In Bee Dance, follow a foraging honeybee as she searches for food and returns to the hive to share the news in a honeybee dance! A honeybee searches for nectar, then returns to the hive to tell the other bees. She does a waggle dance, moving in a special figure-eight pattern to share the location of the foodsource with her hivemates. With vivid and active images, Rick Chrustowski brings these amazing bees to life!
Karl von Frisch, in January 1946, deciphered the dancing language of honeybees. Over the previous summer, he had discovered that the bees communicate the distance and direction of food sources by means of the dances they run upon returning from foraging flights. The news of the discovery, which led later to a Nobel Prize, quickly spread across Europe and beyond. The Dancing Bees is a dual biography on the one hand of von Frisch as one of the most innovative and successful scientists of the twentieth century and, on the other, of his honeybees as experimental and especially communicating animals that play a rich role in human culture."
How honeybees make collective decisions—and what we can learn from this amazing democratic process Honeybees make decisions collectively—and democratically. Every year, faced with the life-or-death problem of choosing and traveling to a new home, honeybees stake everything on a process that includes collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, and consensus building. In fact, as world-renowned animal behaviorist Thomas Seeley reveals, these incredible insects have much to teach us when it comes to collective wisdom and effective decision making. A remarkable and richly illustrated account of scientific discovery, Honeybee Democracy brings together, for the first time, decades of Seeley's pioneering research to tell the amazing story of house hunting and democratic debate among the honeybees. In the late spring and early summer, as a bee colony becomes overcrowded, a third of the hive stays behind and rears a new queen, while a swarm of thousands departs with the old queen to produce a daughter colony. Seeley describes how these bees evaluate potential nest sites, advertise their discoveries to one another, engage in open deliberation, choose a final site, and navigate together—as a swirling cloud of bees—to their new home. Seeley investigates how evolution has honed the decision-making methods of honeybees over millions of years, and he considers similarities between the ways that bee swarms and primate brains process information. He concludes that what works well for bees can also work well for people: any decision-making group should consist of individuals with shared interests and mutual respect, a leader's influence should be minimized, debate should be relied upon, diverse solutions should be sought, and the majority should be counted on for a dependable resolution. An impressive exploration of animal behavior, Honeybee Democracy shows that decision-making groups, whether honeybee or human, can be smarter than even the smartest individuals in them.
Omnipresent in virtually all terrestrial ecosystems and of undisputed ecological and economical importance, the study of social insects is an area that continues to attract a vast number of researchers. As a consequence, a huge amount of information about their biology and ecology has accumulated. Distilling this scattered information into a highly
This book describes and illustrates the results of more than fifteen years of elegant experimental studies conducted by the author to investigate how a colony of bees is organized to gather its resources. The results of his research--including studies of the shaking signal, tremble dance, and waggle dance--offer the clearest, most detailed picture available of how a highly integrated animal society works.
Reprint of the revered Harvard UP original of 1967, itself a translation of the German original (Springer Verlag, 1965)--with a new foreword by Thos. D. Seeley. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
“One of the most informative picture books about honey bees, this is surely among the most beautiful as well.” —Booklist (starred review) A tiny honey bee emerges from the hive for the first time. Using sunlight, landmarks, and scents to remember the path, she goes in search of pollen and nectar to share with the thousands of other bees in her hive. She uses her powerful sense of smell to locate the flowers that sustain her, avoids birds that might eat her, and returns home to share her finds with her many sisters. Nature lovers and scientists-to-be are invited to explore the fascinating life of a honey bee. Back matter includes information about protecting bees and an index.
Tis book, already translated into ten languages, may at frst sight appear to be just about honeybees and their biology. It c- tains, however, a number of deeper messages related to some of the most basic and important principles of modern biology. Te bees are merely the actors that take us into the realm of phys- ology, genetics, reproduction, biophysics and learning, and that introduce us to the principles of natural selection underlying the evolution of simple to complex life forms. Te book destroys the cute notion of bees as anthropomorphic icons of busy self-sacr -i fcing individuals and presents us with the reality of the colony as an integrated and independent being—a “superorganism”—with its own, almost eerie, emergent group intelligence. We are s- prised to learn that no single bee, from queen through drone to sterile worker, has the oversight or control over the colony. - stead, through a network of integrated control systems and fee- backs, and communication between individuals, the colony - rives at consensus decisions from the bottom up through a type of “swarm intelligence”. Indeed, there are remarkable parallels between the functional organization of a swarming honeybee colony and vertebrate brains.
From ancient cave paintings of honey bee nests to modern science’s richly diversified investigation of honey bee biology and its applications, the human imagination has long been captivated by the mysterious and highly sophisticated behavior of this paragon among insect societies. In the first broad treatment of honey bee biology to appear in decades, Mark Winston provides rare access to the world of this extraordinary insect. In a bright and engaging style, Winston probes the dynamics of the honey bee’s social organization. He recreates for us the complex infrastructure of the nest, describes the highly specialized behavior of workers, queens, and drones, and examines in detail the remarkable ability of the honey bee colony to regulate its functions according to events within and outside the nest. Winston integrates into his discussion the results of recent studies, bringing into sharp focus topics of current bee research. These include the exquisite architecture of the nest and its relation to bee physiology; the intricate division of labor and the relevance of a temporal caste structure to efficient functioning of the colony; and, finally, the life-death struggles of swarming, supersedure, and mating that mark the reproductive cycle of the honey bee. The Biology of the Honey Bee not only reviews the basic aspects of social behavior, ecology, anatomy, physiology, and genetics, it also summarizes major controversies in contemporary honey bee research, such as the importance of kin recognition in the evolution of social behavior and the role of the well-known dance language in honey bee communication. Thorough, well-illustrated, and lucidly written, this book will for many years be a valuable resource for scholars, students, and beekeepers alike.
