The Inverted Beehive

OK, so I think I figured out what was getting me all sorts of distracted over the past few weeks. I've had this image boring into my head and I can finally get a grip on it, and I am going to try and write about it now... we'll see if this works out.

I think I will being with sexual reproduction strategies (nope, don't get all excited by this). There are two sexual reproduction strategies - the Big Baby Gambit and the Little Baby Gambit. The Little Baby Gambit is when an individual has thousands of tiny offspring but puts no energy into protecting and raising them. And, ergo, the Big Baby Gambit is the opposite; when an individual has a few larger offspring and puts a huge amount of energy protecting and raising them. It comes down to a function of energy allocation... spiders choose to put all of their energy into numbers, while people put their energy into nurturing. In the end, both will end up with about the same number of successful adults... it is just two different strategies.

The significance of this is that, as a forester I can tell you, that to manage a forest we first must understand it's reproduction traits and cycles, and everything we do to that forest must be justified in accordance with this understanding. This is because all life adapts to survive and reproduce in its own environment. (reread this post now.) Bees have, over time, successfully evolved through the Congregate Selection Method and the Sexual Selection Method. And, they made it through the Sexual Selection Method using the Little Baby Gambit. Thus, now we see a beehive as a successful evolution through the Industrial Selection Method, but a successful evolution down a separate path from our own. For, you see, humans are the only species on this Earth trying to create a complex community structure that have evolved using the Big Baby Gambit. And, the community that we will create cannot be the same as a beehive.

Unfortunately, our history is full of examples of "leaders" trying to impose the structure of a beehive onto people. Over and over again we see a ruling class creating a police force to whip the labor force into shape; that is generally how we interpret what we see in a beehive (even though it is not true - the structure of a beehive has taken millions of years to evolve to be what we see today, and we have only been at it for about 25,000 years.), but it cannot work for humans because we use the Big Baby Gambit. Individuals that use the Big Baby Gambit are extremely competitive, and protective and nurturing of their young. So, since the ruling class cannot have all the thousands of babies to sustain our society leaving the working class to do nothing but sustain and protect the ruling class... simply impossible. That is the arrangement in a beehive, since the drones do not need to worry about reproducing they have the ability to focus solely on the job of sustaining and protecting the one bee that does reproduce.

So, what does this mean? Well, I am glad you asked... In my mind there is an image of a human community that has successfully evolved through the Industrial Selection Method, and it looks like an inverted beehive... but, more on that tomorrow.