By Philip Atkinson
The complex and sometimes mysterious workings of a beehive can be a metaphor for working life today.
If we lift the lid of a hive, we notice thousands of individuals working together towards a single purpose. Communication takes place in the dark. Strategic life or death decisions are taken when they swarm. Many specialised tasks need to be completed, organised by different departments. And, like any organisation, there is competition for resources.
Leadership of this system is key. Let’s dive deeper to think about the role of the Queen and to reflect on different leadership roles today.
Of the 30,000 to 70,000 bees found in a hive at the height of summer, approximately 90% of them will be hardworking female worker bees taking on six different and specialized roles throughout their short life span of just a month.
As soon as they hatch, the young female worker bees are trained to be ‘housekeepers,’ to look after all the cells, make sure they are clean, and keep the larvae and the brood warm. They take time to train the previous cohort of bees that have just hatched to do the same, before continuing their ‘career’ as nanny, nurse and builder. They leave the hive for the first time for their penultimate role in security where they greet the returning forager bees to the hive, laden with pollen.
The female bees only fly for the first time in their final role of forager. When we marvel at a bee pollinating a beautiful cherry tree or balcony flowers, what we are seeing is a bee at the end of its lifespan, foraging and pollinating for the last two to three days of its life. Be kind to them. It is the end of their life’s work.
Then there are the drone bees. Big and bulky male bees with huge bulging eyes that touch in the middle. They are called drones because they describe the deeper sounds their wings make when flying, due to their greater size. They don’t do any work and can’t even feed themselves. They are not even able to sting. Their activity consists of being fed honey and waiting for an opportunity to mate with the queen.
Once a drone has inseminated a queen, it dies in victory. Other drones will fly around in packs looking for other queens to mate with. At the end of the summer, when the drones are no longer necessary, they are forcibly ejected or left to starve by the female worker bees.
There is only one Queen Bee. The female worker bees ‘create’ her by feeding normal female larvae with Royal Jelly which is a powerful hormone, and it turns her into a lifelong egg-laying machine. She is almost three times the size of the females and she is fed and kept at the right temperature by attendants. She has only one job: to lay eggs.
She lives at the bottom of the hive, in the dark, where it’s coolest. She will crawl over the cells to lay her eggs, followed by an entourage of bees that will look after her. Over her entire productive life – about two to five years – she will lay up to 2,000 eggs per day.
We can’t take lessons too directly from the bees, but the way we look at them and their system can help us to stop, pause, think about all of our roles, and challenge old mental models and ways of working.
In 1887, the Victorian naturalist George Cruickshank described the Queen bee as being at the top of the hierarchy, a bit like Queen Victoria. He suggested she controlled the hive, partly because that was the lens through which they observed the world. Today we have a more nuanced understanding of a hive and working life. The Queen bee serves the population and the whole colony works together as a single organism, but with many essential parts. At work today, we are eschewing command and control hierarchical models for more servant leadership models and creating the right environment for good people to do their best work. There is an important role for female leaders to challenge the old models and status quo and role model a more conscious leadership style.
Another way to learn from the workings of the hive is not through the gender of the individuals but the roles they fulfil. Bees teach us the benefit of being completely dedicated to a single role and performing it to the best of our ability, while at the same time being aware of the specific skills that will next be in demand. We should all keep an eye on the horizon of what skills will be needed next and continually learn and gain new capabilities.
Let’s have some fun too recalling the male drone bees. They are only able to do one role, and when the conditions change, they are no longer necessary. Let’s use this as a lesson to keep learning and keep investing in our skills!
In addition to investing time to learn, the bees are also responsible for teaching the younger generation. This is a commitment we could all do well to invest in, for the good of the colony, and the wider ecosystem. We can all become better role models, leaders, recruiters, parents, and volunteers. Like the bees, let’s keep learning, keep being supportive and keep adapting to our environment.
Everyone deserves to be led well.
Long live the Queen!
Philip Atkinson
