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While learning the ins and outs of beekeeping, I also learned a few things about us.

By us, I mean you and me. The humans, and how we are similar to honeybees in some ways.

Like people, honeybees are hardworking. Well, not all honeybees. In fact, not all humans, either. But there are more hard workers than slackers in our society, current diatribes notwithstanding. The same is true in the bee society.

People with doctorate degrees and lots of time–like years–have studied the behavior of the honeybees and compared their society to ours.

Bees can exhibit an individual trait of attractiveness that is similar to human interactions. Most bees prefer to interact with their friends and family members. Strangers? Not so much. Like bees, we are more apt to be drawn to family members, and our friends are apt to be more like us than not.

Although there are many similarities between the honeybee society and ours, there also are just as many differences.

In the world of the honeybee, its society revolves around the leadership of a female and survives because of the worker bees, all of whom are also female. The queen bee is revered, even worshipped, in the home. Every day, when the sun comes up, the worker bees head out the front door, jump off the porch and get after it like Dolly Parton in “Nine to Five.” All day long, they jump from petal to petal, filling their baskets with pollen, taking it back to the hive, dumping it, and zipping back out for more until the day is done.

In the human world, especially at the top of the ladder, females are rarely found. Males run the companies, control government practices and decide what’s best for the rest of us.

You might be skeptical of this information and ask how those brainy PhDs learned what goes on in the bees’ little white house, called a hive.

I hope you’re sitting down. They placed a bar code on each bee. Yep, that’s a thing. In fact, beekeepers will soon be purchasing new “packages” of bees to install in an empty hive, and they usually are asked to decide whether they want the queen in that package to be marked so that she can be more easily spotted in the hive. Beekeepers who sell their bees can mark the queen’s head with a posca paint pen that uses water-based, non-toxic paint.

These bar codes put on the bees by the PhDs enabled the researchers to track the movement of every bee every day. That’s how they determined whether bees actually interacted with the same bees. They knew everything about each bee’s behavior.

In some ways, you might say that we too have bar codes attached to us because we carry at all times a variety of electronic devices that are being tracked. “They” know where we go, what we do, what we see and what we say.

You can read much more about this fascinating honeybee research by Googling “Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.” That is, if it hasn’t been deleted or erased by now.

Larry McDermott is a local retired farmer/journalist. Reach him at hardscrabblehollow@gmail.com