Honeybees — Humanity’s Best Friend

Duration: 4 hours

Target Audience: Engineers, product designers, R&D managers, corporate heads

Brief:

Honeybees are humanity's best friends. Honeybees have inspired man since time immemorial. Bees are revered as messengers of gods and celebrated in all ancient cultures. In this lecture we will see: (1) The anatomy of honeybee, (2) The structure of the hive, (3) The life cycle of honeybee, (4) The relationship of honeybees with the Sun, flowers, plants and other insects in its environment, (5) The chemistry of honey, (6) The lessons that corporations can learn from the bees, and finally, (7) The problems of honeybees. We will see all these topics in the “3x4 Nature’s Matrix” framework. 

Honeybee’s structure and form enables it to gather nectar, produce honey and wax, learn, navigate, defend, and communicate through intricate dances. The dance language of honeybees surpasses in complexity and richness only by human speech. They get-up at sunrise and labor all day long, and lifelong, and they end their foraging each day at sunset. In the words of Emily Dickinson,  “His labor is a chant, His idleness a tune; Oh, for a bee's experience, Of clovers and of noon!”

Honeybees make essential decisions, weighing the costs and benefits of alternative food sources. Honeybees are near-sighted, but navigate with great precision. They memorize odor, color, shape and pattern of each species of flower they harvest and the best time of the day to forage them. 

Honeybees have been the subject of more research than all other insect species combined, yet they continue to surprise the scientific community. Life in the beehive is established with extraordinary wisdom behind it. Not only bees make honey, they do a lot more than that. Each colony might have up to 60,000 bees. Honeybees make decisions collectively—and democratically. Every year, faced with the life-or-death problem of choosing and traveling to a new home, honeybees stake everything on a process that include collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, and consensus building. These incredible insects have much to teach us when it comes to collective wisdom and effective decision making.

The colony—honeybee hive—represents the ultimate social state, with complete selflessness and redistribution of ‘income.’ Bees not only work together to achieve a common goal, but, in the process, create a highly coordinated, efficient and remarkably productive organization. The hive behaves like a miniature but incredibly successful business. From the bees, corporate management can learn atleast 25 powerful insights, including how to distribute authority, keep management simple and protect the future of the company. 

Honey—the food worthy of offering to gods—is used as source of sugar, as preservative, and as medicine. Honey is too thick for bacteria to inhabit, and impossible for fungi to metabolize. Honey contains several types of sugars, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, hormones, acids and some aromatic substances. Bees make honey; we all know that. But what happens between the bee buzzing around and the sticky fluid in the jar on our dining table, is a mystery to most of us. It takes 12,000 bee-hours to make one jar of honey.  They never complain about their hard life. That’s why William Blake said  “The busy bee has no time for sorrow.”

From prehistoric times to the present day, humankind’s reliant relationship with honeybees continues to be strong. Honeybees enable pollination. Pollination leads plants to produce grain, fruits, and vegetables.  About the economic contribution of the honeybees, Dr. Vandana Shiva—a physicist and an environmental activist—said, “The beauty of the seed is, out of one you can get millions. The beauty of the pollinator is, it turns that one into the million and that’s an economics of sharing. That’s to me the real economics of growth because life is growing.”  Honeybees are responsible for 4 out of 10 morsels of food that go into our mouths and then into our stomachs. Bees nurture and sustain life on earth.  A wise scientist once said:  “If the bees disappear from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination … no more men!”  Bee crisis is the world crisis.

At present honeybees world-wide are facing insurmountable problems. In the autumn 2006 an unnerving phenomenon hit the United States: honeybees were dying everywhere. The problem soon spread to parts of Europe and Asia, earning the name CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). To this day nobody is absolutely sure why it is happening and what the exact causes are. The causes could be: Pesticides, Monocultures, Verroa mite, Cell phone towers, Domestication, Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), Artificial bee breeding, and so on. But one thing is certain: These innocent pollinators which are helping the world to flourish and stay in bloom are being maltreated.

Honeybees are one of the most remarkable and highly evolved species of the world, with much to teach us about the possibilities and mysteries of living in harmony with Nature. What works well for bees can also work well for us. This lecture will focus on most aspects of honeybees, appreciate Nature for creating these marvelous machines, and see how and why the honeybee is humanity’s best friend.