Bee-location: Can Insect Infestation Lead to Good Consulting?Understanding deliverables is essential to a good consultant experienceRandy C. Hice
 Now, bees and I have some history |
Colorado’s mercurial weather gives way to a few interesting phenomena. One of those is that I have seen more hailstorms in Colorado than in all of the states I have ever lived combined. Hail can fall out of the sky with no warning, and in almost any season except winter. Auto body shops love the pummeling the cars take here, as it makes for a constant revenue stream.
Another distinct feature of Colorado, especially the Front Range area where I live, is the breathtaking number of rainbows. Not just faint smudges of color, but vivid spectral palettes that sit in the east as the fast-moving weather spills from the mountains to the west, and flows over my house, setting the stage for the backdrop of droplets that are illuminated by the clear sun once the foul weather blows over.
One such rainbow was lighting up the eastern sky when I strolled down my deck around the north side of the house. I didn’t usually go to that part of the deck, but I wanted to view the weather break over the mountains to see if the clearing was being chased by more bad stuff. I was looking past an overhang to the house, and I saw them — bees.
Bee movie
Now, bees and I have some history, you must understand. As a nine-year-old, I was walking down some steps in the back yard of a neighbor’s house that were nothing more than 6 X 6 timbers. Halfway down, my foot broke through what I thought was a rotted timber. Within moments, I was enveloped in a tornado of angry honeybees, who, after I likely stomped their beloved queen into a waxy paste, elected to rain hellfire on me. Now, Usain Bolt, the Jamaican photon who won the 100 and 200 meter dashes at the Olympics, would have had zero chance of catching me when I tore out of there. I was being stung by the tornado about once a second all the way to my bike. I mounted it on the run, and melted my rear tires as I targeted home, about 150 yards away.
My dear mother had uncanny composure in such crises … one of dozens that occurred over the years. As I flew into the house, the most persistent and vengeful of the tornado bees followed me in. Mom calmly pulled off my tee shirt, and grabbed a can of Raid. “Close your eyes and mouth” she said smoothly, and she soaked me in the foul toxin. With the immediate threat dispatched, she grabbed a flyswatter and casually assassinated the remaining bees in the living room. All in all, I had about 70 stings, and the fact that I did not suffer a collapse from anaphylactic shock was amazing in itself.
The second encounter was maybe two years later. I was sitting in the rear seat of the car on the right side. No A.C. in those days, at least not in
 To the right, a huge piece of the hive was thick with thousands upon thousands of bees. The consultant said, “The queen is probably down in there.” All of those cells are filled with bee larva for next year. |
my family’s cars, and so I was hanging one arm out the rear window and gripping the top of the door frame. I saw a blurry cloud about 100 yards off the starboard bow, and thought it was a dust devil. We were going about 60, as I recall, when we hit it or, rather, them. Yes, you can see where this is going. Evidently, word had trickled through the bee underground that my mom had taken out hundreds of their brethren a few years earlier, and they waited in ambush along a country road on the way to my dad’s hometown of Plainwell. They sacrificed themselves mightily as we hit the cloud…a kind of bee Katrina for them. But some, funneled by the eddies of air caused by my arm outside the window, were jetted into the car at high speed. Soon, I was beating them with my bare hands, as my dad, his windshield coated with a thick gel of smashed bee carcasses, slammed the brakes to halt the car before a telephone pole did it for us.
So, back in the present day… I was looking at a small, but distinctive cloud of honeybees who had set up shop in an overhanging part of the roof some 25 feet above the ground. Could some of the Michigan bees have followed me through my moves to Georgia, Florida and now Colorado? Nah, couldn’t bee — ah — be.
My first instinct was to grab the can of 25-foot hornet killer and let them have it. After all, with bees, I’m Wyatt Earp and they’re the Clantons, and this is war. I was rummaging around underneath the sink in the laundry room where our weapons of mass destruction are kept, and found the can. My wife happened to be on the phone as I purposefully strode through the kitchen. She covered the mouthpiece.
“What are you doing?”
“Payback”, was all I said.
“Huh?”
“Bees.”
“Wait a minute, Bruce.” She covered the phone.
She turned back to me. “What now?”
“Honeybees have invaded the house, and I’m going to serve a toxic eviction notice.”
She got on the phone. She was listening to Bruce, and she put up her hand. “Bruce asked if you know for sure they’re honeybees.”
“I know my bees, and I know this species very well. They’re honeybees.”
She listened a bit more. “Bruce says you can’t spray them.”
“Watch me.”
“No, he says there’s a hive up there, and you can’t wipe out the bees because all the honey will attract other insects and various other pests.”
“Oh, that’s just great.”
I snapped open a Heineken and began to peruse the Internet. I needed a consultant — a bee consultant. There’s only one bee consultancy in the Denver area, Schultz Honey and Wax. Within minutes, I had them on the phone.
“Mr. Hice, you can’t kill those bees. You haven’t sprayed them yet, have you?”
“No, why?”
“Because, if they’re honeybees, you have a lot more bees than you think. They only move in during the spring. So, if that’s the case, you may have more than 15,000 bees in there.”
My BS meter was going off like a claxon. “What do you mean, ‘if they’re bees’?”
“I want you to go to our Web site and look at our identification page. There you will see how to tell the difference between honeybees, hornets and wasps.”
“I know the difference.”
“Still, we don’t want to come all the way down there to remove bees, and find out they’re not honeybees.”
“They’re honeybees.”
“I still would like you to go to our Web site.”
“Listen, I have been stung by hundreds of bees. I can see the bees hanging low with pollen on their legs heading up to the hive. I have killed a good many yellow jackets and wasps. These are honeybees, and I don’t need to go to the damned Web page.”
“Okay. Well, we will have to get a team out there to remove them. If you spray them, you may kill a few on the outside, but you’ll never kill them all. If you don’t remove them, they will build a bigger hive next year.”
Fearing I was being ‘sold,’ I asked, “How much?”
“It will take our crew the better part of the day. It will cost $1000.”
“You’re joking? Long-distance Raid is seven bucks.”
“I said you can’t spray them.”
“What happens if you get up there and you find the hive is more like eight inches square?”
“It won’t be. We have been doing this for years. If they moved in during the spring, and that’s likely, you will have at least 15,000 bees, maybe more, up there. We’ll take digital photos for you to prove it.”
Yeah, well, I Photoshopped my son’s picture into a donkey, so it is trivial to clone a few bees into a menacing swarm. Nonetheless, they showed a few days later. On went the radiation suits and bonnets, and up the ladders they went. Soon, they’d torn off a five by eight foot section of my roof, and down came the boss to chat.
“Well, you have between 20,000 and 25,000 bees up there.”
“No way.”
“We have photos.”
“Give me your suit.”
“Sure, see for yourself.”
Properly protected, I clawed my way up the ladder with one hand, protecting my recently surgically-repaired shoulder. With my own digital camera in hand, I made it to the top of the ladder. I looked into a frenetic mass of bees. To the right, a huge piece of the hive was thick with thousands upon thousands of bees. The consultant said, “The queen is probably down in there.” All of those cells are filled with bee larva for next year. To the left, a huge section of the hive, about a foot away from the residences, was devoid of bees, and glistened golden in the sun.
“That’s the honeycomb. We’ll package it for you after we remove the bees. It’ll be the best honey you ever tasted.”
For a grand, it better be.
Soon, I was down at the bottom and the consultant had re-suited. He used a strange bee vacuum of some sort. The bees were sucked from the hive, gently down a tube along the ladder, and into a canister. Only a few were smashed. The rest were quickly relocated to a temporary hive with their queen, to be driven north of town and put to work as commercial honey producers. Good for the honey company, good for the bees, good for the Hices.
So, the Bee Consultants were trustworthy and very knowledgeable. But how do you know if the consultants you’re considering, or using, are the same?
A recent case study
Last year, I was asked to propose some services for a large pharmaceutical company. They had decided on a LIMS, and wanted a quote for validation and a few other services. We quickly examined the available project information, and determined they were in dire need of workflow analysis, as this project involved U.S. and European facilities.
“We have done workflow analysis, and we have harmonized the workflows,” they said proudly. They proceeded to provide us with the “workflow analysis and harmonization” documents. The entire testing organization was represented on a single page of paper — the same for the entire stability organization.
We proposed that about 75 percent of the work involved re-working the “workflow diagrams” and then truly harmonizing the environments. Our presentation keyed on these points. After carefully detailing how we would expand their workflows to the proper level of detail, and what “harmonization” really meant, they repeated. “Well, we don’t really need that because the previous consulting company already did workflow analysis and harmonized them.”
No they didn’t, and the work we saw was, frankly, a rip-off. We basically could use nothing at all from the previous consultant’s work, and we estimated the customer likely spent upwards of $50,000 on “workflow analysis and harmonization” that was utterly useless, or will prove to be.
So, how would you know? If the proposing company had good sales collateral, and a few handpicked references, they might have sounded good on paper. In this sad case, they probably did sound good on paper and, even worse, the customer thought the deliverable was actually pretty good work.
But, as a professional in this business, I know all too well that shoddy work might never actually be noticed. It’s not like you asked for a lawn to be mowed, and the mowers gouged huge furrows in the lawn, scalped it down to bare earth, and then bolted. These deliverables likely had no expectations attached to them, since the subject matter was somewhat arcane, and likely only other consultants could interpret them. Maybe somewhere down the line, when the developers came in the customer said, “Well, you can just remove these line items from your Statement of Work regarding design because it’s all right here!” At this point, the developers become the bad guys and either set the customer straight, or simply nod their heads and do it their own way.
One more example
Here’s another one for you… A large company on the west coast had developed some internal workflows covering maybe a half dozen labs. They went to their LIMS vendor and asked if they knew of anyone who could come in and help with further “workflow analysis.” Our name came to mind, but the problems started when the customer wanted only one person-week of work to do a complete workflow analysis. The vendor agreed to book one person-week with us, and I decided to do it myself. But, when I assessed the situation, I quickly figured that it wasn’t one week of activity for one person. Rather, it was likely three weeks of work for two people, or six person-weeks…fine longer than the customer wanted to pay for.
Internally, we talk about fixed price or de facto fixed price projects as “taxi rides.” If you go to a city, and ask to be taken to a destination, off you go, and the meter is running. It costs what it costs. Now imagine arriving at, say, O’Hare airport in Chicago and saying to the taxi driver, “I want to go to the Sears Tower, but I have only $15 to spend.” Well, the cab driver will take off, and about at the Eden’s Expressway, stop the car, and say, okay, we’ve burned $15, do you want to get out here, or pay another $30 to get downtown?” Sounds silly, right? Yet it happens all the time.
Here’s the problem
People are expecting more and more activities for what they perceive to be a fair price, yet they don’t understand the deliverable, so, not wanting to walk from the business, consultants will tailor the deliverable to the budget. No consultant (who is not taking psychoactive medication) would promise a six lab workflow analysis for one week’s pay. Yet, they might deliver a high-level blow-by for that money…in other words, the cab stops at the Eden Expressway.
Now, I could have called BS on my bee consultant. I could have said, “Look, I don’t want to be in the bee relocation business, just go up there, nuke them, and get out.”
And, about springtime, I either would have had a pesticide-resistant swarm of super bees with a bad attitude, or I might have had a clutch of fat rats, dining on pure honey. In this case, I did my research, the bees are happy, I’m happy, and I’m using “the best honey I ever tasted” on my cereal.
Randy Hice is the president of the Laboratory Expertise Center. He may be reached at editor@ScientificComputing.com.