Bees have always intrigued me; they are more advanced versions of ants, who, in their own right, are no slouches as advanced life forms. As a colony, ants are capable of anything. They can conquer and consume animals thousands of time larger than any single ant. They need to cross a bridge? Make a bridge of ants. They want to find food? They send out hundreds of scouts and scour the surrounding square kilometre. Bees add to the hive-format civilization biologically based weaponry and flight. Think about humans with similar modifications!
Bees have the ability to create their own houses anywhere they please. They can make all their own food. They can go to war with neighboring colonies and deter or kill any intruder of any size. On a nature show once, I heard a fascinating story of survival in Japan. European honeybees were imported because their honey yield is twice that of the native honeybees. Also present is the Japanese Hornet, a three-inch long beast that can decapitate tens of thousands of honeybees in an hour. Of course, a few of these could decimate an entire colony if left unchecked. The Europeans were going about a Japanese Hornet invasion by lining up to attempt to sting it. In effect, they line up to die. Conversely, the Japanese honeybees have evolved an effective and elegant method of dealing with this terror. They wait until the Hornet enters the hive, and they all swarm onto it at once. They don’t sting, but vibrate rapidly to generate heat. Things get too steamy for the Hornet and it dies once the temperature exceeds 47 degrees Celsius; the defenders can survive to 52 degrees Celsius.
Bees have the ability to adapt to any natural stimulus and survive. This can be said of any animal still alive, but most creatures accomplish this by some simplistic mechanism. Lizards (Leopard Geckoes?), if faced with danger, detach their tail and run. The milk snake evolved to have bright colours so it appears poisonous. Cats evolved to have rough tongues for maximal grooming and water drinking. While these can be appreciated with the less-is-more mindset, I feel that the adaptations made by bees are much more complex and nuanced. If cats were like bees, they would not have evolved rough tongues, they would have created communities where some cats were in charge of grooming and others in charge of gathering water.
Humans have slowly evolved to catch up to and surpass the degree of civilization of bees. Earliest caveman fulfilled all his own needs, being responsible for food, shelter, tool making, protecting of his family, etc. If you look at the human race today as an endpoint, it is clear that the key to advancing as a species is to specialize more. If you need to learn how to make shoes, sew, farm and grow food, and do everything else required to meet one’s needs, it is logical that you will be worse at any one skill than you would have been had you focused on gaining proficiency in any single task. This is why cities were key in human progression; one person could enjoy items all made by specialists. All of one’s needs could be met to a greater degree. Henry Ford took this concept to the extreme in the assembly line. His success is evidence enough of the benefit of specialization.
The question is, who has a more effective society, bees or humans? It is a sensitive subject, and one in which nobody can escape personal bias. We have art, music, science, and other things that would not be possible without an advanced society. But at the same time we have many social problems. In human societies in general, there is greed, corruption, murder, and generally flaws in the system – all of which, it seems, is not present in beehives. So there are pros and cons to being a human.
One could argue that the flaws don’t matter, that such is the cost of having such an ambitious and intelligent brain at our disposal. I would be inclined to disagree with this. There was an old Greek myth about a man who was punished by the gods by and forced to push a rock up a hill, only to have it fall down the other side, for all of eternity. But, the story goes, the man became more and more accustomed to his situation, until he forgot about his past life and became happy with his new life. The point of this is that happiness is a state relative to one’s experience. Therefore, the mother holding her newborn child, the man pushing the rock, and a bee all have the same maximum capacity for happiness. Living a life where you are forced to do nothing but fill a contributing role to the hive, as long as you weren’t exposed to a more fulfilling existence at any time, you would be as happy as a human Nobel Prize winner; both are filling their perceived maximal potential. The only difference is that the bee is guaranteed fulfillment of this potential, while the human is will almost certainly fall short of his/her goal.
Happiness should act the compass with which one navigates the seas of life. So in this instance, if one is use happiness as a guide, it has been demonstrated that it would be better to be a bee than a human.
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