After all the queen drama today, I watched the hives and contemplated (cried) over how fucking scary nature is.

I am repeatedly overwhelmed with emotion over my admiration for bees, but also at the realization of how a colony of bees is much like human society on Earth.

During the action surrounding the queen today, I especially noticed the groups of bees that had set themselves apart from the forming bundle.

While some attended to the queen and made her their prime focus, others were more intent on different areas of the hive.

There were the bees attending to the queen (the political activists), the bees creating propolis to cover the interior (the health conscious), the ones collecting sugar water (the food providers), bees building wax to make comb (the sustainability-minded), and the bees festooning their bodies between the frames (the ones that no one quite understands, but respects anyway).

This made me think about society and how our own perceptions of the world and our placement within different social classes affect our behavior and what we direct our attention to.

In an integrative and ultimate goal-oriented community, these different directions are beneficial to us all because each direction is inevitably moving towards the greater good of the community.

But I don’t see this like minded-goal in human society. We humans are all living very separate paths and most people are more preoccupied with the good of the individual than the good of the whole. Humans: as we complete our days and move in our separate directions, we lose sight of the world around us and often times what our neighbors may be experiencing at the same time.

Humans place priorities at different levels of interest just like bees. The only difference is that at the end of a season, the betterment of the colony is the ultimate goal that all bees biologically are created to achieve. Their separate directions will lead to a whole picture. Humans, on the other hand, are left with separated chunks of “fulfillment” that only have the power to positively impact the individual instead of the worldwide community.