Honey Bees
Honey Bees workers are all female, and they have a natural interest in sexual reproduction. To maintain the stability of the hive, the Queen secretes a pheremone that literally makes them uninterested in mating. Not only that, but any newly hatched queen will immediately kill any other queens, and destroy any queens that have not hatched.The average honey bee lives for 6 weeks, and it spends nearly half of that time looking for work to do around the hive. Death is due to exhaustion, rather than a nautral process. They have a single stinger, which is connected to their... er, guts. The stinger is designed to disembowl them killing both themselves and harming their enemy, ensuring that there will be no voilent internal conflicts within the social order.
My question is this: Do Honey Bees represent the pinnacle of social evolution? They have effectivly controlled all aspects of reproduction, labor, food distribution, and defense. . .
posted by Chris W. @ 11:28 PM
