Bees

Bees have their animal group soul of the beehive or bee-state on the buddhi plane (1905-09-29-GA093A), hence they display a higher level of intelligence than anything else on Earth including current Man. The community of bees functions as a demonstration of selflessness (selfless giving love and sacrifice).

Aspects

• Bees completely given up to the influence of the planet Venus, they live in an atmosphere pervaded by love (1923-02-03-GA348)
• the origin of the 'bee' (and relation to fig wasp)
  • bees were bred from wasps in the Atlantean epoch when the animal forms were still changeable (1923-12-10-GA351)
  • created by the adepts in the Atlantean epoch through "magical union of self-sacrificing animal/plant beings with spiritual Venus beings" (re Roessner&Hildebrandt and Lorenzen)
  • Note: this is just one example, Rudolf Steiner mentions that the origin of other animals close to Man was also through development by Man in the Atlantean epoch, eg pets like cats and dogs, see also animal kingdom

Honey

• working of honey
  • eating honey furthers the right connection in Man between the airy and the watery elements. The human being needs this to further the activity of his soul-forces within his body, to prepare his soul that it may work rightly within his body — breathe rightly (1923-02-03-GA348)
  • honey intensifies the (silicic acid) formative forces that incline to the hexagon form and stream from the human head. (1923-12-01-GA351))
• honey is especially important and good for older people, it gives Man the up-building formative forces especially needed at later age. Honey assists in maintaining the bodily form. It is not important to eat it in tremendous quantities, only a question of moderate consumption absorbing its forces. (1923-11-10-GA230, 1923-11-26-GA351)
  • The honey effect can be supported by diluted, homeopathically potentized quarts (silicic acid, hexagonal chrystals) at later age if such a honey cure was missed during youth (1923-12-01-GA351)
• treatment in the case or rickets: a honey diet from the age of nine or ten months upto the age of three or four (1923-11-26-GA351)
• for more on the formative forces contained in honey, see Discussion Note 1 below.

Lecture coverage and references

Overview coverage

End 1923, as part of the cycle 'The Functioning of Spirit in Nature and in Man. The Being of Bees', Rudolf Steiner covered the subject of Bees in nine lectures.

Reference extracts

1903-06-18-GA091

(p120) describes manas rising to budhi as the society creating principle. Both bees and ants create with such wisdom that the human intelligence could not do better.

Just as the dog can not understand where Man gets the consciousness that he misses, so also Man cannot understand what is at work in a bee-state community, because it is a higher budhi-manas principle. This budhi-manas principle that came down on the Earth was actually developed on Venus. With the sons of Venus, the manasaputras, also the group souls of bees and ants came down. That is the reason why these animal states are so exceptional. They are like the end limbs of a higher consciousness, like the fingertops relate to Man's brain. Our pets and home animals are more individual, but their group souls are far behind those of the group souls of bees and ants.

Note: the lecture contains a schema that puts the group souls of the animal-state a level higher than the spirit land (arupa and rupa), labelled 'mentalplan' which ought to refer to budhi and nirvana planes. See Planes or worlds of consciousness.

1905-09-29-GA093A

When from the higher planes one studies consciousness as it functions in the beehive, one learns how later on Man will produce matter out of himself. In the future the human body will also be built up out of carbon; it will then be like a soft diamond.

... the consciousness of the bees is to be found in the higher regions of the Buddhi plane.

...

How then did the ant-consciousness enter into our Earth?

This took place through beings who stand higher than we do who had already gone through the process of creating their body for themselves. Males, females and workers, the three members of the ant heap, comprise the body of a higher spiritual being. The human spirit also comes gradually to the point of dividing itself into three parts. Willing, feeling and thinking become separated in the case of the esoteric pupil. The molecules of the brain divide into three groups. The esoteric pupil must then out of himself connect a definite feeling with a mental picture. When he sees suffering, in order to experience pity, he must consciously add this feeling to it. To the front of the head lies the thinking part, above, the part of feeling, to the back of the head that of willing. The esoteric pupil learns to bring these consciously into connection with one another. Later these three parts become completely separated.²¹ He must then control the three parts in the same way as an ant heap controls the males, females and workers.

Now we can ask why higher beings manifest themselves in an ant heap. But if formic acid had not been introduced, the whole Earth would have been different. The foreseeing wisdom of higher intelligences was aware of the moment when formic acid had to be brought into the Earth.

1905-12-28-GA090B

(p250-251) explicitly states that ants and bees are quite different, and they should not be taken for the same (although both live in a community wisdom)

1907-09-14-GA101

What does the Man of today have in him of Old Saturn's warmth? His blood-heat. What at that time was distributed over the whole of Old Saturn has in a measure freed itself and today forms the warm blood of Man and animal.

When you investigate the temperature of a beehive, you find it to be about the same temperature as that of human blood. The whole beehive develops a temperature comparable to that of blood because, in accordance with the nature of its being, it goes back to the same source as does the human blood.

• So, the occultist designates the bee as born out of warmth.
• He designates the butterfly as air being
• and the snake as earth being.

Again you see from these considerations how deeply symbols and occult signs are connected with what we know of the evolutionary history of the planets and of Man.

1923-02-03-GA348

Bees completely given up to the influence of the planet Venus, they live in an atmosphere pervaded by love.

With the exception of the Queen, the bees are actually beings which, as I would like to put it, say to themselves

“We will renounce the individual sexual life that we make ourselves ‘bearers of love.’”

Thus they have been able to bring what lives in the flowers into the hive; and when you begin really to think this out rightly, you will reach the whole mystery of the bee-hive.

The life of this sprouting, budding love which is in the flowers is there too, within the honey. You can also study what honey does, when you eat it yourself.

What does the honey do?

When honey is eaten it furthers the right connection in Man between the airy and the watery elements.

Nothing is better for Man than to add the right proportion of honey to his food.

For in a wonderful way the bees see to it that Man learns to work with his soul upon the organs of his body.

In the honey the bee gives back again toMan what he needs to further the activity of his soul-forces within his body. Thus when Man adds some honey to his food, he wishes so to prepare his soul that it may work rightly within his body — breathe rightly.

Bee-keeping is therefore something that greatly helps to advance our civilisation, for it makes men strong. You see, when one realises that the bees receive very many influences from the starry worlds, one sees also how they can pass on to man what is fitted for him. All that is living, when it is rightly combined, works rightly together.

When one stands before a hive of bees one should say quite solemnly to oneself: “By way of the bee-hive the whole Cosmos enters mMan and makes him strong and able."

1923-GA351

is a cycle of nine lectures on Bees

Arthur E. Powell: 'The Solar System' (1930)

from Ch 19: The Lord of the world and his assistants

see Atlantean epoch#References and further reading

Among other plans for the helping of evolution, the Lords of the Flame brought from Venus certain additions to our kingdoms. They imported wheat as a specially desirable food-stuff for humanity, and they also brought .. bees and ants - the bees to modify the vegetable kingdom and assist in the fertilisation of flowers, as well as to provide a .. nutritious addition to human food.

It was explained in The Causal Body, p. 63, that both bees and ants live in a manner quite different from that of purely terrestrial creatures, in that with them the Group-Soul animates the entire ant or bee community, so that the community acts with a single will, and its different units are actually members of one body in the sense in which hands and feet are members of the human frame. It might, in fact, be said that they have not only a Group-Soul, but a group-body also.

Our human evolution has attempted to imitate all these importations, but with somewhat indifferent success.

In imitating bees we have produced wasps, and in imitating ants we have produced 'white ants', as well as curious little ant-flies, which are almost indistinguishable from them. The nearest that we have been able to get to wheat is rye, but the crossing of the wheat with other native terrestrial grasses has given us oats and barley.

from Ch 34: The coming of the Lords of Venus

We come now to describe the most dramatic moment in the history of the Earth -the Coming of the Lords of the Flame; an event for which long preparations had been made.

The Barhishads and the Manu of the Third Race had done all that was possible to bring entities up to the point at which the germ of mind could be quickened, and the descent of the I could be made.

The Secret Doctrine, as we saw, spoke of Them as projecting the spark of mind into the mindless men and awakening the intellect within them. The meaning of this is that They acted as a magnetic stimulus; They shone upon the people as the sun shines upon flowers, and drew them up towards Themselves, thus enabling them to develop the latent spark and to become individualised.

H. P. Blavatsky mentioned some of the ”sons of mind, as incarnating among the people whom they were trying to help. The Lords of the Flame did not Themselves incarnate among men in the ordinary way; H. P. Blavatsky was here referring to the Barhishads who did enter into ordinary human bodies and so for a time became part of the race.

But for the help kindly given to us by these great Leaders, the world would have been a very different place today. Without Them not only would millions, who became human under the impetus which They gave, be still in the animal kingdom, but all the rest of humanity would be far behind the position in which it now stands.

The fourth round being especially destined to the development of the desire-principle in Man, it is only in the next or fifth round that man is intended to devote himself to the unfolding of the intellect. Owing, however, to the stimulus given by the Lords of the Flame, the intellect has already been considerably developed, and we are therefore a whole round in advance of where we should have been but for Their help.

We also saw previously that they brought to the Earth bees, ants and wheat.

Iwer Thor Lorenzen

For more in depth reading on the spiritual aspects of bees, see Iwer Thor Lorenzen references below

Ralf Roessner with Clemens Hildebrandt in 'The Light Root'

A short extract from 'The Light Root: Nutrition of the Future, A Spiritual-Scientific Study' (Ralf Roessner with Clemens Hildebrandt)

For more in depth reading on this, see Iwer Thor Lorenzen 'Metamorphosen' - third part: Bees and mystery beings.

the light root and the bee are not found in the higher spirit world as other plants and animals. They have been created by the masters of the mysteries in ancient mysteries and their essence originates elsewhere.

Both originated in the magical union of self-sacrificing animal/plant beings with spiritual Venus beings. These highly developed spirit beings had formerly been the inspirers of the social fabric in human communities, up until the decisive entry of the I. This separation happened at about the middle of the Atlantean epoch.

The spiritual beings behind the bee colony and light root had become united by magical cultic means through priests in the Atlantean epoch. ...

.

.. the ether body of the Venus being was brought in connection with a fig wasp (parasite), which was originally solitary, the astral body was connected with a twining, smotherling plant which was 'tamed' to become the light root.

This to ensure a continuing union working productively into the future of the spirit self and life spirit of this Venus being .

Honey

1923-11-10-GA230

Milk is the food for the child that is not yet able to transform the mineral into the warmth ether. It stimulates the formative forces in the head. Similary honey is the formative food for older people.

It would obviously be a good thing to be able to have in outer form what is accomplished within by the head, enclosed as it is inside skull. It would be good if what the head does inside itself could somehow be accomplished in outer form from outside. The forces which are there within the head are suited to the consumption of milk; when the milk is there in its etheric transformation it provides a good basis for the development of these head forces. We must, therefore, have something which acts like milk, which, however, is not fabricated within the human being, but is fabricated in outer nature.

Well, there is something existing outside in nature which is a head without an enclosing skull, and which therefore activates from outside those very forces which work inside the head in children who need the milk, and must indeed create it anew; for the child must first bring the milk into the warmth-etheric condition and so create it anew.

Now a stock of bees is really a head which is open on all sides. What the bees carry out is actually the same as what the head carries out within itself. The hive we give them is at most a support. The bees activity, however, is not enclosed, but produced from outside. In a stock of bees, under external spiritual influence, we have the same thing as we have under spiritual influence inside the head. The stock of bees produces its honey, and when we eat and enjoy honey it gives us the up-building forces, which must now be provided more from outside, with the same strength and power which milk gives us for our head during the years of childhood.

Thus, while we are still children we strengthen through the consumption of milk the formative forces working from the head outwards; if at a later age we still need formative forces we must eat honey. Nor do we need to eat it in tremendous quantities — it is only a question of absorbing its forces.

Thus one learns from external nature how strengthening forces must be brought into human life, if only this external nature is fully understood. And if we would conceive a land where there are beautiful children and beautiful old people, what kind of a land would this be? It would be “a land flowing with milk and honey”. So you see ancient instinctive vision was in no way wrong when it said about lands of promise that they are such as flow with milk and honey.

Many such simple sayings contain the profoundest wisdom, and there is really no more beautiful experience than first to make every possible effort to experience the truth, and then to find some ancient holy saying abounding in deep wisdom such as “a land flowing with milk and honey”. That is indeed a rare land, for in it there are only beautiful children and beautiful old people.

1923-11-26-GA351

lecture 9, from RSH: Moderate consumption of honey is wholesome for old people, milk is better for children, because honey assists in maintaining the bodily form. Steiner recommends a honey diet from the age of nine or ten months upto the age of three or four in the case or rickets.

1923-12-01-GA351

lecture 11, from RSH. Silicic acid forces that incline to the hexagon form stream from the human head. One can intensify these formative forces through honey (hexagon form of the honeycombs). They are also included in milk, which is suitable for infants. For children from the second dentition, honey cures (like honey in warm milk) are remedies, in old age only honey. The honey effect can be supported by diluted, homeopathically potentized quarts (silicic acid, hexagonal chrystals) at later age if such a honey cure was missed during youth.

When you go into the mountains you find, just where the rocks are hardest, where so to speak, the very hardest earthly substance pours in — there you find the quartz-crystals. You find many kinds of crystals. You will remember I drew these quartz crystals for you; they look like this: (Diagram 10). When they are entire, they are formed below just as they are above, but usually, they are not perfect. They come out of the rock; they grow, as it were, out of the rock in the form I have just drawn for you here. What does this signify? It signifies that the earth permits crystals to grow out of itself which are hexagonal, growing to a point. Within the earth there is thus the power to build up this six-angled form.

As I have so often explained to you, the forces that are within the Earth and in the universe, are also in Man. The Earth in her turn receives this force from the universe; Man has it from the Earth. Man has the same force within him which, in the earth, drives out the crystal. How is it then within him? Truly, gentlemen, the human body is full of quartz.

Quartz as you find it in the mountains is one of the very hardest of substances, But substances are not everywhere just as they present themselves to us here or there. In man there is something quite similar to quartz, but it is in a more fluid form. Why?

You see, if one observes — and one must really observe in the right way, and with a true inner vision — what flows continually from Man's head into his limbs (see Diagram 11), and this is most interesting, there streams incessantly downwards from the head what the Earth once upon a time caused to flow from within outwards, and which became hard up above there, and settled down, for instance, as quartz crystals. It streamed out from the interior of the Earth. In Man it flows from his head through the whole of his body.

[see also Schema FMC00.513 on Spiritual scientific physiology]

It is quartz, or silicic acid. But the human body does not permit the quartz to become a crystal. That would indeed be a fine business if we were all to be filled up inside with quartz crystals!

Only to a point where the quartz is about to become hexagonal does Man allow the thing to go; there he stops it; he does not allow it to go any further. Thus we have only the beginnings of the quartz formation in our body, and then it is arrested; it must come to an end.

Our whole life rests on this — that we are perpetually on the point of forming hexagonal crystals from the head downwards, but we do not permit it actually to come about. These hexagonal crystals always wish to take form in us, but in reality they do not do so. They are interrupted, arrested, and then we have, so to speak, the quartz fluid in the highest possible state of solution within us.

If we had not this quartz-fluid within us, we could for example, eat ever so much sugar and we should never have a sweet taste in our mouth. This tasting of the sugar is brought about by the quartz we have within us, not by its substantiality, but by what is the will within it to become hexagonal like a crystal. That is what causes it; that is the essential.

You see, in the interior of the earth this crystallising process is continued. Man arrests the silicic acid when it wants to grow spiky up above inside him. The earth allows it to become spiky up above.

But man needs this force, this silicic acid force — i.e., this power to bring forth hexagonal forms — man has need of it.

I imagine that you are not all of you good geometricians. Geometry is not exactly familiar to you all; you could perhaps not straight away, draw a quartz crystal, or model one in clay. But your body is a very good geometrician, and wants always to be forming such crystals. We are prevented from doing this. All life consists in the holding back of death, and when we can no longer hold death back, we die.

Now let us look at the bees. The bee flies out and gathers nectar. This it works upon in its own body, and in so doing provides its own life-forces. Further the bee prepares the wax. What does it do with the wax? It makes hexagonal cells. You see, the earth makes hexagonal silicic-acid crystals. The bee makes hexagonal cells, and this is extremely interesting. If I could draw the bees' cells for you — or if you remember Herr Müller showing them to you — then they look just like quartz crystals, only they are hollow. But in their form they are the same.

You see, these cells are hollow (Diagram 12), but what is put in them? The bees' eggs are laid there. Where there is silicic acid in the quartz, here in the cell is a hollow, and there the bee places its eggs. The bee is shaped by the same force that is within the earth and forms the quartz. Here the finely dissolved silicic acid (Diagram 13) is at work. A force is at work there, though this cannot be physically proved. The nectar works in the body of the bee so that it can shape the wax in a form which man really needs, for man must have those six-cornered spaces within him. Man needs the same thing. Inasmuch as the bee is the creature best able to give form to this hexagonal force, the bee is the creature that everywhere collects that particular food which can best be transformed in the body into this hexagonal force.

You need only eat some honey and you receive an immensely strengthening force. If you are too weak to develop this hexagonal force in yourself which has to pass from the head into the whole body, if you no longer have the power to give the blood so much firmness that this force is always present in it, then honey must intervene — or milk in the case of the child. The child has not yet got this hexagonal force; therefore, it must receive it from what is prepared in the human being as milk.

Now you see, gentlemen, that you can give as much casein, fat, sugar and salts to the mice as you please — and they will die. Why? Because the animal also needs this hexagonally-working force. If one only mixes together chemically casein, fat, sugar, and salts, then the force present in the hexagon is not there. When you give the mice milk then it is there. Only in milk it is not so strongly present that when the milk is turning sour it crystallises hexagonally. If this hexagonally-working force were a little stronger in milk, one could drink sour milk and it would form little silicic-acid crystals on the tongue. This would taste as though the milk were full of tiny little hairs. But it does not go so far, because milk comes from the human or animal body, and there it remains fluid. This is sufficient for the child but not for the grown man. But to become adult is something that already begins in childhood, so we must give the child the more powerfully-working hexagonal force that honey contains.

You see, gentlemen, it is very interesting that when you take milk, even if it comes from the human being, it is still something belonging to the animal-nature in man. In man it is animal. If you take honey, it comes from the plant kingdom — indirectly through the bee. But it comes from the plant world and has a plant nature. If you take silicic acid — quartz — then this has a mineral-nature; it has quite a definite hexagonal form. The wax which is produced within the bee itself through the food which is its nourishment, the wax has received its form; it does not originate it, it receives the form as developed in the hexagonal cell. In milk this form is dissolved again; only a shadow-picture of the hexagonal crystal remains in the milk (see Diagram 14). Thus, one can say that honey is a substance most suitable and health-giving for man.

One might however, be inclined to think that it would be just as good if man were to take some silicic acid instead of honey, for then he would also obtain this hexagonal force. But the silicic acid which has been driven as far as the hexagonal form, as far as to evolve this silicic acid form, contains too powerful a crystallising force; it would work much too strongly in man.

1923-12-10-GA351

lecture 12, from RSH: preparation of honey as process in the bee, which otherwise takes place in the plant ... Bees were bred from wasps in the Atlantean epoch when the animal forms were still changeable.

The bee is a creature which in very ancient times was developed from the wasp.

1923-12-15-GA351

from RSH: the venoms of bees, wasps and ants (formic acid) as rests of the animal reproductive forces on Old Moon. Today they are important as enlivening forces for plants (formic acid).

[continued description of Old Moon]

The vitamin which must be what cures the scurvy is not to be found among the component parts. Where then is it? So now they make this fine tale — it must be in the water of the milk! Therefore, the remedy for scurvy is the water! This is really absurd, but it is a learned affair today. For if water is to contain vitamin, then with our learning we should arrive up there in the clouds. We should have to look around us and say: “Water is everywhere and vitamin is in the water.” But then we would be at the stage at which the earth once was. Only today, it is no longer so. Plant-life was there, a living plant covering, and this living covering of plants was fertilised from all directions from the environment. There were then no separate animals, no wasps for instance, but from the surrounding regions there came a substance which had an animal-like nature. Our earth was once in a condition of which one could say that it was surrounded by clouds that had plant-life within them; from the periphery, other clouds approached and fertilised them; these clouds had an animal nature. From cosmic spaces came the animal nature; from the earth the essence of plant-being rose upwards.

All this has changed. The plants have become our clearly outlined flowers which grow out of the Earth, no longer forming great clouds. But within the plants there remains a longing to receive an influence from without. Here we have a rose growing out of the earth; here a rose petal, here another, then a third and so on. Now comes a wasp. This wasp immediately bites a piece out of the rose petal, carries it off to its nest, and uses it for building, or gives it as food to its young. A piece of the rose petal is simply bitten out by the wasp, and carried there, Well, as I said before, our rose bushes are no longer clouds: they have become sharply defined things. But what once lived within them, what was once united with all that entered in as the essence of animal life, this has remained behind within the rose leaves and blossoms. It is there within them. In every rose leaf is something which must of necessity be in some way fertilised from without, from the whole environment.

...

.. what the flowers actually need, is a substance that also plays an important part in the human body. When you study the human body the most diverse substances are found in it. But everywhere within the human body these substances are transformed into something which, in certain quantities, is always present within the human body which has need of it. This substance is formic acid.

If you go to an ant-hillock, and collect some ants and squeeze them, you get a juice. This juice contains formic acid and a little alcohol. It is inside the ants. But this juice is also very finely distributed over your body. Whatever you eat during your life time is always transformed into formic acid, not of course, exclusively, for there are other substances also, but in small quantities. This formic acid permeates your whole body. When you are ill, and have not sufficient formic acid within you, it is a serious matter for your body, for it then has a tendency, just because you have not enough formic acid within you, your body has a tendency to become gouty, or rheumatic. It develops too much uric acid, and too little formic acid. The ants also have in their bodies this substance that the human body needs. This formic acid is indeed something that is made use of throughout nature, you cannot find any bark of any tree that does not contain some formic acid. Formic acid is everywhere in the tree, just as it is in the human body. In every leaf, everywhere there must be formic acid.

But not only formic acid must be there, but also what is closely akin to it, and later becomes the bee poison. All these insects contain a certain substance within them which is poisonous. If one is stung by a bee, one gets inflammation; if one is stung by a wasp, it is sometimes even worse. This business of wasp stings can be pretty bad. Brehm describes how these insects can play bad tricks on men and animals.

It happened that a young cow-herd had taken a large number of cows out to graze, and the pasture was full of wasp nests. The cow-herd's dog ran about; suddenly the cow-herd's dog goes mad, rushes round like a mad dog, and no one knows what has happened. As fast into it can the dog rushes to a neighbouring stream, flings itself into the water, and shakes and shakes itself. The lad was much disturbed by this, and goes to the rescue of the dog. He does not jump into the water, but tries to help it from the bank. Most unluckily he steps on a nest, as the dog had probably done before, and the wasps sting him too, and he begins to rush about like a madman, and finally jumps into the water. And now, because the dog has vanished, and the cow-herd has vanished, confusion arises in the herd of cows. The cows which tread on nests also get stung, and behave as though mad. Finally, most of the herd are in the stream also — as if they were all mad.

You see, insect stings can do one a very bad turn. All these creatures have poisons in them; even an ant stings one, and causes a little inflammation because it injects some formic acid into the wound. This formic acid, moreover, is present in all living things in a right dilution. If there were no ants, bees and wasps, which are the preparers of these poisons, what would happen?

The same thing would happen that would also come to pass in the propagation of the human race if all the men were beheaded, and only women were left on the Earth. Humanity could not then continue to exist, for the male semen would no longer be there. Well, these creatures all have the semen in addition, but they nonetheless need what comes from these poisons for their existence, for these poisons have remained over from what was once in the whole environment. In the finest state of dilution, bee poison, wasp poison, ant poison, once descended upon the plants from cosmic spaces, and the remnants are still present today. So when you see a bee sitting on some willow-tree or on some flower, you must not say: the insect only wants to rob the flower of something; rather must you say: when the little bee sits there and sucks, the flower is so content that it lets its sap flow to the spot where the bee sucks. While the bee is taking something from the flower, bee or wasp poison flows from the bee to the flower. From the wasp, the wasp poison flows, and more especially when the ant attacks the tree stump which no longer has life, formic acid flows in. If the ant visits a flower, then the sap of the flower unites with the formic acid. This is necessary.

If these things did not happen, if bees, wasps and ants did not exist and continually attack the plants and bite into them, then the necessary formic acid, the necessary poisons, would not flow into the flowers, and the plants would in time die out.

You see, substances such as are usually called life-substances, are highly valued by Man; yet it is precisely only these substances that are truly life-substances. If one has deadly nightshade, within it is a poison, a very powerful one. But what is the deadly nightshade? It collects spirituality from the world's environment. Poisons are gatherers of what is spiritual; for this reason they are healing remedies. Fundamentally speaking, the flowers sicken through the life-substances, and the little bees, and wasps and ants, work continually as small physicians bringing to the flowers the formic acid they need, and at the same moment, healing their sickness. Thus all is once more healed.

The bees, wasps and ants are not mere robbers, for in the same moment they bring life to the plants.

It is even the same with the caterpillars which would also die out, and none would remain after a time. You will probably say no great harm would be done if all the caterpillars were to disappear; but in their turn the birds feed on them. Throughout the whole of Nature there are these inner relationships. When we see, for example, how the ants permeate everything with their formic acid, we look into the whole household of Nature and its splendour. Everywhere things happen that are essential for the maintenance of life, and of the world.

You see, here is a tree, and the tree has bark. The bark decays when I cut down the tree; then it moulders. People say: “Well, let it rot away.” Just try to imagine all that moulders away in the forests, fallen leaves and so on, within the course of the year! Men are willing to let it all rot away, but Nature orders it otherwise. Everywhere there are ant-heaps, and from these ant-heaps formic acid enters into the soil of the forest. When you have both forest soil and an ant-heap, it is the same as if you take a glass of water and add a drop of something else to it; the whole contents are at once affected. If you put in salt, all the water is at once made salty. If you have an ant-heap then the formic acid goes in the same moment into the forest soil, and all the soil which is already decaying is saturated with this formic acid.

It is not only into the inner parts of the living plants, and into the still living caterpillars that formic acid penetrates when the bee sits on the flower, and the flower absorbs what it receives from the bee. All these things can only be learned by means of spiritual science; the other kind of science is only concerned with what the bee takes away from the flowers. But the bees would never have been able to sit for thousands of years on the flowers had they not fostered them in the act of biting into them.

So it is also with the lifeless substances of the woods. Even physical science as it is today, concludes that the earth will one day be quite dead. It would indeed be so, for a state of things would eventually come about when decay would prevail, when the earth would be dead. That this will not be so, is because wherever the earth decays it is in the same moment penetrated by all that is yielded up by the bees, wasps and ants. The bees, it is true, give it only to the living flowers, the wasps for the most part also to the living plants. But the ants give what they hand over in the formic acid directly to what is mouldering and dead; in a certain degree they rouse it to life, in this way doing their part that the earth in its decaying substances shall still retain life. Well may one say that wonder is awakened at the activity of the spirit in all things, but when one can approach it more nearly, then one realises it has immense significance.

Let us look once more at those farming ants which cultivate their little field, and change the character of the plants they grow there. Truly, gentlemen, a man could not nourish himself with what grows there, for if a man were to eat those little rice grains that are as hard as silica, he would first get strange illnesses because he would have too much formic acid inside him, and in addition to this, so injure his teeth that for a time the dentists would be kept busy. At last, he would die wretchedly, because of these silica-hard rice-grains which had been thus developed.

But the ant-heap would say: when we ants go out into nature and suck that out of the plants which is everywhere there, then we get far too little formic acid, and can give far too little formic acid to the earth. Let us therefore, select the plants which we can cultivate so that they get quite hard, stony hard, and then we can get plenty of formic acid from this hardness. So these farming ants do this that they may get the greatest possible amount of formic acid. It is these ants again that give back so much formic acid to the earth. That is the connection. From this you can see that poisons when they cause inflammation, or the like, are also perpetual remedies for the holding back of the processes of death. One can say, it is precisely the bee that is of great importance in this regard, that all may be preserved within the flowers; there is a great affinity between the bees and the flowers.

1923-12-30-GA233

Here we can gain an insight into a strange working of Nature. But this same working is present in Nature in other places too.

Suppose for instance that the animal is not merely incapable of providing germ substance which can expose itself to the cosmic ether for the sake of reproduction; suppose it is not even able to transform any substances within it into inner means of nourishment, that is, to use them for its own inner nourishment. The example of the bee lies near at hand.

The bee cannot eat anything and everything. It can only eat what the plant has already prepared for it. And now observe something very strange and remarkable. The bee goes to the plant, seeks out the honey juice, absorbs it, assimilates it within itself, and then builds up what we admire so, the wonderful cell structure of the beehive. Here we observe two most strange and wonderful processes:

• the bee sitting on the flower outside and sucking in the juice,
• and then, having gone into the beehive, building up from within itself in co-operation with the other bees the cells of wax that will be filled with honey.

What is it that really takes place?

You must look carefully at the shape of the cells. They are like this and here comes another joined on to it, and so on, and so on. They are small cells, and similar in form to something else we find in Nature, only there the hollow space is filled up; they are shaped like quartz crystals, like the crystals of silicic acid. If you go into the mountains and examine the quartz crystals, you will find you can draw them, too, in that form. The drawing will, it is true, show some irregularity of shape, but in the main the form will be similar to the form of the bee-cells that are arranged side by side. Only, the cells of the bee are made of wax and the quartz is made of silicic acid.

When we follow up the matter, we find that long ago at a certain point of time in the evolution of the Earth the quartz-crystal was first formed in the mountains. It was formed under the prevailing etheric and astral influences, with the aid of silicic acid. There you have forces that come from the circumference, working, as ethereal-astral forces, and building the quartz crystals in the siliceous substance. Everywhere in the mountains you will find these crystals with their wonderful hexagonal forms. What you find in the solid crystals, you find again as hollow forms — as hollow spaces — in the cells of wax, in the beehive.

For what happens? The bee takes from the flower that which once upon a time brought the quartz crystal into being. The bee fetches it up out of the flower and makes with the substance of her own body imitations of the quartz crystal. A process thus takes place between bee and flower that is similar to what took place long ago in the macrocosm.

I tell you these things that you may understand how necessary it is not merely to take cognisance of the presence of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, all of which analysis is piteously abstract, but to observe and note the marvellous formative processes, the intimate inner conditions that prevail in Nature and her processes.

Discussion

Note 1 - On honey

This note covers the formative forces contained in honey as a substance, and its form like quartz chrystals made up of silicic acid.

For explanation, see Working of substances and their forces#silica and lime

Key lectures:

• 1923-12-01-GA351
  • Silicic acid forces that incline to the hexagon form stream from the human head. One can intensify these formative forces through honey (hexagon form of the honeycombs).
  • The honey effect can be supported by diluted, homeopathically potentized quarts (silicic acid, hexagonal chrystals) at later age if such a honey cure was missed during youth.
• 1923-12-15-GA351
• 1923-12-30-GA233
  • bees and enlivening forces for plants (formic acid)

.

Supporting schemas:

• Schema FMC00.542 and Schema FMC00.513 on Spiritual scientific physiology
• Schema FMC00.571 on Formative forces, linking formative forces to ethers
• workings of the formative forces contained in organic substances, see Working of substances and their forces
  • silicic acid: see Schema FMC00.423 and Schema FMC00.467
  • formic acid and oxalic acid: see Schema FMC00.589

Related pages

• Animal kingdom
• Worldview Spiritual Science

References and further reading

• Werner Christian Simonis: 'Milch und Honig' (1965)
• Iwer Thor Lorenzen:
  • 'Die geistigen Grundlagen der Bienenzucht' (1938); published in NL as 'Natuur en wezen van de honingbij : bouwstenen voor een geesteswetenschappelijk gefundeerde bijenteelt' (1989) published in EN as 'The Spiritual Foundations of Beekeeping' (2017)
  • 'Metamorphosen' (1958), third part: 'Bees and mystery beings'; published in EN as 'Bees and the Ancient Mysteries' (2018)
• Ralf Roessner: 'The Genius of Bees and the Elemental Beings: How the Spiritual World Works through Bees for Nature and Humanity (2017)