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Photo of a bee by Maciek Mono, CC BY-SA 3.0 |
And as you might expect, over the course of the winter, I learned a lot about bees. I learned about the different castes of bees--workers, drones and queens--as well as the varied roles of each. At different ages, worker bees have different responsibilities. Throughout a hive, bees also engage in complex communication. Beehives can become very large during the busy summer and fall - a hive may have 50-60,000 individual bees in it, but if the queen bee is killed or leaves, the entire hive will be aware in just a few hours. Bees can tell each other the location of good quality flowers, or incite each other to attack based upon different pheromones they release.
As I learn these different bits of knowledge, I'm continually reminded of science fiction. I'm struck by how closely the life-cycle, communication style, and social structure of the bee is mirrored in many representations of alien life.
What I find most interesting about this is that these works all show the bad aspects of the bee--the danger, the "hive mentality," the complete difference from a human's understanding of existence (if that's really a bad thing). And of course this makes sense-- I mean, who would make a movie about a bunch of aliens making honey?
But as a beekeeper, I kind of wish this weren't the case. Bees are hugely important, not only because of their own intrinsic worth as a species, but also to human life. Without the pollination that bees provide, our lives would be drastically different. But because bees are so foreign, so alien if you will--and because this is a difference that is played up by science fiction books, films, and video games--the perception of them is that they are dangerous, that they are a threat, and that they should be killed.
And of all the things that we could learn from bees, this is the one thing that is definitely not true.