The Hidden Language of the Bees
What we can learn from a honeybee about how to live our lives
Winged travelers soar,
Sunflower galaxies whirl,
Cosmic dance in gold. — Chuck Metz Jr.
By Chuck Metz Jr. & Shannon Mullen O’Keefe
What is this dark hum among the roses?
The bees have gone simple, sipping,
That’s all. What did you expect? Sophistication? — Mary Oliver, Hum
In the vastness of the universe, our simple backyard gardens host alien oases.
They’re tiny embassies of minds and senses profoundly different from our own.
And sophisticated they are, yes.
Within their boundaries, symphonies play — melodies too delicate, too nuanced for the human ear, resonating in frequencies uniquely attuned to their ambassadors’ music. These gardens sing not only of the present but breathe whispered harmonies of bygone eras, their tunes imbued with grace and the allure of millennia past.
With each passing age, we find ourselves increasingly estranged from these melodies, their lyrics fading into the recesses of our collective memory. Yet, every leaf rustle, every bird’s song, every petal’s unfurling tells ageless stories within these hidden scores.
If only we’d listen.
They are like a drawer full of love letters — lost. Unless we crack open the drawer to read them.
Their tales serve as enduring reminders of the intricate web of interconnection that, despite our forgetfulness, binds every life form. In these gardens, a vast universe is mirrored in the profound depths of life’s smallest, most intimate, and lovely moments.
If we’d only look up, we’d notice again that nestled within this simple garden outpost — the honeybee lives a life worth noticing.
A bee’s dance is a voice telling tales of pollen, nectar, and life.
For bees possess language, a hidden tongue that is elusive to our comprehension.
This language, woven from an intricate dance suffused with pheromonal messages and other subtleties we have yet to grasp, reflects the complexity of their world. Were we granted a lens to truly perceive and understand this hidden dialect, we might find that their messages, if not their gestures, resonate with a familiarity transcending species. Their actions and signals reflect universal themes: survival, community, discovery, and the enduring quest for sustenance and understanding.
We rarely think of it in this way, but we are evolutionary kin of a sort — socially complex, sense-making pattern seekers — each paying tribute to ancient hunter-gatherer forebears of differing needs and drives. We must find a hive’s harmony, too. We’re also shaping the tapestry of our hives — of our lives.
But we struggle to find a voice and a way forward. Global problems that are almost too obvious to state yet again raise dissonant chords. And now, we breathlessly pursue AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
Perhaps we’ve complicated things.
What if we look at the patterns creatures like the bees offer us? They may offer us humbler solutions.
What is there to learn from the simple, sipping, humble honeybee, that darling that hums among the roses?
Here are six lessons we see.
(Simple) Sophistication
Let’s start with fractals.
A fractal is an infinitely complex, simple solution.
Consider the Mandelbrot set; it sounds fancy, and it looks like a heart or a flower laid sideways. A recursive bloom of a fractal pattern it is considered one of the best visualizations of mathematical beauty.
Fractals are everywhere in nature. Mathematicians are fascinated by their symmetry and presence. The Fibonacci sequence is a famous fractal; each number is the sum of the preceding two.
The petals of a flower?
The Fibonacci sequence.
As for the honeybees, they may buzz around the Fibonacci sequence of the petals, but they offer a fractal themselves. The hexagonal fractal. This, of course, is the honeycomb, made up of seven regular hexagons, all lined up. Architects like Marcel Breuer have used this shape in their designs to elicit beauty, like the Saint John’s Abbey.
The beauty shows up in this way: all sides are equal in length, and the opposite sides are parallel.
The honeycomb serves a purpose.
The honeybee’s home is sophisticated in its simplicity.
It is simple yet beautiful. Sometimes, simplicity is what we most need.
This is the first lesson of the honeybee.
Communication (is) a Waggle Dance
Communication is about more than just exchanging information. Mercantile dealings deprive it of deeper meaning. One-dimensional transactions entangle essence with paucity, reducing communication’s richness to mere trade.
We are a social species. Like the bee, our sight is also multifaceted, but collectively rather than individually. A connected kinship peering at the world through each other’s eyes.
And what we see together is superior when we allow it.
When we connect, we’re not just comprehending someone’s words; we’re resonating with their feelings. Their perspectives. Their underlying intentions.
Connection demands relationships beyond the surface level of words to share far richer meanings beneath. This more profound dimensionality transcends the simple pragmatics of sharing knowledge and ideas. We aspire to understand and be understood, not just intellectually, but emotionally.
Even spiritually.
Hardly surprising. Emotions drove our primal survival. They remain wired gateways within, leading to the unexpected and sublime.
This multifaceted aspect spirals into hidden fractal spaces and scales tucked within familiar landscapes. Environments speak. Species whisper across voids. Repeated down to the most microscopic scales, hidden dimensions lay tightly curled within each word. Each sound. Each nuance of flower, leaf, and seed.
If we but dance.
We have a deep human need for far vaster levels of interaction. Such a need demands the creation of space where meaningful exchange can flourish.
Which demands effort…and time.
Time away. Rare in this digital age, where information exchange tumbles rapidly and impersonally. Digital platforms might enable us to share information efficiently, but they lack the depth of multidimensional connection. Body language. Scent. The wisp of breeze and brush of touch.
George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”. (1) In the silent dance of the bees, there is an eloquence that surpasses words, a reminder of the profound connections that exist beyond spoken language.
They remind us that effective communication underpins cooperation.
And thus speak bees. In a world of strident social media, the intricate language of bees, a dance of meaning, illustrates the criticality of clear and purposeful communication and connection. Their dance is their voice.
To dance is not only joy but communication. This is the second lesson bees would teach us.
(Work Together)
The hive, a universe in miniature, operates on a principle of interconnectedness that humanity can scarcely grasp.
Helen Keller, herself a testament to overcoming isolation, observed, “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much”. (2) This echoes in the hum of the beehive, a reminder that in the collective, in the unity of purpose, lies a strength unattainable in solitude.
In their diversity, bees find their resilience. From the queen to the worker, each buzz contributes to the harmony and resilience of the hive — a fortress sealed with the strength of propolis.
Bees seem to understand that work is the output. They’re not working for money. They’re working for each other.
They each take a job and fulfill it.
“Every honeybee has a purpose. Some are nurses who take care of the brood; some are janitors who clean the hive; others are foragers who gather nectar to make honey. Collectively, honeybees can achieve an incredible level of sophistication, especially considering their brains are only the size of sesame seeds.” (3)
Each bee has a job in the hive. The hive respects its work.
Of course, humans seem more complicated, but are we? The novelist and Christian apologist Dorothy Sayers once wrote an essay about work in which she said this:
“The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work done. To do so would mean taking the attitude of mind we reserve for our unpaid work — our hobbies, our leisure interests, the things we make and do for pleasure — and making that the standard of all our judgments about things and people.”
She also says we should ask a man not “‘What does he make?’ but ‘What is his work worth?’ of goods, not, ‘Can we induce people to buy them?’ but ‘Are they useful things well made?’ of our employment, not ‘how much a week?’ but ‘will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?’”(4)
Working together multiplies individual giftedness. The strength of our offerings synergize in unexpected ways.
On unexpected scales.
Efforts become fractal, repeated across dimensions from the unutterably small to the infinitely large. And in this practicality lies a great lesson.
Scale is only in the beholder’s eye.
Significance. Vision. Need. Size becomes irrelevant, the comparison of apples to oranges. Because the meaning is fractal. And this elevates all work efforts.
This is the third great lesson from the honeybee.
(Look and See)
How we see is also a lesson from the honeybee.
First, imagine perceiving the world through the eyes of a bee. Their vision is a technological feat — an engineering masterpiece. They have compound eyes made of myriad tiny facets, the ommatidia. It grants them an expansive visual canvas, allowing them to discern swift movements and minute patterns.
And imagine — bees have five eyes.
They don’t see red, and they follow the sun.
Their eyes are attuned to the softer, ultraviolet colors of the spectrum.
To us, the world is a dazzling display of colors, but for bees, this spectrum shifts. Their eyes dance with ultraviolet, blue, and green hues, yet they remain blind to the embrace of red. And in this altered visual realm, flowers unveil secret ultraviolet glyphs.
While these symbols elude human vision, for bees, they shine brightly, guiding them to nectar’s sweet embrace.
Perhaps not unlike the fictitious Na’vi culture as portrayed in the movie Avatar, in which when they say “I see you,” it means many things. Things such as “I see into you, I understand you, I love you, I respect you, or I see you physically in front of me.”
This way of understanding that what is in front of us changes, even the same thing, with the passing of the sun behind the cloud, a shadow on the sidewalk appears or disappears.
Perhaps the way the bees see is an invitation to open our eyes to the possibility that we can embrace multiple understandings and we can see things in multiple ways.
Perhaps there is more than one way forward.
Another lesson from the honeybee.
(Life is Fleeting)
A fifth great lesson the honeybee offers us is that life is fleeting. We all know this, nevertheless, the reminder is worth it if we’ll only remember to relish today.
Consider this:
A female worker bee in the spring and fall lives thirty to sixty days.
For male worker drone’s life might last for just over thirty days.
Some bees that are prepped and ready for winter might live as long as six months.
A queen honeybee outlives everyone but still only lives a couple of years.
In two years as a human, we’re just getting started. We talk and walk and climb and jump by then, and chances are we still have another seventy years to live. In thirty days, we haven’t even had time to notice a season pass us by.
But how often do we stop to notice they’re fleeting?
And this is the point. While some are pursuing technologies, AI-enhanced health apps, that might enable us to extend our lives — aiming at one hundred years to start — our average human life is still close to just eighty years.
This means that we live something like six thousand times longer than the honeybee. All the same, the abbreviated span of a honeybee’s life reminds us that life is utterly fleeting. Whether we have sixty days or sixty years, no matter how we’re counting, what starts will end.
And we never really know when that will happen.
For us.
So what? You might say.
So what precisely?
“To think that the sun rose in the east! that men and women
were flexible, real, alive! that everything was alive!
To think that you and I did not see, feel, think, nor bear our
part!
To think that we are now here, and bear our part!” said Walt Whitman.
Life is only ours (or the honeybee’s) for a delicate few moments. In the end, it will seem.
According to astronomers, the universe is 13.7 billion years old. And so, we are like the honeybee, more than we may like to think.
How relatively much or little time we have may only be a matter of perspective. And perhaps that might invite us to respect our next minute more.
(Find Certainty) amidst Complexity
And this is perhaps the greatest hidden gift of all.
Honeybees more or less do one thing. They “have a plan, and they work their plan.”
They find pollen and bring it back to the hive. And then, they find pollen and bring it back to the hive. And then they find pollen and bring it back to the hive.
It is a ritual. It is a routine. It is a routine. It is a ritual.
They stay within the bounds of their calling by seeking, finding, and returning. Their life seems to be a cycle of purpose and work and working for a purpose.
Amidst complexity, they find certainty in honoring their path and their place.
They’re not in it for economic gain. They’re in it for honey. Which they store for the cold months when they cannot leave their hive to find flowers to gather more food from.
And in this cycle of life, they thrive.
Regenerative cycles and certainties, like fractals, seem tiny but expand and repeat endlessly…creating a place in which we can (all) thrive.
Theirs is not the certainty of having all the answers. Life is too complex for that.
Theirs is a certainty of engaging in a cycle of thriving.
Not a bad lesson.
Conclusion: Embracing the Wisdom of the Hive
“The Hidden Language of the Bees” invites us to not just observe but to partake in a conversation that transcends species. It is an invitation to learn from the smallest of teachers, to listen to the whispers in their buzz, and to find in their world a reflection of our own.
In embracing the wisdom of the hive, six simple lessons from a small creature. A hidden hexagon that helps us not to diminish our own humanity but expand it as endlessly as a growing honeycomb.
We recognize we are part of a community that extends beyond us.
The honeybee, in its tiny yet immensely significant existence, is a reminder of our place in this community — as members, each with a role to play in the greater symphony of life.
There is wisdom to be discerned in this tiniest consciousness.
Fractal lessons that resonate across time and scale.
The little
worker bees live, I have read, about three weeks.
Is that long? Long enough, I suppose, to understand
that life is a blessing. I have found them — haven’t you? —
stopped in the very cups of the flowers, their wings
a little tattered — so much flying about, to the hive,
then out into the world, then back, and perhaps dancing,
should the task be to be a scout-sweet, dancing bee. — Mary Oliver, Hum
1. Caroselli, Marlene, “Leadership Skills for Managers,” 2000
2. Keller, Helen, “The Open Door,” 1957
3. National Geographic Animals article: Honeybee
4. Sayers, Dorothy, Villanova Press: “Why Work?”
Chuck Metz Jr. A historian by training, Chuck’s passion for science and its impact on human behavior involves him in projects examining the intersection of contemporary science and its challenges to human culture and growth. He is most often found on LinkedIn, where he curates information and hosts discussions under the tagline This Random Sense of Wonder. He is author of YES! A Quantum Song of Love children’s book series and is currently involved in the Balance the Triangle human behavior/technology interface project. His past publications include; This Community of Companions, 100 years of Bush Brothers history; Three Mile Island and Beyond, a memoir of Harold Denton and the 1979 nuclear accident, and he is a contributor to Uncertainty: Making Sense of the World for Better, Bolder Outcomes.
Shannon Mullen O’Keefe is founder and Chief Curator of The Museum of Ideas. The Museum invites leaders, thinkers and everyday experts to express the ideas that will shape our better future. (Coming Soon: Summer 2024, The Moon Interviews with Lifeship! Stay tuned.) She is also a thinker, advisor and strategist dedicated to imagining what we can build and achieve together. She is a founding member of QCollective and co-author of a new book, 10 Moral Questions: How to design tech and AI responsibly. She practiced the art of leadership for close to three decades, leading workplace engagement and culture change initiatives. She has served in leadership and executive roles in a global professional services firm and in a nature-based nonprofit organization. Find her leadership thinking on LinkedIn.
