Just the Bees

Today I got some dope on bee-keeping. It is quite a profitable business apparently.

What got me thinking and I am wondering why I haven’t thought about it before, is how the bee colony behaves.

So there is one and only one queen, The Queen Bee and all she has to do is reproduce. The male bees, also known as the drone bees, they, well, assist. The worker bees, tens of thousands of them, as the moniker suggests are the ones that do all the work - they go out and get the nectar, they make it into honey by ingesting and regurgitating that nectar a thousand times and they look after the young larvae. They also protect the hive since they possess the sting.

What is strange are the group dynamics. So there can’t be two queen bees in a hive. If such a situation does develop, it will result in fighting and wide-spread destruction. While jealousy, ego-clashes and the like are quite the norm among humans, imagine bees behaving like such divas.

What is even more interesting is that the bee society is a matriarchal one. They worship the queen, because she gives birth. It is the highest calling. If she goes amiss, the hive disintegrates. They all pack-up and leave.

As an aside, the flowers give their nectar freely in exchange for some pollination.

This post has taken on a life of its own. Ideas are flying as I write. I am thinking, every other creature on earth is quite blatant and unashamed about the fact that the prime motive of their lives is to procreate, to spread the seeds of their species as far and as wide as possible. Humans are the only ones that look to the arts, philosophy, intellectual stimulation and love as being central to their existence. Humans are the only ones who search for a purpose and a calling and some higher plane. Then again, humans are the only ones that desecrate the process of procreation and dishonor the provenance of creation - the woman.