A Letter from Chris Suarez
FIND YOUR HIVE
Who wants to be an apiculturist?
Ok, I didn’t know what that was either. Let’s start over. Who wants to be a beekeeper?
Every day on my drive home I pass an open field with a line of ten or eleven white wooden boxes. They are home to bee colonies. Each one of those boxes, or hives, house anywhere from 60,000-80,000 bees. They are committed to their colony, and each have a very specific role. Once in a while as I drive by, the beekeeper is out in the field with his white suit, hat, and net checking on his bees - or more appropriately checking on his honey.
This spring we brought some mason bees home to the farm to help with some of the pollination of our fruit trees. It led me down the path of reading up on bees in general. As I looked a bit more closely at the organization of the honey bee - their workforce, the rhythm of their hive, their benefits and products - I couldn’t help but think we all need a hive.
Now don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely some weird stuff going on in that hive. The queen honey bee has two main jobs, both with incredible purpose. The first job? She lays up to 2,000 honey bee eggs every single day! I won’t say any more. Job number one is growth of the hive. The second job is releasing chemicals with a scent that helps unify the colony. Job number two is building culture in the hive.
Every honey bee in the hive has a job. One being no less important than the next. Some male honey bees are called drones. They have no stinger and are born without the body parts to collect nectar or pollen. He is alive solely to mate about ten times, before having his abdomen ripped out in the process. Thanks for taking one, or ten, for the team. I won’t say anymore.
The worker bees are there to do just that. They are fighters. They are workers. They are producers. They are creators. They are nurturers. They are collectors. They get it done. Period.
Worker bees feed and take care of the bee larvae after they are laid. They tend to the queen. They collect nectar and pollen. They process the incoming nectar and create honey.
The organizational and operational structure in the hive is what makes the workers so effective, what makes the queen so efficient, and what produces incredible results. The benefits and byproducts of a highly functioning hive are innumerable and priceless, much like the advantage that shows up in business when we plug into organizational and operational excellence.
What are the benefits?
Pollination
As bees fly from flower to flower and plant to plant looking for nectar to feed their colony and create honey, they bring pollen with them. The pollen that sticks to their furry bodies and six legs winds up pollinating over 85% of food crops that we as humans enjoy - my apple and pear trees, cherry and plum trees, my tomatoes, artichoke, and peppers. Perhaps most importantly my grapes. I find it fascinating that while the bees go about working on their product and doing their job, they help co-produce fruit, vegetables, flowers, and well, even wine, for all of us. The by-products of hard work are pretty sweet.
Wax
Worker bees convert honey into beeswax. This is no easy feat and it takes teamwork. To produce a pound of wax, bees will need to ingest up to eight pounds of honey. That will take them visiting a mind blowing 30 million flowers in order to create a pound of beeswax. It does us well to think a bit more about the work that went into that chapstick, lip gloss, hand cream, or even eye shadow or other cosmetics - all of which are made from beeswax. In order to convert honey into wax, the bees need to huddle together and increase the temperature in the hive with their body heat. This then allows them to convert the sugar from honey into wax. They use that beeswax to create their hive as well, having discovered that the hexagon is one of the strongest and most efficient shapes and structures in modern engineering. They use that shape to build an incredibly strong hive - built on hard work and teamwork. The six sides of the honeycomb remind me of the six pillars of what we call an experiential life: Career, Relationships, Personal Growth, Wealth, Health, and Spirituality. That hive takes incredible effort to create.
Honey
Well what’s a honey bee, if they don’t produce honey? The earliest record of humans eating honey dates back to 7,000 BC or the Neolithic period. A painting in a Spanish cave in the Valencia region depicts a human collecting honey in a basket while bees swarmed around. Throughout history honey was eaten by royalty, traded by Romans, given to Greek gods, and even collected by Winnie the Pooh. Honey is made from the nectar collected from the flower and stored in the bees stomach until they get back to the hive. Once there, they pass the nectar through their mouth to another bee, who chews it for about half an hour. This happens again and again, until it is turned into honey and then stored in the hive. It is a multi-step and multi-person (or bee) process that creates such an incredible product.
Health
Honey has powerful antibacterial properties. It prevents infection in skin wounds and has been shown to relieve allergies thanks to trace amounts of pollen. It has skin clearing and wrinkle reducing powers. It is used for treating coughs, boosting memory, preventing low white blood cell count caused by chemotherapy, and helping with fertility (just ask the queen bee).
We can learn much from how bees organize, collaborate, execute, and produce. As I look around the hive I have chosen to work in, play in, produce in, and fly back to each day, I see so many similarities. The end result is always a team effort. Anything worth anything is always a product of teamwork and partnership.
It takes work every day to create an incredible hive. To grow the colony, to build culture, to pollinate those around us, to ensure the hive is strong, to work together to produce results, to all play our part and succeed in our role, and to make sure everyone is taken care of along the way.
Who is in your hive?
Chris