Honeybee beekeeper, executive coach and leadership team expert, Philip Atkinson, studies the busy bee hive and the bees responsibilities. He suggests that understanding honeybee behavior can improve our own interactions with one another. Embrace the wisdom of honeybees—“Bee Wise”. Proceeds from the book go to, beesfordevelopment.org.

Everything we do in life and at work is improved by

partnering with other good people.

Who's buzzing on this episode?

Well, I have the pleasure of featuring Philip Atkinson, a

beekeeper from Alsace France.

He has a deep passion for living alongside honeybees and gaining insights from them.

Philip observes and has come to understand the very intricate working relationships

among the bees and taking that knowledge

he founded his company, hive Logic.

That is awesome.

Absolute awesome name for your company, Philip.

So, with this knowledge, he has become a successful communications coach and

leadership team expert for his company.

And while he has captivated.

Actually mesmerized me really with his book Bee Wise,

so this is a fabulous name, fabulous book, fabulous guest, and I'm so thrilled

to welcome Philip Atkinson to the show.

Philip, it's so great to have you here.

Welcome to your positive imprint,

Catherine, what a lovely introduction and it's

lovely to connect and to be here.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

There's,, so much about you that I have been reading that's just

incredible you're in two places, Alsace for your bees and then Switzerland.

But first of all, let's back up and just welcome you again and talk about how you

got into honeybees and what life is like for you growing up and entering this

world of honeybees and your background.

Great, Catherine, thank you.

And I, but actually as and, and as we're sitting here, I'm seeing your

lovely logo and I kind of want to reach out and touch it and make, you know,

I know it's about positive imprint and I just wanna say I'm seeing it in

the welcome and I just want to reach out and, , we are going to share about

positive imprints today, so thank you.

Well, guess what your positive imprint is in that.

It's part of that logo.

It's, yes, it's.

I gonna tell you a little bit story about what I love about beekeeping and honey

and bees is everybody has a bee story or honey story or something to do with

family or childhood or nature or wonder.

I, I, I'm English, , I live in France and I work in Switzerland.

So there's a quick European tour for you.

Um, in England, my great uncle was a beekeeper and I was a tiny kid, but it

was just, it was always a great mystery.

He would disappear and come back with, with boxes of

honey and then jars of honey.

And then I would get on my bike and deliver jars of honey back home to my mom.

And, and I had a kind of a mystery about it, but I didn't get the chance

to learn from him, unfortunately.

And then fast forward, probably 25, 30 years.

, I live in the countryside in France and I was out walking my dog one day, and in

the forest I found a little wood cabin.

And that wood cabin had a sign above the door and it said Bee Club.

In French

and there was a small door with people coming and going, and there was a

real buzz inside and it smelt amazing.

It smelt of honey and wax in the summer.

And I said, I'd like to join you.

I found my tribe and, and I joined.

I enrolled and the following Monday I started at Bee Club.

It was great.

And then, then you took out my work.

There's a, a work twist actually.

I started beekeeping as a antidote to work.

It was something completely different to work.

It was a, it was my home, home hobby and my work work was organizational

design and teams and coaching.

, They were meant to be two separate things.

And of course, of course it hit me that the busy, complex buzzy workings

of a hive that involves communication and teamwork and decision making.

Of course that's very similar to working in a large, complex organization.

And that's when this metaphor came to life for me at work.

And I started using beekeeping stories to help open up difficult

conversations or projects at work, and it has carried on from there.

That is so inspiring.

I absolutely love that.

And, and you are so right.

We have, everybody has a story to tell whether it was a sentimental story mine.

Mm-hmm.

Just I'll share with you, since you brought that up.

Mine actually started as a wee little girl and my dad would tell stories.

He made up his own stories and he made up a story about Jerry the Bear.

Mm-hmm.

And told stories every night before bedtime for years about Jerry, . His

first encounter in life away from his mother were honeybees.

And that's what got him into trouble were the honeybees because he followed the bee.

'cause he knew the bees had honey and then lost his way where his mother

was and ended up exploring the world without mom , so bees and, and Jerry

the bear certainly are sentimental.

Well, I want to read this part to you, , from your book

" If you are interested in bees, I hope you are curious to learn more.

If you are curious about the world of work and your role as a leader

and as role model in society

I hope this book gives you some prompts for further thinking, self-reflection

and action or behavior change.

"And I love that, this is for everybody.

And the cover of your book where you have the bee and the

12 different, , leadership.

Uh, yes, I can see the visual 12 leadership lessons

from a busy beehive, and there are 12 chapters and 12 topics.

Communications, communications, creativity, productivity,

continuous learning, and then we carry on around including change

in diversity and, and purpose.

you've taken what you have observed in your research as a beekeeper

and learning about these bees and learning about their working relationships.

And of course they don't all get along, but in order to make it work,

they have to each do their job.

Bees have seven different jobs and only fly for the last few days of their life.

Yep.

Yep.

Catherine, thank you.

So that's, that's true.

So in the summer.

Hardworking female worker bees, they have a lifespan of only about 34, 35 days.

Yeah.

And when you see them flying and foraging and landing on flowers and looking

for pollen and looking for attractive blossom, that's the last job they do.

And it's only for three or four days, and that's the end of their life.

And before then from birth, they specialize in these six preceding jobs.

And it's absolutely fascinating.

When the bee is first born where first hatches out of the egg and out, out the

larvae,, when it's first born, it's fully formed and ready to work immediately.

And it's trained to be a nurse bee And it's trained by the bees that are only a

few days older who've just done this job.

And a nurse bee means actually going over all the larvae and feeding

them and making sure they're okay.

And it's a really specific job.

And that's what they're trained to do.

After three or four days, they stop.

They then spend time training the new hatchlings to do exactly

that job, just as they did.

And then they are trained in turn to become builders and they build

those beautiful hexagonal cells.

That's a completely different job with a different set of skills,

but they do it to 150% of their ability for three or four days.

And then they train the previous bees.

And then they are trained to be nurses and to be nurses they look after the sick

and they look after the bees and they do a different job and they look after the

queen, and then that carries on and then they go into a job, uh, about security.

So they, they get towards the front door, but they don't fly yet.

So they go to the front door to be security bees and, and

to guard against invaders.

And then they become temperature regulators and they, they flap their wings

to keep the air moving in a, in a cycle to keep the humidity and the temperature.

And then they're at the front of the door welcoming the foragers back, and

then they prepare to do the job that we see, which is flying for the first time.

And it's, it's a fascinating model.

What it means is for bee survival, if the beehive has an accident, say a bear.

Say, Jerry, the Bear knocks the beehive over and all the bees need to immediately

turn their attention to building.

All the bees know how to build, and they can all stop what they're doing

and build the hive, because that's why important, um, the lesson for

working life here in the chapter.

We go in more depth.

, But look, we are not bees and we're not like bees, but, but it, it provokes a

discussion around skills and it says, do the job you're doing really well.

Throw yourself into it wholeheartedly.

And then when you've mastered it, help to train other people.

That's the first thing you be a mentor, be a teacher, be a guardian.

You know, help, help people and then keep gaining different skills.

So, you know, in today's workplace with AI for example, you know, we don't

know what the future is, but we can keep gaining valuable skills and don't

get stuck in one job for too long.

Keep moving, keep learning, keep changing.

And if you like something, do more of it.

If you don't like something, move on.

Or if you, if you want to go deeper in something, go deeper in something.

But the lesson is in your career.

Keep being valuable by keep gaining skills.

And it's a fascinating discussion that we have in that chapter

your Bee Wise book is a tremendously brilliant way

to, , bring the force of nature right, of humans together I love it.

I love it.

You love spending the summertime there observing and being in your

peace and quiet with your bees and then you found that you, wow, the

bees can teach the world something.

And so you founded Hive Logic.

Thank you.

I just wanna, let's just go a bit deeper for a minute.

My, my company's called Hive Logic Hive, as in a beehive hive logic.

It has a ring to it, but we're involved in communication and

coaching and leadership and change.

And I actually just want to call out, I name the company Hive Logic because

most of my clients are scientists in big life science companies.

They think they're rational, they think they're logical.

And as soon as I started working on projects, I realized these topics

have nothing to do with logic.

They're everything to do with emotion.

And you know, like the bees in a hive we are complex organizations.

We as humans, when we come together, we bring in biases and beliefs and

backgrounds and behaviors and emotion.

So probably a better name for the company would be Hive Emotion, but

it doesn't have the same ring to it and the company was launched.

But I just want to acknowledge the work we do.

And part of our positive imprint on the world is helping people stop and pause

and, and think and just feel and notice a little bit more what is happening.

And that's as leaders, as parents, as, as society volunteers,

as brothers, as sisters.

We all just need, I think in this world of all this change we actually need stop

and pause and think a little bit harder and feel a bit harder and notice a little

bit harder what is happening in our lives , and then we can work more effectively with

a system, with a group of people just by understanding things a little bit better.

There's a B story that then comes with this.

Chapter eight in the book, and it's called Don't Get Stung.

Yes.

And just take a moment.

'cause it, it supports what we've been saying as a beekeeper on a hot summer,

summer's day, you know, like Jerry the Bear, you can approach a beehive

and as a beekeeper you put your gloves on and you have your tool in hand

and you have your hat on, and before you take the lid off, my lesson as a

beekeeper is to slow down and to pause.

And the first thing is.

You can smell if the bees are stressed or not if the bees are happy to make honey

and you can smell honey coming out the front door, it might be a lovely blue sky.

It might be a beautiful day, but there might be a storm

coming later that evening.

Look, as humans, we can't see, but the bees can sense the atmospheric

pressure change and the bees get, get stressed and they stop making

honey and they make propolis.

And propolis is a be a sticky, bee glue that secures the inside of the hive.

And before you, before you've taken the lid off and put your hand in the

hive, if you just pause and smell the hive, you can smell the propolis

and you know they're stressed.

So don't take the lid off.

Now at work.

I'm not saying smell your colleagues, but just pause and notice.

And then, and then there's another thing you can actually hear if

they are stressed, if they're happy, they make a lovely note.

It's like a B flat.

If they're stressed, it goes up almost an octave.

And you can immediately just hear they're stressed and, and

you can see they're agitated.

If they move at the front door, you can see they're agitated.

, And the lesson is, let's use all of our sensors and just take a little bit

of time to notice what is happening.

And then I play with this, if your boss is stressed, that's not the

right time to ask him for a pay rise.

Yeah.

You know, just, or if you know, if, if, if you're working in organizations

or if, if you're working as a group of volunteers, just notice what the mood

is because accordingly, that gives you a clue of how to behave and how to interact

and how to make a positive change.

So just stop and pause and think.

Before the lid off the hive and putting your hands in.

That's, that's a fun chapter.

I wrote this quote down, but I didn't write which chapter it came

from, it's more of a risk not to evolve.

Well, first of all, I mean, the whole model of evolution

is that the external environment changes and we need to adapt to, to

match ourselves to the environment.

And that's the stimulus for evolution.

And look at the world today, you know, with technology, with AI,

with the internet, with everything else, with politics, the world,

the world is changing fast and actually many good things as well.

You know, in terms of, , elements of diversity and equality and, and,

and what free, , what is happening.

And therefore, as not just as leaders, but as parents, as volunteers, as community

members, as as role models, we actually need to keep involving ourselves.

And that means gaining more skills, or it means letting go of some of our old

patterns of behavior and our old beliefs.

, I've got four kids and they keep me young, and their view of the

world is very different to my view of the world when I was growing up.

And it's for, it's for me to adapt to understand their perspective and under

understand their fears and concerns and their hopes and their excitement.

It's different to my own experience of being a teenager.

You know, I need to, I need to evolve.

, It's my responsibility to evolve just 'cause I'm the parent does

not, absolutely not mean I'm right.

I need to evolve the system today.

And that's, that's the exciting work and that's the important work and that's

part of the positive imprint that I wanna help encourage in the world.

Join me next time for part two with Philip Atkinson.

To learn more about Philip Atkinson, go to Hive-logic.com and

his project at, beewisebook.com.

That's B-E-E-W-I-S-E-B-O-O k.com.

Again, all proceeds go to the Charity Bees for development.

You can , check out beesfordevelopment.org.

Bees for Development works to promote sustainable beekeeping,

to combat poverty, build resilient livelihoods, and benefit biodiversity.

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