00:02
The cosmos is within us. We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. Carl Sagan. Welcome to the lessons from nature podcast, modeling the secrets of the bees, hosted by Mark Rubin.

Mark Rubin  00:22
If you hear my voice, you're alive. And if you're alive, your body's doing work to keep you alive. US energy to do work and the energy powering your work used to be inside the sun.

Hannah Mather  00:36
All living things that do work are adapting the variables, adapting the competition, adapting the seasonality and adapting to processes that move energy around their habitat. And today on the lessons from nature podcast, we'll be discussing secret eight, from honey as money moving honey is work. And it's about the work all living things do to stay alive. I'd like to use my co host Tana Mathur Hannah is a biologist with a deep connection to all living things. She's a bee influencer on Instagram, she takes amazing pictures of Penson insects and birds and other animals, and provides insightful comments along with cool music. Hannah is CO hosting for episodes with me, where we discussed the biological secrets of the bees through the lens of the humaneness of making money, and the bee business of making honey. Welcome, Anna is great to have you here. Always good to be back.

Mark Rubin  01:35
I'm going to start this off with a definition. And this definition is the definition of the word work in the context of what we're talking about here. When people hear the word work, they think different things. So I'm going to define it in the context of business work, and also biological work. In this context, we're talking about the work of moving energy. And there's there's three kinds of energy, there's potential energy, kinetic energy, which will also call actual energy. And then there's theoretical energy. And I'll define those here. So potential energy is energy and a habitat is energy. That's a route around us at all times. And sometimes there's more of this potential energy around. And sometimes there's less of this potential energy around depending on the topics we discussed on the previous three episodes, about the variability of things in the seasonality of things, and the competition of things. And now all those things together. The idea is to create processes that move that energy efficiently, so that there'll be enough energy to survive. And that potential energy, the energy that's around, get the gathered through these processes, and converted into what I'm going to call now actual energy, which is energy that gets collected and stored somewhere. And in business, that potential energy is potential money, it's stored when it becomes converted from potential money into actual money in the money bank. And the bees are doing the same, they use up they're storing this potential energy of earning the potential energy into actual engine. And in the honey Bay. There's also the concept theoretical energy, which we haven't talked about yet. But theoretical energy is like energy, like on a spreadsheet, a bit, too, would be knowing how many flowers are around, like the number of flowers and how many calories are in each flower, and the distance of every flower from the central point to how much energy it would take, like in calories to go get that energy and is it worth it or not. And that's like on a spreadsheet, the potential combining a theoretical model with like, the actual potential and all the things together. And in business that's done with a pro forma, where you where you look at the market, how big is the market? How many customers are in the market? In my business? How much junk does a customer have? How often do they have junk? What's the average size of the jump to my pricing? How far away is it? How much can I get? And basically so that's a that's a theoretical idea. And the idea is to use that for planning. So basically, it's like, what, like, how big is it, and how much can I get, but those are the kinds of energy available and work is the optimization of those three things. Basically looking at the theory, and then doing processes that move it around and then and then trying to have as much left over at the end. So when business. The objective one of the objectives is to organize work and workers so that there's extra energy leftover at the end. And this is called profit. So it takes takes honey to make honey it takes money, take money, and basically because it takes money to power work, and even if you pay your own yourself, if you have a business where it's only one person you have to pay yourself money because you have to eat and stay alive. But if you have other people then they then of course they have to They're paid money to, because that enables them to live their lives. And the idea is to optimize this work. So that there's profit leftover, which is the profit, the money that goes into the money bank, can you think of some examples of how bees are efficient, and how those efficiencies create the most amount of honey in the shortest period of time, with the least amount of work and the least amount of risk,

Hannah Mather  05:25
I'd probably say they're most efficient in that they optimize their population based on seasons, and when they'll be able to collect the most honey without having to support the most amount of bees. So they'll start off the spring, early spring with their really small population that overwintered, and then they'll build that up. Because once there's a full peak colony with 60,000 bees, and that, that costs them about 1800 calories a day, which is the same amount as a adult human needs. So once they have that many individuals in their population, their energy requirements are really high. And so they have to make sure that they're bringing in enough to cover that and to store some are the winter. So that's definitely why they need to keep such close tabs on their efficiency, because it can easily get out of balance.

Mark Rubin  06:20
You know, an interesting parallel in businesses, my biggest expense is people. Same thing, for the same reason, in the business that I'm in about half the cost is people. So for every dollar that comes in 50 cents goes to paying people, there's tons of other costs in the business than a man in the business is almost all costed sold, which is that the energy to do the work as you're paying the bees to do the work. And that includes Hina, hive in the winter. And we talked about the idea that if there's not enough energy in the hive, going into the winter that the bees could could run out of energy, because they're doing more work to keep it keep it warm. And you could also insulate the hive and make it a little easier for them. And that comes with trade offs with like humidity and other things. And that's the same thing in a business, if you don't have enough honey in the bank, going into the slow season, we talked about seasonality, that you won't survive the winter. And something in the book honey as money. next winter is always coming. So even if you survive this winter, you pick up on next month or in every in every business and every part of life next winter is always coming. So the next thing to talk about is the idea of continuous improvement, waste reduction, and eliminating unnecessary steps. So in in business, the business is organized around learning, so that the managers who are operating the business have the ability to absorb information and continuously improve what's happening. And so creating, you know, a process of, you know, looking at expensive things that cost money through the lens of the less money you spend, the more money you have leftover. Simple as that and what's worth it and what's not in the B world are there are some examples of continuous improvement or waste reduction or eliminating unnecessary steps.

Hannah Mather  08:21
The one that comes to mind is when they're foraging, trying to find those flowers that are closest to the hive and that are in clusters that they can get multiple you know trips out of instead of having to go to many places farther away to collect from so it definitely helps the bees to optimize their energy intake if they're not having to burn as much energy on the way there and back and then they'll communicate this to the other bees in the hive via the waggle dance and the way that they do that dance depicts how far away the sources are so that's how the bees in the colony will pick up on which resources are the closest and the most beneficial for them to focus their energy on and all had that way

Mark Rubin  09:11
you know that reminds me I lived in Denmark for three years there was a two towns right next to each other and these towns had rival soccer teams football teams there but soccer teams here and there was a sign that and a town a it's a distance to town B and it was the distance around the world minus the distance because they wanted they were so far apart we had to go the other way as the descent of the other town have the same sign but then you know the other direction. It reminds me that people when they do work attempt to do things as fast as possible in the shortest number of steps. Because time is Jaime which was secret for and you see this in life like people negotiate for things like to buy something like a car for example. No one negotiates the at the highest price Have people negotiate the lowest price because they're what they want to do is save time later, because it takes more time to earn the money. And this this idea of optimizing, which would be like the shortest distance, least number of trips, and communicating to reduce number of trips for other people is part of the hive mind that also exists in business too. And it's super important, I agree completely that that is the best example, because the intelligence is in the field. But now as of where the energy is, is not inside the office, the people who work in the office don't know anything about what's actually happened, okay, you just they measure stuff and make up stories, but the people, the bees that are in the field doing stuff, they know what's going on. And so creating frameworks for this information to flow back and forth is super critical in the hive, mind of business, and the hive mind of the bee world. Next, we're gonna talk about performance metrics, that things that get measured. And the idea is that performance metrics improve efficiency, because if you if you can measure something, and know you know, how well it's doing, you can make decisions. And if you can't measure something, then you can't. One is marketing. Something I measure is even things like how many houses are in this territory where my trucks can drive. And the other thing I would measure things like, what's my cost per impression for these people to see my brand was like how many dollars per impression. And the idea is to sort of optimize those things to try to get as many eyeballs on the brand as possible for the lowest cost. Next is sales and sales measure conversion rates. So imagine had 100 employees that go pick up junk, and let's say, 10 of them, when go to a customer's house, convert 100% of those potential customers into actual customers, meaning, they go and they talk to them, and they say things and whatever. And it's fair, and the customer says yes. And imagine I have 10 employees, they go to a customer's house, they don't really want to do the work. So what they do is they talk to customer out of it, okay, it's basically is like, it's too heavy, it's too hot, it's where, and so some people do things that are advantageous for themselves in the company, and some people don't. And then there's a bell curve of performance in the middle. And the idea is to give people scripts and incentives to do the things that are beneficial for everybody. Because in the end, the business people with money. So the like, that's where the money, the money comes from the customers, not the business. So in other words, just really just spreading it around. So basically, the people they can get more than they get more in the bee world. Are there any kinds of things that they measure? And how are those measurements used to inform decision making?

Hannah Mather  12:53
Well, I can kind of speak on this from the beekeepers perspective. And that, you know, when the beekeeper goes into the hive, to inspect things, some of the things that we're looking for, which are the same as the bees are internally monitoring, but it's just easier to explain a little bit from the beekeeper perspective. But so you want to look for the eggs that the Queen is laying, because that indicates that the Queen is healthy, and in the hive and lay, you would look at the patterns of that those eggs, whether it's in an inefficient pattern, whether it's all of the eggs are clustered together and going out in a way that allows them to optimize their resources. If you notice that the eggs are spotty, just kind of all over with no rhyme or reason, then that would be a reason for us to look into that clean, keep an eye on that colony, they might be struggling with something, then you're also looking for, you know, inventory taking inventory of their pollen, and their nectar stores, how they're doing, where they're storing it. And then another important metric would be you know, any sign of disease that we want to keep on top of and make sure that we intervene in the way that you need to so that they can continue to thrive. And the bees kind of monitor this all themselves internally. But you know, there are some times where the beekeeper CEO needs to step in and make sure that everything's going to plan.

Mark Rubin  14:20
Well, you know, that that was a great list of things to monitor and all those things have parallels in business, the inventory, how much money is in the bank and what resources are available. Disease is measuring culture, okay? Because Because culture can be unhealthy, bad, and intervening when things are going well and things are becoming not optimal. Say it that way, is something that humans can do well, because we're adaptable. And we have tools, some kind of disease prevention treatment is the same as doing a cultural upgrade. Let's do an off site somewhere and have some fun and throw some horseshoes and have a barbecue like whatever it is. Okay, these things that you're doing Weighing in business are the same have metaphors and analogies that are identical to what's happening the high, because honey is money and the game is the same. Next up in a business, it's important to cross train people. And the idea is that as people in a business system evolve and grow and mature, they often seek roles and new learning experiences. And creating a platform for people to learn and grow in the business is critical to keeping people and keeping them happy. Because, you know, basically, there's some people that just want to do the same thing over and over again. And there's some people that want to learn new things. And third, cool, you know, whatever is different kinds of people. But the idea is by training people and cross training people, they're at least exposed to new opportunities, at least at least they're aware that there are other things they could do. And so in the in the hive, I know there's we talked about the idea of there's different functions in that job functions roles as their training going on, are they learning from each other,

Hannah Mather  16:00
I would imagine that they definitely are, as they do pick up on new habits that they'll see other bees doing. It's a really interesting field of research. Honeybees will have different roles throughout their lives that vary a little bit from when they're the youngest, when they first emerged, there'll be the nurse bees, they'll make wax, they'll attend to the Queen, they'll receive the nectar that's being brought by brought back by foragers and storing it. And they kind of all learned their next task by watching the next age. But also, it's not super strict, because in some cases, where something will happen to a colony and say they lost a ton of their foragers, there will be other bees, that will have to step up to fill those essential roles. And they might not be as well equipped as the oldest foragers in an ideal hive, but they are able to adapt and fill those roles. And I think that without that, then the colony would be so sensitive, if they lost, you know, one role, they need to have the other workers being able to sell those, even if it's not ideal, it keeps it running until everybody's caught up.

Mark Rubin  17:15
That's a great example. And as you know, in a business, the managers role is to manage the workers who are gathering the energy. But occasionally, if workers don't show up or are hurt, or something goes sideways, the managers are in this trucks picking up job as the filan person to keep the hive alive and keep the honey flowing. And I can tell you for sure, I'm not good at picking up Chuck. Because we move 10 times a day. And that, you know, is beyond my capacity, you know, to do. So I understand what you're saying is that is that the being adaptable, in terms of or flexible, I suppose in terms of roles, and filling in even though it may not be optimal is better than not doing it all, keeps the hive humming. Let's talk about the hive mind, because really, in business, it's all about people making decisions in the junk business. And eight hour day, people might be putting junk in a truck for like, an hour or two. And the rest of the day is either driving or talking or thinking or doing things. And what makes it work is the minds of the people not the the so much the body, the bodies and people's important for moving the energy, but the rest of the time they're not. And so empowering employees, by providing them with decision making authority and autonomy, and opportunities for growth, improves morale, and improves productivity. And really what it is is distributing the decisions to the field D centralizing the decision making. So people can react to the zillion variables that are having every second of the day. So in terms of the hive mind, in a beehive are the foragers, for example, making decisions like on their own. And how does that, like we talked about communication, but how was the decision making that's happening in the field, improving the efficiency of the hive,

Hannah Mather  19:14
I would say that a good example of something like that would be like when a swarm which is when part of the hive when when a hive, the population gets too big for the space that it's in, they will send out the queen with a bunch of workers. So it'll be almost half the hive will leave to find somewhere else to go and then the remaining bees will make a new queen and continue on. And something interesting that they do when they're in this swarm position is that they'll stop if you play it, they'll stop and just be a ball of bees somewhere and from that, they'll send out Scout bees that will start looking for new locations and they'll come back those Scout bees will leave and come back and they'll start doing their little waggle dances. To get other Scout bees to go to the same location, and basically how they decide is what location gets the most Scout bees to go there and agree on it, and come back. And basically, once they're all doing the same dance and all going into the same place, it's just the public opinion of the hive. And that's where they'll bow. So it'll start out with maybe three or four potential locations that are all kind of competing against each other. But eventually, they'll all choose the same one, and that will be their new home. Based on the opinions of lots of the bees sell, they're kind of optimizing, it's not up to any one person, it's their little way of voting for where they want to be next,

Mark Rubin  20:45
smart, because Because perspective is unique to an individual, everyone has their own perspective. And nobody knows anybody else's stories. Even if you tell somebody your story, they still alive your perspective. And creating a system of voting with the people or bees that are the ones most impacted by you the benefits or risks of the decision is a better way to create a hive approach to decision making. And that way, no one person can be sort of more right than anyone else. As a parallel in business. I've moved offices maybe four or five times. And I always I went first. And I looked. And then I always had my management team come and look at options. And talk to you the pros and cons which in the junk businesses distance to the transfer station access to the highway centralization, and the habitat, how close are we to the most number of houses were within the habitat, which zip codes with the best zip codes based on demographics and whatever were the most flowers are the closest to the to the almond trees are the closest to the desert. Where are we in the game and thinking through all the possible where one I got wrong, I'd say I got a new office. And they put in a toll road. In between the time I found it, this was perfect. And the time that I signed the lease, they put in a toll road. And in this toll road, my cost per year was $42,000 of tolls in the first year. And I didn't even know there was a toll road until the year ended and $40,000 worth of tolls, which was more than my read. So basically, you could see like little things like that can destroy all the profit. Let's talk about incentives in business. I mentioned that the decision making is happening in the field at the intersection of the employee and the customer. There's lots of decisions. One way to try to improve the decision making is to align compensation plans, incentive plans, so that the employees make decisions that are advantageous to them. And also advantageous to the company and creating a transparent alignment of like, like mechanical stem of like if this then this and creating something that is fair and fair meaning in this case that the more energy that they gather, the more reward that they get, and having the game be simple, so that the employees understand how their actions result in, in this case, extra money. Are the bees doing something? So are there any rewards baked in to the game of the bees, in terms of individual can an individual bee get rewarded more by decision making than than than not,

Hannah Mather  23:30
that's a tricky one inside a high because they are a social organism. So they're kind of all looking out for, the way that they were their instincts work are for the sake of the whole colony. So it's kind of hard to say that anyone specifically is incentivized. But I guess you could say that on a more specific level, they'll be incentivized to go to the flowers that they think tastes the best, or that are the easiest for them to collect nectar from so on an individual basis, you know, a bee is free to go to whatever flower they so choose. And they can then put their findings in the mix and try to sell that to the other bees being the best. So just their own energy optimization for themselves, then that turns back around kind of benefits the colony.

Mark Rubin  24:24
I just realized the difference and why it doesn't apply, is it my customers are scheduled, which means that flower called us. So it's a difference between foraging, which is opportunistic, and scheduled, which is deterministic, is that we know basically the employee doesn't have a choice to go to like a knock on our door and like say, Hey, we're here to take with you. We go to where people call us. And so that creates a different kind of system. It will be better I'm going to change the game. We're knocking on doors. See what happens. Okay, that would be bad. But it's interesting even just to think about the differences and why. Okay, next is as technology upgrades. And in business, things are always changing in terms of technology and talk technology is a tool. So basically creating tools that improve efficiency. So in the junk business, for example, having GPS in the trucks that track the trucks, now we know where the trucks are also, having monitoring in the trucks about driving is good. How aggressive driving, for example, is it really speed and go faster than the speed limit? Did they brake hard? Did they take a turn fast, like whatever it is, to try to reduce risk. So those are just two examples of technology also scheduling and dispatching systems, even having a cell phone, I had cell phones in the beginning of I've been doing this for 20 years. But we didn't always have maps, we have map books, paper maps, is hard to drive. Looking at paper, now it was up to people in the trucks, we had a driver and a navigator. But even so teaching people how to use paper maps, where are they on the map, and the math become outdated. And there's new roads. And by the way, paper maps don't have traffic conditions. So I'm gonna say would be printed every five seconds, which would be expensive. So the point is, is that having, you know, newer technology, on a cell phone, or on GPS, because time is honey, optimizing the drive time is critical. So are there any tools or technologies that honeybees use to to improve efficiencies?

Hannah Mather  26:32
There are, I will say that they're old technologies, though first new, they've been recycling the same things for quite a while. And one of those is their ability to collect propolis, which is resins and saps that they collect from trees that have really strong antimicrobial properties. And so they'll, if they're in a natural hive, like in a tree hollow, they'll use that propolis to smooth out the rough edges, they'll seal their whole hive in the propolis. And that helps them with a few things that helps weatherproof their wild hive, it also helps reduce disease for the microbes and bacteria that might grow. And it kind of seals everything together. It's their glue that they use for everything to keep their house sanitary and clean. And for people that has a lot of medicinal properties, too. We're really lucky that they make such a cool thing. Propolis is probably my favorite hive product that they do. But it's just really it's really cool the things that they manage to collect from nature that they've been doing for 1000s and 1000s of years to optimize their home. So I would say that's one more of these kind of differentiate from people and that they're not doing the latest and greatest. They're kind of just they found what works and they're keep doing it.

Mark Rubin  27:55
Well, so to your point in the business where and optimize anymore. There's diminishing returns. And that's a good lesson from the bees. Okay, so even knowing that and that's the lesson from the bees is like simple is good enough. Like, is there a Hey, Hannah? Is there a new hexagon technology available after 100 million year? What do you think? I

Hannah Mather  28:15
think it's still working for them.

Mark Rubin  28:17
Okay, I carry in since the sugar is also a hexagon molecule. I think there's a good lesson there. Okay, that this is the lesson. Some things are good enough. That's it. Okay. It's great. So Hannah, as we talked a lot about optimizing work in the beehive. Is there anything else you'd like to add? I feel like we've

Hannah Mather  28:42
covered so much the last few episodes, I'll probably think of something else as soon as we get off. But right now, I think we covered a lot.

Mark Rubin  28:51
And it's been great to have you on the biology series of the lessons from nature podcast. I really enjoy your perspective and ideas. If you're interested in learning about Hannah's work, please follow her on Instagram at Hannah's Honeycomb, or photos of nature are incredible. And her comments are insightful.

Hannah Mather  29:09
Thank you for having me. It's been so fun talking about all the parallels between business and Bs. And, you know, these are obviously one of my very favorite topics to talk about. And I love being able to connect it with other perspectives of life that you wouldn't normally think, go together, but they really do go hand in hand. So well.

Mark Rubin  29:30
Thank you again, Hannah. It's been great to have you here and spend time with you. All living phase or adapting to changing conditions. The fact that you're alive means that you're good at reacting the variables that impact your ability to do work, and to gather me congratulations on your ability to do work that enables you to survive. If you enjoyed this decision about work. Please subscribe to this podcast lessons from nature modeling the secrets of the bees. You The next four episodes start the psychology series. The psychology series covers teamwork, plans, specialization and communication. Visit project tonyalight That life for more information about living in harmony with the rest of nature. Thanks a lot for watching.