What is ‘Apis’?
The scientific name for the European honey bee, Apis mellifera, comes from two sources. Apis is the Latin word for “bee” and mellifera is Greek for “honey-bearing.” The name for our business wasn’t chosen for any other reason except Jae has a slight obsession with honey bees. However, there are some great connections between our work and the lives of these amazing insects.
For example, as Erika Thompson of Texas Bee Works explains in one of her TikTok posts that a colony of bees is not a monarchy, led and ruled by the queen bee, as many people think. Instead, the female worker bees are the collective leaders and make decisions for the colony as a group. The queen bee’s only job is to lay eggs to create more worker bees. If she does her job well, the colony will follow her and protect her. If she does not do this well, gets too old or dies, the worker bees can replace her by feeding a developing female worker bee a diet of royal jelly. Doing this means the colony goes on and on for generations, benefitting the good of whole colony. There are some great metaphors in this simple story.
Each of us has an important role to play in life, including our life at work. While human life is more complex than the life of a bee, we all have the capacity to find our purpose and perform at our best.
As in a beehive, we generally have to play our roles and do our work in cooperation with others, both as a part of a team and within an organisation as a whole. In more progressive organisations, leadership is changing, moving away from a clear directive style to one that embraces collaboration, coaching, inclusion and support.
We support individuals, teams and organisations in the quest to find purpose, meaning and harmony at work.