Piping Hot Bees & Boisterous Buzz-Runners

Thomas D Seeley
Princeton University Press, £25.00

Thomas Seeley has produced a fascinating and readable account of his life’s work investigating honeybees. Even as a 10-year-old, observing wild bees in a black walnut tree, he was asking searching and relevant questions. His ability to successfully apply scientific methodology is abundantly clear as he documents his research through his PhD and subsequent career to explore 20 different, but related, behaviours. He looks at the similarities and differences between wild bees and managed colonies, the mechanisms and criteria that determine homesite selection and the interplay of ‘buzz running’ and ‘piping’ to stimulate swarm departures. He also shows that communication in bees is more complex than just the simple waggle dance described by Karl von Frisch and involves behaviours that initiate a wide variety of social interactions, such as dissemination of the queen pheromone, grooming and summoning nectar collectors.

Interwoven with his research are personal stories that show how his love of bees is integral to his life, even going so far as to spend his honeymoon investigating bees, with his wife, in Thailand. He poses intriguing questions following on from accurate observations of bee behaviour. He explains how he develops relevant experiments to elucidate answers to these questions and then presents the data collected in clear and concise diagrams. His explanations are never over-heavy with scientific terminology, yet are so well described in straightforward terms that his research would be understood by any interested nature lover as well as beekeepers and scientists generally. This is a superbly informative and impressively readable book that I have very much enjoyed reviewing.

Dr Alan Woollhead