The Buzz About “The Mother Hive”

Last week I read Jack London’s short story, “The Strength of the Strong”, which was a reply to Rudyard Kipling’s attack on Socialism in the form of his short story, “The Mother Hive”.  This week I read “The Mother Hive” and liked it just as well as London’s story.

As the title would suggest, the story’s setting is a bee hive with a certain working order that maintains the life of each individual bee.  One day, a negligent guard bee lets in a dreaded Wax Moth.  Throughout the hive’s existence, the bees have been warned that a Wax Moth that infiltrates their world will destroy their working order and eventually will destroy their world.  The Wax Moth begins to tell the bees that their work and order isn’t necessary, that the traditions of the hive are simply outdated and that the bees could have just as much of a good life by rejecting the traditions with which they have been living.  One bee, Melissa, sees the error of the Wax Moth’s ideas but is unable to prevent the majority of the hive from buying into them.  As a result, the bees end up eating parts of the hive that are not meant to be eaten and giving birth to strangely shaped baby bees which continue to eat the hive.  Melissa is able to persuade only a few bees to secretly raise up a Princess Bee to replace the current corrupted Queen Bee.  As the hive becomes increasingly decayed, the Bee Master eventually burns it while Melissa, the Princess and the few bees in Melissa’s camp “swarm” to the Oak Tree to start a new hive and a new life.

The story is written as a fable, almost a fairy tale, and stands up with the best of them.  It’s beautifully written and is probably one of the best stories by Kipling that I’ve read.  The way he is able to take the natural world and infuse it with a battle for good and evil is amazing.  The burning of the hive by the Bee Master is painted brilliantly in sweeping apocalyptic prose.  I have a feeling that perhaps the politics involved may have in some way kept it from being thought of as a great story in some circles.  I have not done exhaustive research as to the specific circumstances or events that may have prompted Kipling to write this story.  The only information I could come up with was that the story was his attack on Socialistic ideas that he thought were infiltrating his society.  The story itself does not specify the Wax Moth as a Socialist; it simply shows the Wax Moth undermining the traditions that have kept the hive going.

If I would recommend these two stories to anyone, I would probably suggest reading “The Mother Hive” first and then read London’s “The Strength of the Strong”.  The idea that Jack London would stand up for socialism was a little surprising to me.  His characters all seem to be rugged individualists that pull themselves up by their boot straps.  It’s difficult to imagine Wolf Larsen in The Sea Wolf as a socialist.  At the same time, I’m reminded that many of London’s rugged individualists end up dead.  I plan on reading biographies of London and of Kipling in the near future, perhaps this will shed some light on their lives and political beliefs.

“Bees are not men.”

Since I’ve been reading the works of Jack London and Rudyard Kipling, I’ve wondered whether they knew each other and what they may have thought of each other’s work.  As they lived and wrote during approximately the same time period (turn of the twentieth century), I’d be curious as to whether they would have anything to say to each other.  After reading London’s short story, “The Strength of the Strong”, I have an inkling of what might have taken place if they had met.

The anthology I’ve been using to read London’s short stories has been Jack London: Short Stories edited by Earle Labor; Robert C. Leitz III; I. Milo Shepard.  The notes for this short story indicate that London wrote this as a reply to a short story that Kipling wrote called “The Adventures of Melissa” (originally published as “The Mother Hive”) in which Kipling attacked Socialism.  According to these notes, London also told a fellow writer that “No one was in the slightest way aware of the point of my story”.

“The Strength of the Strong” is told by a prehistoric grandfather to his prehistoric grandsons.  The grandfather explains that people used to live in trees by themselves and they only had the strength of “one”.  When they realized that together, they might have the strength of “ten”, people moved from the trees to caves.  Then they discovered that some of them could hunt, some could protect, some could cook.  After a while, some of the people became stronger than others and took all the land.  Some of the people learned how to hunt better and took all the food.  Eventually, the majority worked very hard for very little, while a select few didn’t work at all and had tons of food and land.  At one point, someone decides they need “money”, so they string sea shells together and call it “money”.  For some, all they did all day was (literally) make “money”.  After reading the story, I had to agree with London’s own assessment.  I’m not really sure what point he was trying to make.  It was difficult to figure out which political and economic ideals he was satirizing and which ones he was embracing.

However, London brilliantly satirizes Kipling’s writing style and story-telling methods.  All the characters in London’s story have Kipling style names with a slight twist that pokes fun of them.  The grandfather’s name is Long-Beard while his grandsons are Deer-Runner, Yellow-Head, and Afraid-of-the-Dark.  Other characters had names like Strong-Arm, Three-Clams, One-Eye, Little-Belly, Dog-Tooth, Pig-Jaw, Big-Fat, Twisted-Lip.  My favorite was The Bug.  He went around making up songs and stories about bees to calm people down whenever anyone got too riled up and distraught over their circumstances.  I have a hunch that The Bug was supposed to be Kipling.

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned that, while both London and Kipling extensively used animals in their stories, London’s animals were more like animals whereas Kipling’s animals were more like humans (anthropomorphic – there’s that word again).   London seems to make a very clear point in what he thinks of this aspect of Kipling’s writing when, in the last line of “The Strength of the Strong”, he states “all that will come to pass in the time when the fools are dead, and when there will be no more singers to stand still and sing the ‘Song of the Bees.’  Bees are not men.”

Tune in next week when I’ll let you know what this story of Kipling’s, “The Mother Hive”, is all about.