The workers and the shirkers

Busy bees – they work all day long for the good of the hive.

It’s hardly surprising that sociologists have long considered honey bee colonies to be a perfect example of collectivism; comrades living in a higher phase of a communist society, in which Marx would expect ‘From each according to her ability, to each according to her needs.’

But there’s a problem with this analogy because whenever I open up my hives it seems to me that only half the bees are actually working.

Now admittedly they could be having a tea break, but I’m beginning to suspect there is more than a grain of truth in the old joke about communist economics:  They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work!

For sure worker bees don’t earn much (see Worker’s Wages) but could it really be that some socialist workers are really lazy shirkers? The answer seems to be.... yes!

Scientists attached radio-frequency identification tags to hundreds of individual honey bees and tracked their activity for several weeks to discover that over half of all the nectar and honey bought into the hive came from just 20% of the foraging work force. It seems the bees know that hard work kills, so most of them opt for a life of indolence.

It makes sense. The hard working bees provide more than enough food for the colonies needs so the shirkers only pull their weight if they have to.

On reflection it seems that bees provide a pretty good model of socialism.....

I've embedded a video clip about the research below:

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