Joanna Frank as Regina in
The Outer Limits (1964)
I.
Amongst social insects, such as ants, wasps, and honey bees, a member of the reproductive female caste destined to become a queen is known as a gyne. Such a privileged bee is selected at the larval stage and fed a diet consisting exclusively of royal jelly; a protein-rich secretion which ensures her sexual maturity [1].
Raised in a specially constructed royal chamber, she will emerge as a virgin queen, bigger in size than a worker, but smaller than a queen in her prime. Her initial desire is not to fuck as many drones as possible, but, rather, to seek out and kill any potential love rivals; i.e., any other virgin queens, be they newly emergent like her, or still developing in their cells [2].
Once she has established herself as top bee, the new queen will fly out on the first warm sunny day to a congregation area, where she
will accept the attention of her admirers and mate with a dozen or more drones; male bees who exist only to
sexually service the queen and who, having done so, fall to the
ground exhausted and dying.
In other words, drones
are literally fucked to death by the queen and the congregation area is both an orgy zone and a killing field.
Providing the weather remains fine, the queen may return to this area for several days until she feels herself to be sexually satisfied and full of sperm [3]. Then she is ready to start laying self-fertilised eggs at the rate of about 1,500 a day, whilst worker bees surround her and see to her every need (feeding her, disposing of her excrement, etc.).
So, the question - aimed primarily to heterosexual males amongst my readership - is this: Would you fuck a queen bee were she to assume human form?
It's a question that was posed by my favourite episode of The Outer Limits: ZZZZZ; an episode in which a queen bee, having metamorphosed into a woman, attempts to seduce an entomologist in order to advance her species [4].
And why not, indeed? For as the narrator of the episode says:
'Human life strives ceaselessly to perfect itself, to gain ascendancy.
But what of the lower forms of life? Is it not possible that they, too,
are conducting experiments and are at this moment on the threshold of
deadly success?'
Leaving aside the anthropocentric conceit expressed here, let's provisionally grant that other species apart from man are conducting experiments in evolution and (unconsciously) striving for growth and greater complexity in order to gain an advantage over those against whom they compete for resources.
And this is probably as true for bees as for any other species; for what is a bee, after all, but an evolved form of ancient wasp? [5] So, let's suspend our disbelief and experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to the outer limits ...
III.
In the episode under discussion, Dr Benedict Fields (played by Philip Abbott) takes on a new lab assistant; a beautiful, but somewhat odd young woman called Regina (played by Joanna Frank). Inventing a hard luck story, she is provided with room and board by the kindly (but boring) entomologist and his wife Francesca (played by Marsha Hunt).
Fields is conducting research into the language of bees and hoping he might find some way to communicate with them. Regina is excited by the prospect - though not half as excited as she is by the mating habits of bees and the willingness of drones to sacrifice themselves in the act of love.
Despite being happily married - and old enough to be her father - Fields is clearly attracted to Regina. This naturally causes a certain amount of resentment in Francesca, although her suspicions of the younger woman are not simply the result of jealousy; she knows there is something queer or not-quite-right about her.
This is confirmed when one night she watches Regina from her bedroom window dancing about in the garden from flower to flower and then momentarily morphing into a giant bee whilst licking nectar from a water lily. Of course, this is dismissed as a nightmare by her husband.
Later, however, when Francesca finally confronts Regina, the latter releases the bees kept in the lab and encourages them to kill Francesca. Grief-stricken, but finally aware of Regina's true nature and purpose, Fields rejects her sexual advances and gives her a moral lecture on the eternal character of love between a man and his wife.
Frightened that he is about to swat her, Regina backs away and accidently topples from the bedroom window to the ground below. The shock of the fall triggers a transformation back into her insect-self and she buzzes off into the night, presumably returning to the hive, or perhaps to die alone in some quiet spot, having failed in her mission to mate with a human.
The closing narration reiterates the moral of the episode, just in case any viewers missed it:
'When the yearning to gain ascendancy takes the form of a soulless, loveless struggle, the contest must end in unlovely defeat. For without love, drones can never be men, and men can only be drones.'
IV.
I have to say, if I were in the good doctor's shoes, I'm not certain I'd've been able to resist Regina's sexual allure and physical beauty; here was a woman not just with bee-stung lips, but a bee-stung body! And surely, as an entomologist, one would have a professional obligation to experience the unique (if deadly and perverse) form of interspecies experience being offered ...?
What I'm trying to say is that, in my view, Joanna Frank as Regina could turn any man into a melissophile ...
Notes
[1] All bee larvae are given a taste of royal jelly in their first few days, but only those destined to become queens are fed this exclusively; the others must make do with a mixture of nectar and pollen known as bee bread.
[2] Unlike worker bees, the queen's stinger is not barbed and so she is able to sting (and kill) repeatedly without causing fatal injury to herself.
[3] A young queen stores sperm from multiple drones in her
spermatheca, from where she will selectively release sperm for the remaining years of her life in order to fertilise her eggs.
[4] I'm referring to episode 18 of season 1, entitled 'ZZZZZ', dir. by John Brahm and
written by Meyer Dolinsky, which first aired on ABC in January 1964. The episode can be watched in full on the Daily Motion website: click here.
[5] Bees evolved from ancient predatory wasps that lived 120 million years
ago. Like bees, these wasps built nests and gathered
food for their offspring, but while most bees feed on nectar and pollen, their
wasp ancestors hunted other insects.
Whether this makes the former more perfect versions of the latter is of course highly debatable. As far as I understand it, natural selection is a process that facilitates adaptations to an evironment, thus improving the chances of survival, but there is no intelligent design at work and evolution isn't progressive (unless one happens to subscribe to an orthogenetic model of the latter).
