Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners

"Thomas Seeley has spent his career unraveling the mysteries of honey bee behavior. His goal has been to understand how the 30,000 or so bees in a colony work together as a unit to accomplish such things as finding and occupying a snug nest cavity, furnishing it with beeswax combs, filling these combs with brood and food, and keeping themselves well nourished, comfortably warm, and safe from intruders. In this book, Seeley's goal is to illuminate these and other mysteries about the workings of honey bee colonies and explore how those mysteries were solved. Seeley's aim, as he says, is to review how and what he and his colleagues have learned about honey bees and to share some things that are not in the scientific papers: the personal experiences that drew him to these studies, the little observations that led to important insights, and the feelings of delight that came with solving each mystery. The book's thirty chapters are roughly chronological, offering a meta-history of the field alongside explication of various studies. Each chapter is structured approximately the same way: first, Seeley describes how he and his colleagues discovered a specific mystery about how a colony works, then how they solved it, and finally each closes with an explanation of the implications of the mystery and the way it fits into the wider field of honey bee research. Intimate and informative, PIPING HOT BEES AND BOISTEROUS BUZZ-RUNNERS will weave together personal narrative with the results of over 50 years of research into honey bees and honey bee colonies. It will offer context for more current research and introduce readers to the deep workings of honey bee behavior"--