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Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners takes readers inside a world seldom seen even by beekeepers, shedding light on twenty of the most compelling mysteries of honey bee behaviour.
Thomas Seeley has devoted a lifetime to the study of honey bees and their colonies, unravelling the secrets of these wondrous insects in a career spanning six decades. In this book, he weaves illuminating personal stories with the latest science, explaining such mysteries as how worker bees function as scouts to choose a home site for their colony, furnish their home with beeswax combs, and stock it with brood and food while keeping tens of thousands of colony inhabitants warm and defended from intruders. Along the way, he shares the experiences that drew him to these studies, the small observations that led to big breakthroughs, and the sense of excitement that came with probing each mystery.
Richly illustrated, Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners provides a rare look at how a singularly passionate scientist and his colleagues deciphered the pipings, shakings, and puzzling tremble dances of honey bees, and how this journey of scientific discovery continues to shape our understanding of these remarkably intelligent and vitally important insects.
Thomas D. Seeley is the Horace White Professor of Biology Emeritus at Cornell University. His books include 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.
"Beekeepers will watch bees afresh and with even more astonishment after reading about these subtle yet highly sophisticated behaviors and how they were ingeniously discovered."
– Stephen Fleming, coeditor of BeeCraft magazine
"Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners is Thomas Seeley at his best, an engaging blend of keen observation, rigorous science, and personal reminiscence. More than just fascinating descriptions of bee behavior, this is a love letter, written by someone enamored from a lifetime spent studying honey bees."
– Mark L. Winston, author of Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive
"In this brilliant, enthralling, and wonderful book, Thomas Seeley modestly describes how he solved twenty mysteries of honey bee behavior by asking the right questions and designing simple and elegant studies to answer them. This is a beautifully written masterpiece by our foremost honey bee researcher, giving extraordinary insight into the sophisticated communication and astounding behavioral complexity of honey bees."
– Nicola Bradbear, founder and CEO of Bees for Development
"Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners is an intellectual journey into the life of one of the planet's most interesting and ecologically crucial animals. Honey bees have evolved social behavior that astounds, and uncovering their secrets has been a century-long effort by generations of biologists. This entertaining and informative book reveals what we now know about the bees' communal life, enabling us to view it from the outside in."
– Bernd Heinrich, author of Racing the Clock: Running across a Lifetime
"An inspiring book that reads like a good detective novel. Seeley's sense of awe and respect for honey bees is infectious. With each chapter, the curtain is raised a little more, revealing how the mysteries about honey bee behaviors are solved."
– Marla Spivak, University of Minnesota
"To really know honey bees, you must be aware not only of what they do and how, but most importantly why they do what they do – moment to moment, season to season, honey flow to honey flow. Thomas Seeley captures these moments, telling a story that is brimming with humor and enriched by the discoveries and personal reflections of a truly gifted scientist."
– Kim Flottum, author of The Backyard Beekeeper
"This masterfully written book introduces the reader to the elegant experimental studies by which Thomas Seeley unraveled the complex behavioral mechanisms that enable a honey bee colony to function as a decision-making unit. Indeed, Seeley pioneered the experimental study of swarm intelligence in social insects, and this book is an impressive testimony to his admirable scientific achievements."
– Bert Hölldobler, coauthor of The Guests of Ants: How Myrmecophiles Interact with Their Hosts
