The worker drones of the alien space bugs have banded together and overthrown their Queen...

Worker bees can actually lay unfertilized eggs in real life, albeit only to produce males, given their haplodiploidy! The queen produces pheromones and bullies the other workers to keep them in line. As the queen grows older, however, the workers may eventually attempt to overthrow the old queen in their own little communist revolution. The queen goes on a rampage, trying to kill off all worker-laid eggs, whereas the workers actively start to rebel against the queen by building smaller, irregular cells that end up suffocating the Queen's own offspring.

Things continue until eventually the Queen is killed off, anarchy descends upon the beehive until either a new Queen installs herself or the hive naturally deteriorates.

>bugs institute a political system that works for them culturally
>FREEEEDDDDUMB THE MOCRACY BOMS AWAY
Next I suppose you'll force them to take loans from the IMF in order to hire your companies to rebuild infrastructure you need to strip mine their resources from under them, then act appalled when they start swarming your borders looking for a better kitchen to infest.

...

I thought they're just fodder for star drive tests? You know we only issue them 12 hours of oxygen each?

youtube.com/watch?v=hJlidLVfwWc

Who cares about that? The most pressing issue is CLEARLY getting gay-marriage legalized in the kingdom!

...

Bees sure are weird creatures.

>The Author of the Acacia Seeds
And Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics
>MS. Found in an Anthill
>The messages were found written in touch-gland exudation on degerminated acacia seeds laid in rows at the end of a narrow, erratic tunnel leading off from one of the deeper levels of the colony. It was the orderly arrangement of the seeds that first drew the investigator's attention.
>The messages are fragmentary, and the translation approximate and highly interpretative; but the text seems worthy of interest if only for its striking lack of resemblance to any other Ant texts known to us.
>Seeds 1-13 [I will] not touch feelers. [I will] not stroke. [I will] spend on dry seeds [my] soul's sweetness. It may be found when [I am] dead. Touch this dry wood! [I] call! [I am] here!
>Alternatively, this passage may be read:
>[Do] not touch feelers. [Do] not stroke. Spend on dry seeds [your] soul's sweetness. [Others] may find it when [you are] dead. Touch this dry wood! Call: [I am] here!
>No known dialect of Ant employs any verbal person except the third person singular and plural and the first person plural. In this text, only the root forms of the verbs are used; so there is no way to decide whether the passage was intended to be an autobiography or a manifesto.
>Seeds 14-22 Long are the tunnels. Longer is the untunneled. No tunnel reaches the end of the untunneled. The untunneled goes on farther than we can go in ten days [i.e., forever]. Praise!
>The mark translated "Praise!" is half of the customary salutation "Praise the Queen!" or "Long live the Queen!" or "Huzza for the Queen!"—but the word/mark signifying "Queen" has been omitted.
>Seeds 23-29 As the ant among foreign-enemy ants is killed, so the ant without ants dies, but being without ants is as sweet as honeydew.

>cont

>haplodiploidy

That cannot possibly be a real word.

>An ant intruding in a colony not its own is usually killed. Isolated from other ants, it invariably dies within a day or so. The difficulty in this passage is the word/mark "without ants," which we take to mean "alone"—a concept for which no word/mark exists in Ant.
>Seeds 30-31 Eat the eggs! Up with the Queen!
>There has already been considerable dispute over the interpretation of the phrase on Seed 31. It is an important question, since all the preceding seeds can be fully understood only in the light cast by this ultimate exhortation. Dr. Rosbone ingeniously argues that the author, a wingless neuter-female worker, yearns hopelessly to be a winged male, and to found a new colony, flying upward in the nuptial flight with a new Queen. Though the text certainly permits such a reading, our conviction is that nothing in the text supports it—least of all the text of the immediately preceding seed, No. 30: "Eat the eggs!" This reading, though shocking, is beyond disputation.

>cont

>then act appalled when they start swarming your borders looking for a better kitchen to infest.
That's when we firebomb their hives and just colonize their land instead.

>We venture to suggest that the confusion over Seed 31 may result from an ethnocentric interpretation of the word "up." To us, "up" is a "good" direction. Not so, or not necessarily so, to an ant. "Up" is where the food comes from, to be sure; but "down" is where security, peace, and home are to be found. "Up" is the scorching sun; the freezing night; no shelter in the beloved tunnels; exile; death. Therefore we suggest that this strange author, in the solitude of her lonely tunnel, sought with what means she had to express the ultimate blasphemy conceivable to an ant, and that the correct reading of Seeds 30-31, in human terms, is:
>Eat the eggs! Down with the Queen!
>The desiccated body of a small worker was found beside Seed 31 when the manuscript was discovered. The head had been severed from the thorax, probably by the jaws of a soldier of the colony. The seeds, carefully arranged in a pattern resembling a musical stave, had not been disturbed. (Ants of the soldier caste are illiterate; thus the soldier was presumably not interested in the collection of useless seeds from which the edible germs had been removed.) No living ants were left in the colony, which was destroyed in a war with a neighbouring anthill at some time subsequent of the death of the Author of the Acacia Seeds.

Haplodiploidy is a sex-determination system in which males develop from unfertilized eggs and are haploid, and females develop from fertilized eggs and are diploid. Haplodiploidy is sometimes called arrhenotoky.

They really are. And the funny thing is, what indirectly causes this reaction is generally the males.

The current theory as to why insects such as bees and ants cooperate so well is because they are extremely closely related genetically: an individual bee shares 75% of her genetic material with any one of her sisters. However, males only share 25% of their genes with their sisters, so they are basically half-brothers. Workers therefore care very little for male drones, and will likely starve them in favor of their sisters, or attempt to birth their own, without the queen's control, hence the tense relations between queen and workers.

So, basically, bees are incest loving bastards?

Where did you get this? It's cool.

It's more that one queen gives birth to a huge amount of bees.

That's usually how bumblehee hives collapse at the end of a season, isn't it?

People tend to vastly underestimate just how autonomous eusocial animals are. There are species of ants that have little jousting matches after a queen dies to pick who becomes the new queen.

Its a short story by Usula K. Leguin. Her early stuff and shorts are dope. Later works are some earthmomma hippy bullshit.

This. I suspect worker drones would indeed hold the reins of power, although what political ideology would be used to justify it isn't so clear. Although, I think you could also imagine soldier bugs giving the orders, a sort of shogunate.