In this beautiful essay at Maisonneuve, Kate Barss considers the mating and family habits of bees in examining the societal barriers and prejudices she and her partner Bear must navigate as a lesbian couple trying to start a family.
First, a young queen flies two to three kilometres from her hive. It’s a rare moment of solitude—the only time in her life she’s alone. Aside from this flight and to swarm, she never leaves the hive. If she dies, her hive risks dying too, each generation depending on her to reproduce; aside from a few exceptions, the queen is the only reproductive female bee in the hive. Once she reaches the drone gathering area, usually open airspace above a visibly-distinct landmark (perhaps a boulder or a steeple) she mates with ten to twenty drones, or male bees. With this act, the queen packs a lifetime of sperm into her spermatheca — a small pearl-shaped organ located just above her poison sac and stinger. She never has to mate again and, over her two-to-five-year lifespan, will lay 150,000 eggs from spring to fall, hatching into about 1,500 bees per day. During sex, the drone’s phallus explodes, killing him immediately. His purpose singular and disposable, his role complete.
I don’t want sperm delivered like UberEats or bartered for a bottle of rosé on local trade groups — but I do wonder about creating a more collective model of sperm and egg donation. Like my own potential family, honeybees also select one individual to reproduce on the families’ behalf — millenia has taught bees that it is advantageous to divide up this labour. The queen becomes a queen by being fed extra royal jelly: a protein-rich secretion made from digested pollen and honey. These extra delicious helpings let her reproductive system fully form, unlike worker bees, which don’t have complete reproductive systems. They share the rest of the labour. In Canada, queer men are prohibited from donating sperm in the same way that they were banned from donating blood — no dice unless you’ve been abstinent for three months, even if you’re in a long-term monogamous relationship. This denial seems like a missed opportunity — there is a long history of queer people helping each other start families, a sense of reciprocity and generosity that goes beyond heteropatriarchal norms.
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