Better Teamwork? Be More Bee.

My honeybees can stop time.??At least that’s how it feels when I visit them. My apiary is a small collection of ramshackle boxes like a little shanty town, some tall towers where hives are flourishing, many smaller boxes of young colonies starting out in the world. A visit here is a chance to breathe, to be present in the moment.??When I’m with the bees, everything around us melts away, I’m drawn into their world with sharp focus.

For those less familiar with the lifecycle of the honeybee, let’s just skim the surface of basic bee biology, before we dive deeper.??Bees are fascinating -??social insects that can create colonies of up to 50,000 individuals working together with common goals.??There is one queen, laying up to 1000 eggs a day in the height of summer.??The eggs go from larvae, to pupae before emerging as adult bees.??Worker bees are female. They collect nectar and pollen from flowers, and store it in the hive to feed themselves and their young.??The males are called drones and are only kept around for reproduction.??The queen mates with several drones a few days after she’s born, and stores their semen to fertilise her eggs with for the rest of her life.??

The bees are in boxes called hives.??We humans put ourselves in boxes of our own design.??In the world I call myself a “vet” and a “coach” – here I call myself a “beekeeper”.??But removing the boxes allows a fresh perspective, and suddenly I’m curious - what can the honeybee teach those of us prepared to fly from our self-created boxes and really explore???If you want better teamwork, can you stop time now, and see what you can learn from honeybees?

·??????Align purpose and planet.??Flowers and bees evolved together. Each serves the other’s purpose.??Flowers are brightly coloured and produce nectar to tempt bees to visit them. As they do so, pollen sticks to their hairy bodies and is transferred to other flowers.??Therefore the flower uses the bee as a key mode of its reproductive cycle.??They need each other, and this is our bees only food source.??On a warm spring day the blossom literally hums – it sometimes seems the bees visiting the flowers and the plants themselves are two parts of a greater whole, working together for shared success - literally the evolutionary?win-win.

·??????Work when the sun shines.??Bees don’t get up early,??and they don’t venture out of the hive in the cold or rain.??They work hard when the sun shines, correlating to a flower’s peak production of nectar.??But when the weather is poor, they don’t work at all.??So, they aren’t always busy bees – they use their resources of time and energy strategically, venturing out when the sun warms up the hives in the mornings. So, I try to time my visits to suit them.??Bees work hard, but they aren’t busy fools chasing after resources that aren’t there to profit from. And they’re selective, choosing to pay less attention to weaker nectar, for example from apple blossom, to?focus on the higher reward from their best customers, better nectar producing plants.

·??????Look after your own.??The inside of the hive needs to stay warm to best protect the developing larvae, so I open it as little as possible.??Every time I take the lid off and inspect them, heat is lost, and this chill can literally kill them.??So, the bees sit on the larvae and they all huddle together.??In the winter this looks like penguins in Antarctica, with the bees moving slowly around from the outside to the inside to preserve heat. In the height of summer, the bees will fan the entrance of the hive with their wings to dissipate the heat.??Around the developing larvae, the bees frugally store their honey and pollen to both feed them now and mitigate against hard times ahead.??In nature, the excess is a scare resource, and?assets need careful management.

·??????There are always?priority stakeholders?– the queen needs to be constantly fed to maintain her egg production, and when the bees are making new queens, these are fed the best food of all – royal jelly. Come wintertime, there is a need to?make difficult decisions.??The drones are no longer required so are ejected from the hive – survival is more likely when you look after your key team members and it is the winter worker bees who will ensure the hive survives the cold season.

·??????There is indeed a?hive mind, and although it’s not always apparent to me looking in, the bees are working to a plan.??Communication is key?– a worker bee can tell her co-workers the direction and distance to a nectar source using a specific waggle dance, all the more impressive that this is done in the darkness of the hive using vibrations.??And the bees know best - it’s often clear they have a strategy.??This might be the production of a batch of new queens, or creating a swarm to find a new home.??Once in this swarm, bees hang in a cluster from a tree, yet communication continues – the bees go through a rigorous process of investigating and deciding on their new home, holding off decision making until they have?collaborated a consensus decision.

·??????Bees?upskill?themselves, so their individual life journeys are also about?self-development.??Over their short lives they take on a number of roles, starting with cleaning within the hive, progressing to nursing roles where they feed the young larvae.??Eventually they progress to guard duty, protecting the hive from unwelcome visitors before finally becoming a fully fledged forager outside the hive.??This is?lifelong learning.??Once they start flying, young bees hover outside the hive, flying round in ever increasing circles as they improve in confidence until eventually they can learn the location within a ten kilometre radius – the honeybee equivalent to?mastery.

·??????When I visit my bees, I can always?expect honest feedback, solicited or not. In fact, the bees will have different moods on different days. Sometimes this is weather-dependant – they are always grumpy before a thunderstorm and usually happy in the sunshine – but there are occasions when we are just not quite on the right wavelength.??The bees make plans, and I’m not really part of them, so when I turn up as an uninvited guest I can sometimes feel unwelcome.??They will sting,?using anger as a last resort, but in doing so the bee will die, so they ‘d rather not.??The sting contains pheromones which attracts other bees to also sting.??The ultimate expression of teamwork where your co-workers are ready to make sacrifices for the greater good.

When you’re with honeybees there are life skills you can’t help but develop – be calm, patient, gentle, but decisive, interested, and passionate.??The wisdom of these little creatures is remarkable.??Remarkable too how much we have in common, and how we think our values of teamwork, self-sacrifice, lifelong learning, strategizing and nurturing the next generation are exclusively human.??

It would benefit us all to be a little more bee.