beeing
Explanation
This comic features two characters observing a beehive. One muses, "Wouldn't it be nice to be a bee?" The other responds with what bees' lives actually entail: their entire existence is spent going from flower to flower, spreading pollen, helping their colony reproduce -- essentially, they are biological drones with no individual autonomy.
The first character says "Humans are like that, just for $16" -- a joke comparing the tedium of bee labor to minimum-wage human labor. The second character then reveals they thought the first person was going to say bees are admirable "or something," but the first character pivots to noting that bees "can survive without us" -- while humans apparently cannot survive without cranes, suggesting human civilization's dependency on heavy machinery (and by extension, industrial infrastructure) makes us less self-sufficient than insects.
The humor lies in the bait-and-switch. What starts as a whimsical "wouldn't it be nice to be an animal" reflection quickly becomes a commentary on the drudgery of low-wage human labor. The comparison between bees -- who work themselves to death for the hive -- and humans who do roughly the same thing for barely above minimum wage is both funny and bleak. The final punchline about cranes adds an absurdist layer, suggesting that for all our supposed superiority, humans are arguably more dependent and less capable than bees.