The secret lives of bees.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Briefly Noted - 'Honeybee Democracy' - Book review - Brief review

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People tend to project familiar institutions onto almost anything alien, making misleading metaphors that sometimes get frozen into our language. So it is with the "queen bee," that fat mama bug who does not, in fact, rule anybody. In Honeybee Democracy (Princeton), the biologist and beekeeper Thomas Seeley reminds us that the queen "is oblivious of her colony's ever-changing labor needs ... to which the colony's staff of worker bees steadily adapts itself." Honeybee society, he writes, is a spontaneous order with "no all-knowing central planner" and "an enviable harmony of labor without...