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that the drones had a louder voice than the female workers, just as the rooster's crow is louder than the sounds made by hens, but seems to have conveniently ignored the "piping" noise, much more pronounced than the humming of the drones, produced by queens shortly after they emerge as adults from their waxen cells. Piping queens also show another less than feminine trait when they attempt to kill any other queens emerging in the colony at the same time, but this behavior also seems to have gone unremarked. Similarly, queen bees were described by Richard Remnant in his 1637 writings as "gentle and loving," though it is hard to see a female that dispatches rivals by biting their heads off and renders her subjects sterile as being particularly benign.

It is possible that some of the sex role confusion about bees was deliberate; scholars have questioned whether, for example, Benjamin Franklin was unaware of the current state of knowledge about the sex of the worker bee, or whether he might have changed the pronouns from the original song to suit his purposes. I am more inclined to attribute the errors to ignorance. My own admittedly unofficial polls show that, far from being common knowledge, many of my students and those I meet at other universities have no idea that worker bees and ants are female. After my lecture on army ants, the legendary voracious consumers of everything in their path, a typical exchange with a student will go as follows:

"So, Dr. Zuk, you know about the ants?"

"What about them?"

"Like, you said all the workers were female, but what about the army ants?"

"Their workers are female, too."

"Yeah, but what about the soldiers, the ones you said have those huge jaws and everything?"

"They are female, too."

"So really, the soldiers, they are female?"

"Really." At that point the student usually slouches off, eyeing me skeptically. I always feel that I have let them down, but it's not clear how.

Lest you think this is an American fixation, I should tell you about Yamba the Honey Ant. Honey ants, sometimes called honeypot ants, are found in the arid regions of Australia and a few other parts of the world, where they live underground in a network of chambers and tunnels. While most of the ants are able to leave the colony to look for food, some of the workers have immensely swollen abdomens that serve as living storage vessels for the rest of the colony. They never leave their underground den, and other ants tap on the honeypot individuals to get a drop of food. Native peoples, including aboriginal Australians, dig up the nests to harvest the stored honey.

In central Australia, a children's television show features Yamba the Honey Ant, a cheery character portrayed (with a bit of poetic license) in the red, yellow and black colors of the aboriginal flag. On a visit to Alice Springs, I was encouraged to see that Yamba was accurately depicted with six legs, and I wondered if this faithfulness to reality went so far as Yamba's sex. Alas, it does not; Yamba is firmly a male ant, leaving generations of Australian schoolchildren to grow up with the same misconceptions as my own undergraduates.

Insects, Chromosomes, and Surf City

THE FOCUS on males in films about bees and ants, and our own unthinking assumptions about the sex of animals in nature, may say things about the sex bias in human society. But an even more egregious failing in the error is that it means people don't learn about one of the most amazing things in nature: the sex ratio, or the relative proportion of males and females in a population, and how it evolved. Insects have been essential in our understanding of this fundamental issue in biology, and they also exhibit some of the weirdest maneuvers on the basic theme.

We take for granted that under natural circumstances, roughly equal numbers of boys and girls are born into the world. Indeed, for many species of animals, including people, that is the case, with a sex ratio of 50:50. But why should that be so? If you think about it, from an evolutionary standpoint it seems puzzling that so