Cosmometric Genealogy
Extract from the book “Bee Wisdom: Teachings from the hive“, by Sandira Belia.
“Among the strangenesses of the bee world, here is one of the most curious: parthenogenesis. This is asexual reproduction where an embryo can develop from an unfertilised female gamete. Among most species who practise this style of reproduction (like some reptiles and fish), the generated offspring is female. With the bees, however, when the queen deposits an unfertilised egg in a cell, the being to be born will be masculine. The male is, therefore, a clone of his mother, possessing the same genetic information and a very different body. He has no father, but he does have a grandfather. This particularity of the bee folk gives their family tree a unique cosmometry.
Human genealogy, like that of most animals, is constructed according to a geometric sequence with the common ratio of 2 (that is, each level is multiplied by 2). A child has two genetic parents, 4 grand-parents, 8 great-grand-parents, and so on. If we observe the ancestry of a male bee, we see the appearance of a sequence of sacred proportions: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34… In this now-famous series known as the Fibonacci sequence, each term is the sum of the two preceding terms. The more we progress in the series, the more the ratio between two consecutive numbers approaches Phi, the Golden Ratio (1.618). When the queen of a colony dies unexpectedly, the royal pheromone which inhibits the fertility of the maidens ceases to be diffused throughout the nest. In those cases where there is no fresh egg available and, therefore, she cannot be replaced by an ‘emergency queen’, a maiden then begins to lay eggs. Not having been fertilised, she will only produce male eggs. Even though the orphaned colony is condemned to die,3 the genetic characteristics of her line will have the possibility of continuing to propagate, thanks to the males issuing from the laying maiden. The family tree of the maiden differs slightly from that of the male: it starts one notch higher. The mother of the maiden will necessarily be a queen, but it may be that her paternal grandmother was also a maiden. Does this make sense?”
