by Bennett Hogg Wednesday 10 September 2025

Estimated reading time:

13 min read

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Renaissance and early modern music theorists tried to establish connections at the philosophical and practical levels between music and nature, whether that involved searching within animal sounds for the roots of music, as in Athanasius Kircher's Musurgia Universalis (1650), or through the various incarnations of the idea of the Music of the Spheres. In the twentieth century the Austrian modernist composer Anton Webern invokes the 'natural law' that he believes lies behind classical music theory. He draws on Goethe's 1790 Metamorphosis of Plants to explain aspects of German musical philosophy (and compositional practice) that see in ideal musical structures the organic unity of natural organisms: just as each part of a plant — leaf, root, stem, flower — appear different to one another but are part of the same organism, so the different elements of a music composition — its themes, harmonies, motives — should be seen as interconnected and part of the same 'organic' unity.¹ In the present day, field recordings of the natural environment that are presented as sound art, and data sonification² are some of the more recent technological manifestations of this deep-seated belief in a connection between the natural world and music. So, when Charles Butler writes in 1623 that 'if Musicke were lost, it might be found with the Muses Birds' (a poetic reference to honeybees rooted in Greek classicism),³ he is but one of many participants in a long tradition that continues right up to the present.

Butler's training in the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and music, predisposes him to attend to sound. In The Feminine Monarchie sound plays a number of roles, and although his actual interpretations of some of these sounds would no longer be supported by scientific understanding, the role played by sound in his book illuminates how it affords, for him, insights into the world of the bees. At the time Butler was writing, sound was the most reliable way to gain an insight into the interior of the beehive in its normal, working state.⁴ One of his key mistakes, from a scientific perspective, was his interpretation of the sounds that he heard inside the hive as 'voices', although this was a common perception in the seventeenth century (and earlier). Athanasius Kircher, for example, devotes an extensive section of his encyclopaedia of music to the vocal organs, as he sees them, of crickets and frogs, dissecting them to assign them roles analogous to those of the human speech apparatus.⁵ However, that bees communicate through physical vibrations rather than sound, as such, in no way invalidates the ways that the term 'voice' is, for Butler, a powerful marker of the bees' social, and dare we say cultural, lives.⁶ His focus on the bees' voices also uncovers a whole way of thinking about bees as a social and political community.

When the queen leaves the hive the populace of bees makes 'an extraordinarie noise, as if they spake the language of the Knight Marshals men' (B2r). If the queen is removed from the hive, the beekeeper will also hear 'a murmuring noise both without and within', then a joyful buzzing when she is restored to them (N2r-v).⁷ Their 'voices' express their collective emotions; they are effectively vehicles of a collective super-organism.⁸ The bees are even compared with 'merrie Gossips' at one point (P1r) suggesting a vernacular mode of communication akin to that of a busy city. The queen's voice of command, though, is law, and this is referred to several times, both in terms of informing the activities of the community of bees, and shaping what Butler imagines as the courtly political discourse with her daughters in swarming time.

Butler correctly identifies two sounds, as they are perceived by humans, which are closely associated with the swarming of bees, though for the bees these are experienced haptically as physical vibrations that spread out into the wax combs.⁹ Today these signals, which you can listen to here, are usually referred to as 'tooting' and 'quacking'. In his fifth chapter Butler hears as many as four royal voices converse together. He imagines that there is a reigning queen with whom the eldest of her daughters pleads leave to depart with her retinue (though in fact the queen bee who is the mother of the 'princess' would have actually left the hive some days earlier with the prime swarm). The 'princess' uses a different voice to that of her mother, the one he supposes is the reigning queen. The other princesses join in, imitating their mother's song, but on different pitches. A distance is thus established between the princess begging her mother's leave, and the rest of the 'court'. What Butler is actually hearing is the 'tooting' of a free-roaming, newly emerged virgin queen, combined with the 'quacking' of other queens still inside their cells. These sounds are produced by the various queens vibrating their abdomens against the wax of the honeycombs. The tooting signal begins with a long note which rises in volume and pitch, followed by repeated notes, and is a high pitched, hunting horn-like sound, whereas the 'quacking' is on a lower pitch, in general, and consists only in the simple repetition of that pitch.¹⁰ The different pitches Butler hears of the quacking signal, which he ascribes to the reigning queen and her other daughters, actually indicates the maturity of the other as yet unemerged queens; the more mature they are the higher the pitch of their quacking. Butler's observations, his descriptions, and transcription of these 'voices' into musical notation are remarkably accurate representations when compared with recordings of tooting and quacking, though his interpretation of them as political negotiations in the royal family are of course anthropomorphic projections.

Sound also mediates human interaction with bees for Butler beyond his anthropomorphic projections. He is dismissive as to the effectiveness of 'tinging' (also tanging or ringing) a swarm, the tradition whereby a beekeeper will bang on a metal object in the belief it will encourage the swarm to settle, but notes that even if it is not effective in controlling the swarm it does serve the purpose of notifying neighbours of a claim to ownership, something underlined in Chapter 2 where he says that hives should always be set within sight and sound of the beekeeper's home. Later in Chapter 5 he notes that once swarming bees are out of the sight and hearing of their owner 'you have lost al right and propertie in them' (L3v). In other words, they can be anyone's for the taking.

He also advocates knocking on the side of the hive and listening to the resultant sound to get a sense of the hive's population (G2v-3r). Combined with lifting the hive ('poining') to estimate how much honey is in it this uses sound as a non-invasive method of determining the state of the hive that beekeepers still use today. An old beekeeper I knew would tap the hive before lifting the lid to decide if he needed to wear his veil or not, depending on whether the hive 'growled' or 'purred', only the latter signifying that he could open the hive without protective clothing. The research team of Martin Bencsik at Nottingham Trent University have used computer-controlled devices to tap on the side of beehives, with the sound made by the bees in response to this intrusion into their world being analysed in close detail to determine the relative health of commercial beehives: the sound the community of bees make in response to the tapping from outside can indicate, through sophisticated digital analysis, a rich field of information about the current state of the population within.¹¹

Despite being often held up as role models of hard-working, responsible behaviour, some bees turn to the bad, and hives are sometimes robbed by bees from other hives. Attacks by robber bees result in 'such a noise and dinne, as if the Drum did sound an all-arme [alarm]' along with 'a more shrill and sharpe note' that Butler understands as coming from 'their generall Commander' to egg them on to fight the attackers (R1r). After such a battle the successful defenders gather at the door of the hive and 'buzze one to another, as if in their language they did talke of the fight, and commend one an other for their fortitude' (R2r). But voice can also mark the presence of enemies, and the wasp in particular is identified by the bees by 'the strangenesse of hir voice' (Q2r). Sound and tapping the hive can serve to identify, according to Butler, those hives most at risk from robbers. If on tapping the hive the bees within 'doe make a great noise both above and beneath' then the hive is likely strong enough, in Butler's estimation, to resist any robbers. If, though, the bees within 'make a little short noise, though they be heavy and have Honie enough' then these are the hives most a risk of being plundered by rogue bees. Like robbers, the drones are also seen as contrary to the generally decent, hard-working nature of bees, being lazy, and living 'by the sweat of others brows' (H1r). Here their 'lowd voice[s]' mark them out, along with their 'round velvet cap[s]' and 'full paunch[es]' as 'but idle' companions (H1r). But later in the chapter Butler seems unable to resist mentioning that though in bee society 'the females … have the Soveraigntie, yet have the males the lowder voice, as it is in other living things, Doves, Owsils, Thrushes, &c' (I1v)

But the bees voices are not only used to command, or to raise a violent tumult. Butler devotes a good deal of text in Chapter 1 to two stories in which bees build a wax 'chapel' to house a piece of consecrated communion wafer that has been introduced into the hive. Though these are obviously mythic accounts, the description of the bees' behaviour mentions the 'sweet noise' in the chapel they have built, and how within 'they sung most sweetly'. One version of the tale even has a belfry with bells in it (D1r)! When not negotiating royal succession, or raising a tumult, bees are heard as once again the Muses Birds, praising God in song within their tiny chapel, albeit an imagined one.