• kromem@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That the leader of a bee hive can’t be female because the gods don’t give women weapons, and that the drones can’t be male because they take care of the young.

    Not only did Aristotle writing this in Generation of all Animals cause misinformation around this to spread for literally centuries on end, including the presumed gendering of a ‘king’ leading the hive to be used to argue for a patriarchal dynastic monarchy as part of God’s design - the wildest part is he acknowledged that other people were saying that the hive had a queen and the drones were male.

    Dude was straight up like “some people say…but this can’t be the case because of my commitment to misogyny which ignores things like lionesses existing.”

    • Rakonat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Wow they screwed that all up.

      Drones do not take care of the young. At all. Literally all the drones do is eat and roam the hive until breeding season, then they get it on and die alone since their hive won’t let them return after they copulated, and if there ever become too many drones the workers chase them out and kill them if they try to return. Different species do it a bit differently but in general the drones are the first to be culled if resources ever get low. The only major exception is if a hive lost their queen, some workers can lay unfertilized eggs which develop into male drones to pass on the genetic diversity of the hive, as they anticipate dying out without a queen and no eggs young and healthy enough to rear new ones.

      • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Drones die after mating, as the act of mating kills them. It’s not the hive rejecting them.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_(bee)

        The process of ejaculation is explosive—semen is blasted through the queen’s sting chamber and into the oviduct. The process is sometimes audible to the human ear, akin to a “popping” sound. The ejaculation is so powerful that it ruptures the endophallus, disconnecting the drone from the queen. The bulb of the endophallus is broken off inside of the queen during mating—so drones mate only once, and die shortly after.