ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how colonists used bees as a means of physical and symbolic domination, an attempt to justify their violence against sovereign Indigenous nations through a culturally ingrained metaphor of the natural world. It draws upon the work of seventeenth-century clerics and historians to show how the symbolism of the hive organized colonists’ understanding of their divinely ordained mission. It also examines Germantown-founder Francis Daniel Pastorius’s The Beehive (1696), which offers a foundational understanding of the early American work ethic. Building especially on Pastorius’s depiction of women’s labor and virtue, the chapter also explores the role of the women’s spinning bee in pre-Revolutionary New England, emphasizing the effects of hive symbolism on the ecosystem and labor systems of the colonies. The apian icon mediates settlers’ approaches to nature and its resources, enabling them to reimagine the social fabric of their “new” world.
