(Posted Originally as a response in the League of Kick Ass Business People)
A couple days ago, I helped a local bee-keeper hive a swarm of honey bees that found its way to our land. Having been an assistant bee-keeper on the prairies for a short stint, I found that keeping bees in boxes was a very messy and limited yet amazing engagement.
This experience with bees attempting to go feral was different than working with bees hived in boxes for the purpose of crop pollination. The elegance of the molecular, tactile, and behavioural communication system of this swarming hive-mind as it sought a home drew forth a new awareness from my own clunker of a domesticated information processing system. This living ball of life was wild and outside of the human system (for a couple days anyways). This community of bees seemed so completely tuned with the function, rhythms and cycles of the day. They exhibited an elegance and grace that is hard to describe. Such is relationship of complexity and language. Only poetry, music, art and pure mathematics seem to do such natural systems justice.
Read the rest of this entry »
