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The Myth Of The Cartoon Bee Hive
How can a bottle of corn sugar be so funny?
Well... It was this tall yellow thing with that grooved dome top. YOU KNOW what I’m talking about. It looked a bit like these:
Now we have all been conditioned from child hood to associate this sort of shape with HONEY. It seams ludicrous to try that with corn sugar in my opinion. OK so it’s SWEET, but bees don’t make corn sugar.... Alright, so it’s no-name. Cut em some slack.. Well how about no stupid gimmicks either?
Anyway, that reminded me of something... Something from the dark misty back waters of my own child hood. Anyone over 25 probably remembers the old Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons where some one got an ass load of pain from interaction with a strange oval shaped object hanging from a tree that contained lots of angry bees.
This grey, or yellow foot-ball shaped object always had a direct resemblance to the shape of honey bottles, and indeed to the shape of old fashioned bee hives:
But that shape isn’t really the doing of bees. Old fashioned beehives of that sort were basically just upside down baskets called "skeps". They were spirals woven out of grass (or whatever) hence there distinctive shape:
It’s true that SOMETIMES bees in the wild will construct combs in a lattice configuration ROUGHLY like the stereotype we see in cartoons, but that’s just physics at work. Bees build there combs in layers, and they are not enclosed.
They would probably prefer a hallow log to build in, and otherwise are just as happy building a hap hazard affair such as this:
The truth is that the bee hive we know from cartoons is a bizarre confusion of skeps and the idea of bees building there hives in trees. My theory is that this is actually a triple confusion. Cartoonists got paper wasps/hornet nests, skep hives, and wild bee hives all mixed up with each other
It’s WASPS/HORNETS that sometimes build enclosed round hives that dangle from tree branches.
A lot of people still can’t tell the difference between a bee and a wasp, and I wonder if it was much different 60 years ago when they made these cartoons.
To me a wasp nest is WAY more frightening than a bee nest. As a child a learned the difference. Bees are fussy, round, and soft, and don’t want any trouble. Wasps are smooth sharp, and shiny, and they are mean FUCKERS... and they don’t have any fucking honey so don’t come calling.
Just ask a bear. That’s the other inevitable shape of honey bottles. Bears... BEARS... FULL OF HONEY.
