Billy the Bee 2

Ministerial Meandering

Billy the Bee 2.

Nature was wasteful - Billy could see that.  After all, there were plenty of drones in his hive, but only one was going to mate with the next queen.  The rest, well, they just died.  Lots of bees to do one job.  Still, it was the same for the girls; all the potential queens would be stung to death by the first to hatch, and then she would take off on her ‘maiden voyage’ to mate with the ‘lucky’ drone in mid-air, and eviscerate him at the end of their union, where upon he would drop dead to the ground, literally emptied of all he had bee(n).

But humans - Billy couldn’t fathom them.  They too had so much wastage - but such a lot of their wastage seemed unnecessary to him.  They were so often leaderless, or had leaders who were so obviously NOT leaders, and yet they were given power - and then had no idea how to use it because they were either stupid, or driven mad by the opportunity - or both.  And yet the hive still didn’t drive them out!

Then there were the lost ones - there seemed to be so many of those.  Humans with no idea what to do with their lives and absolutely no sense of purpose or direction.  Those were the ones he wanted to get into his hive and tell them what their meaning in life was supposed to be(e).  Hives may not have been the most varied of societies, but each bee knew his or her role - and did it to the best of their ability.  He felt both irritated and sad for the lost ones, because they wasted their lives and misbe(e)haved, eating up honey stores and Royal Jelly that was never for them in the first place.  When the current queen swarmed, they would be truly lost, never having found a reason for their lives.

Now Billy was no PhD, but he could see value in the idea of getting rid of waste before it built up and clogged the hive.  After all, that’s what the worker bees did when they were doing a clean-up on the hive, and they shoved all the excess drones out, where they would die - be(e)ing useless to fend for themselves.

The ideas of eugenics and euthanasia were, as terms, naturally unknown to Billy, but he knew that the topics caused great concern to humans - and he could see why they did.  After all, in his society, no defective bee ever became adult, and was instantly shunted out with the trash before it ever buzzed.  And the older bees just simply stopped being fed or feeding themselves.  The trouble with humans was that they seemed to want to keep both ends of their respective lives going for as long as they could.  That caused huge ethical problems for humans, and they held long, agonised debates on the topics - and never came to any useful conclusions.  The result was that they needed more and more ’special’ hives, just to look after the bees who needed extra attention.  It probably would have been all right if they hadn’t been so successful at doing it, because now there were more and more especially elderly bees who had become more like baby pupa again.  And there just weren’t enough hives.

Billy wasn’t sure what the answer for his humans might be(e).  Perhaps he would have to talk to his queen…

Philip+