Animals: Honeybees

Abstract

Although Thomas Seeley claims that Honeybee Democracy is a recap of Martin Lindauer’s 1995 research on honeybee swarms, it is much, much more. This beautiful book is teeming with information about honeybee behavior and is filled with lessons about individual honeybees, their colonies, and what actually occurs when bees swarm. Seeley’s love of the topic and of science is evident throughout the book, and the joy of discovery exudes from its pages. His passion for the subject of honeybees is infectious.Seeley uses Lindauer’s experiments about honeybee swarms as a jumping-off point to write about the important lessons of honeybee behavior and to describe his own lifelong studies surrounding honeybee swarms. In the process, Seeley gives the reader insight regarding the ingenuity that is required to design concrete experiments. The book goes on to discuss how the decision to swarm is arrived at, and how the individual scout bees work within a swarm, getting the colony to come to consensus about where the location of their new home will be.Spanning more than 50 years of research on honeybee colonies, this book delves into various experiments that look at the idea of “honeybee democracy.” First, Seeley explains how decision making is employed within the hive when the colony needs to relocate. The author then explains how swarms act as a group to arrive at their new home, during which another decision-making system is used by individual bees to inform the swarm as to where they are going. In the last chapters of the book, Seeley equates the honeybee method of decision making to that of primates, equates the bee to the neuron and a swarm to a brain, and restates his belief that decision making in honeybee societies can be compared to that in human societies.Whether you are a bee enthusiast or animal behaviorist, professor or student, this book is a wonderful read. Infused with personal anecdotes and written in a style that immediately welcomes the reader, it imparts more than just a missive about honeybee democracy. Each chapter contains a description of one of Seeley’s experiments, with explicit methodologies that would allow the experiments to be repeated by the reader, and they are written in a way that captures the attention of even the least scientific reader. Many of the chapters end with further questions arrived at from the research Seeley has done, inviting readers to start exploring honeybee behavior on their own.The author leaves the reader with a bit of wisdom: “We now know that the amazing feat of democratic decision making performed by the scout bees offers us deep lessons about how a group of individuals with common interests can structure their group so that it functions as an effective decision-making body. It is worth taking careful note of how the scout bees manage to be so good at all three of the key ingredients of good decision making by a group: identifying a diverse set of options, sharing freely the information about these options, and aggregating this information to choose the best options.”