School kids need a new lesson about royal jelly.
The kids in the Grade 5 classroom knew all about royal jelly.
“The bees feed it to their babies and they turn into queens.”
And so it is. We think. Royal jelly – countless journal articles (and Wikipedia) tell us – stimulates the latent she-ness in a female larva. It removes her from a future life of weary drudgery as a worker destined to live six short weeks, then die wedged between some dusty stigma and anther. Royal jelly gives the lucky larva a future life as a queen employed in monotonous drudgery as an egg-laying machine destined to deposit progeny for three years in a crowded dark den, then die in a palace coup. There’s not much of an advantage in the queen’s life. But it’s longer. And there must be a crown or something that comes with the job.
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