As the Louis Armstrong song lyric has it, “Birds do it, bees do it; even educated fleas do it.” Though the song is about falling in love, the lyric could also apply to leadership behavior. People are, of course, animals, so it stands to reason that some aspects of leadership among the humans would reflect some aspects of behavior among other critters. Before various species of hominids walked upright in the world, other species had been practicing varieties of behavior that look a lot like leadership. Many of these behaviors are well know to all of us, even those of us who have no special knowledge of animal behavior. It’s fairly easy to identify patterns of behavior that look like critters working together to adapt to challenging problems in their environments, especially in the assumption of different roles by different members of the hive, flock, herd, pride, or clan. Such roles are often distinguished by age, gender, strength, and skill. Ultimately, it’s not too difficult to recognize that the driving purpose of all the patterns of leadership behavior is the whole group’s survival and adaptation to a challenging environment.
Some of the behaviors summarized below are obvious to even the most casual observers; others have been described by expert animal behaviorists.
Like ants, wasps, and a few other complex species, bees are considered “eusocial” by scientists who study them. This means that bees, ants, wasps, and a few other species depend on social behavior that ultimately subordinates the individual critter to the welfare of the whole community. Considering the bees, life in every hive is organized around a female queen who is way bigger than any other member of the hive and whose primary function is to give birth to many little baby bees. In other words, the future of the whole bee community depends on the queen and on those who take care of the queen. Thus the queen is pampered, supported, and catered to constantly. The downside of the queen bee’s life, however, is that she never gets to do anything other than lie around and give birth to little baby bees over and over and over again. That may be necessary, but it seems depressingly boring to me.
Male bees are called “drones,” which implies that they don’t do much, but of course they do contribute their genetic material to the queen for the sake of reproduction. Other female bees are generally “worker bees” who spend much of their time out of the hive looking for and gathering nectar from flowers, the main ingredient in the honey that forms the bee diet. (And which is also coveted by human beings, some of whom make a living as beekeepers.) Worker bees communicate with each other in order to find significant sources of nectar. They do a little waggle dance and point their hind ends toward the nectar-laden flowers they have discovered so other worker bees can help deliver the goods back to the hive. Interestingly, the process of gathering nectar to make honey also benefits the flowers, whose reproduction depends on the process of fertilization by distributing pollen from plant to plant. Though worker bees are individually not as critical to the life of the hive as the queen, it seems to me that the life of a worker bee is a lot more interesting than the life of the queen.
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