What the Bees Know
Even as bees pillage here and there from flowers, but afterward make honey, which is all theirs; it is no more thyme or marjoram. So the pieces borrowed from others, he will transform and jumble together, to make of them a work wholly his own, that is to say, his judgment.
, Essays, 'Of the Education of Children' (trans. John Florio) (1580)
The bees have been invoked so many times in discussions of creativity that the metaphor almost slips past us. But Montaigne’s version carries a detail worth pausing over: “it is no more thyme or marjoram.” The original flowers become undetectable. The transformation is total.
There’s comfort in this, if we want it. We’re all bees. No one creates from nothing—not Mozart, not Dickinson, not the friend whose work we most admire. Everything enters the hive from somewhere else. The anxiety about sources, about what we’ve borrowed or absorbed or found ready-made, may be misplaced. Perhaps what matters isn’t where the material comes from.
But then there’s that curious phrase at the end: “his judgment.” The work becomes yours not merely because you touched it, but because you transformed it through something Montaigne can only call judgment—the intimate, idiosyncratic act of deciding this matters and that doesn’t, this belongs and that stays out. What is judgment, exactly? And where does it live?
It seems to require some kind of friction, some encounter between the raw material and something inside us that resists, shapes, and selects. The bees don’t simply collect; they digest. The flowers pass through their bodies and emerge changed. Whatever our raw materials—wherever they come from—the question might be less about their origin than about what happens next. What does it mean to digest? What do we have that transforms?