ARISTOTLE WAS THE one who said the largest bee in the hive was the leader of the colony, but because of the time he lived in, he made the assumption it was a king. Even though scientists subsequently saw that same monarch laying eggs, cognitive dissonance allowed them to still assume it was a male, because female rulers just…didn’t exist. In the 1600s, when a Dutch naturalist, Jan Swammerdam, dissected a queen bee and found ovaries, it was the final proof that the “king” bee was actually female.
