I watched a really cool Ted Talk this week about honeybees a BonaResponds leader sent to me. He said I would enjoy it, and he was right. In fact, I have found myself thinking of it repeatedly over the past few days.
We probably all know honeybees have had a rough time. Bee experts suggest that four things are leading to more widespread hive die-offs: increased use of pesticides, monoculture fields, parasitic diseases and lack of flowers. This is well known. And while a huge problem (you probably have seen the memes: no bees, no food), it is not the reason why I agreed with the talk so much.
If you take the talk at its face value, the literal prescriptions to save the bees are in line with what BonaResponds and PositiveRipples are already doing. In Haiti, Sierra Leone, Liberia and The Bahamas, we support backyard gardening programs and small farms growing multiple crops. We encourage flowers to be grown around the crops and the use of natural and organic farming whenever possible. These efforts were a large part of our recent trip to the Bahamas with Enactus where we did the groundwork for numerous gardens at homes, with schools and in community areas. We are now getting almost daily updates about their growth, which has been excellent and their plans to do more gardens in the future.
But the reason for writing this is not to talk about the problems facing the bees, but to build on the ideas that the TED speaker Marianna Gee, a Canadian beekeeper, presented. Gee admitted to getting depressed about the enormity of the troubles that bees are facing. Without naming it, she gave a perfect example of the classic 1/N problem so often discussed in business and economics classes. Simply put, it suggests that no one person can have any significant impact on such an enormous issue, so no one has an incentive to try to fix it.
Bees face the same issue. A typical beehive of the size that Gee was describing needs approximately 100 pounds to survive a cold winter. Even to a novice like me, that sounds like a lot. The fact is made even more daunting when she explains that a typical bee can make 1/12 of one teaspoon of honey and that the vast majority of bees die before the winter and are replaced with offspring that will proceed to use the honey.
But it works. Each bee does its job, and the small bits add up to a successful hive.
The lessons we can draw from this are numerous. We all need to do our part. Small pieces add up. We must occasionally toil when the payoff will benefit others and not us ourselves.
Like a single bee, we can only do so much alone. A lifetime of work for any one person is too little to make a big impact on most of the challenges facing us, but when we work together we can accomplish so much. This idea holds for almost everything from making peace, to ending global warming to cleaning up after a natural disaster: alone it is too much for any individual, but if we all pull together we can get the job done.
BonaResponds is by no means as efficient as a bee colony, but like a bee, we are all asked to do our part, whether that part is donating or volunteering. We won’t be able to do it all, but we can do our part, and when combined with others around the globe, we can make the world a better place. Won’t you join us? “Bee” the difference you want to see in the world.
Quote of the week: “It is not the style of clothes one wears, neither the kind of automobile one drives, nor the amount of money one has in the bank, that counts. These mean nothing. It is simply service that measures success.” – George Washington Carver
By Jim Mahar, Professor Columnist
jmahar@sbu.edu
