Bee-ness

From "The Blight of The Honey Bee" (David Wallace Wells):

They help each other navigate using vibrations in the air and, without any appreciable brain capacity, can memorize landscape features, allowing them to range 20 square miles without getting lost. They are the only insects endowed with symbolic language — in fact the only animals other than humans whose conversations would please Saussure. When they are not communicating through pheromones, they do it through an elaborate system of dances, namely, the “round dance” and the “waggle dance,” a figure-eight maneuver of at least a hundred circuits that incorporates the changing angle of the sun and allows bees to describe the precise distance and direction to a location of interest, usually a pollen site, water source, or new hive, though the dance can also be used to choreograph a defensive swarm. Since these dances are not just declarations of fact but also express intensity of feeling, a pair of political scientists in England recently suggested they are really a form of “quadratic voting,” a superior political model that, they acknowledged, real-world humans had not yet achieved. Of course, a honeybee colony is not a democracy; very noticeably it is also not a patriarchy. In addition to its queen, who personally picks the gender of each of her many thousands of offspring, all the workers in a colony are women

 ~ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/06/bees-are-literally-worrying-themselves-to-death.html