To the best of my knowledge, there is not a comprehensive work on bees and political theory. There are three areas of study that come about: (1) the discovery by Charles Butler that it is a Queen and not a King that rules the hive, which is a debate that extends from 1609 when The Feminine Monarchie is published until the mid-eighteenth century, largely in English; (2) tangentially in relation to Mandeville; and, an area I haven’t looked into very much, (3) the discovery of the bee dance and its relation to language by von Frisch in 1947. Another place you might want to look is at sociobiology, which has extensively studied ants and bees as “social animals.”

I’m looking for a more contemporary book that provides an overview of how bees have been used as models of social organization and political theory. It’s for one chapter of my undergraduate thesis on the Brethren of Purity (there’s a nice Wikipedia article about them). Any ideas?

David