Less than 24 hours after Beyoncé premiered her visual album Lemonade on HBO, a conversation that initially centered on the project’s artistic depth quickly turned into a swarm of gossip. On the night of its release, fashion designer Rachel Roy made the mistake of recycling a line in the track “Sorry” (where Beyoncé sings about a mistress known as “Becky with the good hair”) in a now notorious Instagram photo captioned, “Good hair, don’t care.” The clear implication, which aligned with earlier speculation, was that Roy had had an affair with Jay Z. Roy’s Instagram page was immediately flooded with comments littered with bee and lemon emojis, dumped there by purported Beyoncé fans—the Beyhive—in support of their queen. The ensuing scandal made Roy cancel an event two days later, but the damage lives on in her comments section.
The Beyhive’s sometimes laughably menacing activities have earned them a reputation for being crazed, as well as an inordinate amount of media attention. Articles surface anytime Beyoncé-related emojis (bees, crowns, and now lemons) and negative comments appear on a famous person’s page, which is often. Infamous, relentless, devoted and, often, self-certified trolls, these so-called fans are active participants in what’s become a social media sport: attacking, in their own comical, psychologically damning way, anyone who dares to critique Beyoncé.
But these emoji-bombers who incessantly cape for Bey remain largely anonymous and impossible to quantify, in spite of their nonstop visibility. I wondered: Who are they, and why do they go so hard?
Like any habitual social media user, I’m way too accustomed to seeing garbage comments on celebrity pages (Instagram often attracts the worst of them) without thinking twice. But the comments on Roy’s page post-Lemonade (“home wrecker,” etc.) made me wonder what kind of person goes that far, though, and how many of them were human (possibly in multiple senses of the word). For a long time, I’ve assumed that the Beyhive consisted of bored teens and the type of adult trolls whose primary interaction with society is online. But when I investigated personally, the picture started to get bafflingly diverse.
Of the more than 30 Instagram users I messaged over the course of a week (all of whom had publicly commented on a Rachel Roy-related photo at some point), 13 of them have private accounts. Their follower counts range from 0 to 10,000. Their profiles include descriptions like “makeup artist,” “fashionista” and “vegetarian.” Two users had hundreds of followers but no photos at all. One person agreed to talk before writing back, “Actually no.” Another, with whom I spoke on the phone, left me with more questions than answers. The others I communicated with were an mix of men and women in their 20s and, seemingly, sane.
The latter characteristic surprised me—sort of. I’ve long been aware of how passionately the Beyhive reacts if anyone so much as blinks at Beyoncé wrong. I was curious how they’d treat me, an inquiring non-celebrity. But as I attempted to suss out their identities, I found more than a few people willing to talk to me—despite hitting some walls, and receiving some adolescent retorts. When asked to comment for this piece, for instance, one user—who I messaged through Instagram Direct—shot back, “I don’t know u.”
Fair enough. Theoretically, no one knows anyone on the internet, which is a wasteland of unaccountability that’s helped birth a nation of anonymous Beyoncé fans who’ve earned a reputation as the most aggressive fan base (some say bullies) out there.
An abridged list of past subjects of Beyhive rage—through an attack strategy familiar to many as “dragging”—includes Amber Rose (targeted for asking why Beyoncé doesn’t get called a slut), Rita Ora (for getting too physically close to Jay Z in a photo), Keyshia Cole (for criticizing Beyoncé’s single “Bow Down”), Kid Rock (for having the audacity to imply Beyoncé isn’t an icon), Keri Hilson (for dissing Beyoncé in a song and then shading her in a red carpet interview), TLC’s Chilli (for jokingly banning the terms “Bey, B or Queen Bey”) and Karrueche (for making a crack about Blue Ivy’s hair on TV). More recently, they went after Rachel Roy’s daughter Ava Dash, just for being Rachel Roy’s daughter.
The Beyhive is everywhere, but since Instagram is the main source of the latest attacks—and since Instagram’s messaging option is less restrictive than Twitter’s—I set my sights there.
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