This morning the Secretary General’s team undertook a team-building activity which was great fun, for we began our day in the garden of the La Hulpe home of our colleague, Zoltan Krasznai, who is a bee keeper. Once again, as the photo shows (that’s me on the right, Zoltan on the left) I got up and personal with some bees. In fact, we all did, for Zoltan demonstrated to us how to divide and separate off a colony and how to harvest honey. As he worked, slowly, methodically, meticulously, he taught us about the bees and their behaviour. We looked at a queen and saw the difference between the male and female bees and the normal honeycombs and those for princesses. Zoltan has five hives in his apiary, which is relatively small but, as the sun rose in the sky so the bees became ever more active and impressively noisy. However, for as long as we stayed out of their direct flypaths to and from the hives, they left us alone. Zoltan loaned me a book about bees that I have eagerly started. A bee colony can be regarded as being almost a living organism in its own right, like a coral reef or a sponge, despite being made up of thousands of individuals. Perhaps the most interesting fact I learnt was that until the late eighteenth century the colonies were destroyed when the honey was harvested. It was only with the invention of the moveable comb hive that the colonies could be preserved and that led rapidly on, in the nineteenth century, to the development of breeding programmes and the commercialisation of honey production. To state the obvious, what we were witnessing was one of the most efficient teams in the natural world at work. Great fun – and educational (as this Harvard Business Review article shows)!