Final Essay

Bees are the Key

Walking into the school’s lab on this Wednesday morning was different. Today felt different. There was a sense of accomplishment. The underclassmen opened up the kits and began working on their robots. Who would have thought this day would ever come? The seniors and a couple of us juniors sighed a huge sigh of relief. We were finally done with our first step and now we can get to the fun part.

You wake up one day and the world is running just the way it should, but better. Everyone is working towards something and everyone is satisfied with the world. Are we in a utopia? No we are actually in a beehive. Change is the key to the future and surprisingly this key is held by our little black and yellow friends.

How many times has there been a time in your life where you felt like something was not done the right or proper way? Now how many times did you do something about it? The answer to that is somewhere near zero unless you are the next Martin Luther King Jr. or the next Gandhi. Creating change is not that easy, but raising awareness and taking the first steps towards this new future is not very difficult. All you have to do is believe in your idea and get others to support you. If an idea is good enough you will always gain followers and supporters.

Carl Zimmer, the author of “The Secret Life of Bees,” would definitely agree with this statement. Zimmer focuses on a study conducted on bees to show the way in which they work. Usually when we think of bees we think of a chaotic scene. However, this is not the case. Bees are actually more systematic than we may have thought. All bees work towards a singular goal. They all want the hive to survive and the Queen to keep living. This unity really helps the hive prosper and continue to grow and spread. Bees also share ideas with one another, such as moving the hive to a better location. If this location is truly better, more bees will join in and get the entire hive to move.

This mentality is almost identical to the one I mentioned above. Where believing in your idea and if the idea is good, the followers will grow and the idea will eventually come to life. It is the little steps that make a difference and in the bee’s case, the bees are those little steps. They split themselves up to do different tasks. Some are in charge of going to flowers, others are constantly looking for better hive locations, and the list goes on.

In my life I have encountered many situations where I felt change was needed. However, in a majority of those situations I never did anything about it. I just let my day go by and hoped that maybe someone would bring it up or that someone would stand up against whatever it was that needed to be stopped and fixed. But for one of a select few times I stood up for something. This was during my junior year of high school. Me, along with a few friends of mine and some seniors were able to start a robotics club in the school. We were able to get the school to create separate funding for our club and in a way forced the club into the school’s environment. While this was not a massive step, it was still a step for me. Not only was I able to let my voice be heard but we also forced a club into existence after quite a few people before us failed to do the same thing.

While my experience was nothing major, these rules or ideas for creating change can be seen in the biggest movements. One specific movement would be the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. Matt Taibbi, in his essay “How I stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests,” writes about there being a sense of beauty in fighting for what is right. Taibbi mentions how at first even he did not like or care about the movement. To be completely honest, neither did I. Taibbi writes, “You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve.” There are a lot of references in this quote but the essential meaning is that protesters usually go unnoticed. Taibbi is saying that this is how he initially felt and I used to feel the same way. I kept hearing about it but just pushed it off to the side. I did not realize that something that to me felt had little to no impact, was so large that we still feel its impact today. The events of Wall Street are what led to the horrific financial situation of the United States in the last few years. Taibbi also questioned what the movement was even for. The reason Taibbi said the movement was important and had a certain beauty to it was that there was a need for change. The protestors were all there to make change. Although they cannot keep protesting forever, the protestors can go into better way to advocate for change and actually change the system by starting a non-profit.

The protesters are like the scouts from the beehive. They go out looking for a problem and fight to finish it. Although the protesters do not really have a set goal they will eventually come up with one. The scouts are looking for answers as to where they can find a good place to migrate to. The protesters are looking for answers to their political and economical problems. “‘Bees are to hives as neurons are to brains,’ says Jeffrey Schall, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Neurons use some of the same tricks honeybees use to come to decisions. A single visual neuron is like a single scout” (Zimmer). This visual is actually very powerful. Think of the hive as a brain. Our brains function all day every day until the day we die. Now if we think of a hive and the brain being the same or similar that is a marvelous feat for the hive. The hive is now a self-running system that is nearly flawless in all its ways.

If humans were to run their democratic system the way bees run their hive, this sounds cheesy but the world or at least our country would be a better place.

One of the strengths of honeybees is that they share the same goal: finding a new home. People who come together in a democracy, however, may have competing interests. Seeley advises that people should be made to feel that they are part of the decision-making group, so that their debates don’t become about destroying the enemy, but about finding a solution for everyone. “That sense of belonging can be nurtured,” Seeley said. The more we fashion our democracies after honeybees, Seeley argues, the better off we’ll be. (Zimmer)

This seamlessly relates to the protests. protesting requires a group effort and if not everyone is sharing the same goal then the protest is pointless and doomed to fail. I believe this was the reason the group before was unable to start robotics club. The physics teacher told me that the group who failed was not always on the same page. The good thing about the group I was a part of was that we were all very open to new ideas. We all did have different goals but he were able to work together to create one single goal of at least starting the program and getting underclassmen interested in order to keep the club running. The other part of our goal was funding and we were able to take care of that a well.

A connection between bees and the Occupy Wall Street movement seems unlikely. However, the connection in made in the teamwork and sharing of a goal. Walking into the room that day felt really great. We succeeded in something others had failed to do. We set up a self running system whose only resource is people. Robotics club is still going on today and our teachers are thankful that the club had even started.