Steal Some Sweet Sweet Wisdom Honey!

Happy Memorial Day! (You are not supposed to say that, it is Uncouth.) Have you remembered to thank a troop for your freedoms today? You know how those troops get if they don’t get their thankings. Are you done? OK, good, now let’s talk about bees, instead. Long time readers may remember that your humble Shypixel is an OG (read: amateur) beekeeper, going way back (kept a couple hives for a couple years), and that he knows just about all there is to know about bees (what he read in a beekeeping for idiots book). Shut up, parenthetical, it’s my article, I’ll write it however I want.

PREVIOUSLY, IN BEEEEEEES!

But why bees, Shy? I’m just going to suspend the rhetorical exercise, and admit that the bees are us, OK? I was going to get all clever and write a whole article about bees, with a big dramatic reveal that it was actually about us all along — but honestly? That sounds like work. Fuck that.

So. The cat’s out the bag, the bees are us. Bees have problems, we have problems, bees work together to solve problems, we elect sociopathic lunatics to the highest office in the land. See? Samesies. But all kidding aside, I think we can steal some sweet sweet wisdom honey by taking a closer look at how our best honey-making, sometimes accidentally deadly friends go about surviving in an unforgiving world.

Get your bee goggles on, we’re going for a ride.

Bees rely on communication to survive. They send scouts to find food and water, and when those scouts return, they report their findings. Bees “talk” to each other using a complicated combination of pheromones and dancing, which might seem a little odd until you watch a few Tik-Tok videos.

But the bees don’t have a word for Roundup.

Poison is everywhere. The average suburban American lawn is a sea of toxins disguised as paradise. And these chemicals don’t just kill, they disrupt memory, navigation and communication. Even worse, the poison comes home with them. It gets carried back to the hive, endangering the entire community.

Now, more than ever before in human history, communication is vital to our survival. But as even Grok will tell you, our systems of communication have been poisoned. Critical information is lost in a flood of glittering distractions, misinformation, manufactured outrage, and the thick fog of mental exhaustion.

In this analogy X is Roundup.

I’m not saying that Elon’s Frankenstein’s monster — the one he stitched together from the dead parts of Nazis, KKK Grand Poobahs, and probably a horse scrotum — will cause cancer, but I’m also not NOT saying that. What I am saying is that the Social Network Formerly Known As Twitter is a fucking sea of poison, and it infects everything. And worse, it’s not even unique in that.

When systems start failing, bees have three weapons to defend the hive: caution, quarantine, and disinfection. Every bee that returns to the hive is inspected. Bees that are sick, or that smell wrong, are kept separate. Other bees will work to clean and disinfect wherever they can.

We have to do the same. In our communications, obviously. But also in our political thinking, our daily behavior, and in resisting the slow, stupid slide into Evil Idiocracy. If we used caution in whom we paid attention to, the biggest story of last week might not have been Jake Tapper’s new book, I Like Money. We need to quarantine ideas that are not working, and not be Amy Schumer’s cringy cousin harping on the price of eggs not falling because nobody fucking cares, Chuck! And we need to disinfect our institutions. No, I didn’t say purge, I said disinfect. Like of misinformation. Of rotted structure. Of unchecked viral bullshit. Don’t get me fucking started about how this is the exact wrong time for purity tests.

Don’t worry though, things will get worse. One of the biggest annual challenges facing honeybees is called the Dearth. It comes in late summer, or early fall, when all the resources start to dry up, until they vanish altogether. The hive turns inward, and focuses on survival. Picture Ned Stark as a drone, “Winter is coming!”

Bees will cluster into a tight buzzing ball, vibrating their wings to generate heat, only leaving to gather stored honey. They conserve energy. They share resources. They avoid waste. If you lean your head against the outside of a hive box in the winter, you can hear them humming their little communist anthem.

It almost feels insulting to even explain this part of the analogy to you, it’s so painfully obvious. Resources drying up? Check. Stocking up for lean times ahead? Yup. Being forced to turn inwards and rely on each other rather than social safety nets, constitutional protections, or even basic fucking medical services, the same ones that used to be the backbone of American democracy? Yeah. We get it Shy, we got it right away. Are you getting paid by the word or some shit?

But wait, there’s more!

A big ball of bees has more chance of survival if it a BIG ball of bees. Big balls of bees require more resources, yes, but they also generate more heat. We need to be the biggest ball of bees we can be. (Yes, to answer the question I know you are all asking right now, that sentence was a ton of fun to write.) This means gathering and defending as many resources as possible, so we can actually be a big-tent party. Stop groaning, I already warned you about purity tests.

Big balls of bees require big tents to shelter them, and remember: The bees are us.

You know what is at the center of that big ball of bees? (I promise that is the last time I will use that phrase. I’m lying.) The Queen! Yup, that’s right, Beyonce.

Every hive needs a queen. You might wonder, what happens when a hive doesn’t have a queen? If you are more of a commie like us, you might instead wonder what happens to the common bee when it doesn’t have a hive?

We’re back to TikTok, and we’re back to purity tests. Lemme ‘splain…

It’s pheromones and dancing. Bees seem to know some things instinctually. Among them:

• Our queen smells like us. If the queen doesn’t smell like us, it’s not the queen — we need to jettison leaders that can’t get with the fucking program. The smartest thing Britain ever did was to put Neville Chamberlain into that novelty cannon and shoot him over a tank of sharks with the Fonz in a leather jacket on water skis. Can we please start doing the same thing to Democratic leaders who won’t fight, but with votes?

• We smell like our queen. Meaning, once we find the right people to lead us, we stand with them. We work together, and we act, as much as possible for a bunch of (mostly) hairless river apes, as one. We’re not all Democrats, and we don’t always have to be in disarray.

• If you dance like us, you are one of us. People think of bees as ferocious in their defense of the hive from outsiders, and they are. But what is an outsider, to a bee? Any honeybee, from any hive, be she a worker, or be he a drone, that has the scent of the queen’s pheromones, and whose dances can be understood, is a member of the hive. Genetics, birth origin, race? Those have nothing to do with it. If you are working for the things we are working for, you are one of us, if you are working to stop what we are working to stop, you are one of us. Gooble Gobble, motherfucker, you’re one of us!

A swarm of bee without a queen is completely harmless. We are not bees, even though the bees are us. We don’t need queens. Or kings. But we must never be harmless.

We are not bees, yet we must become a hive. It is essential for survival and for any hope of defeating the fascist morons who have wrapped our country up in a gimp suit and are about to do some awful things to Marcellus Wallace. Our hive will be the Bruce Willis character, and do some action movie stuff, so that Marcellus Wallace can call some guys to go medieval on some asses.

We’ve got to be done merely surviving. It is time for our big ball of bees (I lied earlier) to start fighting. Thing about humans is, we don’t die when we sting.

Let me leave you with one final little fact about how bees survive the winter. Something on which for you to ruminate …

When things get dark and cold, and it looks like there might not be enough food to make it through, bees will absolutely throw every single male bee out of the hive.

And won’t even feel bad about it.

Slay, little queens.

But also feel free to give us $$$