向蜜蜂學管理智慧

????“如果你縮短了蜜蜂的壽命，只縮短幾天，年輕的蜜蜂不得不提前去野外，那么整個事情就會陷入混亂，”戴夫?哈肯伯格告訴我。他經營著一家產業化的授粉服務公司，公司的業務很有趣：哈肯伯格養了很多蜜蜂，并將蜂巢出租給莊稼需要授粉的農民。對于農作物來說，沒有什么比蜜蜂授粉更好的了。但事情并不這么簡單。問題是那些作物帶有農藥，而農藥會縮短蜜蜂的壽命，只是幾天，但整個事情就被搞砸了。真的搞砸了。當發生這種情況時，整個蜂巢都會崩潰。最近這種事頻發，而且有了正式的名稱和縮寫：蜂群衰竭失調癥（Colony Collapse Disorder，簡稱CCD）。

????結果是，這種因其組織和勤勞而令我欽佩不已的昆蟲，正在被我們的產業化過程殺死，具有諷刺意味的是，日益稀缺的蜂巢使得針對產業化作物授粉的蜂巢出租也變得水漲船高。從中我們也許可以得到一些教訓，過度復雜可能會加速組織的覆滅，或是，我們用來保護自己的手段反而可能貽害最甚，或者僅僅是萬事萬物都是相互聯系的。到底是什么，還是讓蜜蜂來評判吧。

????"If you start shortening lives of bees, just by a few days, young bees have to go to the field earlier, and the whole thing gets messed up," Dave Hackenburg tells me. Hackenburg runs an industrial pollination services company, which is a fancy way of saying that he keeps a whole lot of bees and rents hives to farmers who need their crops pollinated. There's nothing better at pollinating crops than bees. It's not even close. The problem is that those crops have pesticides, and the pesticides shorten the bees lifespan, just by a few days, and the whole thing gets messed up. Really messed up. When this happens, a hive collapses. And it's been happening so much lately that it's become an official disorder, with an acronym and everything: Colony Collapse Disorder, CCD.

????So the insect we so admire for its organization and industry is getting killed by our own industrial processes, which, ironically, makes renting these increasingly scarce beehives for industrial crop pollination all the more expensive. There's a business lesson in there, probably, about how over-complication can hasten the fall of the organization, or how the things we put in place to protect us might do the most harm, or simply the interconnectedness of all things. But I'm going to leave it bee.