What Honeybees Can Teach Us About Democracy
Hank fills us in on the democratic ways of the honeybee and makes a request for more interpretive dance in our own political systems. Like SciShow: ...
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[Theme Music] So once again it is election season here in the United States of America, and watching all this TV and reading all the news, it is hard not to think that there must be a better way of doing this! Well, there is. The honeybee way. A beehive is actually one of the most awesome examples of true democracy in nature. At the beginning of each summer, a hive has typically gotten so big it literally cannot accommodate another bee. So the biggest decision the colony has to make every year is where to relocate. And that decision is made not by the queen, but by the workers. All non-reproductive females, and everybody gets a vote. We think of bee colonies as being monarchies since they have something we call a queen. However, the queen doesn't actually make many decisions; she mostly just...
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[Theme Music] So once again it is election season here in the United States of America, and watching all this TV and reading all the news, it is hard not to think that there must be a better way of doing this! Well, there is. The honeybee way. A beehive is actually one of the most awesome examples of true democracy in nature. At the beginning of each summer, a hive has typically gotten so big it literally cannot accommodate another bee. So the biggest decision the colony has to make every year is where to relocate. And that decision is made not by the queen, but by the workers. All non-reproductive females, and everybody gets a vote. We think of bee colonies as being monarchies since they have something we call a queen. However, the queen doesn't actually make many decisions; she mostly just...
