Alarm clock beeps and we awake
Shower, dress and coffee take.
By bus or train or maybe drive,
The worker bees attend the Hive.

We swear allegiance at the gate
By swiping cards with face and date.
The Hive accepts and lets us in,
The working day can now begin.

We settle on our usual flower
Evenly spaced throughout the tower.
Collecting pollen is the task
The Queen of worker bees does ask.

But digital collection now does mean
The flower itself is rarely seen.
Cocooned inside our comfy Hive
The world outside can be denied.

A button press, the screen awakes
By which our Queen communicates.
With mousey clicks and chairy squeaks,
This is the way to us she speaks.

Beemail, buzzphones, meeting cells;
The honey from our Hive excels
But honey-making is so tough,
Those other hives keep playing rough.

The Queen bee tells us we must change
And, even though this seems quite strange,
She says to us she has a plan
To split the Hive throughout the land.

“A strategy is what we need,”
And to her buzzing all pay heed.
“A different one from what we had.
The worker bees have been so bad.”

The Queen herself is far too busy,
Buzzing around, she makes us dizzy.
Her generals gather us in groups
And pass her message to the troops.

“We need less workers”, they will say,
“Or get less honey if allowed to stay.”
The buzzing soon becomes intense
And troubled workers wander hence.

We feel we’ve heard all this before,
Throwing workers out the door.
We can’t recall that this then worked
But duties still cannot be shirked.

The Queen herself is sometimes seen
To speak to workers on the scene,
And while this is anticipated,
Little is communicated.

And so the workers clean their wings,
And into boxes, pack their things.
We say goodbye to friends we loved,
Some wish to leave and some get shoved.

They buzz away to another hive
And make more honey, 9 to 5.
The Queen, of course, will get to stay,
It seems she has an MBA.

Stephen Tomkins
27 March 2014