Eusocial talk

People Idiots are reliably preoccupied with insect "eusocial" behaviour, a faux fascination manifesting itself in the very peculiarly limited sense of tendentiously misapprehending irrelevant details culled among the physiology of inferior lifeforms and repackaging them as purported "science" at the ready to support imagined "arguments" that aren't really arguments thrown like so many shitgrenades at more economically relevant fields (in the limited "rent extraction" sense of "economic"), such as public policy.

In a functioning world it would be pointless to point out that the word "social" used in contexts such as "social insects" has absolutely nothing usefully or meaningfully in common with the word "social" used in contexts such as "human society" ; or that "insect behaviour" is similar to "human behaviour" in the exact sense "square wheels" are similar to "square heads" -- purely formal, entirely meaningless, mere coincidence driven by paucity (or terseness) of notation.

We do not however live in such a wonder as a functioning world ; instead we're stuck with hordes of utter imbeciles which were taught the alphabet, and naught else besides -- enough of the tools of thought to cause trouble but not actually enough to help themselves at all, let alone positively impact human reason in any meaningfully measurable way. So we are stuck pointing out that it doesn't the fuck matter at all whether "eusocial behaviour" has appeared twice, fifty times, or only once in the genus Bombus (the bumblebees) -- because whether it did or whether it didn't, socialism is still the collector of the dumbest of the dumb, the ideology of idiots by its very nature ; and "altruism" is still a recent coinage of little substance or import, its meaning and intension purely stylistic, like "out of sight" or "wicked" ; and so following.

In which vein, let's point out three important lines in which bees aren't merely dumber than Jews (in itself quite the accomplishment, even for insects) but outright not meaningfully social at all :

• Theft. All animals are practically described by a numeric, scalar value : their fitness value. This is the great contribution of the theory of natural selection to the world of thought (and the thing about it that non-"scientific", usually religious thinkers so abhor). For human females this fitness value is the fabled sexual market value, the scalar which resolves practical dilemmas such as ignore-or-capture. For bee colonies this fitness value is the ratio of the bee resource value versus the honey resource values in the beehive : beehives with a lot of honey and few weak bees are weak in this sense, whereas beehivess with lots of strong bees are strong in this sense (irrespective of how much honey they actually hold, for practical reasons -- bees don't accumulate wealth past certain limits within their natural purview). As part and parcel of their eusocial beehaviour, older bees are not usually allowed back in the nest unless they carry significant honey income. This creates the situation where their own life isn't worth anything to them unless they manage to get some honey, and in conditions of limited available natural resources they will attempt to simply steal honey from other nests. If they attempt to steal from a strong beehive they get killed, which is the intended functioning of this "social" arrangementⁱ, but if coincidentally they attempt to steal from a weak beehive (or one which happens to have otherwise allocated its bee resources) and some make it back home, they will readily enlist other, non-old bees to follow! Such an ad-hoc invasion army will cause very lively battles, which result in casualties, on both sides. That the process weakens the already weak beehive is the lesser concern : the thieving beehive, the one where old bees managed to involve normal bees in the theft, also loses some bees -- and for its efforts gains honey. This double whammy lowers its value exponentially. More honey with less bees equals disaster, as a new weak beehive was just formed ; and because "eusocial" means some specific things in context -- in the context of insects -- the success of old bees from the previously normal, now weakened hive in their activity encourages old bees from other hives to repeat the process, except this time with the last theft's invader on the invaded side. If left to their own devices, hundreds of bee hives in geographic proximity can be reduced through this mechanism of pure eusocial bee-haviour into utter oblivion within the week, leaving behind something like three or four decimated, barely holding on to life queens, a bunch of larvae dying from neglect for lack of workers and well... The winter is coming.ⁱⁱ
• Mites. Varroa is the destroyer of bees, a crab-like little mite that lays its eggs inside the bee egg cells. The fact is that the bee upon which the mite feeds can not -- for very good reasons derived from necessary engineering choices and unavoidable optimizations driven by the extreme constraints of the design -- rid itself of the parasite. You'd be exactly in the same position if you got a tick between the shoulder blades, it's simply something you can't reach and that's that. So what do you do, should you get a tick between your shoulder blades, a pimple in the ear, a certain itch about the frenulum etcetera ? Why, you ask your "partner" to scratch it for you ?! I wonder why the bees don't, eusocial as they are ; because in point of fact there couldn't be such a thing as varroa if the bees had enough fucking sense to, you know... see something, say something. Or at the very least bite the something. It's not like the mite has any defense whatsoever to another bee besides its host lovingly embracing it with its maxilae. So maybe that's the correct response to rape in the female herd, then ? If you see some visibly distressed chick being thrown about by some jerks, just walk away ? Pretend nothing's going on ? It's how the bees do it, after all!
• General fucktardedness. There's a moth whose larvae feed on the wax, the bees could readily kill, but do not. There's been plans to vote for change, and pick a black bee to be the queen, because no black bee has ever been queen in fifty thousand million years, but the bees don't seem interested. The no bee left behind programme hasn't even been voted on, in fact, bees don't even vote at all to this day, and so following.

How shall I put this daintily-gingerly enough for the moron crowd... Here's a thought : lay off with the pretense to "open minded"ness, you're not some kind of vastly informed, greatly regarding, super-horizon'd meta-intellect of the comic books. You're a sad schmuck with nary a clue and no perspective to speak of, and that's precisely what you'll stay.ⁱⁱⁱ

Okay ?

1. So presumably, following the idiot logic, old people should be sent to conquer Russia -- not because they have a chance, but specifically because they don't, eh ? It's how the bees do it!!! [↩]
2. Since absence of natural, forageable resources is a key ingredient in the "socio"-disaster, Winter is indeed coming. [↩]
3. This isn't a discussion of your behaviour, but of your substance, there's no "how-to" de-schmuck-ification guide because there can't be. [↩]