向蜜蜂学管理智慧

    “如果你缩短了蜜蜂的寿命，只缩短几天，年轻的蜜蜂不得不提前去野外，那么整个事情就会陷入混乱，”戴夫•哈肯伯格告诉我。他经营着一家产业化的授粉服务公司，公司的业务很有趣：哈肯伯格养了很多蜜蜂，并将蜂巢出租给庄稼需要授粉的农民。对于农作物来说，没有什么比蜜蜂授粉更好的了。但事情并不这么简单。问题是那些作物带有农药，而农药会缩短蜜蜂的寿命，只是几天，但整个事情就被搞砸了。真的搞砸了。当发生这种情况时，整个蜂巢都会崩溃。最近这种事频发，而且有了正式的名称和缩写：蜂群衰竭失调症（Colony Collapse Disorder，简称CCD）。

    结果是，这种因其组织和勤劳而令我钦佩不已的昆虫，正在被我们的产业化过程杀死，具有讽刺意味的是，日益稀缺的蜂巢使得针对产业化作物授粉的蜂巢出租也变得水涨船高。从中我们也许可以得到一些教训，过度复杂可能会加速组织的覆灭，或是，我们用来保护自己的手段反而可能贻害最甚，或者仅仅是万事万物都是相互联系的。到底是什么，还是让蜜蜂来评判吧。

    "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.