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UnDisciplined: What bees can teach us about trust and collaboration

When you think about a beehive, you probably imagine the queen as the leader. But that's not actually how it works. The decisions that impact the hive are determined through the collaborative thinking of the entirety of its population.
Daniel Milchev
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Beehives in an apiary

When you think about a beehive, you probably imagine the queen as the leader. But that's not actually how it works. The decisions that impact the hive are determined through the collaborative thinking of the entirety of its population. And so bees might have a few things to teach us about how to make informed collective decisions.

Ang Roell is a founder of They Keep Bees, and the author of Radicalize the Hive, a collection of stories from beekeepers across the nation — a resource for new and intermediate beekeepers and a manifesto for organizational change.

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Matthew LaPlante has reported on ritual infanticide in Northern Africa, insurgent warfare in the Middle East, the legacy of genocide in Southeast Asia, and gang violence in Central America. But a few years back, something occurred to him: Maybe the news doesn't have to be so brutally depressing all the time. These days, he balances his continuing work on more heartbreaking subjects with his work on UnDisciplined — Utah Public Radio's weekly program on science and discovery.