Bees are like what?

In looking at beehives and the lessons that Seeley argues are translatable to our own groups, one thing that is significant is that the techniques really only work in small, tight-knit communities or groups of people. The two examples that Seeley kept coming back to was a certain town hall meeting and his own faculty meetings. The different suggestions don't seem to be translatable on a larger level. Even evolutionarily looking at the way human communicate is based in small groups- much like packs of wolves- humans were originally nomadic hunter-gatherers who didn't have to deal with other groups of people. Part of the reason communication works in small groups so well and people are much more able to achieve a consensus is because the people all have shared experiences and history together. These faculty, and even more so the bees, have been working together for a long time. The bee's whole world revolves around the hive, unlike the US as a country.

Indeed, many of the studies that we have looked at through reading for class are experiments comprised of groups that take random people who have never met before and then place them into a group to study group dynamics. While this approach is much clearer/ simpler to look at, it does not replicate groups of people who know each other really well and already trust or mistrust those that they are working with. It is very hard to achieve this model of intimacy with something like the US government because people do not inherently feel directly connected to everyone else regardless of the small world phenomenon. People need/want to feel heard, and while we have methods for people to come closer to feeling connected whether through those mass phone calls, canvassing, or local speeches, this does not come close to replicating the kinds of dynamics found in small communities of people making decisions that directly and immediately affect their own daily lives, much like the honey bees. We also tend to forget that people are not necessarily making choices and having beliefs founded in rational, logical thought. The bees seems to be able to advertise for new hive sites based on objective principles such as windiness, dryness, volume, and location, but people frequently make decisions on highly subjective issues. Unfortunately the world as it is today is not so simple or insulated as a hive, and though we are getting better and better at connecting people especially through technology, with the addition of more people, issues and decisions tend to get more difficult and convoluted.