Lessons from Nature Podcast

Honey is Money: Observation 40. Secrets of the Bees. mid June 2020 - 2022

May 01, 2024 Mark Rubin Season 1 Episode 40
Honey is Money: Observation 40. Secrets of the Bees. mid June 2020 - 2022
Lessons from Nature Podcast
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Lessons from Nature Podcast
Honey is Money: Observation 40. Secrets of the Bees. mid June 2020 - 2022
May 01, 2024 Season 1 Episode 40
Mark Rubin

Observation:

The single most important observation in the story "Honey is Money: Observation 40. Secrets of the Bees" is the comparison between bee behavior and human behavior, especially in terms of energy efficiency and specialization. The author notes how bees use hexagons to store honey, which is the most efficient shape for creating maximum volume with minimal effort. This is paralleled with human economic behavior, where we seek efficiency in spending money and time, similar to how bees efficiently gather and store energy.

The Lesson:

The most important lesson from this story is the significance of efficiency and specialization in both the natural world and human society.

How this is Helpful:

  • Efficiency: It teaches the value of using resources wisely.
  • Specialization: Highlights the importance of focusing on individual strengths.
  • Comparison: Encourages looking to nature for lessons applicable to human life.


Questions for Reflection:

  1. Efficiency: How can I apply the principle of efficiency in my daily life?
  2. Learning from Nature: What other natural behaviors can provide insights into human practices?
  3. Specialization: In what areas can I specialize to contribute most effectively to society?


For more ‘Practical Dreaming’, visit https://www.markianrubin.life/practical-dreaming 

Show Notes Transcript

Observation:

The single most important observation in the story "Honey is Money: Observation 40. Secrets of the Bees" is the comparison between bee behavior and human behavior, especially in terms of energy efficiency and specialization. The author notes how bees use hexagons to store honey, which is the most efficient shape for creating maximum volume with minimal effort. This is paralleled with human economic behavior, where we seek efficiency in spending money and time, similar to how bees efficiently gather and store energy.

The Lesson:

The most important lesson from this story is the significance of efficiency and specialization in both the natural world and human society.

How this is Helpful:

  • Efficiency: It teaches the value of using resources wisely.
  • Specialization: Highlights the importance of focusing on individual strengths.
  • Comparison: Encourages looking to nature for lessons applicable to human life.


Questions for Reflection:

  1. Efficiency: How can I apply the principle of efficiency in my daily life?
  2. Learning from Nature: What other natural behaviors can provide insights into human practices?
  3. Specialization: In what areas can I specialize to contribute most effectively to society?


For more ‘Practical Dreaming’, visit https://www.markianrubin.life/practical-dreaming 

00:00

My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality. This is the story of honey is money, the secrets of the bees. And this is a book I wrote with my friend Dan Rome. And I wrote this book with him after observing the bees in my backyard, thinking about how they live their lives, and how the bee business of making honey is identical to the human business of making money. As I was watching them, at this point, I discovered the ideas that the bees store honey in a hexagon, which is the most efficient shape, which requires the least amount of work to create the most amount of volume. And I thought, why would that be? And the answer is because time is honey. The idea there is that like all living things, they want to do the least amount of work to buy the most amount of time. And that's like spending money efficiently. Because like no one ever negotiates to buy a car for more money. People try to negotiate to buy a car for less money, no one goes to a restaurant, I guess there's tips, but no one goes to a restaurant and looked at the menu and then agrees to pay like 10 times as much money, again, a negotiating tactic, because what they're really doing is trading that for time working to create the money to trade for the food, so they don't have to grow it in a field and whatever. So since I knew that sugar is energy, and the be stored in the most efficient shape. And that means that time is Honey, I knew that I would be able to uncover the other relationships between the behavior and human behavior around those energy principles. And so I was watching them. My Backyard didn't take me too long, maybe a week to figure out the various components of the bee lives compared to human lives in terms of physics, biology, psychology, economics, anthropology, and futurology. And within each of those six sections, there are four chapters in nonius money that describe these things in b terms, but there's a direct relationship between the B lives and human lives. And essentially, since bees are older than us, we're simply just more advanced forms of bees in terms of the way that we're gathering energy from our habitat. The difference is that humans tokenize this energy in the form of money that we then trade to buy time not working later. And money is a great tool for human beings because it enables us to specialize. So a human being can have a particular skill, something they're really good at, like brain surgery. And that human being won't have to like forage for food or grow corn or defend themselves from harm. Because money enables us to be efficient with our work and it's more efficient. Just like the bees, the bees have special functions. You have basically three kinds of bees in a hive. Yeah, you have a queen bee, whose job it is to lay eggs and they produce. And you have female worker bees and you have male drum bees and the female worker bees have various roles throughout their lives. This is all described in honey as money, but first their fertilized egg then there are larva. Then they hats and they're a baby bee. And then there are nurse B, which is a bee that takes care of baby bees is like a toddler in human terms because they can't fly yet. And then they become a wax bee, which is they create wax in the hive and repair the hive and expand the hive because they're not strong enough to leave the hive. And then they leave the hive. And they become a forger and then they that's when they do the work of gathering energy in their habitat in the form of of nectar, bring it back to the hive, and then maybe usually become what's called an undertaker B which is they clean up the high or too weak to fly. Somebody just clean up the other bees that have died, clean up the debris, and then they die. And another bee that's right before them in the cycle takes takes them out of the hive and removes the debris. And this is the cycle in the B world and in the human world. There are special job functions in a business system that correspond to these things. I explained that later on the lessons from nature podcast, where I'm modeling the secrets of the bees. And that's the next story.