ZOOLOGY
THE BEE AND ITS SKILL
وَأَوْحَى رَبُّكَ
إِلَى النَّحْلِ أَنِ اتَّخِذِي مِنَ الْجِبَالِ بُيُوتًا وَمِنَ الشَّجَرِ
وَمِمَّا يَعْرِشُونَ 68 ثُمَّ كُلِي
مِن كُلِّ الثَّمَرَاتِ فَاسْلُكِي سُبُلَ رَبِّكِ ذُلُلاً69
“And thy Lord taught the Bee
to build its cells in hills,
on trees, and in
(men’s) habitations;
then to eat of all
the produce (of the earth),
and find with skill
the spacious paths of its Lord.”
[Al-Qur’an 16:68-69]
Von-Frisch received the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his
research on the behaviour and communication of the
bees. The bee, after discovering any new garden or
flower, goes back and tells its fellow bees the exact
direction and map to get there, which is known as
‘bee dance’. The meanings of this insect’s movements
that are intended to transmit information between
worker bees have been discovered scientifically
using photography and other methods. The Qur’an
mentions in the above verses how the bee with its
skill, finds the spacious paths of its Lord.
The gender used for the bee in the above verses is
the female gender (fa’slukî and kulî), indicating that
the bee that leaves its home for gathering food is a
female bee. In other words the soldier or worker bee
is a female bee.
In fact, in Shakespeare’s play, ‘Henry the Fourth’,
some of the characters speak about bees and
mention that the bees are soldiers and that they
have a king. That is what people thought in
Shakespearean times. They thought that the
worker bees are male bees and they go home and
are answerable to a king bee. This, however, is not
true. The worker bees are females and they do not
report to a king bee but to a queen bee. But it took
modern investigations in the last 300 years to
discover this.
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