V: Bee
Bee gender will blow your mind.
Good morning. Today is quintidi, the 15th of Germinal, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate l'abeille, quite possibly the most important insect in the world.
Bees are related to ants. I don't know why it blew my mind to learn this, because in retrospect it's very obvious, given the highly complex and specialized social structures they form in service to a single queen, but there's something about think of bees as flying flower ants that really shifts the perspective. (Or, thinking of ants as digging bees, for that matter.)
But there's a recurring theme that's been showing up this Germinal, one that I doubt was intended but I find very fascinating given spring's traditional role as "that time of year when everything has sex." The theme is plants and animals that break the male-female gender dichotomy of our mammalian biology. Lots of plants toy around with having none gender or all the genders, but (most) bees get into a gender place that's really interesting, given that it's another equally valid answer to nature's math problem of how to propagate a gene pool without amplifying flaws through inbreeding.
