Yeah, I know my post above was about naked mole rats and not about bees, but my intent was to lead into an investigation of the communal systems of higher animals (especially mankind) and the social insects (especially bees), but I got called away for a night and a day.
So anyway, back to bees.

The incident of male genetic homosexuality in we Homo sapiens is only about one out of a hundred. In as much as this ratio has persisted for a lengthy time it is not hard to assume a worthwhile social function for this otherwise dead end trait. Honeybees, on the other hand, find that one male to two thousand females is a ratio that works.

And "work" is the working proposition, i.e. 99.9% of the bees in a beehive are workers and all workers are female. Only thirty or so males out of a hive population of sixty thousand are needed to insure the genetic diversity necessary for the health and continuance of the hive which, in a sense, can be said to be immortal.

Very clever is the hive, the female bees are pre-conditioned to perform a succession of specialized chores for the good of the commonweal throughout their interesting, but relatively short, life.

As follows from The Little Book of Bees...

"As soon as the worker leaves her cell, she is bound into the multifaceted work of the colony. She hardly has time to arrange herself before she begins a three-week-stint of internal service which begins with the cleaning of the empty brood cells, readying them for a new generation. After that she feeds older larvae pollen and honey.

Once she has consumed a lot of pollen herself and developed glands to produce liquid food, she provisions young larvae with the nutritious brood milk.
Meanwhile she also becomes part of the Queen's court and gets to clean up and groom the Queen and defend the hive against invaders.

About eight days after emerging from her cocoon, the young worker bee takes nectar from returning collecting bees and passes it on to other hive bees...after twenty-one days worker bees themselves become collectors. From then on their sole job is to import honey and pollen into the hive and carry in, if necessary, hive building resin and water."


What with universal communication and testube genetic engineering the way of the bees might be the comming wave of the future for mansounkind.

Goodnight.