Peculiar hive evolution? - What if
First of all, here’s what I mean by hive in this document (X is my own interpretation - for this post only):
1. a shelter constructed for housing a colony of honeybees; beehive.
2. the colony of bees inhabiting a hive.
4. a place swarming with busy occupants: a hive of industry.
X. Any group of insects bound together in one ‘pack’, serving under a queen.
I spent my afternoon thinking about insectoid evolution. It’s something quite a few people have done for various reasons (such as Starship Troopers), but I had a rather unique proposition. First, let’s consider how evolution might arrive. You might entertain the idea of worker insects (worker bees, worker ants, worker flies, …) to evolve on their own, but as far as I can reason you’d be wrong. This might be true with any mammal (such as humans) evolution, but in a hive all ‘children’ are born from a single queen. Knowing that, it stands to reason that any evolution would come from new generations of queens. The evolution itself might make the queen stronger, or it might make her eggs - or what her eggs produce - stronger; and there’s the interesting part.
What if evolution didn’t actually make the queen stronger at all? What if it made her offspring stronger, smarter, perhaps to the point of sentience. Suppose there might be a hive where the worker bees were as smart as humans, but the queen was only as smart as say a cow. Aside from all other implications, the most interesting - in my humble opinion - would be the fact that a colony, a race even, would depend on a non-sentient for its survival. Think about it - your family, your entire species, would be born from a subspecies that would be considered to be of far lesser intelligence. Imagine for a moment a universe where no humans can give birth, and only cows can produce a massive amount of humans - and another cow every few years to keep the ‘baby factory’ going. Just imagine the moral implications…
