Bee Wise

Watching the bees we can notice the regularity of their behavior—the cadences and patterns—as well as their many seemingly premeditated mutual encounters while coming and going from the hive. Bees elicit a profound sense of awe in anyone who observes their industriousness in action and it is bees’ organic artistry—a live rendition of a super orchestrated performance that even the best military parade would fall short. Bees truly are small marvels, can count (up to four), recognize faces, categorize visual stimuli and form abstract rules of “same” and “different.”, spontaneously recall information and have a robust working memory that enables them to temporarily store, and patch together, multiple pieces of sensory information. 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. Working of large and diverse groups without reference to a specific blueprint and Organising  themselves so successfully together harmoniously and productively can be learnt from bees.

Honeybees fly at more than 24km/h flapping their wings at amazing 230 beats per second and covering a territorial radius of slightly more than three kilometres, but may go as far as eight kilometres away from the hive to gather nectar that makes honey using celestial cues, local landmarks, and basic geometry to guide them. They gather as much as 22kg of nectar per day, producing up to 130kg of honey annually (honey is regurgitated nectar that bees have concentrated to over 80 percent sugars by fanning their wings to evaporate excess water). One kilogramme of honey requires close to 200,000km of flight and the visitation of two million flowers. One teaspoon of honey represents the lifetime work of roughly, a dozen bees. 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 have symbolic language and at least seventeen different, discrete communication signals (including their dance language). 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. Despite having a brain the size of a grass seed with only 950,000 neurons, bees have tremendous cognitive abilities. The highly integrated circuitry of the bee brain that  is the size of a grass seed with only 950,000 neurons, bees have tremendous cognitive versatility that they need to adapt as circumstances Change where, like us, they have to deviate from prescribed behaviors in order to meet environmental trials and unpredictable challenges. These are Complex critters with amazing intellectual capacities. A bee would have no problem with color recall 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. Genetic programming underlies bees’ behavioral feats and they can think and communicate, and that makes the study of their social system particularly fascinating and compelling.  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. In Tempest Shakespeare writes that bees 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, can be applied in any type of Organisation and at any Organisational level to beneficial effect.

The concept of a hive provides a systemic way of conceptualizing the workplace and your institutional strategies and operations. A Call center, for example, is a lot like the bees of a hive who await the return of incoming foragers—callers—who need help unloading their nectar. 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 and so to decide how the call center might Organise in order to improve responsiveness to callers. Unfairly reputed, as they are, to be hardened aggressors who sting without provocation or annoying party crashers at summer outings, “Remarkable creature,” and consider what they quietly teach through the lessons of the hive.