Billy and the Bee
Ministerial Meandering
Billy the Bee (1)
“It doesn’t matter how hard you try, Billy,” his brothers and sisters all kept telling him, “you’ll never lay any eggs and you can’t be a queen. All that straining will only give you a hernia or a massive dump. Or both.”
It has taken Billy quite some time to begin to realise that there are only really three sorts of bees - queens, workers, and drones - and no matter how much he may want to one of the other ones - it just ain’t gonna happen.
Billy’s job is really quite easy - until it isn’t. They have only one purpose in life - to mate with a virgin queen bee. Well, that sounds pretty good! - you might think. Until I tell you that if they actually get to do that, it will kill them. Talk about going out ‘with a bang!’
Most of the time they just hang around the hive being given food and honey by their sister worker bees, and sleeping - sometimes snuggling up to the newly developing baby queens to act as temperature buffers - and perhaps nicking a bit of any spare Royal Jelly that might fall from the workers feeding the babies.
The problem comes around winter, when the workers get fed up with them hanging around having to feed them as well as the baby queens, and kick them out of the hive; that’s really bad news for Billy the drone, as he doesn’t have the wherewithal to forge or feed for himself, so he soon dies of starvation.
Now Billy knew he wasn’t actually PhD material, but he was no academic slouch, and he had been out of the hive enough times to look at the humans (who were planning on stealing the honey) and see how their society worked. And it didn’t seem to be too different. In ‘Bee World’, your sex and your future are determined at birth by Mum. In ‘Human World’, the same is almost certainly true - but the baby developing humans don’t seem to realise that. There seemed to be many who thought and wanted - like Billy - that they should be queens, and just wouldn’t accept that was never going to happen.
Humans seemed to think that they should be able to do whatever they wanted, take whatever they wanted, and live for ever. The idea of having only limited resources or intelligence never seemed to enter their rather limited minds.
Billy understood that he had one season to make the most of, and then it would be over, and if he could end it mating with a virgin queen - well, supernova!
Given the number of eggs the queen of the hive dropped every day (around 2,000), it was amazing that there wasn’t more waste - but if you’re a bee, you accept that 100 or so will never make it to see the outside world. The problem with humans, of course, is that their females only drop one egg per month, and 20 to 50% of those fertilised will have chromosomal abnormalities and miscarry. So humans are not so good at dealing with the natural wastage. It upsets them more. But if they were to spend a little time with the mathematics, they would realize that if all pregnancies ended in live births, there would be another 30 to 45 million people on the earth every year. So quite a lot of those would have to be kicked out of the hive, as there wouldn’t be enough honey or Royal Jelly for all of them.
So how do you choose? For Billy, it wasn’t difficult - his genetics dictated his role in the hive and in the world - but for humans, all trying to be queen bees, there were lots of hernias and piles of poo around.
Billy would have to talk to them…
Philip+