For the Good of the Colony: Altruism or Selfishness

While the beginnings of bee domestication are unclear, with some of the first records of organized beekeeping dating back to ancient Egypt, we haven’t fully understood a lot of bee behaviors until recently and we still don’t fully understand a lot.

Humans are wonderful and curious creatures, but by god did we jump the gun when we projected all of this self-sacrificing, “for the good of the colony”, sisterhood shit onto the honey bees.I am by no means advocating that there is no reciprocity and kindness in nature.

I think by definition part of intelligence is showing kindness and empathy. But the point of being alive, of life itself, is to keep on living. “Love thy neighbor” is more of a societal rule than a rule for life.

Lets Talk About Sex, Baby

We are not infinite beings and so the means of continuing life happens by passing on our blueprint, DNA. We hope our DNA is resilient enough that our offspring have offspring and those offspring have offspring, carrying us on infinitely.

The only problem is we can’t procreate with ourselves, and this turns out to be a reason for our resilience.

The earliest earthlings were able to procreate by themselves by a process similar to cell division. All their babies were identical to them, and there was no need to go 50/50 on DNA with someone else.

While certainly the most effective way to pass along their own genes, it wasn’t necessarily the best way to ensure those genes survived.

An interesting study that illustrates the reason for sex involved nematodes that can produce sexually or asexually and a parasite. The worms that reproduced sexually incorporated new genes into their pool party and were able to survive the ongoing attack from bacteria most of the time. The “selfing” worms, those that reproduced by fertilizing themselves, succumbed to the bacteria.

Humans don’t have a selfing option so we need another somebody in order to procreate. While usually that somebody comes with a whole host of compromises, including that your creation has half of their genes, a big advantage is that your offspring now have two sets of DNA and not just your identical. With more options in the gene pool, our offspring have better odds of having a combination of genes that will help them survive.

What does any of this have to do with bees?

We now understand why living things chose to give up replication and pass on 100% of their genes for the chance that their 50% would have a much greater chance of getting passed on.

Bees come into the picture when we ask the question “Who the hell would give up their chance of procreating at all (effectively a 0% chance of having their genes passed on)??

Most people know that the queen is the only reproductive member of the colony. Only she has the privilege of passing on her genes and creating all further generations. If you weren’t aware, now you’re caught up.

Thinking that bees do this because they understand the virtue of sacrifice for those they love and for the good of their family and species goes back to our desire to personify things in nature.

In a way, this is true, but not for the reasons most think it is. The real reason is inherently selfish. By turning over reproduction to one colony member, worker bees (non-reproducing females) better their chances of passing on their genes.

Haplodiploidy: If the Genes Fit

To understand how this happens, we need to learn about the genetic system of bees. All bees and most other members of their order Hymenoptera (wasps and ants) have a genetic system called haplodiploidy. Haplo refers to the males and means 1 set of chromosomes, while diploid means 2 and refers to the females.

In humans, we each have a set of chromosomes, like a pair of shoes. We inherit one shoe from each of our parents. All humans have one chromosome from each parent, it doesn’t matter your sex.

Not so in bees. As a female, you are made when your mom fertilized one of her eggs with sperm from your dad. However, if you are a male, you were made when your mom decided to lay an egg – no sperm necessary.

It effectively means that male bees do not have dads. They are 100% their mom’s DNA, having inherited only one chromosome from her. Since females are fertilized eggs, they do have a dad and the one chromosome that he passed down to them.

Females also have their chromosome they inherited from mom, so, like humans, bees have a pair of chromosomes. They get a chromosome from dad, the only chromosome he had, so it’s 100% of dad. They only get one of the two chromosomes from mom so it’s the standard 50% from her.

BUT, this means that the average shared DNA of sister bees that have the same mother and father is 75%.

Selfishness Wins The Day

Because a honey bee colony only has one reproductive female, the other ladies in the colony don’t reproduce. This ensures the DNA of the queen doesn’t get “watered down” by the other females producing babies as well. If they all have the same mother and father, they are on average 75% related to one another.

Now we have some clarity on why honey bee colonies have such cooperation and tolerance for once another. Love and care for the other members of their colony is not what fosters cooperation in the colony.

Rather, they are playing the long game by letting another member of their colony take on reproduction. In this way, they can pass along up to 75% of their genes to the next generation compared to the mere 50% they would pass along if they mated on their own.

The Tie-in With Intelligence

While I essentially just wrote an entire article about why altruism in bees is a myth and how their motives for cooperation are entirely selfish, I’m not suggesting we throw out morals for selfish desire in the name of survival.

In bees, we know too little about their behavior and biology to draw conclusion about their generosity or their selfishness. We have no way of knowing if bees have any awareness of their behavior and as of this writing, we haven’t found a way to get a bee to take an IQ test. What we have tested in bees, like their ability to draw conclusions and learn from given situations, shows an intelligence far beyond what we thought was possible of a brain the size of a pinhead.

Honey bees have also been trained to detect landmines for the last 25 years.

There is a lot of benefit to behaviors like empathy, kindness, and cooperation whether they are inherent or learned.

Altruism Everywhere

Human survival is a group effort, and individuals alone cannot survive to pass on their genes. The idea behind some theories of altruism and reciprocity comes down to ensuring our genes survive (group selection theory and kin selection), which sounds pretty selfish. But humans also have consciousness and awareness.

In The Selfish Gene, author Richard Dawkins writes, “Our genes may instruct us to be selfish, but we are not necessarily compelled to obey them all our lives.” Empathy can be learned and built on. We don’t have to rely only on what we come equipped with in our genes. We have the power to create as well.

Altruistic behavior is not just a human characteristic. Animals ranging from other mammals all the way down to some of the most basic organisms like slime molds exhibit altruistic behavior.

Our understanding of ourselves and the world is ever-evolving. The only thing we can be sure about is that as we learn, our views and attitudes change. Even the most “simple” organisms show complex and intelligent ways of being. It is a lesson in keeping our mind open to the possibilities and not allowing our assumptions to be conclusive about what is possible.