You can’t solve what you can’t see – Using honey bee research to understand audit pain points.
This weekend, I had the pleasure to attend the Southeast Michigan Beekeepers Association’s 2025 Spring Conference, where Dr. Humberto Boncristiani, a dedicated beekeeping industry researcher, delivered the keynote. I always look for connections between different topics to deepen understanding and build on existing knowledge. So naturally, when I heard his talk, “Pesticides: The Hidden Harm to Bees and All of Us,” I couldn’t help but relate it to auditing.
On a warm summer day, take a moment to observe the flowers around you—you’ll likely spot a pollinator hard at work, with honey bees leading the charge. Their silent labor is easy to overlook, yet essential to our way of life. Without pollinators, feeding the billions of people on this planet would be unimaginably expensive or even impossible.
But while some creatures help sustain our food supply, others threaten it. Every beneficial pollinator has a counterpart seeking its next meal. Though these animals are simply trying to survive, they inevitably challenge our efforts to grow and protect our food.
Enter pesticides—substances designed to deter, destroy, or repel pests, including insects. They have revolutionized agriculture, enabling advancements our ancestors could never have imagined. But like any innovation, they come with risks. Research shows pesticides affect honey bees in complex ways, and scientists are working to uncover exactly how and why.
Detection is Everything
One of the biggest challenges in science—and auditing—is that you can’t solve what you can’t see. Honey bee populations have been in decline for years, and researchers struggled to figure out why. Was it pesticides? Habitat loss? Disease? The answer turned out to be all of the above, but researchers couldn’t connect the dots until they developed better detection tools—microscopic analysis of parasites, chemical tracking for toxins, and even tiny sensors on bees to monitor their movement patterns.
Auditing works the same way. If your organization lacks proper monitoring tools, unidentified risks pile up like a hive infested with mites. Financial misstatements, cybersecurity gaps, and operational inefficiencies can go unnoticed simply because there’s no effective way to detect them. Auditors act like scientists, uncovering hidden problems by developing better detection methods—data analytics, real-time monitoring, and AI-powered risk assessments. If you ask any Enterprise Risk Management executive what keeps them up at night, they will tell you it’s not the risks they know about; it’s the risks they don’t know about yet.
Seeing the Problem = Solving the Problem
In both honey bee research and audits, the biggest barrier to innovation isn’t the problem itself—it’s the fact that no one knows it exists. Imagine a beekeeper watching a colony collapse without understanding why. They might assume it’s bad weather when in reality, a new pesticide is disrupting the bees’ nervous systems. Without the ability to see the underlying issue, they can’t innovate solutions.
Auditors often face the same challenge. If a company is bleeding cash due to fraud, but there’s no visibility into transaction anomalies, leadership might blame it on poor sales rather than internal theft. If a cybersecurity team only tracks known threats, emerging risks like AI-generated phishing attacks slip through the cracks. Innovation in audit doesn’t come from fixing obvious problems—it comes from identifying invisible ones.
Natural vs. Synthetic: Unintended Consequences in Audit
One of the most fascinating discoveries in honey bee research is that synthetic chemicals—like pesticides—can have unpredictable interactions with natural systems. Some pesticides that were supposed to protect crops ended up disorienting bees, causing colonies to collapse. These unintended consequences only became obvious once researchers studied how natural and synthetic elements interacted over time.
In the audit world, a similar phenomenon happens with new controls and policies. A company might introduce an automated fraud detection system, only to find that employees start bypassing controls in unexpected ways. A regulatory change meant to strengthen financial transparency could accidentally create compliance loopholes. Just like in bee research, auditors need to study these interactions—testing assumptions, analyzing unintended consequences, and adapting recommendations accordingly. Chesterton’s Fence illustrates this principle perfectly, “Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
What This Means for Auditors
- Invest in Better Detection Tools – Data analytics, continuous monitoring, and AI-driven risk assessments help auditors uncover hidden issues before they become major problems.
- Question the Obvious – If something isn’t working, don’t just accept surface-level explanations. Look for underlying issues that might not be immediately visible.
- Analyze System Interactions – Just like synthetic chemicals disrupt natural ecosystems, new policies and controls can create unintended side effects. Auditors should anticipate these and test for them.
Final Thought: Bees and Auditors Have More in Common Than You Think
Honey bees have survived for millions of years because they constantly adapt to new challenges—finding new food sources, adjusting to climate shifts, and even changing how they communicate. Auditors need that same adaptability. If we don’t evolve our detection methods and understand the ripple effects of our recommendations, we risk missing the problems that matter most.
In short: You can’t solve what you can’t see. So let’s make sure we’re looking in the right places.