"Ground control to Major Tam..." Because as a worker I am not a "Tom".
So let's first be clear about Queen Chris's problem.
A drone bee and a worker bee are different. A drone bee among honeybees develops from unfertilized eggs and a worker bee from fertilized eggs. Drone bees are males and worker bees are female. Drone bees exist to service the Queen and Worker bees exist to service feed the drones among many other functions, like keeping the hive cool and moving eggs around and cleaning up the garbage, guarding the entrance of the hive, etc.
Workers have a life cycle where the kind of tasks they perform are at first inside the nest (like moving eggs into cells) and then later both inside and outside the nest (like taking out the garbage) and later inside, but close to the nest, (guarding the entrance) and later foraging. What percentage of workers takes up each task seems to depend on the life cycle of the hive and the "dependence" of the hive upon each task. It seems that once a worker starts performing tasks outside the hive it never reverts to performing tasks inside the hive. Thus a forager never reverts to becoming an egg mover.
Now, I hear Queen Chris calling me, and as a foraging worker bee I have discovered that I am unable to make it back to the nest where Queen Chris is waiting for me and other old foragers. The drones want to be fed. The drones need to be fed. The hive needs its sweet stuff. Where's my Royal Jelly, yells Queen Chris, where's my Bee Bread. "Something is happening here and you just don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?" Queen Chris gets lonelier and lonelier as more and more workers become foragers and as more and more foragers like me get lost and confused... and it is very lonely now since all the workers seem to be lost and the queen is there with no workers and maybe now even all the drones are dying, because "we're idiots babe, and we can't even feed ourselves"!
As for me, I think it is something wrong with my navigation system. What exactly it is I don't know. But i really doubt that it has something to do with cell phones. That's just me, a worker bee with a guess.
Jerry
--- Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > And one more thing. I want to thank Chris for not
> > taking the opportunity to
> > make fun of me about my obsession with bees and ants
> > and swarming insects.
> > But the future will tell... Maybe the bug that has
> > crawled into his dark
> > place is entomologically interesting?
> >
> > Jerry
>
>
> Lyubo, bratsy, lyubo, lyubo, bratsy, zhit!
>
> ËÞÁÎ, ÁÐÀÒÖÛ, ËÞÁÎ, ËÞÁÎ, ÁÐÀÒÖÛ, ÆÈÒÜ!
>
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-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/
His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/
Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/