Bees will produce concrete instead of honey, and we can only wonder what ants will do

Jul 29, 2014 15:02 GMT  ·  By

Lots of people are afraid or at least wary of bees. The things are notorious for being mostly harmless if you leave them alone, but willing to kill themselves by stinging you and pumping all the venom they had in your veins (it tears them in two, literally, to do it).

And since it's not altogether clear what they can interpret as aggressive behavior, most people know it's a good idea to stay very still and wait for it to pass them by instead of making any sudden moves.

Especially if there's a whole swarm of them around. If just one of them stings you, the others will suicidally (literally) proceed to do the same.

Let's not even get started on wasps. They're portrayed as the “bad guys” in fiction involving anthropomorphic bees, but the truth is that they're a lot freer about the stinging/biting because it's not lethal for them to do it.

Either way, humans are wary of even a single wasp or bee, even if it's alone, and the buzzing itself is ominous even to the ears of people who have no knowledge of the “stigma” associated with these insects.

Unfortunately, humans are humans. And humans tend to get bright ideas. One of these ideas would have us live our lives while constantly, or at least often, being forced in close vicinity with bees.

Why? Because the bees would build our houses, of course! Who knew?

Bees: the Next 3D Printers

This has to be the weirdest idea involving 3D printing that I have heard this week. No, scratch that, this is the weirdest idea I have learned about this week, period.

Two people, in a certain interview, described their idea for swarms of bees that would be able to fix our buildings, and eventually build them from scratch.

The bees would produce concrete or something similar, instead of honey, and be “programmed” to work in tandem on a task through a mixture of genetic engineering and training (housing the bees inside a mold the shape of the area needing repair).

No actual plans are in place for this yet, granted, but the idea exists, and there is nothing more wonderful and dangerous than an idea. Especially when there are actual races of bees that can already make a natural version of cellophane.

The Dangers

There are actually many. For one thing, the instinctual wariness or fear caused by the mere buzzing of a bee isn't something that will ever go away from human society.

Still, the construction crews expected to work with these bee 3D printers will probably get the impulse to scream and gibber trained out of them.

However, risks remain. The bees are and will be, in the end, bees, and unless the impulse to “defend” against humans is bred out of them, they will cause a lot of stress when they are sent to fix a cracked pillar or whatever else. Especially if it happens in a populated city area.

Another thing is that being modified to make concrete instead of honey will have a negative effect on flora. You can't just expect the bees to stay cooped up in a beehouse permanently, even if you do provide them with honey or sugar to live off.

Here are lots of other problems with the application of the concept, but maybe not as many as those related to actually creating the bee species itself.

Genetically modifying worker bees sounds great in concept, until you realize that they all come out of the bees laid by a single queen. How will you genetically alter the queen so that the concrete glands only end up in the worker bees and not the other types that hatch/mature? That's just one question.

All this is, of course, making abstraction of the moral implications of twisting nature to our purpose this way. And, of course, if it's done to bees, it can be done to, say, ants.

Maybe we should just stick to robots.