Good morning everyone,

I hope you had a great International Women’s day, celebrating the achievements of all the top international women. In today’s Fem Friday, we’re going to be looking at the contribution of females on a much smaller scale, i.e., that of the insect world! If you don’t like insects very much, firstly there aren’t any horrible pictures of them under the links, and secondly I hope this newsletter brings you round, even a little, to our six-legged friends.

Let’s start with ants. If you’ve been looking for a strong female role model, you could do a lot worse than ants as they can carry up to fifty times their own body weight. There is also a constant power struggle between the queen and the female workers about what the gender balance of the colony should be. This is fascinating:

The root of the power struggle between queens and workers results from the different interests they have in raising new members of the colony. Both – as a result of evolutionary pressures – are interested in ensuring the survival of their genes. The queen does this by producing new queens and male drones to mate with those queens, which will create new colonies. But males, which die after mating, are of no use to the female workers.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/08/010820072111.htm

Of course, this was always going to cover bees, they gave us the phrase “queen bee”. Here’s a review of a book about how we have used bees to model our worlds and the mistakes we made along the way. The author of this book is Bee Wilson (a woman) so lots of bee coverage here today. Bees:

Most amusingly, this is seen in the long-mistaken gender of the queen bee. The idea of a king bee goes back to Greek and Roman times. Most looked at the hive, saw a large bee in charge, assumed it was stronger and more able than other bees, and drew the inference of a master bee. This all seemed perfectly logical until the invention of the microscope revealed an awkwardness: female genitalia. The news was hard for some to take. One English clergyman and apiarist insisted in 1744 that the queen must be a virgin. It was too scandalous to imagine she might have sex with the males in the hive as if she were “a base, notorious, impudent strumpet […] with gallants by the hundreds”.

https://www.economist.com/node/3195667

Finally, I thought of this theme because I encountered this completely lovely blog, by a woman beekeeper in Ealing. I forget what I was searching for but the post I landed on was about walking through London and looking at all of the non-human life there and feeling happy that it was spring. A delightful activity for all ages to read about and do. Here’s a post about myths, snowdrops and the promises of spring for you:

he flower means consolation and promise. In another legend, Kerma, finding her lover dead, plucked a snowdrop and placed it on his wounds. It did not rouse him, but at the touch his flesh changed to snowdrops, hence the flower is also an emblem of death. Even now in rural England the flower is in ill repute, and it is unlucky to carry the first spray of the season into the house […] I’m glad the legend discourages bringing snowdrops into the house as they are much more valuable for the bees. And with snowdrops blowing in the fresh February air, let’s hope their promise comes true soon.

https://missapismellifera.com/2014/02/16/snowdrop-the-flower-of-promise/

Have a super day!

A xx.