Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 5.
The Feminine Monarchie
by Charles Butler, often
regarded as the father of English beekeeping.
We have also seen the example of ethyl oleate mentioned earlier in this chapter. Again,
this is a worker-inspired instruction.
Decentralized control
The bee colony is not, therefore, a dominance hierarchy - which is unusual from a
human perspective -but it is, in fact, very decentralized. Like humans, bees live in
large, organized groups where social behaviours co-ordinate the efforts of thousands of
individuals in order to accomplish complex activities, such as food provision, defence,
household maintenance, brood rearing and so on. But unlike humans, although the
colony is centred around the queen for the obvious reason that she is the propagator of
