If you think about it, we are living in exciting times in terms of the social evolution of behavior, thanks to the Internet, like a bunch of bees in giant increasingly connected hives -- our social hives are buzzing pretty much non-stop. We twitter, tweet, and twirl in new social evolution fascination. We poke, gift, and game in new-old social evolution bursts of "Hey! Look at me now!" on facebook. We blog, we hub, we invite others into that exclusive world of "myspace."

The size of our human hives are ever expanding. We can speak and others of our kind can hear us around the world and speak back - instantly. With a click, we can broadcast a moment of time in a picture that needs no words. We can tell the world about all that we care.

So all this, has me thinking and wondering:

Has this made us better?

Is it making us truly closer to the other members of our individual hives of social activity when we know both the small and the large of what they are thinking and doing?

What is the quality of our conversations?

Will there be a time when every social hive combined worldwide, will grow so unmanageable, that we too will experience colony collapse disorder of the extreme online kind?

If you think that last question seems too far out there, consider this:

• Some of our currently most important online social hives, are already in danger of collapse. Here are just two examples:

You Tube -- User generated content on ever popular "You Tube" has become a financial rock around their drowning neck. To put it simply, the most popular clicked videos, don't attract advertisers because of two factors: (1) They aren't appropriate for the advertiser's audience; or (2) Viewers aren't likely to click on ads, but more rather to move on to the next video. It costs You Tube $700 million a year, but they only make $240 a million in advertising revenues.

Facebook -- With just over a billion photos alone being stored on this site a month, it gets extremely little in return, while it shells out over two million a week to keep up with our insatiable need to "share."

Where will this lead us to?

Whenever I can't see what possibilities the future might hold, or the answers to questions in an increasingly complicated world -- I look back to nature (along with history and science), for guidance. It's in these that I know that real life examples can give me new insights.

I was watching a honeybee, and thinking about some questions one of hubpages most prolific and profound questioners asked me, "Why are bees unselfish compared to us?"

So, all of this led me to thinking about the unselfish ones on this planet, the elite known as the "eusocial." Eusociality is "true sociality," and a real scientific term.   It's very rare, and it's thought that about only three species walking the planet, are capable of being among the chosen ones:

• Ants
• Bees (and wasps)
• Humans

Not many of us know, that this is another elite club of sociability that we all potentially could belong to, if only we wanted to. The members are among the world's most unselfish ones, and there are only three things that you need to be capable of to qualify to join in with them. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you have cooperative group childcare, so no one ends up solely taking care of only "their" offspring?
• Does your inner most social group have multi-generational childcare of that offspring and assistance to the parents during their lifetime?
• Among your kind, is there a distribution of the workload, and does everyone agrees that not all members will work as hard as the others, and that some will not work at all -- and it's OK with everyone, as it's for the good of all?
• Will you agree that not everyone will reproduce, and that this is for the good of all?

Well, the reality that ants and bees have abilities to be totally unselfish compared to humans, is all a bit much for me. You'd think in all our superiority, we'd excel at being the most socially correct, and unselfish of all of earth. Sorry to say, "It isn't so."

While some of us are capable of it, the rest of us are just selfish enough, to have no part or desire for true sociability, and in many ways, I think while we are included on that list of potential elite "hive" members -- it's something mankind will never achieve.

So, as to why bees (and ants) are unselfish compared to us, I'm thinking it's one of life's unsolvable mysteries. Perhaps, the answers are found in that genetically, we are so assimilated and diverse at the same time -- that true loyalty and total unselfishness is something we might embrace intellectually, but are incapable of genetically otherwise? That leads me to throw out that question, back in the direction of the rest of you:

Why can't humans be as cooperative as bees or ants, and work for the common good of all?

I'm thinking we need to find the answer(s) before all of our hives collapse.

A Little Bee Factuality For Your Hive To Think About

Big-eyed drones, the males of the bee hive, are heavy bodied and the kind of bee if you are fearing being stung -- that you'd like to meet, as they are sting less. Pity the poor guys though, as they have short lives, dying off each fall. New males don't emerge until late the following spring. Ninety days of life is about all they get.

In some ways, in their brief lives, they live seemingly idyllic male existences. They don't have to work gathering nectar or pollen. They don't have to do any nursing of the brood, and they don't even have to even do any hive construction. They only have one job and that is to mate with a queen.

Now, in case some of you guys reading here are thinking that's a pretty good sounding job description, consider this:

• Sting less, drones are no defenders of invaders, so they are looked upon as pretty much socially worthless members.
• Their lazy behavior can suddenly be interrupted, when they are forced to generate either heat when the hive gets too cold, or fan away heat when it gets too hot. Fanning a bunch of females might be a little exhausting.
• Sometimes they have incestuous relationships with their sisters, afterwards things don't go well in the hive.
• When mating -- it has to be done on the fly, not always an easy task.
• The honeybee queen requires several drones to have a successful hive, so they are not the only guy.
• Death is certain once they mate, because their male apparatus and other organs are ripped from their bodies in the act.
• If the drone remains celibate, the hive will eventually drive them off as winter nears to starve to death, simply because they eat too much.

So the next time, you see a bunch of bees in the early afternoon, a good distance away from the hive, be kind to them -- as this is a sign that the drones of the honeybee world are looking for death by lust.

Imagine that the moment you were born, you were already fully grown -- such is the beginning of the worker bee life, who incidentally, is always a girl. She's a special girl because unlike us, she has ultraviolet vision. She can actually see which flowers are full of nectar and even more incredibly, she can see the sun even when it is hidden by clouds.

She's also very talented. She can fly more than twelve miles an hour going forward. She can fly backward. She can also fly sideways. All of this being done, while her wings beat two hundred and fifty times a second, while carrying pollen baskets on the outside of her back legs. Talk about multi-tasking!

I'm thinking you don't want to get stung by her, not only for yourself, but because her normally hidden stinger has barbs that prevent her from pulling it out. The good news for you is that she can only sting you once. The bad news for her is that leaving her weapon behind results into fatal damage to her internal organs.

The term "worker bee" doesn't even come close to her job description. First there is her early adulthood days of just being a house bee. She begins her life cleaning the hive, feeding the larvae, building the wax comb, storing food, and defending the hive against all enemies. She has a built in natural calendar of a to do list from the day she hatches. Three weeks later in this apprenticeship, she's off to be a "field worker bee."

By now, she's putting in very long days that begin before the dew dries and end at sunset. She makes at least ten flights a day, usually staying within three miles of the hive, visiting fields, meadows, and gardens. She can stop at an astounding ten flowers a minute, and might visit over six hundred flowers before even returning once to the hive.

Her shopping to do list is long:

• She shops for water to think honey that is too thick. It's also especially important to the hive during hot weather, as it's also used by the bees to air condition the hive.
• Nectar is big on her grocery list. She has to suck nectar with her tongue in order for the hive to make honey.
• She sucks sap from plants with her jaws and stores it in her pollen baskets. That sap is important to the hive, as it seals cracks and varnishes the walls of the hive.
• She also gathers pollen with her antennae and branched hairs. This too goes into her pollen baskets.

As if her work day isn't already hard, when she returns to the hive each time, she must transfer the nectar to a waiting house bee via tongue-to-tongue. If that isn't enough, she ends her day, as she does each trip back to the hive, by dancing an all important dance.

Bee social etiquette is an artistic dance of communication skills of the highest order. Consider this:

• The signal for the dance to begin starts with the field worker bee giving the house worker bee the nectar.
• Afterwards, the other bees gather around her and touch her with their antennas. This allows them to tell what type of flowers she has been visiting.
• She tells them of her travels through her dance movements, both the location and how far it is to travel back to them.

The field worker bee has many dance movements, but two of them are the most common:

1. The Round Dance -- In some ways, it's the best dance of all, because it indicates that the flowers are close to the hive (less than 100 yards away). In this dance she circles in one direction, then turns around and circles back in the other direction. She's having a bit of fun with her girlfriends, in this dance they all know too well -- for she isn't telling them the exact location of the flowers. Her girlfriends must fly out in many directions in a race to find the flowers so close by.
2. Wag Your Tail Dance-- This complicated dance is more complicated than any old fashioned square dance, for it communicates, "Let me show you the way!" in a better than a map hoedown. This special dance is reserved for the flowers that are farther away only. The field worker bee dances in a half circle in one direction, pivotal turns, and runs straight ahead while waggling her cute little behind. What's really interesting about this, aside from the fact that the dance shows the location and the distance, is how the house worker bees know from the dance, exactly where to fly to find the flowers -- because it's all related to the sun. Just how many butt wiggles per fifteen seconds tells the all important distance to the flowers.

Here's a little sample of a bee social communication:

• Ten booty waggle runs = just over 100 yards away
• Seven booty waggle runs = 600 yards away
• Shake your booty only four runs = "Beautiful flowers are a thousand yards away"

There is a nonprofit organization that not only works to protect wildlife, but also to protect the habitat of insects and their kind. This thirty year old society, has some great tips for those who understand the need to protect what some others might wish to destroy, thinking them pests, not as important as other species. Be sure to look into the Xerces Society if you care about this planet!

Just one pound of honey, requires the worker bees to collect nectar from over a million flowers.