Bienendemokratie

by Thomas D. Seeley

Die Bienenkönigin ist keine absolute Herrscherin. Im Gegenteil: Bienen entscheiden alle gemeinsam als Schwarm, sie erforschen kollektiv einen Sachverhalt und debattieren lebhaft, um letztlich einen Konsens zu finden.
Der bekannte Verhaltensforscher Thomas D. Seeley untersucht seit Jahrzehnten in akribischer Kleinarbeit das Leben der Bienen. In seinem spannend geschriebenen Buch zeigt er anschaulich, was wir von diesen wunderbaren Insekten lernen können und dass die Entscheidung mehrerer klüger als die Einzelner sein kann. Ein reich bebildertes, ebenso faszinierendes wie anregendes Buch.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Nature, Animals, Biology, Audiobook, Politics

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2010

About the author

Thomas D. Seeley is professor of biology at Cornell University and a passionate beekeeper. He is the author of The Wisdom of the Hive and Honeybee Ecology (Princeton).

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 5 out of 5]

Final review, just a paragraph of what impact this book has had on me. Reading this and Secret Lives of Ants makes me think that our view of the brain as the source of intelligence, thought and direction and that each one is particular to an individual may well be wrong. Social insects it seems share a brain, it is distributed amongst them so that they can act together but if necessary can also act alone. The power of the whole is greater than that of the individual. Much food for thought in these books.
__________

This is mind-bogglingly hilarious. In 1981, US Secretary of State Alexander Haig (Reagan Administration) alleged that the Soviet Union was waging or abetting chemical warfare against opponents of the communist governments of Laos and Kamuchea in violation of the Geneval Protocol and 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. The main evidence was a material called "yellow rain", yellow spots less than a 1/4" in diameter found on vegetation on alleged attack sites that allegedly contained fungal toxins.

Actually, the author was able to sort this one out. It was Asian bee poo! Someone was left with large yellow spots of egg on their face for that one.
_________

If you think of the entire hive as a brain and the individual bees as neurones, you can see more how they could make decisions without having to possess the the sort of consciousness humans have. And that is the only sort we recognise, but undoubtedly not the only sort there is. It's the same as intelligence, we measure animals on how human-intelligent they are, asking them to solve our problems when they don't have our skill-sets, mentality or would ever be faced with those problems.

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took a side job grading SAT's and have zero time to write a review for this book. That is a real shame because this book is top notch. If you have ever been interested in the best aspects of bee behavior (similar to ant or termite behavior) read this book. You will fall in love with bees, and their decision making behavior, all over again.

I really hope I have time to revisit this book and write a proper review. The waggle dance is so much better than you can imagine. Even if you have learned about it in college courses or through other books, I doubt it will have been covered as thoroughly or delightfully as it was covered in this book.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely detailed, scientific experimentation, over 50 years, discovering how honeybees choose, persuade, decide, and unanimously move to new nests when swarming. By the last chapter, the author is convincingly comparing the neurons in our brains to individual honeybees in a swarm and that a swarm in many ways acts like a thinking brain. Seeley makes a strong case that the honeybee is the most democratic of all creatures.

The one fault with this book (and why it only has three stars instead of 4 or 5) is some of Seeley's methods in the 60's and 70's were violently brutish. He would cut down whole trees and saw them open to get at a bee colony after killing the colony with chemicals. Or freezing a swarm to study it's make-up. Maybe there was no other way to get the information he was trying to discover, but these methods really gave me pause.

Fascinating insights...but at a terrible cost.

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

For what this is (a textbook on how bees live and thrive), it's a pretty interesting read. But I'll confess to not finishing it because a)it was due back at the library and b) I quit caring. At first it's fascinating to learn how bees do their apian thing, but then, after you've read the same thing over and over 5 million times? It gets old. Seeley could have shortened this down to one well-written, educational, intriguing booklet and it would have been a bee masterpiece.

[Radiantflux · Rating 4 out of 5]

101st book for 2018.

Every year in Spring a large fraction of the bees in a hive will its confines and set-up shop nearby, as they actively search a new home. In this wonderful book, Seeley summarizes decades of work leading to an much better understanding how these simple creatures can collect and weigh the pros-and-cons for different potential hive locations and in the end come of an almost optimal decision for where to locate their new home.

This book is as much about the scientific process as the science, and reminds me a lot of one of my favorite books Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds by Bernd Heinrich.

Highly recommended.

4-stars.

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 🌟 Nonfiction>Biology
So this book is exactly as described plus a little more interesting than expected. The writing is witty and as entertaining as it can be while staying on topic ("Bees... serve as flying penises for the plants.").
The intricate dances of the bees that communicate mini maps is amazing! The dedication of Seeley to the bees is clearly deep and enduring.
I expected some lamenting about current environmental issues pertaining to bees- nope! Though this is definitely a concern the author has much more detailed and original work to describe in these pages.

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the recommendation of a friend, picked up "Honeybee," and learned quite a bit about bees! For instance, 95% of the hive are females, who are the workers; 5% are male drones, whose main function is to mate. The queen controls gender by fertilizing an egg to create a female, or withholding sperm for a male. Queens mate (mid-air) with up to 10-12 drones in the first 2 weeks of their lives, holding the sperm in a special sac for the remainder of their 2-7 years of life. When a hive decides to swarm, scouts take up to an hour inside a prospective new home, and return to dance about it. The duration and intensity of the dance influences the decision, which is made by quorum.

Although not a fan of the author's style, the book was informative. I like the outline of what makes a good decision-making group:

1) Compose the group of individuals with shared interests and mutual respect
2) Minimize the leader's influence on the group's thinking
3) Seek diverse solutions to the problem
4) Aggregate the group's knowledge through debate
5) Use quorum responses for cohesion, accuracy and speed.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Caveat: I'm not sure if this book would be very interesting to a non-sciency, non-beekeeper. Not that I want to dissuade anyone, but there are a lot of details about experiments so I'd imagine hearing hive dimensions repeatedly might get tiring to someone who isn't interested in what bees consider optimal.

The good:
- SO MUCH insight into beekeeping
- A lot of fabulous detail about bee behavior and experiments
- Fascinating history tidbits (like the Yellow rain "scare")

The bad:
- It feels pretty close to reading a scientific paper so if you're not into that, it might be a bit much
- The ending summary of how this applies to real life felt weak to me - not because it isn't applicable to real life, it just didn't seem particularly insightful
- Can be easy to zone out during, so not really what I would consider a casual read

[Bianca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very cool and informative book about bees - the insects that "make our world go round" - written in 2010 by Cornell University's bee expert and biology professor. You will learn how the bees decide on their nesting spots and how they communicate with each other. Their behavior is much more interesting than I initially thought and can indeed be compared to a democracy.

[Mishehu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific book! This is exactly the sort of book any aspiring scientist (in particular, naturalist) would benefit from reading. It pays equal attention to scientific details as it does to accounting for how scientific thinking and experimentation in this field proceeds, and to the lived (and joyful) experience of one of its most highly skilled contributors. It's a fascinating, inspiring, and beautifully produced work of popular science. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

[MaSa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ein biologisch ausgesprochen interessantes und einfach geschriebenes Buch, das meine Faszination für Bienen gesteigert hat. Vor allem der Untertitel „Wie Bienen kollektiv entscheiden und was wir davon lernen können“ hat mein Interesse, dieses Buch zu lesen, geweckt. Jedoch werden erst zum Schluss 5 Lektionen dargestellt, die hervorheben sollen, was wir Menschen von Bienen aus demokratischer Sicht lernen können. Zudem sind diese Thesen reichlich oberflächlich gehalten und lassen die gewünschte Tiefe vermissen. Insbesondere fehlt mir hier der Realitätssinn der Thesen, die hier eher als utopische Wünsche scheinen. Es gab zwar interessante Ansätze, zB wie Entscheidungsgremien besetzt werden sollen oder warum Dezentralisation wichtig sein könnte. Vielmehr kann das gewonnene Wissen aber „nur“ für Entscheidungsfindungen innerhalb der Familie/Freundesgruppe in die Praxis umgesetzt werden.

[Wendelle]

This book is so interesting and compelling that readers can read it in spite of a lack of natural fascination with insects. It shows how bees are so unique and peculiar, reading this book is like encountering an alien society, from the way the bees are raised, the way they decide to swarm, the way they develop a new colony, and the way they make collective decisions via 'dance dance revolution'. Also, this book contains a funny anecdote that is revealing of our own society: the US accused the USSR of ejecting biological weapons, only to be corrected by the author who showed it was bee feces.

However, I don't know if I agree with the author that we can learn from honeybees' decision-making processes. Honeybees only have to assess objective criteria, such as size of tree hole and potential as hive site. The difficulty with humans' policymaking is that we are really debating values, the very premises about what makes a decision 'good', even as we debate facts and data. And it's good and healthy to debate values for a culture. Honeybees don't do this, they seem to be programmed with the assumption of values such as, different types of honeybees to have segregated experiences due to their situation at birth, honeybee queens just lay eggs, male drones don't work, potential queens fight each other to death for leadership. Imagine if humans just accepted these values. That's why, we can't just take political lessons from honeybees as this author seems to suggest.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a beautiful read. Although some criticize his style, I enjoyed his enthusiasm. Ascetically, it is beautiful. The cover is gorgeously designed, whilst the illustrations and pictures depicted throughout are outstanding. Most importantly, the content is gripping! As a beekeeper myself, I never fully understood the complex ballet that is swarming until I read this eloquent piece of art.This book reaffirmed my appreciation and love for honeybees. Anything which wonderfully informs the public of the staggering intelligence of the honeybee does Mother Nature a great service. Simply put, this book is a gem. Save the honeybee!

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

As scientists we are taught that our collective work must tell a story. Here the author has finally really done just that. He ties together the published papers over his forty-year career to tell the story of how one study led to the next and what conclusions can be made of the collective body of work. His passion and reverence for the bee is clear and contagious. I learned a lot about the behavior of bee colonies and I respect them more than ever.

[Tom Roth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable book. I'm really interested in behavioural biology, but mainly in primates, so I really doubted if I would enjoy this book. However, it is really well-written, interesting and everything is explained very well. Even if you do not really like bees, this book is really enjoyable! The book changed the way I will look at bee swarms for the rest of my life ;).

[Martyn Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book on honeybee decision making at first appears set apart from history. Thomas Seeley puts together his ingenious experiments, published in academic articles over the course of several decades, and demonstrates exactly how honeybees select a new hive. No doubt this is what honeybees have been up to for millions of years, yet reading this book in the (hopefully) last months of the Trump administration, I felt like there was a tone in these pages that reflected the optimistic early years of the Obama administration. What characterized 2010? A faith in the ability of democracy to bend toward justice, and the ability of data and information to steer us toward a healthy society. Nothing factual about the bees would be different now from those Obama years, but if Seeley were writing now a certain chiaroscuro would’ve made its way into the prose, with darker contrasts drawn between human and bee decision making. I’ve found that people are often resistant to seeing these kinds of historical interpretations of style.

The best thing about Seeley’s work is the sense that he loves working with his bees. One experiment was going to require many hours of direct observation, and Seeley comments: “The work would be slow going, but this was fine by me. I knew that it would be both pleasurable and valuable to watch steadily my small company of brightly colored scout bees...” And this is only one of many passages in which he intimates that he can think of nothing more exciting than learning something new about bee behavior. In this tone he resembles Edward O. Wilson, the eminent biologist and writer who works with ants.

As the title hints, the decision making process of honeybees does not go as one might guess. From the words “queen” and “colony”—applied to bees for centuries—one might think that some level of leadership is exercised by the queen, and that hives send out a swarm like nations once established colonies. But those metaphors are totally wrong. The queen has nothing to do with the choice of leaving the hive or choosing the new home. She follows the collective decision making of the worker bees. In addition, it’s no colony of young headstrong bees that gets sent out, but the older queen and workers. It’s easy to imagine how humans would’ve imagined that hives work something like human cities or nations, and then applied without hesitation a set of parallels.

Seeley looks for positive lessons that could be applied to human decision making from the deliberations of the swarm (“minimize the leader’s influence on the group’s thinking”). This lends a kind of TED-talk feel to the conclusion, and points again to the tech-optimistic time in which the book was published. To my mind it would have been stronger to ease off the direct decision-making parallels and drive home instead the metaphoric implications. The undermining of “queen” and “colony” would be a start (he never quite makes that point), but then Seeley could also have drawn attention to the way the honeybee hive has appealed to groups like the early Mormons of Utah (and others) as a fitting symbol for strict unity of purpose, something which human societies have a hard time attaining.

[Abby]

This was exactly what I wanted. Namely, a bunch of cool facts about the behaviors of social insects, and an in-depth-but-not-technical field trip to the world of bees. BECAUSE THEY'RE AMAZING. And, bonus, hanging out with a truly adorable research scientist who reminds me of all my favorite mentors.

I'm glad I came to learn about bees rather than democracy, though, because I'm still not sure what the bees do counts as democracy. To be fair, I'm not sure what we do in the U.S. counts as democracy, either. But decision-making bees have some things going for them that we don't--highly specific common interests and an evolution-encoded instinct for what makes their decision "good", for starters. Thus, amazingly, Seeley demonstrates that honeybees have almost universal success discovering all their options and choosing the best one.

But I'm also glad I read this in conjunction with learning about the Baha'i process of consultation, a decision-making tool that is fundamental to the operations of the faith. And I think what the bees do is wayyyyyyy more like Baha'i consultation than American democracy, as a process that seeks consensus, not majority rule, and resists individuals insisting on their own ideas. A process that seeks accurate information and true problem-solving and abhors agendas. Basically, this book went a long way to helping me articulate why our current group decision-making processes seem to be failing so miserably, and restored a lot of my faith in the possibility of living as social animals. Because to live together can be truly adaptive--each individual offering experiences and perspectives to a collective that can have more scope and accuracy than any one alone. There is a way to do this well. It probably varies somewhat from species to species, but it can be done.

[Ekaterina Dolgova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing decision making abilities bees have! Well described and good parallels to the society

[Kristin Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This guy bees 🤣
I feel like he went into too much detail on how he set up his experiments...felt like i was reading a dissertation at times and began losing interest, but i definitely learned some cool new facts about bees!

[Hind · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was amazing. Bees are better at being people than people are

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honeybee Democracy was such an interesting book! It is incredible the high intelligence and intricate behavior of honeybees! It is a shame I can only specifically recall about half of what I read in the book, but I suppose that is due to my reading it over a six month period. But I remember the generality of it, and that is that bees are awesome. Thomas Seeley's love and passion for his research is clearly evident in his book. His awe of bees shines through his writing. It is a delight to read the book because that awe rubs off on you as a reader.

The book is mostly about how bees swarm and then choose a new home to live in. They are able to come to a unanimous decision of where they will settle down, that is 10,000+ individuals coming to a unanimous decision, and not just any decision but practically every time the very best possible decision they could choose given their options. The general gist of how they accomplish this is that some 100 scout bees fly from the swarm and scout out possible new homes. They report back to the hive by doing a waggle dance, which is an incredible dance that depending on the vigor, rotations, and shakes tells the other bees the exact distance and direction to the location, and then continue to promote that hive by repeating the dance. However, multiple scout bees are doing something similar so after the options are on the table, the scout bees from the various locations will survey the available options and change their waggle dance to advertise for the best new home. Thus, eventually all scout bees recognize the best available new home and support that option, and the hive reaches a decisions and flies to their new home. Want I find incredible in that process is the scout bees willingness to abandon their side of the argument for another more suitable side, something we rarely see in our human arguments. However, that description hardly gives this amazing process justice so I wholly recommend reading this book, even if you have no interest in bees, biology, science, or any subject area this book makes you think of, it is just flat out interesting to read regardless of your interests.

[Alberto Simal · Rating 5 out of 5]

SIMPLY SUPERB!!
It is one of the best illustrations of what scientific work is about, hard work that can only progress when fuelled by enormous doses of love for the subject matter and even greater love for knowledge. Many times, I found myself wondering about yet another mystery of the bee's behaviour, only to read a few paragraphs later about that same puzzle, tackled with exquisite ingenuity and lots, lots and lots of patience. All the experiments were fascinating, but some of them were truly magnificent!!
The aim of the book, the explanation of how a swarm makes a decision about the location of its new home, would have been enough to make a rewarding read, but the author expanded its scope to a field that had been in my mind for many chapters: neuroscience and the decision-making process in brains. The parallelism is evident, and the comparison throws several tons of soil onto the grave of the hypothesis of a homunculus controlling our mental processing (even if that homunculus is given the grand name "soul").
What I did not expect was the practical application of the research to the field of human groups and their (rather flawed) processes of decision-making. The author, a gentle soul, offers great advice on how to conduct debates more effectively by imitating the bees. I, meanwhile, had my thoughts on our more than probable extinction due to our disgraceful inability to reach consensus on most decisive issues, even when our survival depends on them. We are a social macro-organism without a functional brain; rather like an organism with multiple, metastasized cancers all striving to survive while killing the comunal body.

[GONZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant, I didn't even have the slightest idea that Apis mellifera could have been so interesting, as I came across this book while I was study something completely different. So what we learn is that the original idea for the Star Trek's Borg come from bees and their organization shows how to maximise the useful interactions between the members of a community. Somebody should have distributed this book at the PD Congress in Italy.

Molto interessante, non avevo idea che l'apis mellifera potesse essere cosí affascinante, anche perché mi sono ritrovata per caso a leggere questo libro mentre stavo studiando qualcosa di completamente diverso. Quindi praticamente quello che impariamo é che l'idea per i Borg agli sceneggiatori di Star Trek gliel'hanno data le api, la cui organizzazione in termini di ottenere il massimo per la comunitá a cui appartengono é da manuale. Qualcuno avrebbe dovuto distribuire la traduzione di questo volume all'ultimo congresso del PD in Italia.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel this is a new brand of books written by professors that is geared toward a larger audience. As a complete beginner to beekeeping, there was some good background information about how bee colonies function, as well as how they make their final decisions on where to move the swarm. The science was great. However, I felt the vast majority of the book was Seeley discussing the history of the study of bee-keeping, as well as going into excruciating detail about how he set up his scientific studies of bee swarms.

Its not bad per say, but the book is clearly written for the popular press, and I feel like the author spend the vast majority of his time on nonessential elements. Tell us about the bees themselves, tell us your findings, get to the point, and make your writing interesting!

[Kelvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

...if there are still multiple virgin queens in nest, the workers will allow them to emerge freely. The first one out usually attempts to kill those still in their cells by dashing over the combs in search of cells containing queens, chewing small holes in their sides, and stinging the occupants...if two or more virgin queens emerge together, they will fight to the death...battling queen bees fiercely implant her venom-laden sting in her sister's abdomen...the merciless sororocide continues until just one virgin queen remains alive.

[Firas Abdulhasain · Rating 5 out of 5]

What do dancing, swarm intelligence, and collective decision making and direct democracy have in common?

Honeybees!

Yes, those little creatures buzzing around to pollinate flowers and produce honey.

They are fascinating and we have A LOT to learn from them.

For example:

Did you know that bees do a wriggle dance to convince other bees of their choice for a new home?

Did you know that bees change jobs between worker, enterprising house hunter and explorer?

Did you know that the bees' decision making process is a highly distributed and thus a democratic one, involving dozens or hundreds of individuals?

Key takeaways:
1) Holding an open and fair competition of ideas is a smart solution to the problem of making a decision based on a pool of information dispersed across a group of individuals.
2) Make decisions without the leader being present. Or when the leader is, the leader needs to facilitate instead of influence the decision making process.
3) Apply quorum over consensus in decision making to speed up. It might take till the end of time to convince or outlive an opposing person.


From the book:
"A great scientific discovery: the sophisticated group decision making by nonhuman animals. An investigation of behavioural biology, unravelling the honeybee democracy. A fascinating look into how roles and responsibilities, scouting, and foremost dancing, lead to group decision making."

"It seems that a critical stimulus for inducing a food collector to transform herself into a house hunter is that her stomach has been filled with food for a few days."

"there are differences in how direct democracy works between bee swarms and town meetings. For example, the scouts in a bee swarm have common interests (e.g., all want to choose the best available homesite) and they reach decisions by building a consensus.

The people in a town meeting, however, often have conflicting interests (e.g., some do and some don't want to help fund the town library), and they reach decisions by using the majority voting rule: each individual has one vote, all votes have equal weight, and the option that gets the majority wins. Another basic difference between bee swarm and town meeting is that a scout bee in a swarm, unlike a citizen in a meeting, cannot monitor each exchange within the group's debate and thereby have a synoptic overview of the discussion. Instead, a bee can only observe and react to the actions of her immediate neighbours in the swarm cluster, hence she operates without global knowledge of the information that percolates among her fellow swarm bees."


"While these differences-common versus conflicting interests and local versus global knowledge-between bee swarm and town meeting are real, they do not overshadow several extremely important similarities between the direct democracies of honeybees and human beings."

"Given that 3 to 5 percent of the bees in a swarm participate in the dance debate, we can estimate that a typical swarm of some 10,000 bees will have approximately 300 to 500 individuals contributing to the decision making process."

"It is always a "friendly” competition; the scout bees agree on what makes an ideal homesite, they are united in the goal of choosing the best available site, they share their information with full honesty, and ultimately they reach a complete agreement about their new residence. One valuable lesson that we can learn from the bees is that holding an open and fair competition of ideas is a smart solution to the problem of making a decision based on a pool of information dispersed across a group of individuals."


"the plots of the dance records showed that the scout bees' debates end with all or nearly all of the dancing bees advocating just one site, that is, showing a consensus. A burning question is, therefore, how does the fierce competition among groups of bees favoring different options get transformed into a harmonious agreement?"

[Daniel Duarte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic reading.
Considering that you are an animal behaviour enthusiast, that you are particularly fond of eusocial insects AND that you can ignore a few really disturbing experiments.
I failed at this last one so I gave it five stars based 'only' on the information available in the book. Lots of powerfull insights. The whole process of constructing the knowledge about the way bees make such a complex decision (deciding where to move the colony) is very interesting. Top Science!
but I can't avoid saying that some of the experiments are desastrous considering ethical standards. I don't know if they were approved by some commitee (I guess they where), but I still think that they were poorly (or lazily) designed. An experiment that kills more than a dozen of wild colonies to know the inside configuration of the nest doesn't sound ok for me.
it's all Big Science (with capitals) of course. So great that it doesn't seems to bother about the lives of their subjects, only the knowledge is important. Well, maybe I'm a romantic but I was appalled to read that more than a dozen colonies were poisoned (i.e. killed) with Calcium cyanide for a study of the internal shape of the nests. Some pages after describing the process and the research we can read some ethical considerations: "As I picked through the broken combs and dead bees, sooner or later coming across the lifeless queen, I felt sad to have killed a whole colony, but also excited, knowing that I was the first human to describe in detail the natural homes of honeybees"
Actually 15(!) colonies have the same fate.
In my opinion the selfish justification (being the first one!) don't do as excuse for killing 15(!) wild colonies. Science pushes knowledge forward but it is ok to damage whatever is in the way? Hope not.
I'm not against science, on the contrary, but I guess Science must evolve too.
there are other experiments and other considerations by the author, but... nothing really improves from this.
It must be said that the experiment was done in the 70's. Other times... but the careful considerations should have been improved for the book.

Ignoring this note.. It's fascinating stuff. the final chapters where the comparisons between complex nervous systems (e.g. a primate brain) and the swarm decision processes is very rich.
in the course of the book you will know about what is important in a nest candidate site, how bees evaluate this, how they communicate to other bees, how they decide wich is best, how they can synchronize their flight to the new home...
Consider spending decent amount of time in the graphics since they are very informative.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book got a full star demotion for its last chapter. For the most part, this is of the genre where scientists will write a popular account of their own career and their various experiments. I think Seely's work seems relatively uncontroversial (though I have essentially no counter-examples, so maybe this is all a bunch of hokum), so it doesn't come off as either attacking or defensive, which is often quite off-putting.

The good part of the book is that it's actually quite interesting to learn a bit more about how bees work, and I was shocked at how well we seem to understand how they communicate. Seeley very frequently mentions doing stuff like watching a bee communicate the location of a hive with waggle dances, then Seeley just goes to that location and sees the bees there. I had no idea that humans could understand bee language that well.

One thing that people may not like about this book (though I didn't mind it) is how trivial a lot of the information actually is. The experiments he describes seem like they are essentially the way you'd do those experiments (nothing shocking or novel about the approach), and the information gathered is essentially trivialities about what bees care about and how they gather that information. The answers are not particularly shocking, and my life would be no different if the answers had turned out to be something else. I did find it fairly irritating that every experiment done by someone other than Seeley was described as being some flavor of "brilliant" and every grad student and colleague was some sort of unparalleled genius. It's a bit gilding the lily.

OK, so on to the terrible final chapter. Seeley apparently decided that it was a good idea to try and draw "lessons" from how honeybees organize themselves for helping humans make decisions. Needless to say, these are mindless and stupid platitudes that are just being shoved into the honeybee framing. The problems that honeybees are solving are the easiest part of communication. They're essentially a single organism with perfectly aligned goals and they merely need to communicate facts to one another. Humans are amazing at that. Much better than any honeybee ever could be, so there are no lessons to draw from them about interesting problems for humans. Humans have various much more difficult problems around decisionmaking under uncertainty and in strategic situations (where each individual could take advantage of an asymmetry between individual interest and group interest). I suspect that Seeley knows this and added the final chapter as a way to try and make his bee research seem more interesting and useful, but it really grated on me.

3 of 5 stars

[Norma · Rating 4 out of 5]

How a honeybee colony swarms and finds a new home
Honeybee Democracy is an attractively presented book, from it's plain white cover with bees swirling around the title to the numerous black and white diagrams and graphs illustrating research projects and the coloured photographs studded throughout the text. But it seems undecided as to it's purpose - whether to be the story of Mr.Seeley's life and love of bees and their world, or to instead be an academic recounting of his personal experiments to determine how a swarm decides where to go after leaving the original home hive.

Much of the book is about his examination of the deduced from observation processes that the swarm conducts to find the future home, a process which is a life and death decision for the community: the new location has to be big enough to hold sufficient overwintering stores, be secure against adverse weather conditions such as wind and rain and with an entrance large enough for easy access but sufficiently small to defend. All essential if it is to survive. How the best available new site is first found, considered and, finally, accepted by the whole colony is carefully examined and makes fascinating reading.
More irritating, however, are the constant references that something specified will be discussed in Chapter X and also the careful background of any collaborators Seeley had during his experiments interrupting the ongoing text at the time, and so breaking the flow of what was occuring. Whilst the inclusion of such references is truly admirable, for this reader it would seem to have been better to include this information in the acknowledgments section at the rear of the book. Also at the end, following a brief comparison of brain and swarm, and the usefulness in considering bee decision making with that of human committees, is an index, a (long) list of illustration credits, plus notes. But no bibliography, sadly.

Overall, a very attractive, easy to read book (especially with selected skimming) for anyone interested in those mysterious, hard working colonies of bees who have been on this earth far longer than have we humans.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is good, not only because bees are interesting, but because Seeley knows how to teach science well and make it interesting. His expertise is in animal especially bee behaviour, but the scientific method he uses is so fun to read. What most impressed me was the way that he conducts his experiments. For example, he would adjust the height of different potential hives, paint dots on individual bees to identify them and then observe how many of those dance, and even find the best substance to block the movement of certain scout bees so that they cannot pass the message to others. Painstaking and passionate work and makes me want to do scientific research all over again.

So bees have an extremely complicated system to decide on which new potential place to build their new hive. It needs to be big enough, preferably high above ground, etc. Foraging bees, when lots of food is available, store lots of honey and become scouts and start looking for suitable sites. They assess the site by walking over it and flying in it to calculate the volume. They then go back and advertise their site. The better the site, the harder they advertise. Other scouts are recruited and will go and asses the site independently. Very quickly the best sites get more votes and eventually they agree unanimously on one site. To avoid gridlock, the intensity of advertisement drops over time, and once enough votes are cast, the scouts will go around to prepare the hive by warming it up, and then the whole swarm goes. Specific movements by the scouts who know the place guide the swarm to the new place.

To make the best decision, the leader must:
1. Prepare participants with the issues and background.
2. Not to endorse any particular point of view or else become like Bush who decides to invade Iraq wrongly.
3. Always let everyone speaks once before anyone is allowed to speak again. This allows the most diverse solutions to appear.
4. Have a secret ballot at the end
5. Try to get a majority vote