Despite having brains that weigh less than a paperclip, bees seem to understand Economics 101. A single worker, beating its wings hundreds of times per second, can visit thousands of flowers per day to gather scarce resources of pollen and nectar for conversion into a valuable output — honey.
In this way, bees not only maintain their kind but create a surplus of honey that, in 2023, generated almost $9 billion of value for the global economy. That’s not even counting the spillover benefits bees create by pollinating crops.
Such success merits a case study, one in which democratic socialists, such as New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, might learn a lesson about economic efficiency.
At the 2021 Young Democratic Socialists of America (virtual) Winter Conference, Mamdani told viewers that “it is socialism that we are fighting for…for every single person in this country and in this world.” That’s the socialist side of Mamdani. The democratic side comes in the presentation. He states with friendly winsomeness ideas that could have come from the mouth of Lenin or Marx (this is the same conference at which Mamdani spoke of “the end goal of seizing the means of production”). A smile never seems far from his face.
At times, the conference segment felt like a Bolshevik tent revival. One speaker called the audience “comrades” unironically. Discussion painted the human race in black and white, good and evil. Movements opposing boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning in the name of Palestine, for instance, were casually labeled “horrific” by Mamdani himself.
Among such dyed-in-the-neurons believers, textbook arguments for the capitalist system are unlikely to gain a fair hearing. A lesson from bees is worth a shot.
Unfortunately, the first lesson a socialist might take is one of collectivism. Individual workers own no honey, after all. It is a communal resource controlled by the hive’s governing hierarchy. But this insight is as banal as it is obvious. One might as well argue that bees demonstrate we should live under a matriarchal monarchy.
Looking closer at bee behavior reveals a more profound lesson.
Like on human farms, the workday starts early. When the weather is good, workers leave the hive around sunrise, fanning out for miles to forage for nectar and pollen. Individual bees not only possess a good memory for where they find it, but when they return to the hive, they dance, drawing the attention of other workers.
The “round dance” follows a simple, circular pattern to communicate the location of nearby food sources. The “waggle dance,” on the other hand, is more complex, done in a figure-eight pattern combined with a straight “waggle run.” Through multiple circuits, first in one direction, then the other, the dancing, waggling worker demonstrates how to find a far-off food source it has discovered. And the bigger the source, the more frenetic the dance.
It’s a little like in 1984 when Walmart achieved eight-percent pre-tax profit and the 65-year-old founder Sam Walton did the Hula on Wall Street, wearing a grass skirt and multiple leis, to make good on a wager with employees. The ratio of his business skills to dancing skills turned out to be remarkably large. At any rate, the bees’ dances are something more serious, honey being a matter of life and death for their hive.
The economic lesson is this. Because their survival depends on honey, bees know how to produce it efficiently. Information about how to find the inputs (nectar and pollen), for example, is processed at the level of individuals. The queen, being tended by underlings while killing off rivals, knows she has no business telling workers how to do their jobs. They are the entrepreneurs of the hive. They risk predators as they seek out fertile gathering grounds. Back at the hive, their dances compete for the attention of other bees, and operate like price signals in a market economy, directing investment of capital and effort (worker bees) into more profitable areas while discouraging it from less profitable areas.
In this way, the allocative order of a bee economy emerges dynamically from bottom-up agency rather than top-down planning. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith detailed a similar emergent order in human economies which operate on the principles of free markets and individual initiative. And three centuries of economic history since then have validated that these economies create the greatest collective wealth.
But unlike bees, humans face the possibility of this wealth-creating and freedom-promoting system being hijacked and thrown out by collectivist politicians. Their speeches, like Mamdani’s at the Young Socialists conference, are more about leveraging grievances than spreading understanding. Voiced with a scowl or a smile, they are equally dangerous to anyone who loves individual freedom.