The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us

by Bee Wilson

How is this possible? The first thing to acknowledge is that the plausibility of bugonia went with a general belief in spontaneous generation – a belief which was not challenged by science until later in the seventeenth century, and which actually recurred in various forms until well into the twentieth century. Spontaneous generation meant that living beings could be created from nonliving matter. It was a common assumption, for example, that if you left pieces of cheese wrapped in rags in the corner of a dark room you could actually generate new mice, their lives springing from the cheese itself. By the same token, the stinking maggots found swarming on meat that was past its best were supposed to have emerged out of the meat itself, rather than simply feeding on its surface. It was also believed, both by classical and by Renaissance thinkers, that you could generate wasps from asses, drones from horses, and hornets from mules. Spontaneous generation gave rise to all manner of weird cross-species breeding. There were even those who held that the vertebral column of a dead man could sometimes be converted into a snake.36