Got any links you think would be helpful or just plain informative on beekeeping in general?

Unamanaged bees are demonstrably healthier, and happier (far fewer stings!) than the ones farmed intensively for honey and treated brutally as portable pollination machines. It turns out bees survived for millions of years without human oversight, and if you let them sort things out themselves they adapt rapidly to new stressors like varroa mites. “Conventional” beekeepers have a lot invested in the status quo so keep rubbishing this, but ‘eppur si muove’ as Galileo said.

Analogies between human and bee societies have been made since at least the time of the Romans. They’re generally very stretched analogies and their spin reflects current political thinking (“absolute monarchs”, “perfect democracies” etc). We’re not insects, but to run with your own analogy, sometimes there can be too much control of a society.