights based on available evidence, as well as (at the time) logical, educated
guesswork, in those instances where key evidence was not readily available. The
Solega seem to have built up their picture of honeybee biology on identical princi-
ples. As a different evidence set was available to them, however (the Solega only
gather wild honey from the forest; they have never been beekeepers ), their fi nal
notion of honeybee natural history must necessarily differ from that presented in
Aristotle ’s writings, who frequently cites apiarists’ reports to back up his claims.
Nevertheless, their interactions with wild honeybees over countless generations
have enabled the Solega to attain an understanding of this important insect’s behaviour,
migration , reproduction and ecology, which is totally consistent with their
observations and experiences. It is truly remarkable that they recognise the queen
and foragers as female, that they acknowledge of the role of the queen in swarming
and migratory behaviour, and that they are aware of the behavioural and anatomical
differences between foragers and drones , all in the absence of a beekeeping tradi-
tion. As Ellen [ 72 ] has pointed out, the strict academic demarcation between
‘ hunter-gatherer ’ and ‘ agriculturalist ’ does not accurately portray the activities of
groups so labelled, as ‘ hunter gatherer s ’ often manage and cultivate plants, while
‘ agriculturalists ’ frequently make use of gathered natural resources. It makes little
7.6 C o n clu sio n