I also see it when people talk about drones vs workers vs Queen in a hive.
All of the other bees really are effectively arms of the Queen. The Queen lives 1-3years before another queen takes over, while the rest of the bees live 7 weeks. She mates once, but her drones are just a bunch of flying sexual organs than can mate with multiple outside queens several seasons each year. She can sting multiple times (to kill potential queen cells), while workers die after they sting, and drones have none.
If the workers don't follow her guidance they will be left behind when the hive swarms, or fail to heat/cool the hive allowing the larvae and the hive to survive and continue. Some fraction may not go through the normal cycle, but it can't be many.
You're forgetting the part where the queen is never alone, being prodded along by workers to continue laying eggs at an acceptable pace. When the hive (not the queen!) decides it's time to swarm, they'll force the queen to move more briskly in the hope she loses some weight and the second flight of her life can go more than a few meters. If the queen isn't up to the task the workers will go to some existing brood comb and give the larvae some "royal" jelly to get a replacement. As soon as one spawns the other infantile queens are slaughtered.
The entire reason we get the language of queen/worker/drone is because Europeans saw a complex ordered system and projected their own hierarchy on it. A "queen" bee never issues commands. She's only good for laying more larvae and even if she were to die suddenly the only issue is finding some immature larvae already in the hive to feed "royal" jelly. They don't decide when or where to swarm, and are basically carried by the mass of bees "escorting" them to their new home.
Yes, the queen is the reproductive source of the hive and losing a queen can really mess everything up depending on the timing. To say that all the other bees are simply "arms of the queen" is incredibly reductive though. She can be replaced at any time, and often is as she ages. The "productivity" curve rapidly decreases after the first or second year of life. It's not uncommon for commercial beekeepers to replace a queen every 2 years, and the worker bees aren't much more forgiving when it comes to her performance.
Small aside, it's only in summer that workers live ~7 weeks. They live 150-200 days in the winter. The labor they provide is incredibly metabolically taxing, in comparison with eating and giving birth all day every day.
> Some fraction may not go through the normal cycle, but it can't be many.
Maybe it is because I just saw an animated video on cancer (I’ll find the link when I get home) on YouTube but then so are we thinking of a bee hive as one individual? Like in the video, they talk about how cancer cells refuse to die when something bad happens like they are supposed to…
So this is going to sound cheesy but now I have to wonder, could you zoom out on humans as well? On earth? Are what we call “living beings” what we would call “malignant cells” or at best mutations?
Certain insect colonies typically make good "individual" analogues due to certain roles being infertile and so the genetic lineage actually working in units that are larger than a single bee.
If you think about it, the way we define an individual is a bit blurry anyway - think of those plants and creatures which produce more "individuals" by letting pieces break off and float down the river to take root elsewhere, or reproduce asexually to produce clones. Aphids, for example, on the same plant are commonly clones.
So you can cling tight to the individual as being the thing that is delineated by a mixing of genes in sexual reproduction and have things still make some sense. But if you let that slide and zoom out then indeed life as we know it is just one branching, breaking, mutating organism.
The Earth ecosystem is made of living beings. Why would they be compared to cancer cells? It sounds more reasonable to me to compare them to worker bees.
Cancer cells are essentially a new parasitic life form living inside of you. It is born from you but it is not you. It decided to play by its own rules and pursue its own goals, ignoring the signals that makes the host body functional. Often, it is attacked by the host body immune system like other intruders and it has to defend itself. Some cancer cell lines HeLa have well outlived their host and are used in scientific research.
Worker bees die when they sting mammals because mammal skin retains the barbed stinger tip. However, workers are not inherently one-shot stingers in all cases.
And mammal skin retains the stinger because the barbs were evolved for that purpose, so that venom glands continue to drive venom into the stung animal.
The bees don’t always die when they sting, they sometimes don’t get it lodged and can attack again.
Top tip, wearing a bee suit will help with this, but it’s so damn hot, so if the stings are relatively few, just taking the hit is preferable.
Be more gentle and it’s the best of both worlds - cool and venomless.
I also see it when people talk about drones vs workers vs Queen in a hive. All of the other bees really are effectively arms of the Queen. The Queen lives 1-3years before another queen takes over, while the rest of the bees live 7 weeks. She mates once, but her drones are just a bunch of flying sexual organs than can mate with multiple outside queens several seasons each year. She can sting multiple times (to kill potential queen cells), while workers die after they sting, and drones have none.
If the workers don't follow her guidance they will be left behind when the hive swarms, or fail to heat/cool the hive allowing the larvae and the hive to survive and continue. Some fraction may not go through the normal cycle, but it can't be many.