Article

Bees

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Bees

Bees have been the subject of sustained scholarly attention in the Society’s literature, spanning entomological observation, ethnographic documentation, and the recording of ritual practice across the Malay Peninsula. The records reveal a community of naturalists and administrators who regarded these insects not merely as biological specimens but as agents embedded in ecological, economic, and cosmological systems. From Burkill’s precise mechanical analysis of floral injury in the 1910s, through Dussek’s transcription of honey-collecting verse in the 1920s, to Gimlette’s account of a Kelantan bomor (ritual specialist) engaged to remove a swarm from a colonial officer’s study, the literature traces a consistent preoccupation with the intersection of bee behaviour and human practice.

Botanical Injury and Pollination Dynamics

The earliest of the three records, a brief note by I. H. Burkill published in 1917, documents the mechanical injury inflicted on the flowers of Derris thrysiflora by visiting bees and the consequences for seed-set [1]. Burkill describes how bees force apart the interlocked petals of Derris thrysiflora in their search for honey, causing consistent and characteristic damage. The claws of the petals, which function as springs, are ruptured and suffused with black pigment from the broken epidermal layer. Two dark spots invariably develop at the base of the standard, near the brow over the path to the honey, often composed of three or four confluent perforations. Corresponding perforations appear on the wings, particularly at points where the wings and keel are interlocked, where visitors gain the best purchase [1, p. 264].

The keel, which protects the pollen, is rarely marked except at its claws and tip. Burkill notes that while every flower is repeatedly visited, over 90 per cent fall entire without setting seed; the remainder, though a small percentage, produce what he considers an abundant seed-crop [1, p. 264]. This observation carries a significant implication for the plant’s reproductive strategy: the overwhelming majority of flowers are destroyed in the process of pollination, yet the small fraction that survive yield a disproportionately large harvest. Burkill’s account thus presents bees not as passive pollinators but as agents of considerable mechanical force, whose foraging behaviour simultaneously damages and fertilises the flower in a process that is, in his framing, both destructive and generative.

Honey-Collecting Verse and Oral Tradition

O. T. Dussek’s 1928 note presents a markedly different register of engagement with bees, shifting from the botanical to the literary and performative. Dussek documents a series of Malay verses, bersandui, traditionally recited by honey collectors in Rembau [2]. The text presents numbered stanzas corresponding to specific stages of the honey-collecting process: burning the tree bud (mëmbakar tunam), cutting the comb (memotong sarang), lowering the comb to the ground (mëngulorkan sarang turun ka-tanah), and the pawang’s descent (pawang turun) [2, pp. 56–57]. The verses employ the characteristic Malay pantun form, with nature imagery and metaphorical language—references to birds, flowers, and the wind—interwoven with practical descriptions of the activity. A footnote clarifies that “tunam” in the first stanza refers to carrying fire [2, p. 57].

The significance of Dussek’s record lies in its demonstration that honey collection was not merely a technical or economic activity but one structured by oral literary tradition. The bersandui functioned as a performative accompaniment to the physical labour of extraction, embedding the process within a framework of poetic convention. The presence of the pawang—a figure who descends to the comb—suggests that the act of retrieval was understood to require not only physical skill but a degree of ritual mediation, a theme that Gimlette’s account elaborates further.

Ritual Intervention and Cosmological Belief

J. D. Gimlette’s 1926 note records his experience of engaging a Kelantan bomor to deal with a swarm of bees that had colonised his study, and compares Kelantan and Pahang beliefs regarding bees settling in a house [3]. Gimlette describes the bomor’s arrival at dusk and his method of first physically removing the bees by stroking them with bare hands after sprinkling them with a rice-flour paste. He then performed a ceremony facing east, offering food—chicken, goat, buffalo, cakes, bananas, parched rice, and turmeric-dyed rice—and a gold ring on a tray, sprinkling water and parched rice about the room, and intoning a formula. Gimlette was directed to bathe and change clothes, after which the bomor blew over him while breaking slip-knots of palm leaf, supposedly restoring harmony between him and the bees [3, p. 422].

The bees did not leave, and on re-consultation the bomor agreed to relocate the swarm to a Malay servant’s house, carrying the entire bookcase cupboard outside at midnight. The bees departed the compound within a fortnight, leaving a cupful of honey and about half a pound of wax. Gimlette notes that Kelantan Malays regard bees coming to a house as a good omen but consider it unlucky to drive them from one house to another, whereas Pahang Malays see it as an ill omen requiring a menyambut ceremony. He closes with a personal reflection: shortly after the bees left, he fell seriously ill, and wonders whether dismissing them was the cause [3, p. 422].

Gimlette’s account is notable for several reasons. First, it documents a specific ritual technology—the combination of physical handling, directional orientation, food offering, and the breaking of slip-knots—that was understood to mediate the relationship between human and bee. Second, it reveals regional variation in cosmological interpretation: the same event (bees settling in a dwelling) was read as auspicious in Kelantan and inauspicious in Pahang, with correspondingly different ritual responses. Third, Gimlette’s closing reflection, though framed as personal speculation, gestures toward a broader epistemological question: whether the colonial observer’s intervention in a system of belief carried consequences that exceeded the material removal of the swarm.

Research and Documentation

The three records span a decade and a half and represent three distinct modes of engagement with bees: the botanical-entomological, the literary-ethnographic, and the ritual-ethnographic. Burkill’s 1917 note is characteristically concise and mechanistic, concerned with the physical interaction between insect and flower and its reproductive consequences. It belongs to a tradition of natural history observation that treats the bee as a vector of mechanical force within a floral system. Dussek’s 1928 note shifts the focus entirely to human culture, documenting the oral literature that accompanied honey collection and thereby situating the bee within a framework of Malay poetic and performative tradition. Gimlette’s 1926 account occupies a middle ground, combining the personal narrative of a colonial resident with ethnographic observation of ritual practice and comparative belief.

What unites the three is a consistent refusal to treat the bee as a purely biological object. Even Burkill, whose note is the most narrowly scientific, is concerned with the bee’s agency in shaping the reproductive outcome of a plant species. Dussek and Gimlette, for their part, document the bee as a figure in human cosmology and culture. The literature thus presents a composite picture in which the bee is simultaneously an ecological agent, an economic resource, and a cosmological signifier—a tripartite significance that the Society’s contributors, working in different disciplines and at different times, each addressed from their own vantage point.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. I.H. Burkill (1917). A note upon the way in which bees settle on flowers of Derris thyrsi-flora and the injury resulting from their search for honey JSBRAS 77: 263–264. Read on JSTOR
  2. O.T. Dussek (1928). Bersandui: verses recited by collectors of honey in Rembau JMBRAS 6(4): 56–57. Read on JSTOR
  3. J.D. Gimlette (1926). A bee bomor JMBRAS 4(3): 421–422. Read on JSTOR