Insects & others · plate 55 of 60
Honeybee
Apis mellifera
Works herself to death for a twelfth of a teaspoon.
Only 0.9% of people are Honeybees. (estimated)
If you're a Honeybee
You are never alone and you would not know what to do if you were. You work hard, for the group, at a pace that worries people, and you communicate by means others find baffling but that get everyone to the right flower. You defend home fiercely and at personal cost. You are warm in the plain sense; the hive is kept at body temperature by shivering.
A single worker honeybee produces about one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
The Honeybee as a spirit animal
You are loyal, tireless and far more useful than you are credited for, since your work gets eaten and your dance gets misread. You raise children who are not yours as if they were; in the hive, they are your sisters. The flaw is that you have no idea how to rest, and you defend the group past the point of sense. A summer honeybee lives about six weeks and spends them working; the alternative has not occurred to it.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Honeybee
Do
- Give them a role in the group and a reason; they will do the rest.
- Take their directions seriously, even when delivered as interpretive dance.
- Work beside them; being useful together is how they bond.
Don't
- Don't threaten the group. They will die to make the point.
- Don't swat. That is how the whole conversation ends.
When it goes wrong: A honeybee under threat releases an alarm scent and the whole hive comes; de-escalate early, move slowly, and never flail.
The Honeybee in a relationship
You love collectively, in a way that confuses people who want to be the only one; your devotion is to the household, the shared project, the thing you are all building. You are faithful, warm and extremely busy. The one romantic encounter your species treats as fatal is the drone's, and you have opinions about that.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 10
- Boldness
- 5
- Energy
- 9
- Curiosity
- 4
- Devotion
- 9
- Roaming
- 5
- A returning forager tells the hive where the flowers are by dancing; the angle of the dance gives the direction relative to the sun.
- Every worker is female; the males, called drones, do no foraging and die after mating or are thrown out before winter.
- A honeybee's sting is barbed, so stinging a mammal is fatal to the bee; stinging another insect is not.
Honeybees in literature
- Maya — The Adventures of Maya the Bee, Waldemar Bonsels (1912)
- Melissa — The Mother Hive (Actions and Reactions), Rudyard Kipling (1909)
- The bees — Georgics, Book IV, Virgil (29 BCE)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Honeybee's. If you got Honeybee, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other insects & others
Among the 60
Brehms Thierleben, Alfred Brehm (1876). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
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