I've always found the way that bees and ants organize their colonies really fascinating (and also really, really frightening). One hive might have thousands and thousands of bees, and yet they're able to organize their population, divvy up responsibilities, and build really intricate structures and keep everything running scary efficiently. That's why I was initially drawn to "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees"- it explored that hivemind quality of bees in a really interesting way.
I don't know much about bee slavery, but ants totally do that kind of thing all the time. They've also been known to spread all over the planet and kill whatever ants happened to be there before. When hivemind species like ants and bees work as an army, they do things like take slaves, kill native populations, and set up guards for their new colony that we think of as human, intelligent behaviors. When reading "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees", it seems almost comical to think of bees having ambassadors, scientists, and teachers, because an individual bee is essentially brainless- but as a hive they act like a human society with all of these complex roles.
I know I've posted about EO Wilson before, so at the risk of being redundant:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/books/edward-o-wilsons-new-book-social-conquest-of-earth.html?pagewanted=all
It's an article on a book EO Wilson wrote documenting the evolution of this sort of eusociality in ants and other such colonies, and how it can be related to Human evolution as well.
As someone who used to raise bees for honey, I absolutely adore them. I always deeply associated their behavior with human activity. Whether we like it or not, their is a hierarchy with the same goal in mind: the continuation and thriving of our species. There are different types of bees (as their are humans) and most of them will go to any lengths to achieve these goals. When I was reading the story, I actually forgot about the story being about bees, and went back to the beginning to understand the setting.
ReplyDeleteI think it is funny yet accurate to give the bees so much personification in "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees." I found it extremely interesting to read about bees and what their societies are like. It is interesting that bees have a low intelligence level, yet the can still have human like functions.
ReplyDeleteOkay, wasps are my second biggest fear of all time (first being sharks). If you ever catch me walking on campus and a wasp happens across my path, I will freak out. It's embarrassing. So upon reading this story, I was not surprised at all to find the wasps to be somewhat evil. Their imperialist nature and the cruel way in which they dealt with the diplomats from the bee hive went along perfectly with my idea of the nature of wasps.
ReplyDelete"The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" is probably my favorite story from this first batch we had to read. I especially liked the personification of human governmental structures in the inherent nature of wasps and bees. The fact that Anarchists were "born" was really intriguing.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of bees passing down traits biologically may have a basis in reality. One study suggested that bees pass on their role in the hive (forager vs nurse, for example) via epigenetics, a type of inheritance that does not involve direct changes to the genes themselves, but rather how the genes are interpreted. The bees in the colony are genetically identical, but inheritable and also malleable chemical changes affect how those genes are expressed.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, this is also the means of inheritance described in "What We Found." One of the processes is methylation.
Hopefully somebody in our class will come along and correct all the errors in biological understanding I just made.