insect society Quotes

Insect politics, indifferent universe. Bang your head against the wall, but apathy is worse.

We're all ants. I'm a glittery little ant.

It's true that many say that [they] object to the idea of "human nature," but it's not clear what that is supposed to mean. Are we different from ants?

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

... indeed, what reason may not go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders? What wise hand teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us? Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature, whales, elephants, dromedaries, and camels; these, I confess, are the colossuses and majestick pieces of her hand; but in these narrow engines there is more curious mathematieks; and the civility of these little Citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their Maker.

Not all ants use violence to dominate their world, some use more subtle methods.

The ant world is a tumult, a noisy world of pheromones being passed back and forth.

Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that of bees?

No living creature, not even man, has achieved, in the centre of his sphere, what the bee has achieved in her own: and were some one from another world to descend and ask of the earth the most perfect creation of the logic of life, we should needs have to offer the humble comb of honey.

A million million worlds that move in peace;A million mighty laws that never cease;And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds,Rich with eggs, slaves and store of millet-seeds.They sleep beneath the sodAnd trust in God.

Most people don't have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don't know anything about.

Let us turn elsewhere, to the wasps and bees, who unquestionably come first in the laying up of a heritage for their offspring.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.

We have the ability to approach our race like ants, or we have the ability to approach our race like crabs.

I once heard the survivors of a colony of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow's foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization.

A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees; maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway.

If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the superfluity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and especially with queen bees.

Ants are good citizens; they place group interest first. But they carry it so far, they have few or no political rights. An ant doesn't have the vote, apparently; he just has his duties.