If hiveminds made a society, what would it look like?

[Electric Bone Flute]

Not *a* hivemind, but hiveminds. I want to imagine a species whose individual unit, beyond its cells, are a colony of "bees," controlled by a handful (not one) of "queens." A colony, taken together, is a person. I'm not going to think about the metaphysics of it and Aristotle could probably power a turbine right now, but the result that I want is that there's a race of beings who are "three thousand bees in a trenchcoat." What I'm concerned is the consequence in worldbuilding. If one went to where the bee people came from, what sort of society would they find? I'm having problems imagining it.
The first thing I consider is cells. A drone and a worker would quickly be whisked away by a more powerful bee-person, right? It would be easy to cannibalize, right? Perhaps there would be no cooperation at all. But then I thought, if you think about it from a food perspective, plenty of organisms share resources with other members of their species. Maybe cooperation isn't impossible. So cooperation could be possible. I suppose they'd have rules about cannibalizing cells. Beyond that, I'm stuck about how they'd be different from humans.

 

[Chasejxyz]

If you, just, like, think about it, all animals are just colonies, man. Biologically speaking, a colony is many animals, some specialized in certain tasks, that work together for the whole of the unit. Sponges are a colony. The Portuguese man o' war is a colony. Colonies can be made up of single cells or multiple multi-cell units; they're hypothesized to be the first step to multi-cellular organisms like you or I.

So how would that make their way of living different from humans? Well, how would any other species be different from humans? How do they communicate? Are their situations which they can do so that humans cannot? What objects are they able to manipulate and it what ways? How do they procure food and shelter? How do they reproduce? What do they do for fun? What is their relationship to the environment and other species? Are they good neighbors or bad neighbors?

 

[Electric Bone Flute]

I guess the question I’m asking is; if you replaced humans with bee people, would the societies be any different? All I can imagine is the need to enforce “don’t steal other people’s bees,” and that’s it. I haven’t really thought this through and need to know what else changes

 

[ThinkerX]

I have something like this in a couple of my stories.

First is the 'Mushroom People' on Dagon's World in the `Empire' series. Basically a collective where perpetuation of the whole completely over rules the individual, enforced by a sort of chemical brainwashing (for outsiders inducted into this society.)

The other, on the 'Eldritch World' (a series of tales I've been dabbling with in near non-existent spare time) are the 'city gods.' Essentially, you have a not-quite-godlike entity in a sort of 'larval state' that collects others as servants. These others are then cloned and simultaneously 'connected' with the 'God.' Much of the time, these clones have a degree of free will, though most cannot venture more than a couple dozen miles from their 'deity,' have no secrets whatsoever from said entity, and cannot act against it (though they can act against each other.) Occasionally, the 'god' exerts its will, turning the entire clone populace into meat puppets. This is also done on a more limited and casual basis, large groups 'doing the wave.'