It makes me think that our naming of the brood mother "Queen" and the drones as "Workers" is actually a human biased understanding of the behavioral structure of eusocial insects. It is easy for us to impose on other organisms the notion of a hierarchy of subordination when we observe their organizational behaviors, but how often does this unexamined bias hinder understanding?
I was thinking something similar. "Queen" implies a sort of authority or social dominance which, AFAIK, is not generally present in eusocial species. The "queen" is an egg factory, not a leader, and the workers' relationship to her is more like engineers:factory than attendants:royalty.
I'm okay with "worker" as a name because it's a literal description of their behavior, but you're right that it shouldn't be interpreted as a social status.
Well, these are a different species of insect though. Yellow jackets are wasps, fundamentally different from honey bees.
The behavior of honey bees is one driven moreso by an inherited willingness to engage in servitude, than with wasps. Wasps are predatory carnivores, and their nests are smaller, more distributed, and constructed out of found materials, modified and pasted together. Wasps don't construct nests of secreted wax, they use mud and chewed up wood. Most wasps don't make any honey.
In honey bee hives, the manner of reproduction and sex selection is different. The queen really is the window through which the genome passes, and her capacity to produce devoted offspring, hopelessly obedient to her brand of pheremones, is her mark of success as an organism. And if she produced peers and not subjects she'd never have the spare time or the environment in which to gestate her offspring.
Don't understand why wasps kill poor little honey bees. They don't even eat the bees? I saw one wasp trying to kill a honey bee in my back yard. I got some tweezers and saved the honey bee. It felt good, and I didn't get bit.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 21.1 ms ] threadI'm okay with "worker" as a name because it's a literal description of their behavior, but you're right that it shouldn't be interpreted as a social status.
The behavior of honey bees is one driven moreso by an inherited willingness to engage in servitude, than with wasps. Wasps are predatory carnivores, and their nests are smaller, more distributed, and constructed out of found materials, modified and pasted together. Wasps don't construct nests of secreted wax, they use mud and chewed up wood. Most wasps don't make any honey.
In honey bee hives, the manner of reproduction and sex selection is different. The queen really is the window through which the genome passes, and her capacity to produce devoted offspring, hopelessly obedient to her brand of pheremones, is her mark of success as an organism. And if she produced peers and not subjects she'd never have the spare time or the environment in which to gestate her offspring.
And worse yet, there are species of predatory fungi that infect insects, turning them into virtual slaves even while consuming their failing bodies.
Sleep well.