The Bee, the Ant, and the Spider

The Qur’an has a chapter named after the bee. It has another one named after the ant, and another after the spider.

That alone is a little unusual for a holy book. Insects do not usually get top billing. Let us take them one at a time, because each of them is hiding something.

The bee, and the grammar nobody noticed

Chapter 16, verses 68 and 69 describe Allah inspiring the bee to make its home in the hills and the trees and in what people build, then to eat from all the fruits and follow the paths laid out for it. Out of the bee’s body, the verse says, comes a drink of different colours, and in it is healing for people.

Now look at the Arabic, because this is where it gets interesting.

Every one of those verbs, take a home, eat, follow the paths, is in the feminine form.

The Qur’an is not talking about bees in general. It is talking about female bees.

For most of history, people had this exactly backwards. The bees that fly out of the hive, gather nectar, build the comb, guard the entrance and do every bit of the visible work were assumed to be male. Soldiers. Warriors. Shakespeare wrote about the bee kingdom that way, with soldiers and a king, and that was the common European picture for a long time.

It is wrong. Every worker bee is female. Every single one. The forager, the builder, the guard, all female. The males in a hive are drones, and drones do not collect nectar, do not build, do not guard and do not sting. They have one job and then they are done.

The verbs were feminine the whole time.

The dance

There is one more line in there worth looking at. The bee is told to follow the paths her Lord has made easy for her.

Paths, plural. As if a bee has routes.

Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize for finding out that she does. When a forager bee discovers a good patch of flowers, she comes home and dances on the surface of the comb. The shape of the dance, the angle she walks at relative to the sun, the length of the waggling part, all of it encodes the direction and the distance of the flowers. The other bees read it in the dark with their bodies and fly straight out to the spot.

A bee tells other bees where to go, using a language made of movement. That is not a poetic way of describing an insect. That is a map being transmitted.

Honey, and the healing

The verse says the drink that comes out of her carries healing for people.

Honey is a peculiar substance. It is full of fructose and glucose, it carries vitamin K and a number of other useful things, and it is mildly antiseptic. Bacteria struggle to grow in it because it is so heavy with sugar that it pulls water straight out of anything living inside it. Archaeologists have found jars of honey in ancient tombs that had not spoiled in thousands of years.

Which is why, long before anyone had penicillin, people put honey on wounds. Russian soldiers in the Second World War used it to cover injuries when supplies ran out. It sealed the wound, kept it from drying, and left less scarring. Hospitals today use medical grade honey dressings on burns and on ulcers that refuse to close.

Note the careful wording though. The verse says there is healing in it for people. It does not say honey cures everything. It says something in there heals, and we have spent a long time finding out what.

The ant that spoke

Chapter 27 is named an-Naml, the Ant, and verses 17 and 18 tell a short scene.

Prophet Sulaiman (Solomon) is marching with his army, and they come to a valley of ants. One ant calls out to the others: get into your homes, or Sulaiman and his soldiers will crush you without realising it.

Sulaiman hears her, and he smiles.

For most of the time this passage has existed, readers have treated it as a lovely story and not much else. An ant that talks. Charming.

Then, over the last few decades, people actually studied ants.

Ants communicate constantly. They lay chemical trails that tell other ants where food is and how good it is. They release alarm signals that spread through a colony in seconds. They tap and stroke each other with their antennae. Some species make sounds by rubbing body parts together, and other ants feel the vibration.

They also live in a society that looks unsettlingly like ours. There is a division of labour, with different ants doing different jobs and some of them supervising others. They farm. Certain species grow fungus underground and tend it like a crop. Others harvest seeds, and store them, and bite out the part of the seed that would sprout so the grain will not germinate in the store. If the store gets wet, they carry the grain out into the sun to dry it and then take it back in.

And they bury their dead. An ant that dies gets carried out of the nest to a specific place.

Of all the creatures on this planet, the one whose social life most resembles a human city is the ant. And the verse shows one warning the others about an approaching army, which is a thing you would only write if you thought ants talked.

The spider’s house

Chapter 29, verse 41 compares those who take protectors other than Allah to the spider, who takes a house for herself, and says that the flimsiest of all houses is the house of the spider.

Straightforward enough. A web tears if you walk through it.

Except the comparison has a second layer.

Spider silk, weight for weight, is one of the toughest materials in the natural world. Stronger than steel of the same thickness, by some measures. So why call it the flimsiest house?

Because a house is not only its walls. A house is what lives inside it, and the inside of a spider’s house is not a home in any sense you would want. In many species the female eats the male after mating, or before it if he is careless. The young hatch and scatter, and in some species they eat each other on the way out. Nobody is safe in there. Nobody is looked after.

The strongest thread in nature, and the weakest household in it.

Communities like yours

One last verse, and it is a quiet one.

Chapter 6, verse 38 says there is no creature moving on the earth, and no bird flying on its wings, that is not a community like you.

Read that again. Not “creatures that are useful to you.” Not “creatures below you.” Communities. Nations. Like you.

That verse sat there for fourteen hundred years before anybody had the tools to watch a beehive make a decision, or listen to a wolf pack coordinate, or record whales in one ocean using calls that whales in another ocean do not use.

Every one of them, running a society of its own, with rules you were never invited to.