Wasp vs Bee intelligence

As above, so below. Nature explains societies.

A month ago I saw an amazing documentary called Smart Insects that goes into recent discoveries of their intelligence. It helped me start to understand human societies and their respective social order.

I will first explain the intelligences and then go into how it maps onto human behavior that we observe and examples of such in the stories of our time.

The videos are amazing to see but if you don’t have time, skip to my summaries.

Wasps from 22:48 to 32:14. https://youtu.be/Iy6eAE3hmas?t=1368

Bees from 1:48 to 19:52. https://youtu.be/Iy6eAE3hmas?t=108

Wasps and bees have similar sized brains but their utilization is different.
They have a different survival strategy which shows in their respective societies.

Wasps spend a lot of brain power on the logic of ranking as they are more individualistic than bees. In order to survive, they can read the rank and fitness of another competing wasp via various details like individual faces of other wasps. If they see a higher ranking wasp, they do not fight and back down in order to survive.
In the video, they are able to use logic to predict which section delivers a shock and avoid those shocks. The bees were unable to do this task and guessed wrong often.

Wasps excel at logical reasoning and abstract thought. This is what Ian McGilchrist ( The Matter with Things ) would call “left hemisphere” thinking which focuses on details and logic.


Bees on the other hand lack this logic and instead operate on doing tasks with curiosity/flexibility.
In the video, they were able to solve a physical puzzle on how to gain access to food. They were able to use tools!

Bees excel at practical problem solving and tool use. Ian McGilchrist would say that they have good “right hemisphere” thinking which sees the whole and is more connected to physical reality.

If you’re interested, I explain McGilchrist’s ideas in the context of a sci-fi show.
Left brain vs whole brain in Battlestar Galactica Why it's important that we properly attend to reality.


Now I will go into what I see is wasp-like and bee-like in humanity and life in general.

Please correct me in the comments if I missed or misinterpreted something and I will update as needed.

Wasps are individualistic and follow complex hierarchical order. They are like western civilization and capitalism. (I find it funny that this matches with the term WASP - White anglo saxon protestant which built our western societies.)
Darwin’s theory of evolution which focuses on survival of the fittest applies here. Health is managed via the allopathic system that believes we get sick from “absorbing the wrong information" or “invaders". DNA, vaccines, and other chemicals are used to purge one of the “bad guys”.

This is also reflected in some indigenous tribes such as the Aborigines of Australia and various South American tribes. The Celts had quite a few levels of hierarchy.
To survive, these societies relied on an ‘enlightened’ class that set the order for others to follow and set rules to follow. They tended to have religions that reinforced this order where their god(s), clergy, and prophets would tell their members how to coexist.

Bees are communal and despite having defined roles, females can switch between being worker and soldier/protector bees. Males are drones. There are a few roles in these civilizations. Darwin ignored that evolution also uses cooperation in order to survive. Health is managed holistically, where the idea is to “feed the body" what it needs to maintain, repair, and grow.

This is reflected in Asian/Eastern societies that value the group over the individual. Communism tends to be their way of running the economy (China, Vietnam), but as we know a lot of Asia had been colonized by the west which lead to some countries having a mix of capitalist and communist ideals (India, Japan, Hong Kong, The Philippines). Many Native Americans followed a similar order. Vikings were also like this with limited levels and the ability to change roles with demonstrated skills.
To survive, these societies used cooperation. They tended to have philosophies of forces of life and destruction.


So with the analogies to societies, religions, and systems let’s move onto how it connects to psychology.

The narcissist is a person whose sense of self is a reflection of the people and society they look up to. They are like wasps, copying their idols and shunning the enemies of their tribe/society. Psychopaths and sociopaths are like them but are more flexible and can ‘consciously’ change their sense of self depending on their goals. They lack affective empathy (direct concern for others) and excel at cognitive empathy (how to behave to others based on rules).

A good example is portrayed in RoboCop 2 where OCP gives Robocop many rules to follow in order to keep him serving corporate interests over the peoples’ interests. He was turned into a wasp but was conflicted when the rules contradicted his “heart” and the base purpose of being a police officer.

The video of this is in my article: Why DeepSeek uses 10x less power than western AI. RoboCop exorcises his Daemons.

Before these rules, RoboCop had a few directives not unlike the bees/communal strategy. They revolved around general welfare and justice- standing up for truth.

After he exorcized the directives (rebooted by dying and being revived), he had NO directives. This is where he was neither a bee nor a wasp. He became free from rules and was able to act on his ‘heart’.

RoboCop was my favorite hero growing up. I identified with him and his plight.
I immigrated to the US from a non-religious (communal) society with basic rules when I was very young.
The base directives were given to me growing up. Then, I was given the many corporate rules by school and work. It eventually broke me in many ways because many of those rules went against what I learned to love from my family. It drove me into depression and anxiety because I was serving two strategies, bees/wasps and it made me feel like the world was run on chaos. The story of RoboCop is set in the crazy 1980s where crime and corruption were rampant and the progression of technology was for the benefit of the hierarchy instead of the people.

We are in a time where technology is changing so fast and the fear is that we will forget what it is to be human. I’ve felt the fear and dreamt of going back in time to an ideal when we were free from the control of societies which use technology to impose their dream of dystopia. But the RoboCop example was what gave me hope as a child in that while humanity was chaotic in the story, a robot/human hybrid was able to bring back hope for people and rekindle the essential purpose of the police - to protect and serve the people, not the system.

Technology has made life easier in many ways but also chained us in other ways. Why does this happen? It’s because we trusted authority and their wasp-like hierarchy that imposes survival of the fittest (capitalism) while pretending that they care about cooperation. Their idea of cooperation is to keep us ignorant in dystopian systems that they control. The same can be said of communal cultures that keep people ignorant in pseudo-utopian systems (communism) that deny individual rights.

The hybrid is to have a system that values individual rights but also cares for the group. There was a glimpse of that in the Scandinavian democratic socialist countries that combined capitalism with socialism. Upward mobility in these nations surpassed what we have in Western Europe, North America, and the East.
They devolved when the European Union imposed their Globocap (coined by CJ Hopkins) system on them. A Brief History of Global Capitalism

I leave us with a Native American parable that is very wise yet bee focused.

One evening, an elderly Cherokee brave told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, ‘My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.

One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other wolf is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.’

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked, ‘Grandpa, which wolf wins?’

The old Cherokee simply replied, ‘The one that you feed.’


The Cherokee were correct but denied the survival wisdom of wasp-like societies. Their perspective lead them to be taken advantage of and defeated by the wasp-like settlers. Why? Because feeding just one wolf means that they did not truly understand the motives of those who fed the other wolf.
The reality is that we should feed both wolves because as much as our conscious good matters, our shadow also protects us.