One of the grimmest figures for ecological hope and collapse in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) appears as Officer K stumbles upon an unlikely apiary in the ruins of Las Vegas. Honeybees cluster on feeders suspended from an intravenous drip stand or buzz in apparent disorientation through thick red air. When K’s hand becomes covered by bees, he regards it with no emotion beyond mild curiosity. This scene plays out for less than two of the minutes of an almost three-hour film, and the bees are not explicitly referred to again. What, then, do they mean?  

Earlier iterations of Blade Runner (1982; 1992) explore a set of fundamentally Enlightenment-era questions about materiality, mentality and the human. In Blade Runner 2049, the earlier films’ revelation that machines are capable of putatively human, supposedly mental modes – empathy, anger, moral reasoning ­- is old news; that Nexus-9 replicants like Officer K can feel is taken for granted. Instead, K worries about a personhood that he believes to be contingent not on the possession of mental properties or feeling but of biological relationship. His search for evidence of his own biological origins plays out alongside the film’s representations of technologized, denatured organic material. 2049 updates the original Blade Runner’s questions about the materiality of personhood by asking instead if a person, or indeed any organism, can have a meaningful existence outside of its ecological relations. The honeybees that K encounters illustrate a possible answer to this question: without plants, they mill incoherently in the dusty air. 

In the second half of this paper, I turn to two nineteenth-century books about pollinating insects to show how understandings of bees’ ecological relationships have travelled alongside or against mechanistic understandings of these insects. The first of these books is John Evans’ poetic natural history, The Bees (1806); Evans understood the role of flowers in honey production but did not know of the role of honeybees in plant pollination. The second is Charles Darwin’s Fertilisation of orchids (1862), a landmark study in pollination ecology that argues for the co-adaptation of pollinating insects and insect-pollinated flowers. Reading these two works against Blade Runner 2049, I tease out the genealogy of ideas about bees, ecology and a more-than-mechanistic mode of material being, and consider how a small stand of pollinating insects with nothing to pollinate stuck in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas might symbolise K’s tentative reach for personhood.