Bloggin' bees

Bee metaphors are found everywhere -- even in the obscure world of blogging. On useless-knowledge.com, Brooks A Mick says he is working towards a theory of blogging:

But there is another feature of the weblog information network that has not been given its rightful due ... the person who flits from one web site, one web log, to another, taking bits of information from one and posting it, cross-pollinating as it were. This person might be termed a “web honeybee”.

And lastly, we have the “encyclopedic synthesist”, the person who has the array of general knowledge to be able to buzz from weblog to weblog and take the disparate bits of knowledge and synthesize them into a meaningful whole. Do we have enough of these people? This person is not a super-bee. But what is the proper natural-world analogy for such a person? I don't yet have such.

I've suggested to Mr Mick that perhaps his natural world analogy is still in the bee world: maybe it's a drone! A drone, the male bee, does sod-all for his life except drift from hive to hive in the hope that one day he'll do something useful and fertilise a queen. The odds of being a useful drone are very, very slight -- and, if he does happen to be successful, he'll die straight after his one useful piece of work.