The Oldest Businessmen: Honey bees

Most of us are aware about Bees from our childhood and sometimes we got stung by bees and we enjoyed the sweet pain of that. Honey bees are the wonderful creatures and creating backbone of food security. Without bees no pollination and without pollination no food.

Honey bees do business?!! Oh…yes. Honey bee colony is a great organisational setup with more than 20000 work force, by utilising the available resources they are manufacturing a wonderful product called “HONEY”.

In the process of making this monopolistic product, they have to do different business activities like,

Procurement of Raw Material from different sources: Flowering Plants Advertise for the supply of Nectar and Pollen in exchange of pollination service offered by the bees. The plants use beautiful flowers with colourfully designed nectar guides for advertising process. The honey bees send young and energetic, experienced scout bees for the collection of raw material sample. On the way to sample collection the scout bees calculate cost incurred in procurement i.e. distance travelled and energy consumption per trip. Based on samples provided by different scout bees, colony will decide rich source with less energy consumption and start to collect nectar and pollen from low cost quality raw materials. If low quality product available in nearer distance and high quality at farther distance , although energy consumption is more in that, they prefer quality products up to some distance like marginal cost=marginal utility

Another interesting fact about honey bees is management of Work force i.e. division of Labour. The bees in day to day activity perform so many activities. Like cleaning, hive building, pollen collection, nectar collection, water collection, nourishing young bees, queen attending, guarding etc. they will divide these activities among different groups. After emergence from pupa, young bees don’t go for collection of nectar and pollen. They will stay in the colony and learn the different activities by observing the ongoing activities. It’s like training period for them. After two weeks of emergence they will go for outdoor activities. If some bees got physical damage or get old, those handicap and aged bees will be employed for watchman duty i.e. guarding the colony.

The beautiful activity of colony is selection of chairman i.e. queen bee. Only one queen rule the entire colony and maintain colony aggregation with its hypnotising chemical compound present its queen pheromone. When present queen get old and colony feels to have new queen, the worker bees construct 3-4 queen cells. Old queen lay eggs in it and 3-4 queen bees will emerge from those cells. If only one queen emerges first, it will kill all remaining nonemerged queens in their cells itself by using its weapon called sting to avoid competition for the position. If there is two queens emerge simultaneously, then there should be a war!! Right, yes those emerged queen bees will fight each other and the war is so horrible that one will get die. So now the winner has to become ruler but it’s not going to happen, the workers will think if one bee died, what should be the condition of other one, obviously its condition is about to die, so they don’t want this handicapped winner as their ruler, so they kill this winner bee and go for the remaining queen which is still in pupal stage. Because they want strong and healthy ruler for the colony. Cost cutting in the colony: the honey bees will breed male drones in colony multiplication time, these drones don’t work. They just enjoy the honey and warmth in the colony. After successful mating of newly emerged queen there is no need of these lazy males. So the workers throw these male drones out of the colony to avoid extra cost to maintain these lazy bulls. This is same thing what all companies do with their employees!!