Territorial Queen Bee Ambitions

Howdy! It's been a crazy week and a half but in the small hours I've had time to work some more on Ambitions. Today we'll look at a case study on the second rung of our Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Territory. In particular we'll look at the External version of this Ambition, which I'm calling Conquest. European honeybees, the bog-standard honeybee that most of us interact with, tend not to be horribly territorial other than directly protecting themselves and their nests. However, in the last few decades we have seen hybridization of the European honeybee with the Africanized honeybee (A.H.B., or Apis mellifera scutellata). If you've ever heard of killer bees, this is usually what people are talking about. The Africanized honeybee was first introduced in South America to increase honey production, but they have rapidly spread north due to behavioral adaptations that also make them aggressive, protective of their hives, and likely to abscond from a stressed hive to usurp a healthier…