Fellow Workers, Fellow Drones

RESEARCHERS at the Queen Mary University in London claim they have been teaching bees to play football by encouraging them to move tiny balls between goalposts in return for a sugar compound. They justify this research by pointing out that in the natural world bees “have to manipulate different parts of a flower to access nectar.” By testing their cognitive abilities in this way, therefore, scientists are trying to encourage bees to “learn tasks totally unlike their natural behaviour” and, ultimately, convince them that it will be in their best interests to perform an increasing number of repetitive tasks on behalf of their human counterparts in the future.

In reality, whilst certain categories of bee have long been described as ‘workers’ and ‘drones,’ their instinctual behaviour is comparatively more similar to that of the hunter-gatherers of the human world and, thus, the very notion of ‘work’ is just as antithetical to them as the distinction Evola once made between the vocation of the craftsman and that of a common hireling. One represents a labour of love, the other a form of economically-centred dehumanisation. Dharma, if you will, contrasted with the dishonorable prostitution of the mercenary.

In many ways, the manipulation of insect behaviour is akin to the mechanisation of humanity through industry and agriculture. We rightly condemn animals who are forced to perform in circuses and bull-rings, yet it seems that deep in the laboratories of the scientific establishment certain species are destined to join us on the grinding treadmill of modern civilisation.