Bees and wasps are the epitome of feminism. The Queen’s the centre of attention with her hundreds of slaves working for her. What shall I call these slaves? I think I’ll call them…drones. In fact there are species called ‘Worker’ bees and ‘Worker’ wasps. Imagine your entire species being defined by your profession. There are species of bee called ‘Mining bees’ – what if they want to do something else?
We’re miners?
Well can’t you do something else? Like property development or something
We can’t, our entire species must be miners. It’s in our name.
Some of them obviously got bored and mutated to get round this problem. There are ‘leaf-cutter’ bees and those that went into textiles – ‘wool-carder’ bees. Then there are the lazy ones:
And what do you do?
I bumble. Yes we didn’t fancy being miner bees so we decided to call ourselves Bumble Bees. Catchy isn’t it? Yes, well, we just have meetings in the Hive (groovy name I know) with about 150 of us and just bumble together really. It’s great fun…
Unlike bees, wasps are defined more by where they spend their time. ‘I’m a tree wasp’, ‘a sand wasp’, ‘a paper wasp’, and the bizarrely specific ‘Robin’s pin-cushion wasp (cheers Robin, very kind of you)’.
But we all know they’re lying, because otherwise they’d have more exciting names like ‘Jam Sandwich Wasp’, ‘Pear Cider Wasp’ or ‘Orange Solero Wasp’.
‘Hi, I’m Mr Wasp, I’d like a Calippo please. Great, thanks. Got any jam as well?’
