From Capital:

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

Because Marxism is so anthropocentric, because it needs to expand its area of inquiry beyond human affairs, I have decided to start this little series: Marxism and Insects. Each post in the series will look at this and that behavior of a social insect (wasps, ants, bumblebees) and try to translate it into Marxist terms. By doing this, Marxism will gain a much needed cosmic element. My hope is that, post by post, we get closer and closer to a future world where all kinds of societies (stars, clouds, sneezes) are not outside but wholly within the realm of the most powerful form of social criticism known to human beings.

Let's not waste anymore time; let's begin with this insect, the honey bee:
What catches our attention (the attention of a Marxist) is not this insect's happy dancing business, nor the way it builds its complicated hive, but this dark and deadly practice:

The queen is normally the only egg producer in the colony and this condition is maintained by a pheromonal 'feed back' system, whereby worker ovary development is inhibited. The queen and the brood both produce pheromones that inhibit worker ovary development, which prevents individual workers from exploiting the system.

...When populations are large and the nest is physically widespread, the distribution of pheromones reduces at the outer edges, simply because of distance from the queen and brood as well as the larger area of the outer periphery of the nest. this gives rise to a condition of reduced suppression of ovary production... [And this gives] rise to an increase in worker laid eggs, but the numbers of drones arising from them is a very small fraction of those that are laid. 'Worker policing' is the mechanism that causes adult workers to eat 'worker laid' eggs, which are identified by other workers. It is speculated that normal queen laid eggs are marked with a pheromone that is produced by the queen, which is coated on the eggs as they pass over the sting sheath. Worker laid eggs are thought to lack this pheromone and are thus identified as such and eaten by the workers.

It has been suggested that aggression towards workers with activated ovaries is another potential mechanism of worker policing, but I am unsure whether this applies to workers being hoisted out of cells as they attempt to lay an egg or whether the aggression goes further and results it the fertile worker being damaged or stung.

To begin with, this policing of ordinary honey bees has an echo in the human world of today. Not too long ago, the Iranian police warned shop owners in Tehran not to display curvy mannequins. The reason given for the warning/ban is to "safeguard religious values and the Islamic revolution." Here we can easily dissolve the religious values/Islamic revolution unit into the image of a queen bee, and the mass of Iranian shop owners into a mass of worker bees. Indeed, Lord Martin Rees recently pointed out that since the revolution, "the fertility rate in Iran has fallen from 6.5 to 2.1." The sex policing seems to be working.

But it is ridiculous for us to think about human policing without considering worker bee policing. To see some of the reasons for one form of policing, will help us see some of the reasons for the other. Also, we have to read the queen's "pheromonal 'feed back' system" in the way Althusser read the ISA, the Ideological State Apparatus. When this mechanism of oppression and control (the Church, the media, the education system) fails to produce the desired behavior (or subjects), then it is replaced by direct police action: "Hey you!"

The next post will look at paper wasps.