Bee Colonies with Dina Graham

An all-female civilization that votes, dances, and grieves its dead. The men mate once, then die.

Dina Graham fell into this rabbit hole trying to cure her insomnia: pull up something boring enough to put herself to sleep. Bees did the opposite. She knows way too much about how a colony runs entirely on haplodiploidy, where unfertilized eggs become males and fertilized eggs become females, and how a single scout bee’s waggle dance in the pitch-dark hive functions as a literal vote on which flowers the whole colony flies toward next.