Pollinators Teach How to Bee a Team Player

There are numerous books, e-books, articles, and videos that share important tips on how to become better team players in the workplace or any environment where teamwork is crucial. They highlight qualities and traits, both innate and acquired that individuals can cultivate to become effective team members.
Yet, discovering what it takes to fit into the contemporary teamwork does not require research by a ‘great name’ research institute or university.
You can easily gain knowledge by observing the best and most successful example of teamwork in nature, bee colonies.

First, let’s celebrate bees and all pollinators

May 20th is observed across the planet as the World Bee Day. Bees and many other pollinators. According to the United Nations, “nearly 90 percent of the world’s wild flowering plant species depend, entirely, or at least in part, on animal pollination, along with more than 75 percent of the world’s food crops and 35 percent of global agricultural land”. Their activity contributes to sustainable development and especially to food security (SDG 2) and biodiversity conservation (SDG 15).
Given their vital role to the planet and to our existence, the 2020 theme is: Bee engaged!
No pollinators, no SDGs! Do you have an idea or project that promotes the sustainable use of pollinators in agriculture and related ecosystems? Join the Citizen Entrepreneurship Competition and learn how to get started with sustainable entrepreneurship.

What to do?
We can learn from the pollinators and take action as an individual, as a farmer, or as a community citizen

Bees teach how to make a team work, buzz-buzz

Bees represent one of the hardest working and highest performing creatures in this planet
Strong point: Work ethic

First, they have and share the same vision and purpose: To be strong enough to survive the winter. Hence they can reproduce and survive endlessly while sustaining life on earth (and give us honey and other beehive products).

They run their sweet organizations in a highly structured way. The colony includes the queen, the workers, and the drones. Each of them has a defined role. The colony or the organization is a high-performing team of up to 80,000 bees. The higher the number, the higher the performance. This is not the case with many human-run companies. Bees succeed because differently from humans they have a high sense of self-organization. Every bee knows its role, and even though they progress in ranks, a bee can switch into lower rank tasks if needed. They’re flexible and disciplined.

Bee jobs
Housekeepers
Nursemaids
Construction
Guards
Soldiers
Collectors
And
The queen.
There is only one leader, the queen, but it’s a servant leader with a role to fulfill. The way how the queen is made is different from the other workers, and she has only one task, to ensure the continuity of the colony by laying more than 2,000 eggs a day.
It is a leader that serves the colony and that depends completely on the colony. Worker bees attend, groom, feed, and clean the queen.
Differently from the worker bees, the queen can live up to five years and it can sting multiple times. There is something interesting at this point (theatrical drama material). A queen stings only other queens. She has only a mission and doesn’t waste time and energy with petty affairs.
Even more than a leader that serves the colony, the queen is a polestar. She lays eggs and if she fails, the colony will substitute it.

A lesson from the beehive for companies on the COVID employment crisis:

In times of crisis, bee colonies never minimize head-count, they just find a new leader.

What happens in nature can't be adapted 100 percent in our daily lives, but we can always learn from nature.