Sex on Six Legs_ Lessons on Life, Love, and Language From the Insect World - Marlene Zuk [41]
And it goes beyond an expert's superiority at having "gotcha," more than the fun of discovering a telephone in a pre-Bell movie. The way I see it, there are at least two problems with exhibiting such flagrant ignorance about the sex of the social insects. The first is that it perpetuates a skewed vision of the world and its sex roles, a vision that can end up doing our own society some harm. The second is that if you assume everything in the insect world is the way it is in our own species, you miss out on stuff. And in sex roles, as with many things about insects, the truth is much, much more interesting than fiction.
His Thighs with Sweetness Laden
NOT KNOWING that virtually all the ants or honeybees that one sees are female is nothing new. The phrase in the subtitle above comes from a poem by Charles Stuart Calverley, a mid-nineteenth-century Englishman said to be the father of the "university school of humor," a designation that as a professor I find compelling yet enigmatic. He wrote several books of poems, including Fly Leaves, which contains the following lines:
When, his thighs with sweetness laden,
From the meadow comes the bee,
Even Benjamin Franklin fell into the stereotype; a letter he wrote to a woman he was apparently courting contained the following lines from a poem by William Pulteney:
Belinda, se, from yonder Flowers,
The Bee flies loaded to his cell:
Can you perceive what he devours?
Are they impair'd in shew or smell?
Franklin and Calverley, as well as the people from Disney, Pixar, and various other movie studios, were following in a tradition present since at least the ancient Arabs and Greeks, who believed that a king bee, or "bee father," in the case of the former, was in charge of the hive and that the followers were probably male as well, though this latter point was the source of some debate. The Greeks were able to distinguish a category of bees, the drones, that were larger than the workers, but although they disapproved of the bees' apparent laziness (the drones hang around the hive until their mating flight and are fed by the workers but do not collect nectar or pollen), they could not determine the drones' sex. Part of the confusion seems to have been that the Greeks were well aware of the stinging ability of bees and found it impossible to believe that any animal bearing such a weapon could be female.
Similarly, on viewing the fierce defense of the hive exhibited by most social insects, including honeybees, many Arab cultures likened the colony to an army, which naturally implied a military rule, with males as both officers and soldiers. (The stinger is a modified ovipositor, or egg-laying structure, but the workers are generally unable to reproduce.) Aristotle tried to reason out the problem but ran into difficulty because if the stinging bees, the workers, were male, that would have suggested that the drones were female, and he was unable to accept the idea that the males in a society did all the work of taking care of the young. He eventually concluded that bees might have the organs of both sexes in a single individual, as do many plants, but then was further flummoxed by the lack of reproduction on the part of any individuals but the queen (or leader, as he called it).
In Henry V, Shakespeare refers to "The lazy yawning drone," as well as the king of the bees, again without any hint of recognition that the shiftless members of the hive were male. Writing in the nineteenth century, Calverley, it turns out,