Intro to the book "The Wisdom of Bees"

Introduction


We have a stone bench in our backyard five feet from the entrance to our beehive. It is the perfect place to sit and watch the bees congregate on their front porch and to monitor their takeoff s and landings. Occasionally a flight path takes them in the direction of the bench, but the bees rapidly turn upward and dissolve into the sky. My head, like the head of a Pez dispenser, tilts back to see them off and then snaps back down to locate and track another bee preparing for its next mission.



It was during one of these observational episodes that this book was born. Sit around and watch the bees long enough and you notice the regularity of their behavior—the cadences and patterns—as well as their many seemingly premeditated encounters with one another when coming and going from the hive. It isn’t obvious at first, but look hard at the hive and what you begin to notice most is the bees’ organic artistry—a live performance and rendition of a Jackson Pollack drip painting. Their work suddenly makes sense.



When you watch the bees, sooner or later you just have to ask, How do they do it? How do thousands of bees working without reference to a specific blueprint manage to organize themselves in a meaningful way? What are they trying to achieve, how do they coordinate, and what makes them so successful? It seemed to me that the bees were working on the very same kinds of problems we are trying to solve in our organizations. How can large, diverse groups work together harmoniously and productively? I thought the bees could offer some helpful clues. Perhaps we could take what the bees do so well and apply it to our institutions so we can do better. It was a promising hypothesis and the beginning of this book.



We have had our bees for six years and there is no doubt they are a miracle of nature. They elicit a profound sense of awe in anyone who observes their industriousness in action. Foraging honeybees fly at fifteen miles per hour, flapping their wings at a ridiculously fast 230 beats per second, and cover an average territorial radius of one to two miles—but will travel as far as six to eight miles from the nest. Bees may gather as much as fifty pounds of nectar per day and produce two to three hundred pounds of honey per year (honey is regurgitated nectar that bees have concentrated to over 80 percent sugars by fanning their wings to evaporate excess water). One pound of honey requires fifty-five thousand miles of flight (one gallon requires one million miles) and the visitation of two million flowers. One teaspoon of honey represents the lifetime work of roughly a dozen bees (worker honeybees live, on average, six weeks—longer in winter). Known as the “angels of agriculture,” bees also pollinate ninety major commercial crops, the equivalent of approximately $15 billion in agricultural production and one of every three mouthfuls of our food consumption.



Bees live in colonies with overlapping generations and do all of the things we do: provide shelter, care for their young, eat, work, and sleep. In addition, they have developed a system that rivals ours in complexity and surpasses it in efficiency. After all, they have had plenty of time to refine their organization. The oldest known bee is 100 million years old. It recently was found encased and preserved in amber within the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar. Scientists have speculated that bees evolved alongside flowering plants that were taking root during the Cretaceous era and may have begun their evolutionary journey out of Africa as long as 300 million years ago as a splinter group from wasps. This temporal progression represents a substantial head start on the relative newbies of the planet, Homo sapiens. And who wants to bet who will still be around in 100 million years?



The allegorical use of bees as a window into the management of our own social organizations may appear on first impression to be a stretch. For instance, it is tempting to presume that bees are hardwired, or programmed, in ways that we are not, and that our consciousness sets us apart in the animal kingdom. However, this either overstates the prowess of our species or underestimates the true abilities of the bee. As it happens, honeybees have two notable qualities that make them deserving of special attention: they communicate and they think. James Gould, in The Animal Mind, went so far as to attribute consciousness to bees. We assume conscious decision making, for example, when we advise friends about restaurants based on factors such as quality, distance, and cost. Yet, when an energetic creature enclosed in an exoskeleton makes similar suggestions to her pals about flowers, we are reluctant to give them the same mental credit.



Bees are the only nonvertebrate animal (animal without a backbone) that has symbolic language. Because of bees’ sophisticated forms of communication, some scientists have christened them “honorary mammals.” In fact, bees have at least seventeen different, discrete communication signals (including their famous dance language) that use all of their senses. They even have their own version of an intranet built into their comb through which they transmit signals between 230 and 270 Hz. Bees have honed an exceptionally complex system of information exchange by which they monitor internal and external conditions, convey hive status and needs to one another, and direct activities.



If someone called me a “bee brain,” I would take that as a compliment. Despite having a brain the size of a grass seed and blessed with only 950,000 neurons, bees have tremendous cognitive abilities. The highly integrated circuitry of the bee brain gives them the cognitive versatility they need to adapt as circumstances change. To be successful, honeybees, like us, have to be able to deviate from prescribed behaviors in order to meet environmental trials and unpredictable challenges.



Bees truly are small marvels. They can count (up to four) and recognize faces. They can categorize visual stimuli and form abstract rules of “same” and “different.” They can spontaneously recall information and have a robust working memory that enables them to temporarily store, and patch together, multiple pieces of sensory information. If bees had cell phones, they could talk and fly at the same time without incident.



Bees travel many miles to and from the hive using celestial cues, local landmarks, and basic geometry to guide them. Bees view the world in color, can recognize shapes and patterns, and are responsive to a wide range of odors. They can visit up to ten thousand flowers in a day and accurately report places of interest to other bees. They can store and retrieve data about when and where to find high-quality, high-quantity resources, and adjust their behaviors accordingly. For example, they may have dandelions for a hearty breakfast, marjoram for lunch, and viper’s bugloss for an early dinner.



These are complex critters with amazing intellectual capacities. Even seemingly simple abilities such as color recall are more difficult than you might think. For example, I have trouble going to the garden center and buying the same color impatiens that I had bought the day before. A bee would have no problem with this errand involving a simple matching task because they are able to discriminate among alternative colors a day after a onetime exposure of just one hundred milliseconds. To be sure, genetic programming underlies bees’ behavioral feats. However, as is true of us, if bees were not given natural license to decide and act as conditions dictate, they would have long ago lost representation on Earth.



Bees can think and communicate, and that makes the study of their social system particularly fascinating and compelling. Bees have been revered by past generations who saw in the life of the hive virtues that were worthy of importing into our own society. From the honorific scribbling of cave dwellers, through the creation stories of the Egyptians and Greeks, to the biblical lands flowing with milk and honey; from Celtic revelry under the honey moon, to the coats of arms of the Middle Ages adorned with the courageous bee, to the utopian goo of the nineteenth century, the bee has been a divine emissary of the sacred and profound. In fact, through the millennia, bees at one time or another have come to symbolize power, health, immortality, wisdom, valor, eloquence, and plenty. These ready associations were not lost on demagogues such as Napoléon, who, when crowned emperor in 1804, dispensed with the traditional imperial garb in favor of a bee-studded coronation robe. However, his vision of the hive—and for his reign—was not one of community and democracy. Napoléon was seizing the grandeur of the bee for his own ends, and slyly legitimizing the occasion of his crowning—as in the hive, there will be a monarch.



Bees have rubbed shoulders with us for a very long time, giving and taking mythic powers through the relationship, both inspiring us from one generation to the next and serving as an instrument for our own ambitions. Within the hive dwells all that we have admired and worshipped through the ages—the heroic and resolute bee that productively conducts its affairs within a devoted community. It is the one social animal that lets us get close and allows us to observe the beauty and elegance of its motions. The bees quietly do their thing, and we commend them for it.



There is much to admire about the common honeybee. The honeybees’ large accomplishments are especially impressive given their diminutive size. The clues to their success are to be found in their clever social organization that, in the words of Sherlock Holmes, “provides as much incident as can be found on the streets of London.” Recall that Sherlock Holmes ultimately retires to Sussex Downs to live the reflective life of a beekeeper and to complete his magnum opus, The Practical Handbook of Bee Culture. When he is later brought back into service to capture the German spy von Bork, Watson is surprised by Holmes’s reappearance, thinking that he had withdrawn from society. Holmes eases Watson’s concerns by asserting that he has been fully engaged in the details of human interaction by spending many “pensive nights and laborious days” watching the “little workings of gangs.”



As both an organizational consultant and beekeeper for many years, I can concur with the always-astute Inspector Holmes that nature has laid before us a wondrous template from which to learn. The “little gangs” that will serve as our model throughout this book come from the genus and species Apis mellifera: translated “the honey-bearing bee.” These bees are known for their highly social colonies and hexagonal wax cells. The honeybees we mostly see in our backyards are of European ancestry and scientifically known as ligustica.



The honeybee has mastered a great society and it would be phylogenic hubris to think we have nothing to learn from them. To paraphrase Shakespeare (The Tempest), they are the magistrates, merchants, and soldiers that teach the art of order to a peopled kingdom. Thus, using the evolutionary wisdom and operational excellence of honeybees as the model, I discuss twenty-five lessons that can be applied in any type of organization and at any organizational level to beneficial effect. Some of the lessons will sound familiar, and you can accept them as gentle reminders of their importance: principles you know to be true but perhaps to which you have not given sufficient emphasis in your organization. Other lessons may supply those rare missing pieces to complete organizational success.



I have sprinkled examples of the lessons throughout the text in order to highlight their organizational relevance. Nevertheless, since general lessons are meant to be . . . generalizable, I have left plenty of room for your imagination. Given that the range of possible colony-to-corporation translations is limitless, I did not see the logic of crowding out your ideas by overspecifying my own. Most of the time, you will readily grasp the organizational implications of honeybees’ behavior. Nevertheless, I added further thoughts at the end of each chapter to stimulate your thinking about ways in which you might intervene in your organization. In the spirit of the beehive, I have labeled these closing paragraphs “More Pollen”: protein supplements for the brain, as it were. The rationale behind this heading will become apparent as you read the book.



One way you might think about the twenty-five lessons is as a checklist by which you mark the degree to which your organization realizes the lessons, and whether a little more or a little less expression of each would be desirable. To assist you, I have provided a summary of the lessons at the end of the book on pages 189–194, formatted in a way you can easily scan and flag for further consideration.



I ordered the lessons in the main text to introduce you gradually to the honeybee, beginning with basic information and building from there. There is nothing preventing you from skipping from chapter to chapter if that is how you prefer to read. There are a few facts you will encounter in later chapters that presume some understanding of what came before, but you would get the gist of the material. In the concluding chapter, I discuss the lessons according to the type of competing demands to which the honeybees are trying to cope. These opposing forces, or dilemmas, provide a shorthand way to encode all of the lessons, making it easier to retrieve their significance in the context of your work.



Second, the concept of a hive provides a systemic way of conceptualizing the workplace and your institutional strategies and operations. The lessons set forth collectively reflect the honeybees’ best case for the management of a productive society. If you stopped and asked yourself, How can my organization survive and grow while wasting as little energy and resources as possible? the answer would be the twenty-five lessons. As you look for ways to improve your organization, it would not be outlandish to take a step back and ask yourself, What would a bee do?



In fact, I recently rhetorically posed this question to the management of a customer response center. A call center is a lot like the bees of a hive who await the return of incoming foragers—callers—who need help unloading their nectar. As you will see, the colony’s operations quickly change based on one critical measure: the length of time it takes foragers to find the help they seek from receivers. This observation presented an ideal starting place for a discussion of how the call center might organize in order to improve responsiveness to callers.



The science presented in the book is straightforward. No experience is required. Unless I note otherwise, the lessons are based on what researchers currently believe to be true about honeybees. If you happen to fall for these lovely creatures as you learn more about them, I have provided a bibliography to further your exploration. Everything I mention about bees is contained in the books and articles I list. The bibliography also includes citations to the newspaper and magazine articles I mention in the text.



Unfairly reputed, as they are, to be hardened aggressors who sting without provocation or annoying party crashers at summer outings, it is time to freshen the honeybee’s image. My hope is that the next time you spot a bee you will instantly think, “Remarkable creature,” and consider what they quietly teach through the lessons of the hive.