The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild

by Thomas D. Seeley

Humans have kept honey bees in hives for millennia, yet only in recent decades have biologists begun to investigate how these industrious insects live in the wild. The Lives of Bees is Thomas Seeley's captivating story of what scientists are learning about the behavior, social life, and survival strategies of honey bees living outside the beekeeper's hive--and how wild honey bees may hold the key to reversing the alarming die-off of the planet's managed honey bee populations.

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

376 pages, Hardcover

Published May 28, 2019

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

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Thomas Seeley. His work on bees is exceptional and incredibly interesting. This book was a lot different from Honeybee Democracy. Seeley reminds me of Vaclav Smil, a tiny bit less detail oriented than Smill (but who isn't?), but has Smil's way of tying everything back to energy. Seeley is obsessed with how much energy bees need to do such things as build hives, fly to flowers, survive a takeover of queens. Here, in this book, he has laid it out in extensive detail. I skimmed over some of the numbers but others were deeply interesting. When it came to the amount of honey a bee ingests in different situions to have the energy to survive, how temperature (and not genes) changed what seemed to be innate behaviors (foraging and others), and the temperature of the hive, it was impossible not to care about the numbers -- mind-blowing.

Seeley asked, and tried his best to answer, if honeybees were entirely domesticated. Just as we have domesticated cows, dogs, and other animals, have we truly domesticated the honey bee? Seeley provided a history of how humans went from bee hunters to bee keepers. When humans were bee hunters, they sought out precious honey and beeswax. I hadn't really thought about it, but at times, in some societies, the products of bees, such as honey and beeswax were the major resource that brought in the lion's share of money. Along with this history of hunting the bee, Seeley discussed how we came to study the living conditions of the bees in order to trap them and improve their yield.

I really loved everything about this book.

Oddly enough, minutes before I started reading Seeley's books, I had just finished a book called Approach to Neuropsychology in which the author concluded by discussing the hopes parents have for their children and how they have a lot of influence early on and less as time goes by. Seeley began his book by discussing how, when he was a boy, he was interested in watching a tree that housed a beehive. His parents got him a book on honeybees. That book influenced him and sits on his desk today. I think that the author of the neuropsychology book was right about parents having less influence as time goes by, but reading about how Seeley's parent's supported and nurtured the wonder he experienced and expressed, made me think about how important it is to support the dreams and passions of our children. This book was a retelling of Seeley's entire life and his life's work. He has had such an enduring and intense passion for studying bees. It was a truly beautiful thing to read.

[Radiantflux · Rating 4 out of 5]

14th book of 2020.

Seeley's book does what it says on the cover: It offers a marvellous deep dive into the ecology of honeybees in the wild; all the while linking the lives of wild bees to their semi-domesticated brethren, where he offers a number of important suggestions for beekeepers to strengthen the health of their commercial bee stocks.

Each page on this book offered interesting insights: whether these be into the criteria bees use to select a new nesting site; the various tasks forager bees engage in—collection of water, nectar, pollen and sap; how mating swarms operate; how honeybees remain warm and active throughout winter (presumably as they evolved as a tropical species, as distinct from the artic bumblebee); how natural selection has rapidly developed resistance to Varroa destructor mites in wild bees, that domesticated bees lack.

A great book, that will change the way you view the not so humble Apis mellifera.

4-stars.

[Grrlscientist · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We have never known what we were doing
because we have never known what we were undoing.
We cannot know what we are doing until we know
what nature would be doing if we were doing nothing.”

— Wendell Berry, “Preserving wildness: An essay” (1987).

A variety of bee species have been managed by humans over thousands of years to provide a ready supply of honey and, much later, pollination services for a diversity of food crops. But the most common and widespread of these are honey bees, Apis mellifera. The American Beekeeping Federation estimates that honey bee pollination services are worth as much as $20 billion to US food crop production alone, and the National Honey Board valued the 2013 honey crop at over $300 million. Obviously, honey bees are economically important, but unlike domesticated animals, honey bees are not solely dependent upon people to survive. Even today, honey bees are quite capable of living in the wild, free from human interference.

What were the lives of wild honey bees like before humans began intensively managing them and moving them all over the world? Surprisingly, we know little about this. After a career of fieldwork and research into wild honey bees, Thomas Seeley, a distinguished professor of biology at Cornell University, provides insights in his quintessential book, The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild (Princeton University Press, 2019.). Not only does he celebrate the fascinating lives of honey bees, but he argues that by keeping honey bees in a way that respects their needs, we can reduce the frequency of disease outbreaks that they are prone to, and reduce the chances that these diseases may spread amongst native wild bee species and seriously harm them, too.

This interesting and readable book is both a personal account and a scholarly magnum opus as Professor Seeley recounts his studies of honey bees. Professor Seeley relies extensively on his lifelong investigations into wild bees — a passion that began when he was 11 years old — and uses rigorous scientific research to develop eleven chapters covering a number of important cultural, historical and natural history topics, including wild honey bee nests, colony reproduction, colony defense, food collection, temperature control and the annual cycle of wild honey bees.
I was particularly interested to learn that Professor Seeley thinks honey bees are not truly domesticated, especially in the way that dogs, cattle and maize are domesticated. “As a rule,” Professor Seeley writes, “the process of domestication produces organisms with traits that enable them to thrive in environments managed by humans but cause them to struggle in the wild” (Seeley 79).

Instead, Professor Seeley argues that honey bees are semi-domesticated, and reminds his readers that throughout recorded history, humans have domesticated animals by manipulating their environments and by changing their genes. On one hand, we have managed to manipulate honey bees’ environment through the nearly universal adoption of artificial beehives designed to enhance honey production, but we’ve not changed honey bee genes very much.

Although Professor Seeley does note decisive successes in selectively breeding honey bees for hygienic behaviors that improve resistance to devastating diseases such as American foulbrood, chalkbrood, and tracheal and Varroa mites, and also to enhance alfalfa pollination behaviors, he points out that “there is no evidence that artificial selection has altered in any general way the behavior of honey bees” (Seeley 91). He further points out that there are no distinct breeds of honey bees, indicating “that, in many (perhaps most), places, the genetics of honey bees is shaped far more by natural selection for traits that boost the genetic success of colonies on their own than by artificial selection for traits that can boost the profits from colonies owned by beekeepers. This explains why it is that honey bees do not need our manufactured hives, and instead are still perfectly at home in a hollow tree” (Seeley 93).

But the crux of Professor Seeley’s book is the final chapter, Darwinian Beekeeping. In this chapter, Professor Seeley summarises and reviews important differences in living conditions between wild and managed colonies that he detailed in this book. He argues that typical beekeeping practices are often stressful to the bees, and thus, can cause disease. In this chapter, Professor Seeley lists 14 ways that responsible beekeepers can change their practices to improve the overall health — and the lives — of their bees, so these insects can continue to pollinate our food crops and manufacture the honey that so many of us love.

Not only is this scholarly book accessible and well-written, but Princeton did a superb job producing it. It’s printed on heavy paper that will provide bibliophiles with intense pleasure to touch, to hold, and to read. The book features full-color photographs and graphics embedded throughout. The diagrams, charts and tables are placed within the text where they most effectively complement the discussion of various topics. At the end of the book, there is a section filled with considerable notes for each chapter, followed by an exhaustive list of references that will be very useful to scientists and to beekeepers in particular. Although the casual reader might suffer information overload (or alternatively, they may discover a new passion), The Lives of Bees will be highly-prized and often referenced by scientists, beekeepers and students of bees, and will fascinate anyone who wishes to learn more about the lives of these amazing insects.


NOTE: Originally published at Forbes on 30 June 2019.

[Onceinabluemoon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read many books on bees, there wasn’t anything new for me, a bit dry and just to be petty I listened to the audio book, everything was read in meters and footage, DROVE ME NUTS! Pick one unit, since your study was in ny it’s safe to stick with feet, acres, inches rather than both conversions, in reading you can skim, but listening was grating on my nerves!

[Nancy Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm sure there aren't many books about how honey bees live in the wild, and this one has sprung from the pen of a scholar and authority on the subject. Thomas Seeley has painstakingly studied wild colonies for years, as well as being a keeper of domestic bees himself.
Learning about the lives of social insects never ceases to amaze me and this book taught me things I'd never have guessed, such as, once emerging from the pupa stage, a young worker bee starts her career as a nurse for her younger siblings, then becomes a warehouse worker for honey production, and finally graduates to hunter/gatherer of nectar. So they are not born with a specialized job, but do a series of them, unless of course they are a queen, who has a very different life....well, you'd he to read the book.
The Lives of Bees will tell you everything you want to know about bees and a lot of things you didn't even know you wanted to know, along with reams of charts and statistics, which you could skip and still enjoy the book, but which I felt obliged to plow through because, hey, this is decades of research involving climbing trees, spying on bees (who are small and doubtless hard to keep track of) and building various houses to find out which the bees prefer, and why.
Some beautiful photographs, as well.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before I read this book I had the idea that all the wild honey bees in the united States hand been killed by varroa destructor. I could not have been more wrong. I see honey bees on flowers all the time. I wish I knew if they were wild honey bees. I doubt they are. I am glad that there are still wild honey bees in the wild in the united states. It gives me how that honey bees will survive despite the fact of varroa destructor, chalk brood, small hive beetle, deformed wing virus, and all the other pests and
diseases of honeybees. Because I worry that one day there will be no more honey bees. And that would be a shame.
This book talked about everything I ever wanted to know about how wild honey bees live. I was surprised that there are people out there who study wild honey bees. I am glad there are. This book is a weighty book literally. I think my arms got stronger by holding the book in my hands while reading it. Strong mind, strong body.
My favorite chapter was Darwinian beekeeping because it give suggestions on how I could apply what I read about how honey bees live in the wild to my honey bee hives. Thought I don't yet raise honey bees. I hope to raise honey bees someday.

[ella · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

The Lives of Bees is a very interesting read that taught me a lot about the nature of honey bees and how they best survive in the wild. Seeley explores countless aspects of bees’ lives, from the conditions they like to live in to reproduction to food procurement to fending off diseases, all while exploring the unnatural impact of humans’ actions as we try to domesticate bees. It’s a work that teaches us not only what honey bees do in nature, but also what we as humans (and beekeepers) are not doing but should be to support them.

That being said, this was definitely written by a scientist. It held so many interesting graphics and referenced so many studies, and while they were all interesting, I think Seeley got a little bogged down in the science. It felt more like a report on a bunch of different studies and methodologies than a journalistic exploration of the hidden lives of bees. I learned a lot, but a lot of that learning was supplemented by quite a bit of skimming over numbers and conversions that had little meaning to me or the overall significance of a specific study to the lives of bees in general.

I would still recommend it, especially if you’re super into beekeeping or the scientific method, but it was a tad dry for my tastes. I don’t think I was the target demographic for it and I’m sure many in more academic circles will find much deeper value in this book, but for me it just felt like assigned reading for class (which it was, but it didn’t have to feel that way). It’s basically one long academic paper. A very informational and well written academic paper! But an academic paper all the same.

[Stephanie Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is for SERIOUS beekeepers! Published by Princeton University Press and narrated by William Hope, it is a well researched dive into the study of the honey bee in the wild. Seeley started with conducting experiments in his own region. His research became more and more detailed and added greatly to our knowledge of the intricate world these bees live in.
I enjoyed the book and am grateful for Seeley’s studies.

[Liesl de Swardt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written by a professor of zoology, this book read more like a story. Whether you are beekeeper with your own apiary or just interested in bees, this is a wonderful read.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had mixed feelings about this book. I learned a lot about wild and domesticated bees, their life cycle, thermoregulation, reproduction and defense against parasites. Some of the research to determine this was amazing while some left a lot to be desired ethically. I was both fascinated and horrified, which I suppose makes an engaging story.

[Jenn "JR" · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this as an audio book and I loved all the stories about bees, how they live, where they build their homes and how to set up a "bee line" to track down their homes. I probably won't remember everything but I would definitely return to this book if I need a refresher. Bees are amazing animals and Thomas Seeley tells their story well.

[Kaitlyn R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incredibly informative and amazingly boring!
Tonnes of facts, scientific studies, and history about wild and kept bees! But it is clearly written by a scientist and probably for scientists too. Or at least for bee keepers, haha. Super, super dry. My mistake for not listening to it on a platform that allowed me to speed up. Live and learn.

Speaking of, I learned a lot about bees!! So much! looking at it as a scientific textbook on natural beekeeping and bees this is a great book. Less impersonal than an actual text book, but very informative. The author's tone and personal anecdotes can be charming.
If you want to read a history of beekeeping as a history book... well this book has some of that, but it's surrounded and drowned in numbers, figures, and play by play studies. As some one who normally reads for pleasure it was a bit of a chore to get through at times. Especially compared to another fairly scientific book about bugs I read recently, Never Home Alone (5 stars go read it!), the scales lean science and learning here vs Never Home Alone which felt to me to have a more narrative focus.

Anyway, If you want to know anything about bees, it's probably in here. Seemed pretty comprehensive to me but I'm no bee-ologist.
(I am more of one now than I was before I read this though I will tell you that. )

[Barbara Kemp · Rating 2 out of 5]

The information in this book was interesting, but the reading it was like reading a 300 page academic journal. I started to glaze over the data points that just kept coming. In academia, it’s important to lay out your thesis, methods, results and discussion, with all the data so scientists can draw their own conclusions. That isn’t what I was expecting from this book, but it’s what I got. I jus wanted a synopsis of the results and what we can take from those results. The author assumed his reader knew stuff that I didn’t know, such as how a queen can decide whether to lay drone eggs or worker eggs, who gets to be a nurse bee, which bee initiates a swarm, etc. I wasn’t even sure what it meant to swarm, had to look it up on Google. I know more about bees than I did before reading this book, but the slog wasn’t pleasant.

[Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly detailed and absolutely fascinating. I mean it, though. Make sure you're very interested in bees before you pick this up. This book reads very much like an academic paper, citing studies and experiments that the author and some of his doctorate students conduct on bees, on the threat of Varroa destructor and how that's driving wild colonies to evolve, on the history of beekeeping and the evolution of artificial hives, how those changes affects the bees (forcing the bees to produce more honey at all costs is not what's best for the bees, who'da thunk it) and what beekeepers can do to keep their hives healthy. Among other things! This is an absolute must read for anybody who wants to keep bees. I just think bees are neat, and I also enjoyed it immensely.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a scholarly study of the differences in development, sustainability, and health of wild bee colonies compared to those of standard husbandry of bees in agricultural hives. It includes the biology and evolutionary history of honeybees primarily in the U.S.A. Published by Princeton University Press, the book is intended for a serious audience but is certainly accessible to the general public.

There are 292 pages of text interspersed with photographs, graphs, and maps. The book is indexed, has notes by chapter, references, and a list of illustration credits. Seeley is a biology professor at Cornell University and his field work was done in that region.

The reader can read as deeply as desired. They can also skim the areas of data and read for the major concepts, especially the section on Darwinian Beekeeping, using the techniques of wild bees to preserve and protect our most essential pollinators. Recommended. (I read sections, not the entire work.)

Readalikes:
Timothy C. Winegard – The Mosquito; Thor Hanson – Buzz; Paige Embry – Our Native Bees; Edward D. Melillo – The Butterfly Effect; Seirian Sumner – Endless Forms; Bert Holldobler – The Superorganism; Jonathan P. Balcombe – Super Fly; Marlene Zuk – Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test; Mark W. Moffett – Adventures Among Ants.

Pace: Slow-paced
Writing style: Jargon-filled; Scholarly
Frame: New York State

[Koen Crolla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seeley is a biologist out of E.O. Wilson's stable, and where Wilson went with ants, he goes with honeybees. This book is an informative survey of what we know about how bees live their lives both in nature and in controlled hives—surprisingly little!—broadly focussed on Seeley's own research over the decades. He makes a compelling case that bees are undomesticated, and that after ten thousand years of beekeeping (and considerably less than that of scientific study) we still have a very long way to go in understanding them well enough to build effective managed hives, but also that Varroa destructor is not the end of the world and that we have solid, evidence-based strategies for minimising their impact (that commercial beekeepers aren't going to implement).
My own conclusion is that honey should cost $800 per jar.

[Samyy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thorough and complex. I learned a lot of interesting things about honey bees that I wouldn’t have known otherwise.
However there is a large technical aspect to this book so you have to hang on through all of that for the good stuff.
The last chapters on Darwinian beekeeping and differences between wild bee colonies and an apiary were a good summarization.

[Gaby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great book and I will certainly come back to it when I am in a position to keep my own bees because of the incredible information in it. But, the writing style was more technical than I expected and I listened to it as an audiobook. I wish I had read it instead so that I could have better connected better with some of the details and research.

[Jessica McKendry]

Kind of annoyed because I picked up this book wanting to learn more about bee behavior, their psychology, and how they perceive their world. I was kind of disappointed when it seems like the book is geared more toward beekeepers.

Which is great for beekeepers, but I am not a beekeeper lol.

Well written, but not what I was looking for.

DNF at 19%

[Giselle · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF'd 36 pages in

[Bri Lamb · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot more technical than I was expecting but I learned a lot.

[Megan Shaner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is written by a Cornell University professor. Despite this, it is doesn't read entirely as a pedagogical research paper. It does, however, have sections in each chapter that detail how experiments were carried out and how mathematical formulations were done to arrive at hard data. BUT (if you are not a numbers/scientific research fan) DON'T let this previous sentence stop you from picking up this book. I admit I did skim over the numbers to get back to the storytelling about the studies and what they found. Then again, I'm not a university student and won't be graded on this.

The types of experiments that Dr. Seeley has conducted over the past 50 years to learn about the habits and preferences of wild honeybees is fascinating. Through his research, the reader can see the contrast by which bees prefer to live versus how humans prefer they live under our care. This book also helps explain how the Varroa mite has exploded in population worldwide and how honeybees are either succumbing to this harmful pest or are adapting/evolving to withstand it.

The final chapter offers 14 ways that humans can improve the care of honeybees to more resemble their natural habitat, in a fashion Seeley calls Darwinian Beekeeping. For anyone interested in natural or top-bar beekeeping, these suggestions offer a scientific premise on which to base hive management. Although it may be tempting to skip ahead to the last chapter, I urge you to read the previous ones so that you can understand how and why Seeley came to his Darwinian Beekeeping suggestions.

[CHRIS · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve always wondered why Bees are so important to our survival, so curiosity got me on this one.

The Lives of Bees is not what I expected it to be, in a good way. Seeley doesn’t waste anytime jumping into the world of the wild honey bee. You know you’re in for a deep dive into honey bees when theirs a sub chapter called “Evolutionary Origins of Colony Thermoregulation” 🤯

The one complaint I have is that I thought I was getting into a history of the honey bee and how it’s impacted our everyday life, but it was more on the experiments Seeley was running in the area of Ithaca, New York. Don’t get me wrong it was still very intriguing but didn’t see that coming. He does go into a brief history of the honey bee. How long humans have been domesticating them, how they were extracting honey and how people made entire economies out of the honey bee.

For tens of thousands of years humans have relied on the wild honey bee for survival. Let’s hope we thousands more. Cheers 🐝

[S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating book giving an incredible amount of detail and insight into the life and behavior and survivability of bees. It also makes a strong point for the fact that bees literary grown by humans intended by humans are the ones that are seeing 40% losses each year usually due to pesticides and stuff but that bees in natural habitats and living in the wild well they may suffer from year to year are generally unaffected and are living and same concentrations as they were 40 to 50 years ago. I found this really fascinating and when you listen to it at 3 x speed it sounds like a guy who's really really excited about bees telling you everything he can possibly think of. And his passion is contagious

[Billie Hinton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read book for beekeepers. Seeley does research at Cornell University on many important aspects of the lives of bees - both feral and domestically kept - and uses his findings to improve the way we manage our bees. Many traditional practices actually weaken the bees’ abilities to survive pests such as varroa mites and the diseases they vector. He provides recommendations for improving our practices to work with the bees in ways that allow them to develop natural resistances as are found in the wild. Highly recommend.

[Marc Holland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic book, but there’s frustration reading this as a layman (no experience / prior knowledge about bees) The simple basics of how a bee hive works are assumed rather than explained. Also, this is a book by an academic, so it is mostly descriptions of detailed experiments and what was learned. I’d recommending reading the last chapter or two first, then going back into earlier chapters if you want a deep dive on any areas.

[Linda Gaines · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book covered some really interesting information, but it skipped some really basic information about the life cycle of bees that some readers like myself could benefit from. Also there were far too many places that read like a dissertation. There were all these figures and statistics that normally I find interesting, but it just bogged the book down.

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of particular interest is Seeley's contrasting of wild bees and domesticated bees. The arrogance of humans leads us to believe that we can control nature. But Seeley demonstrates that mother nature--not humanity--is in charge.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars because the author is an expert on the subject at hand. I listened to this book in the hopes of hearing about an entomologist's take on Varroa and was not disappointed.

[Al Mellifera · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books on bees ever written. Thomas Seeley is the top expert on bees and is a master at explaining bee behaviors. This is a must read for everyone interested in bees.