Would Bee People be capable of changing to a different government style?

When I first added Bee People to my setting one thing has always interested me the more I thought about it. Would a eusocial race of people be capable of changing how their society works? A caste system is literally in their dna, how would they move away from that? Would gaining human like intelligence cause them to question if things needed to stay like this or would they just continue using that system with no questions whatsoever? ARE BEES CAPABLE OF DEMOCRACY?

Edited by Drakath51 on Dec 1st 2023 at 1:34:00 AM

I think they wouldn't see the point. Like, it would not serve their emotional needs, so they wouldn't bother. A bit like forcing humans to live like a flock of birds.

That said, I bet intelligent bees would invent, like, a hundred significant variations of the hive system their ancestors had. They might develop in entirely unexpected ways. After all, it's hardly like present day humans live in small clan-based villages.

I can see that. But I did make a major npc a male bee person who's attempting to start a coup so that the males can be more than just sex slaves.

...so that they can fulfill their potential as ordinary members of the worker caste!

This is such a radical idea, many female workers can't even wrap their heads around it. A "Female Superiority Movement" may arise to stop them. The Drone Union is threatening to sit out the next mating swarm. The Queen is trying to thread a delicate neutrality.

Tensions are high!

Edited by DeMarquis on Dec 2nd 2023 at 12:18:36 PM

If they're intelligent then they might evolve out of a sturdy caste. Tho i would imagine hardcoded hierarchies would be hard to make dissapear

Does mutating and developing new castes count?

Why not

How technologically advanced are they? I can see technological changes leading to societal ones, as tools and machines would help them overcome biological limitations and allow them to take on a wider range of roles.

You do know that the queen bee is not literally the ruler of the hive, right? That's just a projection. It's like asking "are humans capable of feminism when there are biological differences between their sexes".

There's actually an interesting, though controversial, argument that humans are weakly eusocial - the agreed-upon characteristics of eusociality are reproductive division of labour, overlapping generations, and cooperative care of offspring by non-parents. And humans qualify on at least two of those and possibly all three^note my understanding is that it hinges on how specialised the reproductive labour has to be - the strict castes of the bee template aren't applicable to all eusocial species, not even to all bees. Would humans be capable of democracy if puberty made most of them sterile? I don't think the two are related.

I already know that the queen is not the ruler of the hive.

You raise some good points, I think.

Now, my knowledge of bees is a little too weak for me to say this with confidence, but prompted by those points it strikes me that bees might be argued to already somewhat be either democratic or communist in their behaviour: my impression being that decisions regarding food sources, at least, may be prompted by any worker, and at the least are not subject to decision from any one "authority bee".

But as I said, my knowledge here is weak, and I stand to be corrected!

(I'm not sure about other decisions, such as swarming and provision of royal jelly to a larva in order to produce a new queen. Can someone who knows bees better than I weigh in?)

I don't see why not. I recently learned that ants can be socialist, although I couldn't tell what they did differently than normal ants.

I imagine that the biological built in caste system might create some rigidity. Like the Queen Bee would probably have some ceremonial importance resulting from the fact that she is rare and important. The would be the case no matter if the beehive was monarchist or Marxist. She would also be everyone's mother.

More interesting is the role of drones. A bee hive usually has a lot of drones, but they are kinda useless. The queen usually mates with foreign drones. Bees kick out drones when resources are short. However, a more humanoid bee person drone could probably work, or be be idle. There are a lot more workers, so the cost of supporting a few idle drones might be acceptable.

As far as the workers, there becomes a question of how specialized the economy is, but also the variety of worker bee castes. Ants have different castes of workers, mainly differated by size. I suspect bee people might have some castes that are intelligent or not. All that has to do more or less with economic system and not political.

A Bee People can have one queen, a hundred drones and ten thousand workers. That means that the status of the workers is what is important.

Why not like this?

If a bee-society is like a ship, then why not make the "Queen" the ship's "figurehead" rather than its "captain"?

They can have the government the way the drones and workers want, the queen still remains as the queen with no real power over things.