This is adorable. Now for “but” part. I won’t argue the behavior of cognition of bees with an entomologist, that isn’t my area of the sciences. What I will say is that a bee the comparable size of a house cat wouldn’t likely enjoy much because it would be pretty darn dead or right on the edge of it. There are plenty of evolutionary advantages to being smaller- but there are some pretty straightforward reasons we don’t have “giant ants” the size of dogs and such. Physics doesn’t favor that much.
The first problem is oxygen. To get that huge, many or most “bugs” would need a very oxygen rich atmosphere. Earth may have supported that looong ago, but not for some millions of years perhaps.
The second problem is in how many “bugs” biology works- how their circulatory systems and digestive systems and such function. It may not seem to make sense but let’s put it another way- imagine increasing the size of a jet engine. You keep making it bigger and whatever aircraft you attach it to…
.. would keep getting faster and faster right? No. As the engine gets bigger it gets heavier doesn’t it? But that’s not the only issue. The surface area increases meaning that drag increases on the engine. The larger engine uses more and more fuel the bigger it gets. The fuel is very heavy. Eventually the engine could get so big that if you attached enough fuel capacity to power it for more than a few seconds, the engine wouldn’t be able to move at all! So the physics stays the same but things that work at a certain scale don’t always make sense at another.
The other critical issue which relates to that concept is that most insects bodies don’t play well with physics at larger size. Ever notice how there tend to be many similarities between similar creatures, and between creatures of similar sizes?
Wether you want to take a stance of evolution or creation- all living things “play by the rules” of design dictated by the world around them. Not many large creatures if any have more than 4 legs, this goes back in the fossil record pretty far before you start to see anything particularly large with more than 4 legs. It is believed in evolution that terrestrial mammals evolved from a shared ancestor and thus we have 4 legs or some variant. A giant spider like the old monster films would likely have all its legs break under the weight of its body unless it were drastically different in biology and composition than the spiders we know. Most insects rely on their hard outer skeleton as they don’t have internal bones the way many other creatures do. As an organism gains size, mass and thus weight increases. How does that make sense? Well…
Say you built a little bridge from popsicle sticks- a little road of sticks laid flat. Say you placed matchbox or hotwheels cars on the bridge. You’d need many many many cars most likely- piled cars in cars- before the weight of the cars might cause the bridge to break. You may even be able to stand on a well build bridge of this type yourself and not break it! So then why don’t they make it cheaper and easier to build roads and bridges by using many popsicle sticks or planks of the same wood to a scale size? Why not glue the bridge together if done right it can hold thousands of times it’s own weight? Well- it should be obvious it can’t. That’s how materials tend to work. If a drop of glue will hold the weight of a sheet of paper- let’s say your TV weights as much as 2500 sheets of paper just to pick a number- around 100lbs. So if 1 drop of glue holds 1 sheet of paper up- 2500 drops of the same glue can hold your TV up to the wall…? No. It’s physics and material science.
A piece of standard office paper is very easy to fold in half. It’s not too hard to fold in half again. You can’t fold a standard sheet of office paper in half more than 7-9 times in a row through any ordinary means known. It only takes about 28 folds before your paper would be as tall as Mount Everest or so. It sounds bogus but it’s insane- and by the time you’re getting to that many folds your paper is molecules thin or less- so you’d need a very small and VERY strong machine. Of course that’s academic because in all likelihood you discover what many have found trying to use machine presses and such to fold standard office paper that many times- the materials will break down and basically “explode” or “disintegrate” before you can get much past the number of folds you can do by hand.
That’s just a property of the materials. So when you hear things like “spider webs are strong as steel!” Well… yes but no. Like many materials insects produce or are formed by they are extremely strong for their size or mass etc. but you have to remember that if you machine off a length of most steels to the diameter of a spider silk strand- that steel is going to be very weak. So weak it might likely break under its own weight. That’s much the same as the opposite situation of enlarging many insects exo skeletons. At some point we cross a threshold where the weight we are adding in mass by scaling up a creature is exceeding the ability of the materials it is made of to support weight.
So let’s picture it- picture a human the size of a giraffe. Giraffes have special adaptations like muscles and elements of their circulatory systems to allow the blood to circulate and travel the long distances their height dictates. They have all sorts of adaptations because it’s going to take blood longer to traverse the body and deliver nutrients and oxygen or carry away wastes and toxins. They need to also stop gravity from causing blood to pool due to their height and the mass of fluid that requires. Humans don’t have any of that. If you enlarge a human like some Saturday morning show- the human body isn’t adapted to being that size. We know already that very large humans who are nowhere near that much larger than the species record face all sorts of health risks and complications because their hearts work harder and they have more stress on joints etc etc.
conversely if you shrink a human down…. Say small enough to fit in another humans blood stream? How do they breath?
The oxygen they need to breath is now larger than the means they have to take it in and transport it to their cells. How do they speak when their vocal organs can’t manipulate air the same way because the mass of air is now dramatically more than the mass of the organs to move it. Hearing changes and vision changes too since the light hitting the eyes and the size of a photon compared to the human is different. The surface area of the body which was appropriate to disperse heat to the air and maintain a minimum core temperature across a wide range is now completely off. How do they regulate their temperature?
So it’s very likely a cat sized bee, were it to exist, would have problems if it could survive at all. There are other issues we won’t explore- but the brain of a bee at the scale of a cat would be…. Well…. That’s not something you come across often. The ability of the bee to sense the pheromones and signals it uses to orient itself and understand the world would likely be impacted and so forth. Changing the anatomy or physical proportions and other aspects of an organism can overcome many or even all the issues of scale changes from a structural and materials stand point- but by the time you’re done you generally have a novel but related species that you may or may not recognize as related to the original at all. It might for example not make much sense at that size for the bees stinger to rip out- or the force required to do so would exceed the holding ability of the stinger so that adaptation might be effectively removed. Things like that.
100%. Me too. And allow me to just say this- it is theoretically possible that genetic engineering and/or climate change and man engineered efforts to fight it or engineering of a limited sealed environment could create the conditions under which some aesthetically identical scenario could occur.
So it isn’t impossible at all- simply if one literally Turned a bee giant it might not work- but with any number of natural or man made scenarios in alignment- totally possible with perhaps only minor technical differences that aren’t of much concern to the experience. So dream on, and know those dreams could actually happen.
The first problem is oxygen. To get that huge, many or most “bugs” would need a very oxygen rich atmosphere. Earth may have supported that looong ago, but not for some millions of years perhaps.
The second problem is in how many “bugs” biology works- how their circulatory systems and digestive systems and such function. It may not seem to make sense but let’s put it another way- imagine increasing the size of a jet engine. You keep making it bigger and whatever aircraft you attach it to…
The other critical issue which relates to that concept is that most insects bodies don’t play well with physics at larger size. Ever notice how there tend to be many similarities between similar creatures, and between creatures of similar sizes?
conversely if you shrink a human down…. Say small enough to fit in another humans blood stream? How do they breath?
So it isn’t impossible at all- simply if one literally Turned a bee giant it might not work- but with any number of natural or man made scenarios in alignment- totally possible with perhaps only minor technical differences that aren’t of much concern to the experience. So dream on, and know those dreams could actually happen.