oloriel | Dystopia mellifera (Reply)

Bees. Let's talk about bees. (Let us not, my friends, forget our friends the scuttlefish.)

Bees are weird. Bees are so mindbogglingly weird that their weirdness can be exploited for sci fi, dystopian or fantasy novel purposes, because the normal human brain wouldn't easily come up with the natural weirdness of bees.

Bees, as you probably know, basically have three sexes: Queen, worker and drone. A drone grows out of an unfertilised egg and is good only for eating and, um, handing the hive's genetic material to the queen of some other hive (I did mention the misandrist jokes?). After sex, they die*. A worker grows out of a fertilised egg and has basically the same potential of a queen, but as they're fed inferior (normal) food (=pollen), they're underdeveloped. They do all the work. The queen is fed gelée royale, which makes her develop ovaries and a bladder for storing seed, because she only goes flying out ONCE for a wild orgy, keeps all the seed she gets there, and over the course of the next two years, her natural lifespan, pops out eggs which she either chooses to fertilise with one of the sperms she got - in which case it grows to be a worker - or not - in which case it grows to be a drone. Other than that, the queen just sits around, eats, and makes her people happy by smelling of Queen.

This in itself is weird enough. Try translating this into human terms. Madness ensues.

Now of course, accidents can happen. Clumsy beekeepers, hard winters, birds interrupting the orgy, pesticides, all sorts of desasters may slay a queen. So there are backup plans.
For example, every fertilised egg can be turned into a queen during the first three days of its larvae state. If a worker larva is suddenly put on a diet of gelée royale, the Good Stuff, it grows into a queen. New boss, same game, the hive goes on.

But sometimes this doesn't work out. If the queen disappears in late fall or winter, for example, when there is no more breeding going on, there are no larvae to turn into queens. Or perhaps the bees have no way of producing the Good Stuff. At any rate, the queen is dead. There's no more queen smell in the hive, and the workers "know" they're unable to make a new queen. The hive is doomed.
Mother Nature (who is a bitch bedded on a mattress of corpses) doesn't give a damn about the hive (bees don't have a long life expectancy anyway, only the collective is potentially immortal). Nature only cares on a genetic level.
So what happens to the doomed hive?

Welllll.
A couple of weeks after the queen has stopped smelling alive and queen-ly, another backup program kicks in: The lack of queen-drug makes ovaries of some of the workers develop fully.
This is of little help, as they can neither leave the hive for long flights (it is, remember, winter) nor would they meet drones. They don't have a sperm bladder, just a honey bladder. They have working ovaries now, but they will not get sex. The hive will still die. Winter bees live longer than summer bees, but it's a matter of a few months. They can hope to stay alive until the cherries blossom, maybe, and then that's that.

But. Drones, you remember, do not require fertilised eggs. Male bees get both sets of chromosomes from their mother. Male bees are queen clones. Or, in this case, worker clones, because the workers (who have one chromosome from their mother, and the other from some drone far away) now start laying eggs and raising them. The hive is doomed, but at least its genetic material will continue.

Now beekeepers, who in March check on their hives and find the almost-empty hives, are wont to try and save the doomed people, because unlike Nature, humans tend to care on a personal level. One way of saving a very weak hive is adding it to a reasonably strong one.
If the hive is weak, however, because their queen is dead, this may well doom the strong hive as well. (In these days of varroa mites one shouldn't be too quick to do this anyway, because it may have been the varroa that killed the hive and you wouldn't implant the last few survivors who carry all the surviving mites into an as-yet healthy people, would you?)
Because after a few weeks of queenlessness, the workers not just develop ovaries: They also turn anti-royalist. They don't need no stinking queens. They can do what they want. They now have a sort of parliament consisting of those workers who can now lay eggs (I found no English term for that, alas; in German it's Drohnenmütterchen ("little drone mother") or Afterweisel ("after the queen")). They care for them and for the growing males, and stinking queens are just tyrants who sit around and want a lot of attention.
So when you add a new queen to this dying hive, or implant it into a different hive, first thing the republican worker bees do is go and behead the queen (with a hum of Liberty! Equality! Sorority! presumably). Afterwards they'll probably be killed, because the workers of that other hive are still high on the queen-drug and don't want to be liberated. But they had a moment of triumph! The queen is dead, and only if she's already laid some eggs can her hive breed a new one.

Fun and anarchy! And you thought the world order of Brave New World was exotic.

This was brought to you by Beekeeping For Beginners Part II: What To Do (And Not Do) in March. Did I mention that bees are awesome? Weird. But cool. But weird. But...

I need a bee icon.

PS: It is spring! Meteorologically, calendarically, phenologically! THE SKY IS GRAY BUT IT IS WARM AND THERE WILL BE FLOWERS. Eglerio! *dances in the meadows*

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*I have seen this in a 70s documentary and it looks hilarious. Bees fuck in flight, and you could see the male, who was one moment all enthusiastic, suddenly freeze in mid-flight - wings locked, front legs raised in jubilation - and slip backwards out of the queen and off her back, only to make room for the next drone WHO APPARENTLY DIDN'T GET WHAT JUST HAPPENED THERE.