We can all learn from the honey bees.

Worker bees--sisters--are like feeding machines. They not only feed each other, but feed the queen and their brothers, the drones.

It's a marvelous sight to see, nectar being passed from one bee to another.

Honey bee expert Norman Gary, emeritus professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, and a beekeeper for more than six decades, says it well in his newly published book: Honey Bee Hobbyist: The Care and Keeping of Bees.

Gary points out that "efficient communication is the fabric of social behavior. It enables the thousands of bees in a colony to function almost as one organism--sometimes referred to as a super- or supra-organism, in which individual bees are compared to the individual cells of an organism."

Food sharing inside a hive, he writes, is "dynamic and continuous."

"A hungry bee says, in her own special way, Can you spare some food? If the behavioral answer is yes, the donor bee spreads her mandibles and discharges a droplet of honey or nectar from her honey stomach onto her mouthparts."

The hungry bee, Gary relates, "senses the food, extends her strawlike proboscis, and sucks up the food."

It's share and share alike.

Too bad the human race doesn't operate as a super organism.