How to Live Up to Our Potential
What makes a queen bee a queen bee
NOTE: This is a rewrite of an article I originally published on my website on March 15, 2021.
When I was in 5th or 6th grade my dad decided to get into beekeeping so I had the opportunity to learn quite a bit about honeybees. They are quite interesting creatures, much more interesting than most, and there was one thing about them that puzzled me for years. But before I can get into that I have to describe the three types of bees that make up a colony of honeybees.
First there are the drones, the least important bees in the hive. The drones are the males, they are big fat and useless, they don’t have stingers and they don’t contribute any work to the hive. They are so useless that the other bees in the hive will hunt and kill them in the fall so that they are not a burden on the rest of the hive as they prepare to survive the winter. Drones do prove useful on the rare occasion that the queen needs to mate before she is able to lay eggs but a drone will not survive this encounter.
Next we have the workers. These are the females and as their name implies they do all the work in the hive. These are smaller than the drone and typically make up over 80% of a hive’s population, these are the bees you picture when you think of honeybees. Throughout their two month lifespan they will hold various responsibilities from cleaning the hive, to feeding the young, regulating the hive’s temperature, guarding the hive, and foraging for food among other things. Worker bees have stingers but are unlikely to ever use them on you. Their stingers are barbed within their body so they die soon after stinging anything. Workers also don’t have functioning reproductive organs, they are still female and are capable of laying eggs but their eggs will never develop into a new bee.
Last we find the queen bee. Each hive has one queen who is of course female and the mother of all the bees in the hive. Excluding winter, a healthy queen will lay several eggs every day, during the height of Spring she will lay over one thousand eggs which will all grow to be healthy honeybees. The queen is the largest bee in the hive as well as the bee with the longest lifespan often living two to three years as opposed to the few months that all the other bees will live. Unlike worker bees queens obviously have functioning reproductive organs, but also fully functioning stingers. A queen’s stinger is not barbed inside her so if she would sting something she would not only survive but eventually grow another stinger. When inspecting a hive it is always a nice surprise to see the queen.
The confusion I had for years came from the biological difference between a queen bee and a worker. Genetically there is no difference between them, they are both female, its not like there is a third option when it comes to gender. A queen and a worker could be sisters and yet the queen is biologically superior to her worker sisters. For years I wondered “What makes a queen bee a queen bee?”
The answer finally came upon me when I looked beyond the bees’ genetics and to (for lack of a better term) their lifestyle.
An egg that will grow into a worker bee is laid in a standard sized cell in a beehive. For the first few days the small larvae which the egg grows into is fed a substance called royal jelly, but is soon replaced with other forms of food. Once the larvae fills the cell it is capped with wax until it fully transforms into a bee and emerges from her cell a fully grown worker bee and will live her life eating whatever she has as she goes about her responsibilities in life.
A queen, just like a worker bee, starts life as an egg but unlike the worker a queen larvae is only ever fed royal jelly. The other bees in the hive will also build a cocoon around the queen egg nearly an inch long for it to have plenty of room to grow and develop. Once a queen emerges from her cocoon she goes the rest of her long life only being fed royal jelly. This is what makes a queen bee a queen bee.
One of the interesting things we can take from this is that any female egg has the potential to become a queen bee. Another way of thinking about the difference between a queen and a worker is that a worker bee is just a queen who were unable to live up to her potential rather than a queen being some sort of super bee.
But why am I talking about this? We’re not bees, and most of you aren’t beekeepers, but there is something here to learn about growing to our full potential.
The things that make a queen bee a queen be are not her genetics or anything like that, they are her diet and her environment. Of course a regular bee egg doesn’t have the ability to choose it’s diet or environment, it is chosen for them but we have the power to choose our own diet and environment and we should learn from the simple honeybees and seek to have the best diet and environment we can so that we can live up to our full potential.
I think it is safe to assume that the royal jelly that queen bees are fed is the healthiest, most nutrient dense food that a bee could eat. The fact that a queen bee only eats this food is powerful because she is not only seeking out the best food but she isn’t compromising and caving to the temptation to eat junk food that might as well be poison to her. We should seek to do the same.
That of course leaves us asking what the healthiest, most nutrient dense food for us to eat is. A lot of companies these days spend a lot of money trying to convince us that their product is the healthiest thing, but in reality the healthiest foods don’t come in a box and often aren’t too easy to come by. It is important to remember that most scientists these days are paid off by big companies trying to get you to buy the products that make them the most money.
The explosion of the vegan diet is a perfect example of this. I’m sure the development of vegan “meat” hasn’t been too cheap but enough companies have gotten it figured out by now and mass producing a soy burger is way cheaper than raising cattle so it is no wonder there is a lot of propaganda encouraging us to eat vegan, these companies sell the fake meat for the same price as the real stuff and make a massive profit. Contrary to popular belief a vegan diet is not healthy or good for the environment, we need meat and common ranching practices are much better for the environment than killing everything on a piece of land in order to grow soy or corn. The health benefits people experience from switching to a vegan diet don’t come from the magic of plants, they come from replacing things like cake and fried chicken with fresh fruit and a salad. You don’t have to go vegan or something like that to quit eating junk food.
And I guess that brings us to ask what food is poisonous junk. Contrary to popular belief red meat is perfectly healthy, in fact it is incredibly healthy and foods like liver, eggs, and raw milk are among the best foods on the planet. This is of course assuming that they aren’t mixed with or covered in a bunch of heavily processed sugars and seed oils. These two things didn’t exist 100 or 150 years ago, these are not things that our ancestors ate and are not things which our bodies were designed to digest. These things might as well be poison to us, we should avoid eating seed oils and processed sugars along with everything else made from ingredients that didn’t exist before our food was made in factories rather than farms. When you have that outlook on nutrition food gets a lot simpler. Be like the queen bee and eat good food instead of junk.
And of course we should be mindful of our environments to live up to our full potential like a queen bee. I went into this a bit in my last post so I won’t talk about it in too much detail but generally speaking we should be physically active, spending time in nature, consuming good entertainment, spending time around uplifting people and growing closer to God. This is all fairly basic advice but so many people fail to follow it these days, especially when it comes to media, don’t waste time watching things likely to make you angry.
Now some of you may have noticed the flaw in my queen bee analogy and I briefly addressed it but it is worth talking about further. A queen bee becomes a queen bee because she is raised to be one, a worker bee can’t go back in time and turn herself into a queen bee just like we can’t go back in time to change undesirable things about our upbringing that may have caused us to live under our full potential. Also on that note we can’t go back in time to fix mistakes that we may have made.
While this may be true the great thing about this world is that we don’t have to be defined by the worst thing we’ve ever done or the worst thing that has ever been done to us. We are all capable of change, change is often difficult but the right kind of change is always worthwhile. Don’t let the past define you because your future is not yet written, never be afraid to start a better chapter in your life.
Live like the queen bee, seek to improve your diet, environment, and life to live up to your full potential.