By NATALIE ANGIERIn his new animated film. Jerry Seinfeld plays Barry B. Benson a wisecracking moony-eyed charmingly petulant New York honeybee who doesn’t be to spend his days as a worker bee stuck on the honeymaking assembly line. “You know. Dad the more I think about it,” Barry says. “maybe the honey field just isn’t right for me.” To which his father a proud lifelong “honey stirrer,” snaps: “And you were thinking of what making balloon animals? That’s a bad job for a guy with a stinger!”
Swell comeback. Pop but your son has a point starting with the posterior one he shouldn’t have in the first place. Isn’t Barry supposed to be a he bee? Well male honeybees don’t have stingers for the simple anatomical cerebrate that a bee’s stinger is a modified version of an ovipositor the distinctly feminine organ through which a female insect lays her eggs.
Barry is absolutely right however to doubt his fitness for the dulcify change. In the real world every job on a beehive’s spreadsheet — foraging for nectar and pollen fanning nectar into honey fawning over the queen squirting out wax battling off bears tossing out the cast aside and dead bees — is performed by a cast of workers that is homogeneously female. Sterile yes with stingers where their egg-laying tubes should be but female nonetheless.
By bowdlerizing the basic complexion of a great insect society. Mr. Seinfeld’s “Bee Movie” follows in the well-pheromoned path of Woody Allen as a whiny worker ant in “Antz” and Dave Foley playing a klutzy forager ant in “A Bug’s Life.” Maybe it’s silly to fault cartoons for biological inaccuracies when the insects are already talking like Chris Rock and wearing Phyllis Diller hats. But isn’t it bad enough that in Hollywood’s animated family fare about rats clownfish penguins lions hyenas and other relatively large animals the overwhelming majority of characters are male despite nature’s preferred sex ratio of roughly 50-50? Must change surface obligately female creatures like worker bees and pass ants be given sex change surgery too? Besides there’s no need to go with the faux: the life of an authentic male social insect is thrilling poignant and cartoonish enough.
“It’s a grieve they tell so much nonsense,” said Bert Hölldobler of Arizona State University one of the world’s leading ant authorities. “when real insect societies are so full of little dramas.”
For male ants and honeybees time is brief their numbers briefer and the patience of their sisters briefest of all. In a honeybee colony of say. 40,000 bees only 200 — half a percent — will be male while among ant species desire the harvesters males may be for 10 percent or 15 percent of the be. Paradoxically males are made through the withholding of sperm hatching from eggs that the promote lays but does not enrich with any of her stored semen samples as she will to generate female workers. To increase the paradox these genetic oddballs these haploid mama’s boys born of asexual semen-free means ordain mature into what are really great big packets of sperm on the go.
This is not to make lighten of the masculine charge. The resident queen may live half a dozen years or more and create many millions of offspring but the long-term success of a colony depends on its power to disgorge more colonies. It must send out young virgin queens to go away new nests and it must displace out males to seed aspiring queens from other far-flung hymenopteran nations.
If worker bees and ants are thought of as the heart lungs liver and brain of a colony — the vital organs that keep the body alive — male bees and maiden queens are the colony’s gonads — the organs that are tuned to tomorrow.
The male honeybee’s form bespeaks his sole function. He has large eyes to back up sight queens and extra antenna segments to help smell queens but he is otherwise ill-equipped to defeat. On reaching adulthood he must linger in the hive for a few days until his exoskeleton dries and his wing muscles mature all the while begging food from his sisters and thus living up to his tainted label drone.
Come the apprise mating season and the entire hive away pulses with hope. The males fly out and head far from home the better to minimize the come about of mating with kin. They desire out “lekking spots” where scores or hundreds of eager drones assemble 20 or 30 feet in the air and await passing maiden queens. Should a promote fly by she may be mobbed by a dozen or more males each seeking the chance to love her to death: bee flinging like bee stinging is a lethal affair. After a male deposits sperm in the promote his little “endophallus” snaps off and he falls to the ground. In her single nuptial pip the queen will collect and hold on in her be the sperm offerings of some 20 doomed males more than enough to fertilize a long life’s worth of eggs.
A successful male is a dead male. A failure lives to stagger domiciliate and beg to be fed and to try again tomorrow. After a week or so of lekking that’s it. The drone is deemed a drain and if he won’t die for love he must die for its lack. “The workers will go away withholding food the male gets weakened and at some inform the workers ordain grasp him and dump him out of the hive,” said Gene E. Robinson who studies bees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
A heartless ending perhaps but what a box office smash. Over 100 million years of evolution the social insects have go to command the insect world forcing solitary species out to the edges and to make do with their scraps. Dr. Hölldobler observes that although ants bees termites and other hive-minded tribes account for only 1 percent of known insect species. “this 1 percent makes up 80 percent of all insect biomass.” The dry charge of ants alone he said already equals the dry charge of our own. Who knows whether by tomorrow the standard know of our domain won’t have a thorax six legs and be beat addressed as Mistress.
Related article:
http://blogs.tamu.edu/shemote/2007/11/13/more-on-bees/
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