The Stalwart: Bumblebee Economics

As I mentioned before I went to Jamaica last week, one of my goals was to do some serious reading -- of books. I'm proud to say I accomplished my goal quite well, as I read all of the books on my list during the week I was there. Let me start off by saying that Moneyball was good, but I don't think the world needs another person writing about Moneyball, so I shan't. The best book I read, by far, was Bumblebee Economics. This book first crossed my radar several years ago, when it was mentioned in the book Bionomics, which argued that capitalism was rooted firmly in our biology. The funny thing is, I don't really remember too much about the specific points in Bionomics, though I do recall enjoying it quite thoroughly.

Bumblebee Economics wasn't really an economics book, so much as it was a biology book, though a title of Bumblebee Microeconomics would not have been in appropriate since it was really a study of bumblebees as if they were a global, multinational firm, with each hive as a franchise. The firm's product, of course, is more bumblebees, and the challenge is to make bees as efficiently as possible given available sugar and pollen

Ironically, in the introduction to Bumblebee Economics, the author, Bernd Heinrich, takes umbrage to the way Bionomics referenced his book, arguing that it's a bit absurd to draw human inferences from the behavior of bees (he rants a little bit and lets a bit of a socialistic bias slip, although this doesn't detract much from the book). I'd tend to agree that anyone looking to bees as a model for human behavior is being a bit foolish since, well, they're bees, and bees don't act like humans do. For one thing, their entire life is devoted to queen bees, and they seem to exhibit very little independent behavior.

Nonetheless, there were a number of interesting lessons in the book that felt bigger than just the study of bees. Bumblebees, for example, could be said to have lower margins than other insects, as their intake of energy doesn't lead to the propagation of the species with the same efficiency of other insects. In other words, they spend a lot of energy on things like building and heating the hive and foraging, energy that doesn't go to reproduction. But bumblebees have a good excuse, which is that they thrive in harsh environments, unlike many insects. They're sort of like companies that specialize in drilling in miserable Alberta oil sands. Naturally, they can't profit as cleanly as other oil companies, because drilling up their is so costly and difficult. But, they profit nonetheless, and until anyone else figures out a way to extract that oil better than they can, their difficulties aren't a problem.

The important lesson of this book is that energy is the ultimate regulating force, particularly to animals that can never build up a surplus of it (i.e. all animals that aren't humans). Thus, a species can be conceived as a firm that's grown to specialize in tapping certain energy reserves throughout nature. In the case of bumblebees, one could think of them as a hedge fund that specializes in micro-arbitrage opportunities -- available profits that are too small and costly for most firms to exploit.

It should be added that the real star of this book is the writing, as Bernd Heinrich does an excellent job of making complicated biology topics highly readable and enjoyable. Heinrich states at the outset that to him science is entertainment, with nature as a grand stage. If only more science writers were as deft at as he, more people might view science the same way.