The Lives of Bees: Book Review

Humanity has a long-time fascination with honeybees. Honey has been found buried in Egyptian pyramids, honeybees feature regularly in Greek and Roman mythology, and nowadays urban bee keeping is on the rise as an often nature starved generation attempts to re-connect.

Many books have told the story of how domestic honeybees’ live day by day, but the story of how their wild sisters exist has for a long time remained untold. In the Lives of Bees Professor Thomas Seeley, a leading authority on honeybee biology, gives us a snapshot into how wild honeybee colonies live outside the practices of modern bee keeping. Seeley draws on decades of research conducted by himself and colleagues and describes the nest sites, foraging behaviour and life history of wild honeybees.

Domestic honeybee colonies in North America suffer high levels of decline in contract to wild colonies and Seeley, not only highlights differences between wild and domestic honeybees, but also offers suggestions as to how modern bee keeping practises can be improved to better help domestic honeybee health.

Seeley’s research is made accessible to non-specialists but also contains detailed information that will be of interest to other honeybee biologists. The Lives of Bees will be of interest for both beekeepers and biologists interested in how feral honeybee colonies live outside of beekeeping practices.

You can find the article online here.