Bees and Bridgerton
“He’s shaved off his sideburns and he’s ready to go.”
So peeped Jonathan Bailey, who plays a certain thirst-trap viscount in a certain Netflix bounty (one that smashed single-week records for an English series when Season 2 debuted last month, clocking in 251.74 million hours worldwide). Giving good face-time in a recent media meet — during which the Brit was out of his “Bridgerton” wear and struck me more as your average hipster grabbing a flat white in Hackney — he was telling us journalists about his character’s hunt for a wife in this latest goround.
The course of true love never did run smooth, as viewers know all too well of this marquee production based on the popular Regency-era novels by Julia Quinn. And for the strapping Anthony Bridgerton — whose life is newly turned upside down, c/o the two Sharma daughters, fresh in town from Bombay — this is truer than ever.
Asked to come up with one word to describe this season of the show — with its exploration of the London marriage market, its snow globe of sexcapades and status anxiety — Bailey was quick on the draw. “Yearning,” he offered.
A good word. Libido-leavening, even. Though, thinking back on it later, he could have also easily used another word to size up the season: bees. Yes, bees. Bzzzzzz.
Viewers of the show will know by now about the revelation we get, via flashback, that Edmund Bridgerton, Lady Violet’s late husband and father of the Bridgerton children, perished — oh, my — from an allergic reaction to a bee sting. In front of Anthony, then a teenager, a moment that clearly still shapes him in terms of trauma.
It is something I have been musing on ever since gorging on the new episodes because, as much as we get the symbolism of bees at large, they represent both tragedy for the family but also, at other key moments, a kind of hope. Even factoring into a pivotal scene involving Lord Anthony and one Sharma sister — think: yearning, in a cascade of slow-burn romantic tension.
Honey or venom? Hey, it could go either way.
Eagle-eyed “Bridgerton” fans had long spied the presence of the flying insects going back to Season 1 of the Shonda Rhimes series. Before entering the Bridgerton house for the first time, in Episode 1, they noticed a bee on the family’s door knocker. Likewise, one also showed up on the windowsill when Daphne Bridgerton — Anthony’s sister — gave birth in the season finale. All of which got me digging further into the cultural sting — shall we say — that bees have been giving popular culture since, well, forever.
For millennia, bees have loomed in design and art, representing both rebirth and the cycle of life. According to an article a few years back in Architectural Digest, bees loom “prominently in the mythology of nearly every culture, including those of the Mayans, Hindus, Egyptians and ancient Greeks. Depictions of bees abound on coins and jewelry from the ancient Greek Ionian city of Ephesus … within the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the bee was the symbol of the goddess.”
In the Vatican, one will find them on Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous “Baldacchino,” a masterpiece of sculpture soaring 20 metres over the altar above St. Peter’s Tomb. Napoleon Bonaparte, meanwhile, made them into nothing less than symbols of his rule. In Jean-auguste-dominique Ingres’s depiction of the emperor on his coronation day, he wears sumptuous red robes decorated with gold bees, a choice said to be not just an esthetic one but evidently political.
“The adoption of the bee was a blatant rejection of the Bourbon monarchy’s fleur-de-lis. More cannily, the emblem may have helped win over the public imagination as an homage to a dazzling cache of 300 gold-and-garnet bees discovered inside the tomb of fifth-century monarch King Childeric in 1653,” Carolyn Kelly wrote in the September 2019 issue of Architectural Digest.
Popular literature, of course, has long had a bee obsession, ranging from Shakespeare himself (including a famous monologue in “Henry V”) to Sufi poet Kahlil Gibran — For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life / And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love / And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy — to modern-day crowd-pleasers (the 2001 Sue Monk Kidd novel “The Secret Life of Bees”).
The world of film has followed the pollen too, ranging from a whole genre of horror in the ’70s (movies such as “The Bees” and “The Swarm”) to more family-friendly fare like “Bee Movie” (Jerry Seinfeld! With wings!).
No stranger to the lure? A-listers like Angelina Jolie, who last year appeared on the cover of National Geographic covered in bees. (The bombshell, aiming to help create awareness about depleting colonies and who keeps hives herself, told the mag: “There are two types of bees … the domestic honeybee is the one that makes the honey, and then there’s this other bee, that’s the wild solitary bee that lives a very different life and does not make honey but pollinates. I feel like lately I’ve been a lot of domestic honeybee, but in my heart, I’m wild solitary.”)
Ditto: Beyoncé (whose fans are known as “the beyhive”). She might have hot sauce in her bag, but she’s got hives on her roof. She once also shared with Harper’s Bazaar: “I’m building a honey farm.”
Count Kate Middleton in this mix, too. A passionate beekeeper, the duchess shared spoonfuls of honey with British schoolchildren during a visit to London’s Natural History Museum.
Back in the fantastical world of a more faded aristocracy, meanwhile, the stingers, they go on. Some “Bridgerton” detectives have noticed bee-shaped jewelry on Kate and Edwina Sharma, while one big dance sequence — on the occasion of a ball that Lady Violet holds — stands out for the giant Florentine bee that graces the ballroom floor.
For all the heavy breathing and intense stare-offs that the world of “Bridgerton” always promises — not to mention an actual queen bee in the form of Queen Charlotte — this much is true: there continues to be plenty to buzz about.