History Main / InsectGenderBender

** Combee is based on worker honey bees. Not only they can be either male or female, but males are more frequent, having a ratio of seven males for every female. However, only those rare female Combees can evolve into Vespiquen.

* ''Literature/{{Gor}}'':Not so much averted as flatly denied with the Priest-Kings of Gor. They are giant hyper-intelligent ants, and apart from the hyper-intelligent science, their culture follows that of ants in detail (they communicate by scent, tolerate dangerous parasites in their nest for the sake of their euphoric secretions, on occasion turn themselves into living storage jars for food, etc.) EXCEPT that they're all male apart from one queen, and are as given as Gorean human males to making comments about the irrationality of females. But given that this author has defined a new standard for misogyny, anything else would be unthinkable.
* Literature/TheFirstMenInTheMoon: Despite being described as similar to ants, the Grand Lunar is referred to as a male by the narrator.

[[caption-width-right:350: There are no king ants.]]

* In ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid3'', The Pain refers to the hornets he controls as his brothers, and actually uses the queen to direct their attacks from the backpack he carries.

** [[AvertedTrope Averted]] with queen Beetrice. The gender conventions seem to run on JustForPun.

Further, because the stinger of the Hymenoptera is a modified egg-laying organ, only females can sting. Fiction often depicts male wasps, bees and ants with stingers.

Fiction also tends to show an even or near even split between males to females, when there are barely a few hundred males for thousands of females in most insect societies due to the nature of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploid_sex-determination_system how sexes are decided]].

** PlayedStraight when Graham encounters a colony of ants led by ''King'' [[IncrediblyLamePun Antony]].

* Charmy (a rarely-seen character from some ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog'' games) is a male bee with a stinger. He's also a 'child' despite not being a larva.

* Averted in ''Literature/TheBees'' by Laline Paul; the main character is a female worker bee called Flora 717, and bee gender roles are accurately portrayed with her hivemates.

** Perhaps they were [[JustForPun lesBEEans]].

It's a fact that, throughout history, humans have dwelled in mostly patriarchal societies where the males are dominant and females are primarily childrearers. Because of this, the queen bee was called a "king" by beekeepers until dissections under microscopes in the eighteenth century showed them to be female. Since then we have come to realize that most organized insect hives are started, run and overwhelmingly populated by females. In Hymenopteran social insect colonies (ants, bees, wasps, etc.), females are the only ones who have any semblance of a job, and are responsible for all the work involved in running things, such as building, foraging, defending from outsiders, and most especially creating eggs for the continuation of the swarm. The males? They have sex and then die - or are eaten (or sometimes both). At most, honeybee drones sometimes use their wing beats to help heat or cool the hive.

Further, because the stinger of the Hymenoptera is a modified egg laying organ, only females can sting. Fiction often depicts male wasps, bees and ants with stingers.

Fiction also tends to show an even or near even split between males to females, when there are barely a few hundred males for thousands of females in most insect societies due to the nature of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploid_sex-determination_system how sexes are decided.]]

Note that [[TermiteTrouble termite colonies]] are much closer to human expectations. Termites aren't related to bees, ants, and wasps (they're actually closer to cockroaches), so they evolved eusociality completely separately. For example, reproductive male termites don't die after sex--they spend the rest of their sometimes decades-long lives in the nest with the queen, and are called "kings". The workers can also be either male or female. Surprisingly (or maybe not), few fiction writers have taken advantage of this.

[[folder:Web Comics]]

* Literature/PerryRhodan, due to its nature as an extreme LongRunner written by a team of authors, sometimes averts this trope and sometimes plays it straight. In one memorable case, however, it manages to get ''this'' correct but still mess up. In one storyline shortly after the Earth has been teleported across the galaxy (long story), we're introduced to the dominant species of the sector (insectoid; beelike, to be specific) with a slightly disturbing scene [[ShownTheirWork where drones are rounded up and executed by the workers after having fulfilled their duty while the queen muses on how lucky she was to have been, among other things, fed the right kind of nectar so she won't have to take care of that]] - then switches over to a lengthy explanation of how [[ArtisticLicenseBiology the insects developed because there's too little cosmic radiation in that sector of the galaxy]] [[EvolutionaryLevels for mammals to evolve quickly enough, causing insects became sentient first]].

* Played with in ''TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}'' with the [[BeePeople bee-inspired]] [[WomensMysteries thriae]], an [[OneGenderRace all-female species]] of which only the [[HiveCasteSystem queens]] are fertile. (They [[YouCantGoHomeAgain keep]] male volunteers [[GenderEqualsBreed from other species]] in the hive for breeding purposes.)

* ''VideoGame/BugFables'': Normally averted with eusocial species, as all ant and bee characters are female, with several exceptions, and in-universe lore states that male bees are located in the queen's personal quarters. Termites, meanwhile, have a queen and a king, and male termites are commonplace in the Termite Kingdom, which is [[ShownTheirWork also accurate]]. However, it's played straight with wasps, as the main wasp enemies are male despite having stingers and being extremely common, and they are ruled by a king instead of a queen, [[spoiler:though the king is actually TheUsurper and not even a real wasp, but a fly who brainwashed the entire kingdom, and the true ruler of wasps is a queen]].
* ''{{Franchise/Pokemon}}'':

* ''VideoGame/JetForceGemini'' the 64 shooter plays with this interestingly. The default alien [[InsectoidAliens ant soldiers]], known as Soldier Drones, as well as most of their variants, are identified as female in the multiplayer mode. There are soldier males of their species, though, which resemble termites.

* Averted, interestingly, in Literature/TheBible, in Proverbs 6:6. Considering when that particular book was written and translated, it's probably a manifestation of noun gender (the Old English, Latin and Hebrew words for ant are all feminine, not neuter and thus anything other than "her" would be a grammatical error).

* In the ''WesternAnimation/BitsyBears'' pilot cartoon, the Bitsy Bears create a fake "bee king" to trick Bramble into releasing the beenapped bees. Bramble never calls them on it, but this could be because they launched their plan in the middle of the night, and she was still half-asleep.

It's a fact that throughout history, mammals including humans have dwelled in mostly patriarchal societies where the males are dominant and females are primarily childrearers. Because of this, the queen bee was called a "king" by beekeepers until dissections under microscopes in the eighteenth century showed them to be female. Since then we have come to realize that most organized insect hives are started, run and overwhelmingly populated by females. In Hymenopteran social insect colonies (ants, bees, wasps, etc.), females are the only ones who have any semblance of a job, and are responsible for all the work involved in running things, such as building, foraging, defending from outsiders, and most especially creating eggs for the continuation of the swarm. The males? They have sex and then die - or are eaten (or sometimes both). At most, honeybee drones sometimes use their wing beats to help heat or cool the hive.

* The Spanish word "zángano" (dron) also has the second meaning of "lazy" and has male grammatical gender while "abeja" (Bee) is a female word.

It's a fact that throughout history, mammals including humans have dwelled in mostly patriarchal societies where the males are dominant and females are primarily childrearers. Because of this, the queen bee was called a "king" by beekeepers until dissections under microscopes in the eighteenth century showed them to be female. Since then we have come to realize that most organized insect hives are started, run and overwhelmingly populated by females. In Hymenopteran social insect colonies (ants, bees, wasps, etc.), females are the only ones who have any semblance of a job, and are responsible for all the work involved in running things, such as building, foraging, defending from outsiders, and most especially creating eggs for the continuation of the swarm. The males? They have sex and then die - or are eaten (or sometimes both). Albeit, honeybee drones are known to assist the rest of the colony in using their wing beats to heat or cool the hive, this is intermittent work at most.

* ''VideoGame/BugFables'': Normally averted with eusocial species, as all ant and bee characters are female, with several exceptions, and in-universe lore states that male bees are located in the queen's personal quarters. Termites, meanwhile, have a queen and a king, and male termites are a commonplace in the Termite Kingdom, which is [[ShownTheirWork also accurate]]. However, it's played straight with wasps, as the main wasp enemies are male despite having stingers and being extremely common, and they are ruled by a king instead of a queen, [[spoiler:though the king is actually TheUsurper and not even a real wasp, but a fly who brainwashed the entire kingdom, and the true ruler of wasps is a queen]].

* ''The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper Feast'' accurately portrays Lizzie Bee as a female worker (although it maintains human gender stereotypes by dressing her as a milkmaid, complete with panniers, presumably of nectar). On the other hand, Harold the Herald is a male gadfly who likes "a morning cup of blood". (The "Nature Notes" at the back of the book correct this.)

[[caption-width-right:350: [[DontExplainTheJoke There are no king ants.]]]]

It's a fact that throughout history, mammals including humans have dwelled in mostly patriarchal societies where the males are dominant and females are primarily childrearers. Because of this, the queen bee was called a "king" by beekeepers until dissections under microscopes in the eighteenth century showed them to be female. Since then we have come to realise that most organized insect hives are started, run and overwhelmingly populated by females. In Hymenopteran social insect colonies (ants, bees, wasps, etc.), females are the only ones who have any semblance of a job, and are responsible for all the work involved in running things, such as building, foraging, defending from outsiders, and most especially creating eggs for the continuation of the swarm. The males? They have sex and then die - or are eaten (or sometimes both).

Fiction often fails to acknowledge this. Instead [[BeePeople intelligent insects]] in fantasy media will usually have as a hero ... a male worker? The fact that the ant and bee workers are all females (albeit sterile), and the only males are Drones created [[OppositeSexClone solely from the genetics of the queen]] to fertilize queens of a different colony and [[OutWithABang quickly die after this mission is complete]], sometimes by [[GroinAttack the queen ripping the male's genitalia out of his body]], seems to have no bearing on this trope. It probably doesn't help that, in normal usage, a "drone" is someone or something who works mindlessly, leading to them being confused with the worker ants, who are a separate caste.

Note that [[TermiteTrouble termite hives]] are much closer to human expectations. Termites aren't related to bees, ants, and wasps (they're actually closer to cockroaches), so they evolved eusociality completely separately. For example, reproductive male termites don't die after sex--they spend the rest of their lives in the nest with the queen, and are called "kings". The workers can also be either male or female. Surprisingly (or maybe not), few fiction writers have taken advantage of this.