I do not care to be stung by a bee, yet I find bees infinitely fascinating. Their gliding and hovering is remarkably beautiful, but I will spare you the old saw about their technically being unable to fly. Being neither a physicist nor an entomologist, I don’t think I am qualified to speak about the laws of aerodynamics and physiology. As a political science major, and the grandson, son, and, Lord willing, brother of lawyers, I am happy to comment on the laws and politics of bee society.
And just to note, I would be in good company in this endeavor. Analysis of bees goes back at least as far as the Georgics of Virgil. They are called “Georgics,” by the way, because “George” is at its latin root the name for farmers. So you can imagine how King George III, a lover of the land, felt when he lost all that land in the verdant new world. It’s enough to drive a guy crazy, right?
Maybe not as much as a philosopher / economist / poet who won’t shut up as bees, although to be fair, Bernard Mandeville was about 70 years ahead of George at Eton. Not to fear, there were plenty of disciples taking up Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees” and pouring through it’s descriptions of private vice made public virtue through the power of collective action. Sound a bit like Smith’s “invisible hand”? It should, since Smith read Mandeville before he wrote his own “The Wealth of Nations” back in 1776. An interesting year, that.