Sons of Bees - American Entomologist

Sons of Bees
May Berenbaum
212
three helpful tips (basically,document everything, respond publicly when disrespected
and feel bad for the Queen Bee because she's
probably a sad person with a lot of issues).
I'm not sure how useful this advice actually is, and I wonder about the power of the
metaphor because the article is illustrated by
a photograph labeled "The Queen Bee"that is
clearly and unmistakably a yellowjacket.
It's certainly true that each honey bee
colony has only one queen and that newly
emerged queens aren't very nice to their
sisters (seeking them out prior to eclosion
and stinging them to death), but otherwise
queen bee analogies biologically fall a bit
short. Although she exerts a great deal of
influence over other royals, the queen bee's
authority over her ostensible subjects is
severely limited. Once she establishes her
preeminence in the hive, she flies offto mate
(a process that involves being pursued by
and coupling with numerous drones) and
then she returns, no longer a virgin, to live
out the remaining years of her life in the hive
laying eggs and doing little else. She is tended
continuously by a retinue of workers who ply
her with food, groom her, and push and prod
her to meet the needs of the hive. Not only
does she have absolutely no privacy,were her
retinue to abandon her she'd most likely die
for want of any capacity to fend for herself.
At least the workers get to fly out of the hive
and check out the scenery on occasion-the
queen doesn't see much beyond empty wax
cells awaiting her eggs. Any breakdown in
the production line-by virtue of exhaustion, boredom, or old age-invites a process
called supersedure, whereby workers raise
a new queen and then dispatch the old one
by clustering around her, generating body
heat, and cooking her to death (a process
colorfully described as "balling the queen"
or "cuddle death").
Whatever misconceptions still remain
about the role of the queen in the beehive
are at least not as egregious as they have
been historically. The concept of male
domination over females is so deeply ingrained in western culture that centuries
passed during which, despite all evidence
to the contrary, male scientists for centuries
insisted that honey bee colonies are ruled
over by males, as were most human societies
at the time. To think otherwise, according
to Prete (1991) necessitated challenging
"the very idea of an orderly universe" and,
starting in the sixteenth century, authors of
scholarly beekeeping texts had to go through
extraordinary contortions to ignore gathering evidence of the queen's femininity. In his
1607 History of Beasts, Topsell recognized
that male bees lack stingers and do no apparent work in the hive; to reconcile the facts
with his desire to hold up bees as a model
for idealized (British) society, his tortuous
explanation was that
"The prince of philosophers confoundeth
the sexe of Bees, but the greatest company of learned Writers do distinguish
them: whereof they make the feminine
sort to be the greater. Others again will
have them the lesser with a sting: but
the sounder sort (in my judgment) will
neither know nor acknowledge any
other males but their Dukes and Princes,
who are more able & handsome, greater
and stronger than any of the rest, who
stay ever at home ...as those whom nature pointed out to be the fittest to be
American Entomologist.
Winter 2009
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Q
ueen bees of the metaphorical sort
have been much in the news oflate.
Searching "Google News" with the
term "queen bee" produces far more hits
relating to television programs about teenage girls than to anything apicultural. The
term has gained popularity in recent years
as a name for adolescent girls that use their
popularity ruthlessly to disenfranchise or
shut out other girls who have in some way
incurred their wrath (Wiseman 2002). Thus,
E Online, premier Internet destination for
gossip relating to the entertainment world,
describes actress Leighton Meester (in a
snarky article about her fashion faux pas)
as "Gossip Girl's resident queen bee, Blair
Waldorf" (http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b 15432 7jashion_policeJeighton_
meester Josesjt.html). Gossip Girl,of course,
is a television series relating the fictional
adventures of wealthy teenagers attending
an elite high school on Manhattan's Upper
East Side. The implication of the metaphor
is that the teen queen bee has absolute
power over her subjects, presumably of the
sort that honey bee queens exert over the
30,000 to 50,000 workers in the typical Apis
mellifera colony.
Psychologists have found the queen bee
metaphor useful in other contexts as well.
In 1973, the term "queen bee syndrome"
(Staines et al. 1973) was coined to describe
women who achieved success in a predominantly male work force by basically turning
against other women, a negative stereotype
that has subsequently not been validated.
Notwithstanding the absence of evidence
that such a syndrome exists, the metaphor
persists. The eHowwebsite ("How ToDoJust
About Everything") has a page on "How to
AvoidFallingVictim to Queen Bee Syndrome"
(http://www.ehow.com/howA862104jalling-victim-queen-bee-syndrome.html) with
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Volume55, Number 4
protagonist; and most recently, the featured
bee in The Bee Movie, although possessing
a potentially androgynous name (Barry B.
Benson), is voiced by the decidedly male Jerry
Seinfeld and is smitten by a clearly female
human (although interspecific sexual preference is difficult to analyze). The Pollen Jocks,
the foragers in Barry B. Benson's home hive,
are also clearly male, despite the fact that all
foragers in any real beehive are female.
As for bee gender in advertising, little
progress has been made in the past halfcentury. Spokes-bees ranging from the
Wheat Honey's Buffalo Bee of the 1950s to
the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee of the present
day are unmistakably male. Although they
don't sport facial hair, their voices are male
and they dress like guys (even down to the
pointy cowboy boots in the case of Buffalo
Bee). Antonio Banderas, about as masculine
as any man alive today, voices the spokes-bee
for Nasonex, a preparation for treating allergies. The Nasonex bee is apparently the most
long-lived drug brandname icon/character
in history (http://pharmamkting.blogspot.
com/2 009/06 /nasonex- bee- may-usherin-whole-new-way.html),
having survived
a scandal a few years ago when Ruth Day
of Duke University's Medical Cognition
Laboratory testified at a Food and Drug
Administration hearing that during commercials the Nasonex bee flutters its wings
faster while the voiceover describes side
effect information than when benefits are
described, thereby distracting viewers and
reducing their ability to remember negative information (http://pharmamkting.
blogspot.com/2008 /05 /ruth-day-and-beesrepeat -performance-at.html).
Although bee advertising icons appear
to be exceptionally effective and durable,
they shouldn't be. Selling honey-related
products with boy bees makes no biological
sense-male
bees have nothing to do with
honey except to eat it when it is handed to
them by a female worker. A male bee has
nothing to do with carrying pollen around,
either, Antonio Banderas notwithstanding
(or, for that matter, notwithstanding
the
fact that pollen that causes allergies is most
likely not even from bee-pollinated plants).
All male bees can do is inseminate the queen,
and once that's done, they die (by virtue of
the fact that their genitalia, firmly lodged in
the queen's bursa copulatrix, tear off once
the act is complete, leaving them to flyaway
missing many essential internal organs).
But maybe there are limits to how much
reality Americans can take. According to an
article in Fortune Small Business Magazine
(Adler 2006), when Buzz the Honey Nut
Cheerios bee was redrawn after 25 years
to cut down on the anthropomorphism
and
make him more bee-like, the cereal leaped
in U.S. sales from the No.5 cereal to No.2.
The slogans changed accordingly, as well,
shifting the emphasis from tempting tummies to more the bee-appropriate "The Hive
That's Nuts About Honey." At least it's a shift
in the right direction as far as bee gender
goes-after
all, drones are found in hives,
so at least there's the germ of truth there.
As for whether more realism would be a
benefit, I can't see animated depictions of
sexual suicide moving Honey Nut Cheerios
to Number 1 any time soon.
•••••
References
Adler, c., 2006. Mascot makeover. Forbes
Small Business Magazine 16: http://
money.cnn.com/magazines
Ifs b Ifs b_archive12006 110101/8387296 lindex.htm
Mavin, S., 2008. Queen Bees, Wannabees and
Afraid to Bees: No More 'Best Enemies' for
Women in Management? British Journal of
Management 19 (s1), S75-S84.
Prete, F. 1991. Can females rule the hive? The
controversy over honey bee gender roles in
British beekeeping texts of the sixteentheighteenth centuries. Journal of the History
of Biology 24: 113-144.
Staines, G., C. Travis, and T.E. Jayerante.
(1973). "The queen bee syndrome," Psychology Today 7 (8): 55-60.
Topsell, E., 1658 (reprinted 1967). History of
Four-footed Beasts. London: Da Capo Press.
Wiseman R.,2002. Queen Bees and Wannabes:
Helping YourDaughter Survive Cliques,Gossip, Boyfriends,and Other RealitiesofAdolescence. New York:Three Rivers Press.
Postscript: This essay derives in part from the
chapter "Queen Bees,"in my book The Earwig's
Tail: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-legged Legends,
published by Harvard University Press. Most of
the essays in the book are in turn derived from
past "Buzzwords" columns. As of this writing,
The Earwig's Tail ranks 33'd on Amazon.com's
list oftop-selling books on invertebrates, three
positions below Atlas of Marine Invertebrate
Larvae by C.M.Young, M.A. Sewell, and M.E.
Rice, and 12 positions above F.Harvey Pough's
Vertebrate Life (7th Edition), a book that, given its
title, is doingsurprisingly well onthe invertebrate
best-seller list.
May Berenbaum is a professor and head of the Department of Entomology,
University of Illinois, 320
Morrill Hall, 505 South
Goodwin Avenue, Urbana,
IL 61801. Currently, she is
studying the chemical aspects ofinteraction between herbivorous insects
and their hosts.
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stander-bearers ...and ever to be ready
at the elbows of their loves to do them
right ....If any Souldier looseth his sting
in fight, like one that had his Sword or
Spear taken from him, he is presently
discouraged and dispaireth, not living
long, through extreamity of griefe. Bees
are governed and doe live under a Monarchy...admitting and receiving their King...
by respective advise, considerate judgement, and a prudent election."
Charles Butler's careful dissections and
authoritative
descriptions
of honey bee
biology in his 1612 book The Feminine
Monarchie should have incontrovertibly
resolved any gender confusion ("But heer' is
bot' Reason and Sens consenting, doo plainly
proov' ...dat bot' de Princ' and hir armed
subjects are Shees ...Bees or breeders as
deir leaders: and again, Bee's ...ar femal's"),
but many contemporaries were reluctant to
abandon their idealized views of society, irrespective ofleg number. In Theatre o/Political Flying Insects, a collection of300 sermons
assembled by the Reverend Samuel Purchas
in 1657 as a handbook both for beekeeping
and clean living, references to the life of bees
abound. Although he admitted that "Though
a king in place and power ...[the monarch]
is in sex a female;' he nonetheless refers to
the queen as "he" (or, to be more accurate,
"hee"): "Bees ...[live] under one commander
who is not an elected Governor...nor hath
hee his power by lot...nor is hee by hereditary succession placed in the throne ...but
by Nature hath bee the SOVEREIGNTYover
all, excelling all in goodliness and goodness,
and mildness, and majesty." He even went
so far as to suggest that the "queen" "injects
a spermatical substance thick like cream"
into the wax cells in which future queens
are developing.
Even today, people just can't seem to
accept the idea that females contribute significantly to meeting the various and sundry
non-reproductive demands of civilized life.
Among the worst offenders in bee genderstereotyping today are animators and advertisers. In cartoons, bees who aren't clearly
identified as a queen (usually by wearing a
crown and sporting slightly longer eyelashes)
are almost invariably depicted as male. A
series of Disney cartoons released between
1940 and 1952 depicts Donald Duck facing off
against an arch-nemesis bee variously called
by such non-feminine names as Spike, Hector,
and Claudius; Pixar's Andre and Wally-Bee
(the first digitally animated short film with
a plot) features yet another clearly male bee