Beekeeping and Startups

A year ago, I started learning the art of beekeeping. I bought a cardboard box of bees from a guy selling NUCs out of the bed of his truck in a grocery parking lot near my home. I have one hive in my backyard. I have learned a ton over the last year about bees and find them fascinating.

I could easily write a whole week’s worth of analogies comparing bees and beehives to startups. I won’t.

So here it is.

Rather than explicitly draw all the analogies, I’m just going to write about bees in ways that the analogies to startups are obvious:

• Bees really only do two things:  grow in headcount (make new bees) and try to become rich (the more honey the better)
• Everything in the hive is centered around those two goals, and they have extremely rigorous processes to ensure those goals are successful
• Bees make a plan and execute it everyday, flying out of the hive to get stuff
• Bees work all the time, when the sun is up; and rest when the sun is down
• Bees are extremely meticulous about keeping their environment clean, quickly removing debris and dead bees from the hive
• Bees are extremely meticulous about their work product (honeycomb) and build it with incredible precision; they build thousands of cells to sub-millimeter accuracy; and they care a lot about the geometry of the honeycomb cells (many man-made structures take inspiration from honeycomb as an ideal product of minimal material use, minimal weight, and maximal resilience)
• Bees have competitors that attempt to rob their hives, including beetles, mites, and ants; the Varroa mite is particularly bad in Georgia
• Bees die when they sting; because their whole abdomen is tied to the stinger which gets ripped out of their bodies in the process

The Queen Bee deserves special attention. Queens run the show and make or break the hive. If they are unhappy with the hive, they swarm away with half of all the bees, leaving behind the other half to watch-over the eggs she is leaving behind. Here are some notes about Queen Bees that have startup analogies:

• All bees take their commands from the queen; smoking a hive is meant to disrupt communication channels by blocking the ability of the queen to send out chemical signals to “attack” the intruding beekeeper
• If the hive gets too crowded (i.e. the beekeeper didn’t add enough empty boxes onto the hive to keep growth alive), the queen will swarm away and the beekeeper will suffer the setback
• If the beekeeper is too intrusive when doing hive inspections, the queen will decide to swarm away
• A newly born queen needs to mate; to mate she flies above the drones (which each day congregate in a tree someplace away from the hive) and naturally selects only the strongest bees as her mates, i.e. the ones capable of flying up to her altitude
• If the other females in the hive (known as workers) do not like their queen, they will attempt to make another queen; worker’s have the ability to turn any female egg into a queen depending on how they nourish it; worker’s can also attempt to kill the queen
• If an existing queen finds a queen egg cell, she will destroy it

I could keep going, but this is a sufficient list to show that I’m exciting about bees and they have many attributes desirable in startups. Maybe the Atlanta Tech Village should get some hives on the roof as inspiration :p

What thoughts do you have about bees and startups?

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• Varroa Drop Rate Record – Henfold Apiary 2013
• Creative Entrance Reducers
• Beekeeping for Simpletons
• Disappearing bees worry local beekeepers
• How to Set Up a Beehive
• Guest Post: Bees in the City
• Beekeepers Come to Expect Loss of Colonies