PIPING HOT BEES AND BOISTEROUS BUZZ-RUNNERS

A scholar of honeybee behavior reveals 20 of his discoveries.

Seeley, author of The Lives of Bees and The Wisdom of the Hive, opens his latest exploration with a childhood memory of watching a swarm of honeybees make a home in a tree near his family’s home: “Cool!” This memory sets the tone for the pages that follow, the author’s delight in his work helping to propel readers through the carefully described experiments that yielded his discoveries. Laced with precise measurements and Latin names, these discoveries range broadly, including how bees know when to ventilate their close quarters, decide on a new nesting site, initiate swarms, and optimize food collection. The throughline that binds these elements together is Seeley’s fascination with honeybee communication and cognition and his determination to understand both. One experiment studies how a swarm decides which nesting site to choose; another, how a forager bee learns when a food source is particularly robust. The means by which the author and his colleagues—and he takes care to name them, over decades of collaboration—test their hypotheses involve meticulous work, such as individually labeling 12,000 bees (it took nine days in all), traveling to areas that allow them to control natural variables (a treeless island, a flowerless forest), and tinkering with hives to control egress and ingress. If many of these details are less than compelling as narrative, the overall sense that readers who stick with Seeley will get is that the fun of science is in both practice and results. The author periodically addresses readers with infectious enthusiasm: “I hope that you, too, are able to enjoy this cheery sight,” he exclaims of a nectar-laden bee. Frequent photos, diagrams, and drawings help to lift the informational load.

Fascinating both for its insights about nature and as a portrait of the scientist at work.