The birds and the bees talk, but it's actually about bee reproduction because it turns out that bee reproduction is weird, and it really paints human sexual reproduction as completely arbitrary and not at all "sacred". Here's what I mean:
- Female bees can only give birth to female bees if the egg has been fertilized by a male bee.
- Female bees can only give birth to male bees if the egg has not been fertilized. Yes, that's right: male bees do not have fathers and cannot have sons. They are half-clones of their mother. Male and female don't fit in bee culture.
- Male bees (drones) are overwhelmingly useless apart from spreading genetic material. They die after mating.
- Queen bees don't have special genetics. Any female bee could have become a queen bee if they were fed "royal jelly" as a larvae.
- "Royal jelly" is secreted from the heads of female adult worker bees, and the closest human analog is breast milk, but pumped full of sexual development hormones like HRT or those that are naturally pumped out during puberty.
- The workers choose 15-20 worker larvae to become queens if the queen scent becomes too faint.
- All of the queen larvae are sealed inside their own big round cell to pupate.
- Now here's the fun part: When the queens start hatching, they all call each other simultaneously, even if they're still pupating. They all then fight to the death. The still-pupating queens are murdered of their own instinctive volition.
- No wait, here's the fun part. The victorious queen flies off in a victory lap, being tailed by drone bees from other hives. She's fertilized multiple times mid-flight (the lucky drones dying as a result), and then returns home. This is the only mating she ever does.
- Upon returning, if the original queen is still there, the new queen stabs her with here stinger and takes over.
- Sometimes the old queen leaves with a swarm before the new queen arrives back from the mating flight, in which case the new queen takes over what remains of the kingdom.
- After the most exciting day of her life, the queen spends the rest of her life doing one thing: eating and laying eggs in empty cells. When she starts to slow down, the worker bees raise up a new queen gladiator style to murder the current one.
