15 Aug Bees and Messaging
Our master copywriter, Celeste, has a hobby that we think is fascinating (if not a little intimidating!) She is a bee keeper. Celeste sees cues for messaging perfection everywhere in her orbit. It was just a matter of time before bees and messaging crossed paths.
Happy National Honey Bee Day! (Aug 18th)
Tips from Messaging Masters
My bees and I have a deal worked out: I give them space in my yard and grow things they like, and they pollinate my fruits and give me honey.
Working and watching those marvelous, determined, busy creatures, I’ve observed qualities that translate to message-refinement best practices.
Bees are elegant, effective communicators.
A bee colony has an ultimate goal: reproduction—specifically, create more colonies. The goal requires them to make bees (tens of thousands of them), make honey, and protect those resources from thieves and marauders. To do this they have elaborate and highly effective ways to communicate.
For instance, when bees feel threatened, they release an alarm pheromone. (It smells just like bananas.) When they sting, they leave that pheromone along with the stinger, marking the sting-bearer as an enemy to be attacked and driven away.
A few years ago I had a hot hive (mean and overly aggressive). This hive lived up to Sylvia Plath’s quote about bees “I have simply ordered a box of Maniacs!” One day I took the cover off this hive and peered in. Thousands of pairs of eyes glared back at me. Thousands of bee tails went into the air, thousands of sets of wings fanned vigorously, and whoosh! a wave of banana scent broke on my nose. And then the bees were airborne, crashing into my veil, dive-bombing my bee suit, embroidering my gloves with their stingers.
That was some killer communicating: concise, persuasive, eagerly acted upon.
I got the message, too. I ran.
Here are some other bee-inspired message-refining strategies:
—Focus. Foraging bees fly straight to the nectar/pollen source (“make a beeline”). They only forage from a single type of flower on each trip.
In your messaging, stay focused on your goal. Don’t meander.
—Include beauty with function. Bees build combs of perfect hexagon-shaped cells, sloped slightly downward, the precise size for the intended function: smaller cells for worker brood, larger cells for drones and nectar, queen cups to make new queens. Highly functional, and gorgeous.
Your message has a purpose. Fulfill it. With style.
—Throw out what you don’t need. In the winter, colonies don’t need drones (male bees). So in the fall the worker bees evict them. They drive or drag them out of the hive, and when the drones try to go back in, the workers block them. The drones eventually wander off and die.
When you communicate, don’t luxuriate in your marvelous turns of phrase or your self-referencing. Do those words, paragraphs (slides, pictures) serve your purpose? If not, evict them. Be merciless.
—Learn to see. Sylvia Plath kept bees. J.K. Rowling draws. P. G. Wodehouse played golf. Einstein played violin. Flannery O’Connor kept chickens and peafowl, and painted. Do something (apart from your usual work) that forces you to pay attention.
“Any discipline can help your writing,” O’Connor wrote: “logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. . . . I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they’re any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things” (Mystery and Manners).
—Take flight. New bees work in the hive as nurse bees, and then house bees. They usually don’t begin foraging until they are 22 days old. But on warm, sunny afternoons the young bees leave their work and head outside to fly. They careen around the hive, and hover above it, each day in higher and wider circles. They’re called orientation flights, so the young bees get a sense of what the hive and things around it look like as they prepare to be foragers.
But they look like joy rides.
Every once in a while step away from your work, physically and mentally. Let your mind wander. The ideas will keep buzzing about the back of your brain, and you just might have creative insights that evaded your more direct focus.
If you ever need an assist on creative insights, its what we thrive on. So feel free to reach out.
Resources:
A great article on The Cut about the value of letting your mind meander.
On Bee Culture, all about how bees communicate.
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