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Live a life as a honey bee

RareOdds: 1 in 875 million

A worker bee in one of about 100 million managed hives. About 2 trillion honey bees are alive right now. Your odds of being reborn as one are 1 in 875 million.

Sources: About 100 million managed beehives (FAOSTAT) at roughly 20,000 bees each (order of magnitude only).

Your life

  1. Day 1 · You are an egg in a wax cell in an orchard in California, laid by the only queen in the hive.
  2. Day 4 · You hatch. Nurses feed you hundreds of times a day.
  3. Day 21 · You chew out of your cell, a worker. Your first job: cleaning cells.
  4. Day 25 · Now you feed larvae, the way you were fed.
  5. Day 32 · Wax flakes form on your belly. You build comb.
  6. Day 38 · You guard the entrance, checking the smell of every bee that lands.
  7. Day 42 · You fly out to forage, visiting flowers for nectar and pollen.
  8. Day 46 · You found a field in bloom. Back inside, you dance: the angle and length of your waggle tell others where it is.

Get rebornEvery number and its source

Questions

What are the odds of being reborn as a honey bee?

Odds: 1 in 875 million. A worker bee in one of about 100 million managed hives. (About 100 million managed beehives (FAOSTAT) at roughly 20,000 bees each.)

What are my odds of being reborn as a human?

About 1 in 210 billion if any animal can be drawn. There are roughly 8.2 billion people, but around 1.3 sextillion copepods, 440 quintillion soil nematodes and 10 quintillion insects. Among mammals and birds only, the odds improve to about 1 in 21.

What is the most common animal on Earth?

By head count, tiny crustaceans called copepods (about 1.3 × 10²¹, an order-of-magnitude estimate), then soil nematodes (about 4.4 × 10²⁰, van den Hoogen et al. 2019). That is why the true-odds draw almost always makes you something small.

The odds, animal by animal

Copepod Soil nematode Insect Ant Antarctic krill Fish Wild bird Bat Chicken Wild rodent Human House sparrow Cow Dog Elephant Blue whale Giant panda