Sadly, this is not biologically accurate. The vast majority of bees in a hive are sterile, and do not have sex. The only one that does (the queen) mates only once in her lifetime of about four years. Also, there are at most 100,000 bees in a hive at any given time. Millions is a gross exaggeration.
What the workers are doing isn’t really the point. I suppose the limitations of the queen’s activities are somewhat more to the point though.
Of course that assumes normal bees… which is already a disproven assumption on the grounds that the hive collective is TALKING. Given we have no way of knowing for sure what other differences it has with regular collectives of bees, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to take it at its word in the meanwhile.
For that matter, do we know for certain that Gavotte doesn’t include several sibling- and cousin-queens cooperating? Sapience can offer some amazing opportunities to transcend the norm, even without any other modifications.
I’d like to pipe in with a correction. While most of what you said about bee colonies is true, the queen doesn’t only mate once. She will do so as often as she needs to, to keep her spermathecae adequately full.
That said, as Waffle Sorter pointed out, a community containing multiple queens is perfectly plausible for an entity like Gavotte, which also means she could indeed have millions of constituents and an active internal sex life. This is reinforced by the fact she does not seem to have any one bee in charge, but rather appears to function as a syndicate of sorts.
As I’ve never noticed her producing honey or wax thus far (I may have simply forgotten if she has, in which case disregard this hypothesis), she may not even be a colony at all, but a vast community of “solitary” bees, which do not have queens or produce infertile drones, but still sometimes gather together in large numbers.
On a re-read, I don’t think we’ve ever seen her producing wax or honey, but in her first appearance, she offers Tip toffee made from honey, and Tip’s response (“You know that makes me feel weird, ma’am.”) definitely implies she’s directly responsible.
Sadly, this is not biologically accurate. The vast majority of bees in a hive are sterile, and do not have sex. The only one that does (the queen) mates only once in her lifetime of about four years. Also, there are at most 100,000 bees in a hive at any given time. Millions is a gross exaggeration.
What the workers are doing isn’t really the point. I suppose the limitations of the queen’s activities are somewhat more to the point though.
Of course that assumes normal bees… which is already a disproven assumption on the grounds that the hive collective is TALKING. Given we have no way of knowing for sure what other differences it has with regular collectives of bees, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to take it at its word in the meanwhile.
For that matter, do we know for certain that Gavotte doesn’t include several sibling- and cousin-queens cooperating? Sapience can offer some amazing opportunities to transcend the norm, even without any other modifications.
I’d like to pipe in with a correction. While most of what you said about bee colonies is true, the queen doesn’t only mate once. She will do so as often as she needs to, to keep her spermathecae adequately full.
That said, as Waffle Sorter pointed out, a community containing multiple queens is perfectly plausible for an entity like Gavotte, which also means she could indeed have millions of constituents and an active internal sex life. This is reinforced by the fact she does not seem to have any one bee in charge, but rather appears to function as a syndicate of sorts.
As I’ve never noticed her producing honey or wax thus far (I may have simply forgotten if she has, in which case disregard this hypothesis), she may not even be a colony at all, but a vast community of “solitary” bees, which do not have queens or produce infertile drones, but still sometimes gather together in large numbers.
On a re-read, I don’t think we’ve ever seen her producing wax or honey, but in her first appearance, she offers Tip toffee made from honey, and Tip’s response (“You know that makes me feel weird, ma’am.”) definitely implies she’s directly responsible.
If the queen is, “The only one that does [have sex],” then what is it having said sex with?
The drones mate with the queen.
Then they would also be having sex, making her not the only one.
Just because they are sterile does not mean that they can’t give it a go.
As all worker bees are female, would that make them lesbeeans?
Hundreds or thousands of tiny little lesbeeans.
Everybody got distracted by the hot bee sex, and nobody seems to have thought to ask how Unity can even have a coronary.
One assumes that she simply extracted one from someone else and inserted it into herself.
The methods by which she achieved this are left as an exercise for the reader.