Imagine a large community of families living together in harmony. Each individual in this community cooperates and communicates with the others to complete tasks that they are assigned to them. Survival of each individual would not be possible without the combined effort of the whole community.
Though this sounds a bit like a utopian community, it is in fact the basic structure for one of the most fascinating systems on earth- a honeybee colony. The three main ideas that govern systems- resilience, self-organization and hierarchy-can easily be applied to a bee colony. Resiliency, along with stability and productivity, are all important and necessary aspects of a system. Once a bee colony becomes overcrowded, the honeybees create a swarm with the old queen bee and half of the worker bees while a new queen stays behind with the remaining worker bees. The reason for this is so that the swarm can locate and move to a new site to start a colony. The action of swarming allows the bee colony to maintain stability and productivity, by splitting up the workers and choosing a new queen. The system is resilient by staying flexible to external changes, such as overcrowding.
Honeybees are social insects and rely heavily on communication and division of labor within their colony. Each type of honeybee, the queen, workers and drones, perform a specific set of tasks that benefit the group as a whole. Worker bees are the majority of the workforce and some of their tasks include cleaning the hive, feeding the others, caring for the queen, building beeswax combs, guarding the hive and searching for nectar. The main purpose of drones, the larger male bees of the colony, is to fertilize the queen and they do not perform any other tasks otherwise. The queen bee has two main functions in the colony, which is to reproduce and produce pheromones to keep the colony unified. This self-organization of a single colony allows the hive to act independently of other hives because of the rules and division of labor that govern it.
Lastly, the hierarchy in a bee colony is very apparent. The single queen bee is responsible for creating and establishing a strong colony and she is the only member to lay eggs. She does not “control” the hive per say but the other honeybees in the hive cater to her needs.
The resiliency, self-organization and hierarchy of a bee colony are what make it a highly effective and functional system. We could all definitely take a lesson or two from our captivating honeybee counterparts.
Question: How important/necessary is self-organization in a system?
"The Colony and Its Organization." MAAREC - Mid Atlantic Apiculture Research & Extension Consortium. N.p., 19 Oct. 2010. Web. 31 Jan. 2017.
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