What Bees Teach Us About Portfolio Resilience

Let’s Talk About Bees

No, not that talk. I’ll leave that one to biology teachers and awkward car rides with your kids. I’m talking about actual, stinging, honey-producing insects.

Rory Sutherland tells a great story about bees.

In a hive, when a scout bee finds a good source of nectar, it returns and performs a “waggle dance” — a kind of biological GPS that tells the rest of the hive exactly where to go. Most of the bees follow the instructions. That’s efficient. That’s sensible. That’s what makes the spreadsheet look good.

However, a small percentage of bees ignore the dance entirely and fly off in different directions. To an outside observer, they look inefficient. Unfocused. Perhaps even wasteful.

Until conditions change.

When a hive organizes itself around the best-known source of food, it becomes highly efficient — but also highly dependent on that single source. 

The bees that don’t follow the waggle dance aren’t choosing inefficiency over productivity; they’re playing a different role entirely. By not participating in the optimization of the current source, they are the only ones positioned to discover alternatives.

Most of the time, those additional sources don’t matter. The hive is already well fed. But if the primary source becomes unavailable, that redundancy — built quietly and without debate — suddenly becomes valuable.

What appears to be inefficiency turns out to be resilience.

Nature doesn’t argue about this. It doesn’t debate whether redundancy is “worth it.” It simply builds systems that can absorb change.

Humans, on the other hand, tend to look at those systems and try to improve them.

We have a complicated relationship with inefficiency. We work hard to eliminate it. We optimize systems to squeeze it out. We celebrate elegance, precision, and getting everything to line up just right — until the moment we need the very thing we optimized away.

Take a spare tire.

From a purely efficiency-driven perspective, a spare tire is a poor design choice. It adds weight. It takes up space. It slightly reduces fuel economy. Most of the time, it simply sits there — unused, unimpressive, quietly in the way.

And yet, the moment you find yourself on the side of the road with a flat, that “inefficient” piece of rubber becomes rather important.

No one complains about inefficiency then.

The same tension appears in investing.

The foundation of a sound portfolio should follow the main road — broadly diversified, disciplined, and designed to participate in long-term economic growth. That’s the baseline; those are the four tires on the pavement. A truly robust portfolio, however, also needs a spare.

Not because we know what’s coming or are trying to outsmart anyone — but because systems optimized for a single environment tend to break when that environment changes.

Uniformity feels safe — until it isn’t.

Assets that move in perfect lockstep on the way up have a habit of rediscovering one another on the way down.

That’s not a portfolio.
It’s a synchronized bet.

The uncomfortable reality of this kind of design is that there will almost always be something in a well-constructed portfolio that feels disappointing at any given moment — something that looks unnecessary, something that isn’t obviously “earning its keep.”

That discomfort isn’t a flaw; it’s the spare tire — the explorer bee.
Its job isn’t to perform every year. Its job is to be there when conditions change.

January has a way of making us crave certainty — clean plans, clean forecasts, clean answers. Historically, however, portfolios (and financial plans) designed for survivability may be more resilient during periods of uncertainty than those optimized for a narrow set of market conditions.

Our focus isn’t on winning headline wars or short-term scorekeeping. It’s on building plans that remain usable across many different environments — including the ones no one saw coming.

‍