A Greek and Mediterranean fig-growing practice Steiner read as nature's own beekeeping: wasps carry honey-substance from wild figs into cultivated ones, doubling their sweetness.
The Grafting of Figs in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's worked example of honey formation happening inside a plant rather than inside a bee. He described it in the sixth of his Nine Lectures on Bees (GA 351), given to the workmen at the Goetheanum in Dornach on 10 December 1923. Steiner first traced the gall apple: a wasp lays its egg into an oak leaf through a hollow ovipositor, the leaf tissue then grows differently around it, and the resulting gall serves the egg as the chorion serves the embryo in a mother animal. The fig grower, he said, turns that same partnership into a craft. He ties two wild figs holding immature wasp larvae onto a cultivated tree, the hurried second brood lays its late eggs there, and those figs come out twice as sweet. Steiner's conclusion: the whole of nature is a beekeeper, and the bee only carries outward what the fig keeps within.
The Grafting of Figs is the Mediterranean practice known to botanists as caprification, and Steiner used it as the hinge of his bee lectures. A grower hangs wild figs, each carrying unhatched wasps, in a cultivated fig tree. The rushed insects breed a second time, and the sweetness they would never have made in their own bodies is laid down in the fruit instead.
In Steiner's Own Words
What has actually happened here? The wasps, which though they differ from the bees are yet related to them, the wasps take just that substance from the plant which is on the way to become honey. If in the clever way of the cultivator of the fig trees, the figs of the wild tree containing the eggs of the wasp are thrown up and tied so that they remain hanging up there, and if one then is clever enough to induce the wasps to weave again into the tree what they have taken from the other tree, then honey in the form of sweetness is, as it were, filtered into these grafted fig-trees; it enters into the figs in the form of sweetness because the wasps have prepared it in an extremely fine state of dilution; Nature itself has brought it about in an indirect way.
What it Means Today
What Steiner sketched in front of the Goetheanum workmen is, in the horticultural literature, called caprification, and its mechanism was settled by science within his own lifetime. The Smyrna fig sets no crop unless pollen reaches it from a caprifig by way of the fig wasp Blastophaga psenes, an insect that completes its whole larval life inside the fig's hollow receptacle. In 1899 the United States Department of Agriculture shipped caprifigs carrying live Blastophaga from Algeria to California, and the nurseryman George C. Roeding of Fresno hung them in his Smyrna orchard. The wasps established, the fruit set, and the variety went to market as the Calimyrna fig, which the San Joaquin Valley still grows. Every part of the picture Steiner drew on the blackboard, the reed-tied wild figs, the second brood, the sweetness that arrives without a hive, is a described agricultural fact, not a metaphor he invented.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner's move was not to explain caprification but to reverse the direction anyone reads it in. Orthodox horticulture asks what the tree gets from the wasp. He asked what the wasp gives back, and answered that the honey-forming power is already lying in the plant, waiting for an insect to be hurried into releasing it. The hive, on that reading, is not an invention of the bee. It is the fig's inner wax chamber turned inside out and set on a branch, which is why he told the workmen that nature itself is the beekeeper.
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