Transcriber: Michael McWatters Reviewer: Denise RQ
"To be or not to be" is not the question.
Einstein was reported to say, "If the the honey bees were lost to us,
we would have four more years to live."
He never said that.
When you come to a conference like TED, it's good to have an open mind.
But Jacob Needleman once said, "It's good to have an open mind,
but not so open that your brains fall out."
We need to balance new ideas
with the critical capacity to look at them.
But the bees are very important.
In Manitoba, we export
approximately six million kilograms of honey every year.
The value of the pollinators,
—and it's not just honey bees,
it's also leaf-cutter bees and other bees in Canada—
is around two billion dollars.
Some people say three billion dollars.
Around the world, according to the latest UN report,
the value of pollinators was estimated worldwide, every year,
at approximately 200 billion dollars.
71 of the top 100 crops that we eat
are pollinated by bees and other insects.
There's been a lot of talk
about Colony Collapse Disorder and the disappearance of bees,
and the latest fad is the ZomBees.
And we are losing bees.
But "To be or not to be," is not the question.
Richard Saul Wurman, in Information Anxiety,
stated that his expertise came from his ignorance.
It stemmed from his not knowing.
And that his questions were more important than his answers.
His questions were more important than his answers.
Richard Saul Wurman, in 1984,
had the idea for a convergence of technology, education and design.
And that's what I would like to do, to look at a convergence of technology,
computers, iPads, smart phones, education,
meaning, not just learning about honey bees,
but, significantly, learning from honey bees,
and design is how we bring that together so that the two are fused as one.
As I said at the start, my background is in employee engagement.
Sometimes people see employee engagement as the workplace
trying to suck more work out of you.
That's not how I see it.
It's how we connect to our work,
how we connect to each other,
and what's going on.
I was working with the Provincial Government Department about ten years ago.
We were talking about the structure:
the Minister, the Deputy Ministers or ADMs, the directors, the managers,
and it just kind of flowed through and it was a classic pyramid.
But Debbie...
Debbie was at the front of the class,
and Debbie is a doodler.
And this is what Debbie doodled.
I looked at that and I said: "My God, Debbie,
you've drawn the best organizational chart I've ever seen."
(Laughter)
It's the real organization.
It's how it really appears to me.
And then I got involved in working with bees.
I'm not a beekeeper. I'm not a scientist.
At best I'm a "bee convener."
I like to convene humans and honey bees together for the mutual benefit of both.
And I stuck a couple of computers in hives,
--and you can see them up on the stage.
I stuck a couple of computers in hives last summer,
just to see what would take place.
And I looked and I said: "That's the same
as the organizational chart that I've just showed you."
Except as a dead metaphor it's a living metaphor.
And how do bees organize their community?
How do bees accomplish things?
How do bees do things?
And what might that mean for us?
What if?
What if our organizations were run like hives?
And what if our organizations could return the gifts that the bees have given us
between pollination and honey?
How would that unfold?
So it began a three-act play,
lifting the lid,
penetrate the darkness,
and build the hive.
Lifting the lid.
Lifting the lid is not always easy.
I mean it seems easy to do, but it's fraught with difficulties.
And with bees it's hard because they glue that lid together with propolis.
They put it down.
And we have that old analogy
back to lifting the lid and Pandora's Box.
What if we open that lid and out comes all these terrible things
and the only thing left in it is hope?
I was afraid to lift the the lid.
This is a bit of a journey from fear to fascination.
And hopefully where I don't end up is getting fixated on honey bee factoids.
There's a bazillion facts about bees,
and for some reason people get very obsessed with that.
So if you're going to lift the lid, it's really important
that you have some guides to help you through the process.
There's my two guides.
Phil Valdhouse is a beekeeper near Starbuck, Manitoba.
Phil is also a Philosophy Professor at the University of Manitoba.
Phil's Master's thesis was on bees, brains and behavior.
It's not easy to read, it's a philosophy Master thesis.
But I tried to read it.
And no disservice to Phil, but it really said, "Do bees think?"
And he answered: "They show intention,
but they don't show consciousness or self-consciousness."
There's no evidence for that.
When you look at how bees communicate
they do so with something called "a waggle dance."
What they do —and I'll try to simulate this a bit—
is they go like this through the hive and then they come around again,
then they go like this through the hive
and all the other bees are around them watching it.
And at a moment like that, when you're dancing as a bee,
you don't want self-consciousness.
You don't want to think, "Does my thorax look a little large?"
(Laughter)
So intention is good.
And sometimes when we launch on lifting our own lids,
and engaging in our projects,
we might have a little bit too much self-consciousness.
The other person in the picture is Aganetha Dyck,
the wife of my close friend, Peter Dyck,
we've been involved for 15, 20 years and he's mentored me.
And I became interested in Aganetha and her work.
There's one piece of Aganetha's work called Pivot.
It's one of my favorite pieces.
Aganetha has been working with bees for 20 years.
We've been getting together for breakfast the last few years
and talking about the connections between the workplace and engagement,
and the honeybees.
Aganetha is fascinated by the world of the small.
And I think in our workplaces we have to look at small.
I was in Tucson, and one person said to me,
"We've gone in our workplaces from doing more with less,
to doing everything with nothing."
We need to look at how we work together with that.
Aganetha has engaged bees for 20 years.
If you can engage a honeybee,
surely in our workplaces we can engage each other.
Aganetha co-creates her art with the bees.
She has a stamp.
And it's not like she just throws objects in hives and out they come.
There's a back-and-forth.
But one time Aganetha and I are having breakfast together,
and she said to me, "David, the hive is a very dark place."
And I said, "Yeah, I know Aganetha. The bees are in the dark."
"No," she said. "Behavior."
Aganetha loves bees much like I Iove bees, too,
but there is a dark side.
There is a picture of the queen, she's kind of the bigger bee.
You don't last as long as Queen Elizabeth, 60 years;
your rule is maybe three years.
You lay about 1,500 eggs a day
--it's kind of a thankless job--.
You've got all these bees around you, looking after you.
Oh, isn't that nice? Attendants.
But they're also monitoring you.
If you stop doing your job,
they get you busy and make some new queens.
And those are all your daughters.
Talk about difficult mother-daugther relationships!
(Laughter)
Then, when the new queen is ready to come on board,
they tell you to leave.
And if you don't go, the statement that is sometimes used
is "the bees will cook you."
They'll swarm around the queen.
They'll build up the heat with their wings, and kill the queen.
And then the new queen comes on board.
There is some dark behavior.
Thomas Hobbes said that life is nasty, brutish and short.
A normal honey bee only lives about 45 days.
And there's lots of difficulties,
so as much as I love bees, and as much as I love the workplace,
there's positive and negative.
There is both sides that take place.
Unless you think, "It's pretty tough to be a female in a hive."
The drones don't have a great life.
In fall, they just get dumped if they're not productive,
the queens just chase them out of the hive.
And if they're lucky enough to mate with a queen bee,
it's three seconds and then their penis falls off.
(Laughter)
So it's not a brilliant life.
But I'm looking at how we build our hives, how we come together.
Not learn about bees, but what can we learn from bees.
And so my work has taken place at Phil's apiary near Starbuck, Manitoba.
Those are very small grain elevators at Starbuck.
They're so cute.
I thought it would be nice to have coffee with the bees.
And if you're going to Starbuck you don't have Time Horton's.
(Laughter)
So I brought the bees a Starbucks mug.
This exact mug.
And those of you in branding —and there's a number of you here—
know that Starbucks opened up their brand.
Your brand isn't just your logo, it's what people say about you.
You've got to give social entailments to that.
And they opened up the brand,
and the bees decided that they would build an edible handle.
And the bees, the bees obviously love honey in their coffee.
They filled the cup.
And then the bees built the Petronas Towers.
One of the towers is right inside the cup.
Gaudí,
from Barcelona was fascinated with the architecture of the bees.
And if you've ever been to Barcelona and seen his work,
his legacy from learning about bees and their architecture,
is very powerful.
So what can we bring in social architecture?
What are we famous for in Manitoba?
Before a couple gets married,
you rent Norberry Community Club and you have a social.
And you bring the two families together
and there's drinking and partying and things going on.
And I thought, "Lets' have a Manitoba social."
And the social will take place inside the hive.
50,000 bees could possibly be there.
There's not enough room for all of us physically.
And then there's danger
where people could get stung or something else could happen.
So these three goals is to be social.
A lot of you are on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Google Plus
and the latest platform.
There's a social element going out here, there's cross-pollination.
We're number nine in Canada on Twitter trends.
To think differently inside our hives.
To learn from bees, not about bees.
And then, ultimately, mutual benefit,
as we learn from bees to offer something back to them.
So, how do you enter the hive?
You can enter the hive through Facebook or other platforms,
--here will be more information as this unfolds--.
You can go into the hive, you can tweet the bees.
You can update the bees.
You can Google Plus the bees.
There will be some video output, some sound output, and some other factors.
I'm asking you to think differently.
But not just to think differently, but to act differently.
Richard Saul Wurman said that his expertise
came from his questions, not from his answers.
I don't know exactly how this will unfold.
I don't know exactly what we'll learn from this project.
But I know the honey bees have given us so much.
And I think it's not just physical.
I don't think it's just pollination.
I don't think it's just honey.
I think they offer a model as our world has gone
that all of us are social workers.
We don't have to take an MSW or a BSW.
We're social workers.
And not just social media workers, but social in a variety of ways.
The old pyramid structures of the past are long gone.
And we haven't quite figured out what replaces them,
but I think the hive is certainly a step in the right direction.
Just in conclusion, I was saying to Aganetha,
I said, "Of course, you know,
when I put these computers in the hive, I don't expect the bees to text."
Although we got one bee on there, it's not quite enough weight.
And Aganetha said to me, "They can text."
And I know enough that when Aganetha says something, I better listen.
She showed me a project
that she did in Burnaby, or it was on display in Burnaby.
She took some metal plates and went to a punch press
and had the letters taken out.
And put it into the hive, and of course, the bees filled in the space.
They filled in the space.
And the bees created text.
Yeah, you may need to give them structure.
And I don't expect that the bees
are going to see the world from a human perspective.
Obviously that's not going to take place.
But I think the bees can offer us very much a living metaphor.
And if we're losing so many bees, it's of great concern, perhaps,
that we can give back to them along the way with that.
So what I'd like to do is to invite you to think differently inside your hives.
To be social.
And that's an idea worth spreading.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)