United States
£ GBP
A reprint of a classical work originally published in 1985.
For many years, research on honeybee social life dealt primarily with the physiological processes underlying the social system of the bee rather than the ecological factors that have shaped its societies. Thomas Seeley's landmark book unites the two approaches, emphasizing ecological studies of honeybee social behaviour while also offering fresh perspectives on honeybee behaviour and communication. It covers a broad range of topics, from adaptiveness of worker sterility and the economics of nest construction to information-centre foraging, individual versus colony-level selection, sex ratio evolution, colonial thermoregulation, the evolution of colony defence, and adaptive radiation in colony design. Honeybee Ecology presents honeybees as a model system for investigating advanced social life among insects from an evolutionary perspective.
Thomas D. Seeley is the Horace White Professor of Biology Emeritus at Cornell University. His books include Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners, The Lives of Bees, Following the Wild Bees, and Honeybee Democracy (all Princeton). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
"Seeley's intention is to explain the diversity of traits of honeybees via a natural selection perspective. He appropriately points out that much work on honeybees has been done outside an evolutionary framework and without regard to the problems faced by honeybees in nature. Clearly, this work is the best treatment emphasizing a single species of insect in existence."
– Randy Thornhill, University of New Mexico
