The Ebb and Flow of Honeybee Governance

Here's hoping the bees can get their act together.

Nobody has ever accused me of being an expert in economics or modes of government, or really anything for that matter, but the best I can tell is that, with communism, everybody is miserable, but with capitalism at least 1% are filthy rich (and presumably happy)—and that gives the rest of us 99% hope that we could be the 1%. And hope is a wonderful thing. It could be a little misplaced in scratch off tickets or the dream of becoming filthy rich by beekeeping, but I’m a firm believer that hope is better than no hope.

Sometimes I wonder if honeybees hope. They do odd things from time to time, like sail over the horizon in October (strangely I caught a swarm a few weeks ago), that make it appear as if they are sometimes influenced by some sort of delusional hope, much like the pilgrims sailing over the horizon in hopes of a new society. What discontent must have been brewing in that hive for those bees to swarm in October, to take their chances on the hope that new environs would be more conducive for their happiness. It is not their genetic instinct to swarm in October. Maybe a rabble rousing and inspiring bee instilled hope in her sisters. Maybe they decided to pack up and go on a voyage to flee an oppressive and tyrannical system of governance.

People have often been curious about the governing structure of honeybees. Aristotle thought bees were a monarchy ruled by a king bee (fellow substacker Matt Phillpot at Honey Histories has some good posts on the king bee theory). Then other folks came along and said I’m pretty sure that the king bee just laid an egg, at which point, people believed that bees were a monarchy ruled by a queen (and that Aristotle should have stuck to metaphysics). Then Charles Darwin came along and pointed out that the queen is really just a figurehead used for breeding purposes, that the monarchy is just performative, kind of like the current British monarchy (though both get perks like a lot of royal jam and jelly). Darwin basically posited that, underneath the facade of monarchy, bees were communists at heart, made up of individuals who work for the good of the group, not for personal gain. Then Cornell Professor Tom Seeley came along a few years ago and posited that, underneath the facade of monarchy and underneath the sub-facade of communism, bees are actually red-bloodied, freedom loving bugs who prefer democratic self-governance. You’re darn tootin’.

But who the heck really knows. My theory is that bees’ form of government ebbs and flows over time. Maybe at the time when Aristotle was writing about king bees, the bees really were governed by a series of kings, many of which were named Henry, who turned out to be pretty murderous fellas, so they decided to let a couple of queens have a go at governing, only to find them slightly less murderous, so they tried a new system of government led by bolshevik bees, only to find that job opportunities were pretty limited in scope: you were either an abdomen-licking attendant bee to the Supreme Leader, a peasant worker bee, or a drone who got murdered in the winter. Then the bees experimented with democracy for about 250 years, only to find its great strength—hope—was also its ultimate downfall. A huckster drone, peddling authoritarianism disguised as hope, coalesced a large following of bees, disillusioned by the price of eggs, to vote for him again, at which point he started doing a lot of fun authoritarian things, like rounding up non-native bees, deploying national guard bees on the citizenry, and accepting lots of untraceable foreign honey for meme crypto tokens.

Of course, this pretty much brings us to the present day, so time will only tell what happens next—but here’s hoping the bees can get their act together, before they go back to square one and replace hope and freedom with a system of oppressive and tyrannical king bees.

Is it an orange authoritarian? Time will only tell.