Dance to convince voters

Bees have long been a source of mystery to humans. Humanity has always been impressed by this society “directed” by a queen and whose workers go out to work and come home with the harvest.

Confronted with these highly evolved insects, humans first thought they were under the rule of a king. What a disappointment when they discovered that it was a female who was at the center of all this organization!

Then they thought the queen was being defended by the male soldiers. What another disappointment when they discovered that it is the armed workers who, like Amazons, also ensure the defense of the colony. Obviously, the scientific phallocracy of a certain era had to find a special place for male bees, also called drones. What use were these fat individuals incapable of fighting and whose tongues were not long enough to forage? Nature couldn’t be so unfair to males. There was still reproduction as a way out. It was then imagined that the male bees spent their time fertilizing the queen with magical sperm substances. They didn’t even need to touch her, they had to be unparalleled sex beasts dedicated to satisfying a sovereign who had to lay 2000 potential babies (eggs) a day. But, ruthless science was about to disappoint them again.

Males are a burden on bee society. First, they hatched from unfertilized eggs. In other words, they have a mother, but no father. However, they are a grandfather. Funny genealogy anyway! The queen conceives them without using sperm. They do not participate significantly in the work in the hive and their too short tongue prevents them from foraging on the flowers. In short, these are too many mouths to feed. Some scientists still say that their presence in the hive influences the productivity of foraging workers. Which seems logical, because when you have so many mouths to feed, you have to store more honey and pollen. They also help to ventilate the hive to increase the temperature when it’s cold or to evacuate the heat when it’s hot. In other words, if the queen knew, she would immediately replace these drones with a heat pump!

Opportunists, lazy, profiteers: there is no shortage of qualifiers to describe these males from a human perspective. These drones are also often victims of worker bees who, at the slightest stress, insult them and can even expel them from the hive. They have broad backs, the poor.

Their main role is nevertheless vital: it consists in fertilizing a young queen when she takes flight to found a new hive or replace her mother. A flock of males then pursues her and they mate with her in the air. The female will store the sperm in reservoirs, called spermathecae, and she will keep it all her life. But, as soon as the mating is over, a trap closes on the males. This is because it is almost impossible for them to tear themselves away from the queen without leaving a piece: their genitals and part of the abdomen remain fixed there. We are far from the honeymoon… Even that there are divorces that end better! In summary, if a drone tells you that he stayed up late and that he lost some bits, you must take it at face value.

I know I’ve strayed from the title of my column, but I’ll get there. I wanted to take this path to give a shot of Jarnac to the men who claim more and more of this stupid ideology of the alpha male. I also suspect that several of them are like drones: rather useless, with their too short proboscis which prevents them from foraging. Also allow me to apologize for anthropomorphizing on the backs of drones. Bees are what they are and we cannot draw human criteria to define and judge the role of males in these social insects.

Now, what is the link with the electoral campaign? It happens that in the democracy of the bees, the workers who have to convince dance to assert their program. When a new queen surrounded by her court leaves to settle elsewhere, the choice of the site where to establish the colony is up to the scouts. Like Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain, these workers set off on an expedition and return to the queen and her court to bring back the news. Returning from their mission, each scout dances to argue why they should settle in the site they have found. It is then up to the hive to decode the arguments of each other and to decide. The winner is the one who will ultimately be surrounded by the majority of the hive. A way of saying to him: “You are the one who won universal suffrage, so now take us to this place that you find so extraordinary. This is the “democracy” of bees.

I think we should try this way of doing things to give our election campaigns a little more humor. First, it would change us from the waltz of promises, the pace of which is so frantic that it ends up making you dizzy. Then, with their feet busy dancing, they might get one in their mouths less often. You know, like the CAQ leader when he associates immigration and violence, for example.

With danced election campaigns, I am certain that there would be more representativeness in power, because the chances of having a Latino or African prime minister are much higher.

Now, who would dance what during the election? For Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, it would be a mandatory tango with Manon Massé. Éric Duhaime would slam to better spank in the crowd. The case of Dominique Anglade is more complex. She tried to impress the gallery on the song All torn apart of Charlebois. Unfortunately, she is now paralyzed in a split (wide gap) with one foot caught in the Francos and the other in the Anglos. So she can’t dance. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon would dance to traditional music and François Legault to neo-trad. For those who are not familiar, the neo-trad is just traditional revisited with a modern sauce to solicit more widely. It sounds a bit like traditional, but it really isn’t. One thing is certain, the limbo will have to be banned. Otherwise, our politicians will still compete to know who will sink the lowest, when we would all like to see them set the bar higher.