Summary Of Richard Seeley's Honeybee Democracy

Which set of individuals hold the power to both rule and govern a society, and how this power is acquired, is of crucial importance as it determines the overall way of life of a given group. Relations of power and politics are highly fluid, and can present themselves in a variety of divergent forms. A common form of political power relations is democracy. Democratic political rule involves a system of power relations vested in either elected individuals or the people themselves (Murrel, 2007). In contrast to democratic political rule is oligarchy. Oligarchic political rule is a type of government rule controlled only by a very small group of powerful individuals (Murrel, 2007). Oligarchic as well as democratic forms of political rule can be …show more content…
Seeley (2010) immediately makes us readers mindful of the many choices honeybee’s are required to make throughout their daily lives in order for their democracy to unfold. These honeybee’s must decide, as a collective, when it is necessary to build more honeycomb, where and when to dispatch foragers, and most crucially, the site on which they are going to build their new home. This decision of where to build their new home is crucial to the hives all-around survival and thus the decision made must be a good one. To combat the vast importance of such a decision, the honeybee’s resort to a cooperative form of …show more content…
In his book Chimpanzee Politics, De Waal (1989) studies the lives of a number of chimpanzees being held in a captive enclosure. In part due to the confines of such an enclosure, the social lives of these chimpanzees are inflated. As a result, the chimpanzees display a large variety of both political and social behaviours. Both these political and social behaviours can be determined as fitting within the principles of oligarchic