Who has the most comfortable life on earth? Is it a movie star or a business czar? A military dictator or a fortune inheritor? Actually, it is the queen bee. She has at her command thousands of worker bees who visit flowers throughout the day without saying, ‘Chatt Gaye yaar is zindagi se!’ They also rear the young ones, the larvae and are even willing to put their lives at stake as defenders of the hive.
The queen doesn’t pay them any salary. And she is not worried about a labour inspector or a tax man paying her a visit. What is more, the worker bees never unionize- so there are no strikes and no chants of ‘madhumakkhi rani murdabaad’. The queen bee isn’t short on passion either- she has a reverse harem.
There are a number of males, the drones, who are ever ready to mate with her. Queens of termites and ants have similar types of lives. The wonders of nature are endless- and some of them are not even known to us. In most birds, the male is better looking than the female- think of peacock. But who has to woo whom? You guessed it right. It is the male bird who has to employ various tricks to attract his lady love and this may including bizarre dances.
The male weaver bird spends days to build an elaborate and artistic nest. Yet the females often reject the nest after inspection. But the male weaver bird is no saint. He builds multiple nests and conveys ‘I am yours only’ to many females. The crow is supposed to be a bird with a high IQ. Yet the koels and the cuckoos manage to lay their eggs in the nests of crows who rear these chicks as their own. Apart from field visits, I have learnt a lot about nature from television channels like Animal Planet, Discovery, BBC Earth and Nat Geo Wild.
Nowadays, shows on these channels aren’t pure documentaries- usually they have a story thread running through them.
So, we get to know that amongst birds and animals, there is a lot of love and self-sacrifice but deviousness and selfishness too. In a pack of animals, there will be sharif as well as badmaash members.
There are no feminists in the animal world to keep a check on alpha males and there are no social reformers too. While on a trip to Masai Mara in Kenya I observed that in most deers and primates, the dominant male has a harem of several females.
Put yourself in the shoes of the lesser ranked males, the ones defeated by the alpha males and forced to live as bachelors- one is likely to mumble ‘why me’. But the animal world has a consolation for those of us who have given up on gyms. Elephants and tortoises hardly do any running or strenuous physical activity and yet live to be the longest. A paradox which most of us wish could be true in humans too. If we observe nature closely, we can find as much drama, intrigue, emotion and action as a Hollywood potboiler!
Jas Kohli is a noted humour writer. He is the author of three bestselling humour novels, ‘Lights! Wedding! Ludhiana!’, ‘Lights! Scalpel! Romance!’, and ‘Anything to Look Hot’.