The Female Bee

The Female Bee

In the this chapter (Surah an-Nahl 16:68-69) the Quran mentions that the female bee leaves its home to gather food. Now, a person might guess on that, saying, "The bee that you see flying around - it could be male, or it could be female. I think I will guess female." Certainly, he has a one in two chance of being right. So it happens that the Quran is right. But it also happens that that was not what most people believed at the time when the Quran was revealed. Can you tell the difference between a male and a female bee? Well, it takes a specialist to do that, but it has been

discovered that the male bee never leaves his home to gather food. However, in Shakespeare's play, Henry the

Fourth, some of the characters discuss bees and mention

that the bees are soldiers and have a king. That is what

people thought in Shakespeare's time - that the bees that one sees flying around are male bees and that they go home and answer to a king. However, that is not true at all. The fact is that they are females, and they answer to a queen. Yet it took modern scientific investigations in the last years to discover that this is the case.

So, back to the list of good guesses, concerning the topic of

bees, the Quran had a chance 50/50 of being right, and the

odds were one in two.