The Honey Bees’ Secret to Shared Prosperity

Once upon a time (in college), I happened upon a tree scarred with a jagged hole. When I first neared the tree, I noticed both a hypnotic hum and a heavenly sweet scent emanating from it. For a time, I made a nearly weekly pilgrimage to this natural altar. My trips were always under cover of darkness. And they were almost always accompanied. Week after week, I’d bring a soon-to-be-bee-worshipper friend and baptize them in the saccharin waves.

My friends had been dragged from debaucherous collegiate bacchanalias by a giddy mischievous satryress. I never gave them any hints about what to expect at the end of the dark circuitous paths through the quad. Yet they came along without much fuss. And they were never disappointed when we arrived, for nested within the hollow cavity of this consecrated tree was a feral honey bee colony. Looking back, I marvel at the fact that Bacchus/Dionysus, the GrecoRoman god of wine and parties, also happens to be God of the Swarm. As it turns out, these strange late night sojourns were a fitting break from our sophomoric festivities.

But still, I often wonder, what was so mesmerizing about the fuzzy, little, sweet-smelling, musical, vibrating bodies that rang through the noise and left us both rapt and mollified?

Certainly, the sensory experience must have had something to do with it. But maybe there is something deeper? Some soft suspicion that we have a lot to learn from them. A strong sense that they know something we don’t. An inclination that they possess senses and abilities – magic – presently beyond our own relatively advanced capabilities.

My curiosity for questions like these led me from one bee endeavor to the next, even creating  opportunities to learn about honey bees where there were none: founding the first beekeeping club at my college, commuting across the North Carolina Triangle to conduct honey bee research at another institution altogether, and finally, moving across the country to California to study honey bees in graduate school. The study of honey bees for me was where biology, and sociology began to overlap in really enchanting ways. In fact, eminent insect researchers and academic relatives, E.O. Wilson and his protege Thomas Seeley (both of whom I admired tremendously), are not entomologists. Rather, they are socio- and neurobiologists. 

Now, I still find the lessons of the bees illuminating, the analogies powerful, and the icebreaking fruit low-hanging. One of the facts that I liked to lead with about honey bees is that they “festoon.” This term makes people (myself included) chuckle – and while I know that’s what humans labeled the behavior, the word somehow feels especially correct. Festooning is when many worker bees string themselves together, hand over hand, like monkeys in a barrel. We can’t know all the secrets of the bees, but entomologists have no shortage of theories as to why they do this. Some suggest that the purpose of festooning is to measure and calculate the volume of a space and to subsequently fill the space with wax comb. Imagine that: the bees turn their bodies into measuring tape so that they can work together more effectively, so they can build their homes and raise the next generation. There is something to envy about festooning.

Honey bees are one of many species that are considered eusocial. If we examine the ancient roots of this word, we find the Greek eu, meaning good, or true, and the Latin socius, allied, friend. So, they are truly social. Despite its relative rarity, eusociality is a trait that has arisen, evolved, independently many, many times, in a diverse range of species: naked mole rats, crustaceans, and 8-11 times in the Hymenopteran order alone, including in termites, ants, bees, and wasps – it’s something that works, because it keeps happening. 

All species fall somewhere on the spectrum from totally solitary to eusocial. 

Sticking to bees (my area of expertise), species are stratified as follows (with more or less resolution in number of divisions, depending on who you ask):

1. Solitary (e.g. mason bees)

2. Aggregate (e.g. Dawson’s burrowing bee)

3. Communal (e.g. Texas striped sweat bee)

4. Semi-Social (e.g. Eastern carpenter bee)

5. Primitively Eusocial (e.g. bumblebees) 

6. Eusocial (e.g. honey bees)

This spectrum can give us insight into how the strategy of eusociality evolves, in slow step-wise fashion. Several solitary bees might happen to begin nesting near one another (aggregating) by chance, or in response to some feature of the environment – say, a water source, a lee from wind, whatever it may be. If this poses some advantage to the bees that nested closer together as opposed to those that were more spread out, the next generation will have more of these aggregating bees. Over time, some groups of bees may continue inching further down the gradient toward eusociality. Up to a point, this is relatively simple to understand, but eusociality also comes at a great cost to the individual. In fact, it is wholly contrary to the common narrative of “survival of the fittest.” After a certain degree of aggregation – of socialization – cooperation begins to be more effective than competition.

E.O. Wilson said eusocial individuals coalesce into “superorganisms, the next level of biological complexity above that of organisms.” Ecologically, the functional organism is the entire colony, not single, individual bees. I like to think of it like individual bees being similar to the cells that make up your body. Like bees, individual cells are technically alive, and can sometimes even go on living without the rest of the body in unique circumstances, for limited times. In the human body, there is a normal, frequent turnover of cells. In a hive, bees also turnover regularly, with individual honey bees typically living for only about 6 weeks in the summer. When individual cells or bees die, the (super)organism goes on living. When you exfoliate your face to clear dead skin cells, you do not die; indeed, your skin health may have improved. Likewise, when a moderate number of bees die and are removed from the hive, the hive does not collapse; indeed, its health may have improved. 

Evolutionary and socio-biologists, and entomologists have a tidy list of qualifying behaviors for a species to be considered truly eusocial in a strictly scientific sense.The general traits of insects (and indeed, exhibited by honey bees) required to be considered eusocial are outlined below. 

1. Adults live together.

2. Have overlapping generations (mothers, daughters all live together), as opposed to the lower levels of sociality wherein the mother usually dies before her offspring hatch.

3. There is cooperative division of labor and brood care – the worker bees do most of the work of raising the larvae and advance through different in-hive tasks as they age.

4. There is reproductive division of labor – the queen lays all the eggs while the workers are sterile and do not mate or have offspring.

5. They are perennial, meaning that a single colony can survive for multiple years (as can individual queen bees).

A more general definition, beyond just insects, was given by Wilson in 1971, paraphrased by Nicola Plowes in Nature Education: “adults live in groups, cooperative care of juveniles (individuals care for brood that is not their own), reproductive division of labor (not all individuals get to reproduce), and overlap of generations.”

So, essentially, individual bees give up the “right” to reproduce on their own, in favor of taking care of their sisters. Why would they do this? At what point evolutionarily, does the balance tilt from semi-social or primitive eusociality and competition to cooperation and eusociality?

The answer lies in the theory of kin-selection and biological altruistic behavior. If traits are selected for (increased in the population) by reproducing, the more offspring an organism has, the more “fit” that individual is – the traits that allowed it to survive and produce those offspring were advantageous under those conditions, as opposed to the traits of some other individual in the species that produced fewer offspring. However, take for example a brother and sister pair. Each can have their own children and be considered evolutionarily fit, or if the brother instead puts his effort into helping raise the offspring of his sister, his nieces and nephews, his genetic information is still being passed on, since he shares half his DNA with his sister. He would be more related to his own children than his nieces and nephews, but if by having his help in raising her children, his sister has more children than he would have otherwise had himself, he still “wins” evolutionarily, in the total amount of his genes that survive to the next generation (And there is a formula that is used by biologists to calculate just how many nieces and nephews, or cousins, etc. it would take for it to be worth it to give up personal reproduction). This is known as kin selection, and his behavior to help his sister raise her children rather than focusing on his own reproduction is known as altruism. It is not a purely selfless act, though, because ultimately he still benefits more than if he had been selfish. We have no evidence or reason to believe that animals do this kind of genetic calculus when choosing to rear young, but evolution works on a grand statistical level – the ones that happen to choose this path will become more represented in the next generation’s gene pool. 

So, when an intergenerational family of social bees or mammals are all living together and raising young in a communal setting, at a certain point, it may become advantageous to forego reproducing oneself and instead care for a single, related sister or mother queen to produce multitudes of offspring at once, which is exactly the case with honey bees and naked mole rats. If this goes on long enough, they may lose the physiological ability to reproduce altogether. Once the superorganism is established, reproduction may be considered at a colony-level – when a bee hive swarms, it splits in half, almost like the asexual division of a cell. 

We may also consider perhaps a bit less categorically, and a bit more metaphorically, the true, deep co-evolutionary ecological relationship between bees (and other pollinators), flowers, and the ecosystems they both comprise, as being eusocial. They, in caring for themselves individually, at a colony level, and an ecosystem level, also steward a rippling longevity. 

Back to the ecclesiastical imagery – while honey bees process sweet nectar they diligently collect from flowers into honey,  ambrosia (the elixir of life and the other food of the gods) has its etymological roots in the Greek word ambrotos, meaning “immortal.” It seems fitting that these perennial, overlapping generations, which make up a sort of immortal superorganism (if all goes well) would be represented by St. Ambrose, the Catholic patron saint of beekeepers. As such, eusociality, true kinship, taking care of each other selfishly/selflessly, for the greater good, is the key to lasting, resilient, even immortal existence of a being, of a species. Is this the secret wisdom that we humans sense or crave? 

We may not all, as a species, come together into some enormous global conglomerate – and I am certainly not arguing that we can or should. Rather, I’m aligned with Gavin Van Horn’s observation (in the introduction to the moving Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations series): “Given the place-based circumstances of human evolution and culture, global consciousness may be too broad a scale of care for us.” Van Horn goes on to rhetorically wonder: “To what extent does crafting a deeper connection with Earth’s bioregions reinvigorate a sense of kinship with place-based beings, systems, and communities that mutually shape one another?” Bees, both solitary and social, have literally shaped and been shaped by the vibrancy of colors and scents of the landscape.To satisfy and attract  bees’ vision and olfaction, many plants created evermore unique and luscious flowers, ensuring successful pollination and creating stunning landscapes. Within different bioregions, successful relations between families of bees and the plants they pollinate have begotten a breathtaking diversity of life, beauty and resilience. In fact, the ways that bees interact within their hives and among different hive groupings on the landscape can teach us how caring fully for your group – and allowing those of other groups to fully care for theirs (i.e. staying in your lane) – creates stable, vitalic stewards of those very bioregions upon which the co-existing groups depend. The innumerable discrete hives of bees the world over do not come together into a global plague-like swarm. Rather, many separate colonies exist together in each geographical area where other groups of non-solitary bees are present. Within each hive, the bees form an interdependent community characterized by enduring care, eusocial altruism, sustained, intimate, reciprocal relationship with each other and the land.This may be the future of humanity, of our survival, and our prosperity.  

Moves toward greater sociality, embrace of our interdependence, and more frequent expressions of altruism in human communities need not and probably ought not lead us to model ourselves too tightly on bees – who seem to give up entirely on solitude and individual expression as they move up the spectrum toward eusociality. We need not inhabit the metaphor entirely or deny our beautiful tendencies toward individual expression – instead, we might rebalance and relink the individual and the social, recognizing that, as bell hooks observed in All About Love, “Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” After all, even eusocial bees evolved from solitary ones. 

If we consider the scientific criteria for a species to be deemed eusocial, some (including E.O. Wilson) might already see some of these traits in our own species, in our own communities. Whether or not we are eusocial yet (or once upon a time, in another system, were), the capacity is clearly there. Either through the slow process of evolution, or better yet, through the power of our own choices and collective social engineering, we could become eusocial – and doing so might be just the thing to pull humans back from the brink.

St. Ambrose knows, we need it at a time like this.