ABSTRACT
Percy Bysshe Shelley saw the mythic figure known as Hermaphroditus not only as the pagan world’s patron saint of bisexuality but as the common ancestor from which disparate sexualities descended. The combination of the two connotations – for sexual variety and for holding any ecosystem together – makes the “sexless bee” the very emblem of a queer nature. Neither William Cowper nor Shelley would have known that worker bees and queens are virtually identical except that the ovaries belonging to the workers are undeveloped. The ways in which apian sex, like vegetal sex, is invisible to the human eye seemed to have stirred fantasies about the sex lives of both organisms. In terms of Erasmus Darwin’s influence, The Loves of the Plants appears to have impacted Shelley’s botanical thought in important ways, not simply in terms of using plants as actors in a Hortus conclusus but in terms of vegetal chastity as a theme.
