What child could fail to be captivated by the surprise of a pound of honeybees? The extravagance! The whimsy! You can hear and feel the life in your hands as you explain how the worker bees are all females, and almost none of them will ever have children of their own but will instead raise the children of their queen. Tell your daughter someday that this is a bee whose life is changed by what she was given to eat, and not just in the ordinary nutritive way, but via internal reconstitution to become the most important bee in the hive. Her role is to copulate (don't say copulate, dear) with a male, then spend the rest of her days laying eggs as other bees tend to her every need, willing to sacrifice themselves to protect her. She gathers no nectar nor secrete wax nor fight off enemies with a disemboweling sting nor make rulings the way human queens do. Or used to do. Just lays eggs. Before long, the entire hive is made up of her children, making her their queen and their mommy.

There is no queen in your pound of bees, who are not loving this, but that isn't the point. No king bee either, or males of any kind, as you may teach your future theoretical son how these are bees that only consume, idly, and die. Watch then as he starts to understand what you are saying. These bees never bite, but they have that sting, painful for the bee and painful for the one receiving the sting, which people fear.

Oh, the sharp agony of the stinger!

They sting to defend, not to conquer or to dominate. Consider how many bees there are in a pound, and how many of these decide to sting you and your loved ones, under duress most likely. Though they look like little black and yellow bears, only with sideways mouths and compound eyes, if you had that many bears instead you might be subject to many more attacks more thoroughly than by these bees. The venom they inject is used by some to treat maladies in hopes of a dramatic cure. Some folks are deathly allergic to it and have to carry around a syringe to stick themselves with, just in case, if they don't want to die. The bees fly for miles searching for flower nectar, sweet on their tongues, which is the equivalent of a person running hundreds of miles every day to earn a living. Without bees, many plants would stop giving us food and billions would starve, a fate much worse than being stung by a bee, or by even a dozen bees, although perhaps comparable to being stung by a pound of them.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.