From The Founders
We get asked a lot why we're so obsessed with thermodynamics.
Here's the short answer: because bees are.
A honey bee's brain is the size of a sesame seed; 960,000 neurons compared to our 86 billion. And yet they've solved engineering problems that still puzzle researchers. Navigation by sun, landmarks, and magnetic field. A communication system second only to human language. Collective decision-making that outperforms corporate boards.
All of it running on an energy budget so tight that a single foraging trip has to return more calories than it costs.
We wrote a deep dive on the biology-thermodynamics connection - what 25 million years of evolution optimized, and what 170 years of hive design ignored.
— The Primal Bee Team
The superorganism in your backyard
Honey bees have been perfecting something extraordinary for 25 million years.
Inside every colony, tens of thousands of individuals coordinate without a central controller to maintain "tropical conditions" in their nest—holding brood temperature within a two-degree window regardless of whether it's freezing or scorching outside.
They're not cold-blooded.
They're not warm-blooded.
They're something scientists call heterotherms: creatures that switch between strategies depending on need. A single bee outside the hive is vulnerable. But the colony? It functions like a warm-blooded organism, or, in fancier terms: a superorganism.
The precision is staggering.
New research from the University of Montana found that bees even maintain different temperatures for each developmental stage accurate to a tenth of a degree.
How? Specialized nurse bees contract their flight muscles to generate 42-47°C body heat, then move cell by cell through the brood nest, warming specific eggs and larvae.
The queen leaves empty cells strategically. These “heater bees” use them as heating stations.
This costs about half the colony's annual energy budget, which can be a huge problem if the housing is costing the bees energy, too.
A 2024 study we’ve cited a lot (for good reason) monitored 31 hives across three countries with over 1,000 temperature sensors found that thermal stability predicted colony survival with 96.8% accuracy.
TL;DR: Temperature matters almost more than anything else when it comes to colony survival.
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Until Next Time
The biology-thermodynamics connection isn't complicated. Bees evolved in thick-walled tree cavities. They developed extraordinary thermoregulation systems because temperature means life or death. When housing works with that biology, colonies redirect energy from survival toward growth.
That's the upward spiral. That's what we're building toward.
Stay warm out there,
The Primal Bee Team