A friend of mine once defined life as an extreme result of Le Chatelier's Principle, that is, a system exposed to an external stress will react internally in such a way as to release that stress. It could be as simple as heating up a rock until it radiates the excess heat as infrared. Or it can be as complex as an animal "deciding" to walk away from the hot sun and into the shade. Le Chatelier, of course, is not an explanation, its an observation that fits a lot of phenomena that may not be related in any way at all.

The laws of physics limit the appropriate responses of physical objects to the environment and quantify the nature of those responses, and the guiding principle is the laws of thermodynamics. Things run down, entropy increases, heat flows into the cold. These are not philosophical positions, they are demonstrable scientific principles which must be taken into account when designing real machines. There is math involved.

As long as entropy increases overall, some very interesting but small-scale local reversals of entropy may occur, as when water flows downhill, it may occasionally form eddies and whirlpools that temporarily cause water to flow uphill for small distances. A growing plant may appear to be a total local reversal of entropy, but when you consider the amount of soil and water and air that had to be broken down to simpler forms by the expenditure of a large amount of sunlight to make this possible, then the total entropy is actually increased by the plant.

As the creationists tell us, evolution IS indeed a reversal of the laws of thermodynamics, although if they could see the systems in which evolving organisms interact, they would see that the systems as a whole are increasing in total entropy as the organisms take from them what they need to grow and evolve in complexity, and the universes pays the price by tapping its finite reserves of energy to make it all possible.

We can see this going on all around us, without fail, we can measure it and monitor it, but why it should be so is a great mystery. It seems to be wired directly into the fabric of spacetime itself: a propensity for things to deteriorate, but as they do, little islands of dazzling beauty and temporary complexity arise to amuse and bewilder us. It happens in physical nature, and in living things, and in the behavior of living things, and in living communities, and in ecosystems of communities, and perhaps to higher levels of organization than that.

I think it was Freeman Dyson who made this observation: that in its headlong rush to a heat-death of monotonous homogeneity, the universe first has to pass through a series of bottlenecks, where this decay is constricted and forced, like a mountain stream forced into a narrow gorge. Gravity pulls matter together, so the first source of energy is the potential energy of matter falling into a gravity well. As it does so, the matter heats up and gravitational energy is released as light in the stars, first as mere friction, then as even more light as temperatures and pressures facilitate nuclear fusion. The stars are the first bottleneck, where gravitational collapse is first halted and energy released to make local complexity possible. This takes a long time, and while the bottleneck is there, the universe's mad rush to oblivion is temporarily slowed down and life flourishes briefly. Without these bottlenecks, the universe would quickly become either one massive singularity of infinite mass, or a infinitely large and featureless, homogeneous tenuous gas of matter and radiation.

We know the physics intimately, but how does the universe as a whole always know how to do this? The bees in your post do it, the rocks do it, we do it, and we all do it at multiple nested levels of organization, all of them involving matter and energy, and also involving levels of information processing. I believe that besides matter, energy, space and time there is another essence. It has to do with information, with complexity, with consciousness (properties we normally think of as psychological, not physical). Somehow, matter-energy interacting in space-time is constrained by this quintessence, which is deeply encoded into the structure of nature and the laws of physics. This is the origin of life, of consciouness itself, and like the Force in Star Wars, it permeates everything and flows everywhere, not as mystical mumbo jumbo, but as an inevitable consequence and feature of reality, like gravity or electromagnetism. And we may be the first, perhaps the only, life form in the cosmos to even guess that this is true.