What do you think?
Rate this book
Biology of the Honey Bee
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.
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.
294 pages, Paperback
First published October 21, 1987
6 people are currently reading
185 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 7, 2014
Mark Winston, I ask your forgiveness for FORGETTING (aaarrggh) to include you in the Acknowledgments of my novel The Bees. Your book is SO brilliant and clear, any lay person (i.e. not a biologist) interested in the well-expressed and most fascinating truth of the beehive, will enjoy this book.
And, should I be fortunate enough for my novel to be reprinted, I will rectify my appalling omission.
Bee-lovers, you will enjoy this book so much that you will bore your family and friends about the amazingness of bees.
And, should I be fortunate enough for my novel to be reprinted, I will rectify my appalling omission.
Bee-lovers, you will enjoy this book so much that you will bore your family and friends about the amazingness of bees.
February 19, 2014
Required reading for my beekeeping class. As the title would suggest, this is a bee biology book. I can't recommend it for pleasure reading unless you are really into bees. But as a reference, it's great.
April 17, 2021
I read this book to gain foundational knowledge for my graduate school research involving honey bee scent foraging behavior. It is an excellent resource for honey bee biology education for apiarists, though a bit dated. It will introduce you to so many of the most important topics and historical research done with honey bees. As I mentioned, it is dated and will need to be supplemented with other texts to gain a complete picture of current knowledge in the field. The writing is really easy to follow and clear, even for non-academic folks. Highly recommend!
March 6, 2018
A very thorough book on bee biology. It’s quite technical but I found it surprisingly readable. It needs a bit of an update and could do with more illustrations and would otherwise have scored as five stars.
May 6, 2019
It is just an amazing read. The intricate details of the Honeybee's lives and the perfection of their daily lives , their hive construction is brilliant.
January 28, 2024
Very informative and I could follow the text easily. A good supplemental text for learning about bees and beekeeping.
August 19, 2015
"The honey bee exhibits a combination of individual traits and social cooperation which is unparalleled in the animal kingdom."
One can't live on fiction alone: reading about nature helps keep one's mind in balance. A year ago I reviewed Sue Hubbell's A Book of Bees , a wonderful book about the practice of beekeeping. Dr. Mark L. Winston is one of the world's foremost experts on honey bees and his monograph "The Biology of the Honey Bee" (1987) summarizes well over a 100 years' worth of research into the Apis mellifera species. While the index contains almost 1,000 references to scientific articles and books on bees, the volume is easily accessible to nonspecialists in the field, to ordinary people curious about this fascinating animal, which provides such huge economic benefits to mankind. According to the government sources, in the United States economy "honey bees account for more than 15 billion dollars through their vital role in [crop pollination]". For me, personally, bees are important in yet another way - they are my favorite animal species.
Honey bees are in grave danger: all over the world bee populations are rapidly declining due to various factors, but mostly because of a recent phenomenon called "colony collapse disorder", characterized by "a rapid, unexpected, and catastrophic loss of bees in a hive." We need to try harder to save the bees. Pandas and dolphins are perhaps cuter, but bees are way more important!
The monograph, whose first sentence serves as an epigraph to this review, presents the evolutionary history of bees, the bee anatomy and resulting functions, the bee development cycle, the three bee castes (workers, queens, and drones), the nest architecture, the age-related activities of worker bees (there are well over twenty typical activities that bees are involved in), the collection of food, the world of bee pheromones (chemicals used for communication among members of a species), and the complicated system of mating. The two chapters that are by far the most interesting to me are dedicated to the language that bees use to communicate finding food sources and the phenomena of swarming and supersedure.
I do not think there exists a more fascinating marvel of nature than the dance language of the honey bee. Forager bees who have discovered a new source of food (nectar or pollen) come back to the hive and using several different types of dances, communicate to other bees the existence of the new source of food as well as its profitability, and provide exact directions to that source. Since the bee dance is performed in a vertical plane of the comb, and the directions need to be given in the horizontal plane of the terrain, the bees are able to translate the dance angle from the gravitational vertical into the solar angle (the azimuth of the sun when they exit the colony). Even more extraordinary is the bees' ability to compensate for the movement of sun during the day. They seem to be doing quite advanced computations!
Swarming is the way of bees (macro)reproduction. "In this type of colony division a majority of the workers and the old or the new queen leave the nest to search for a new home." Research into what exact factors cause swarming is still ongoing. Being a math person I am in awe of the fact that forager bees - when searching for a place to establish the new colony and estimating a cavity size - use a process similar to one applied in integral calculus. The precision with which bees build the hexagonal cells in the comb and the accuracy of comb spacing are stunning.
Everybody can and should read "The Biology of the Honey Bee", a serious yet easily accessible research monograph about humans' best friends in the animal world. And please help save the bees!
Four stars.
One can't live on fiction alone: reading about nature helps keep one's mind in balance. A year ago I reviewed Sue Hubbell's A Book of Bees , a wonderful book about the practice of beekeeping. Dr. Mark L. Winston is one of the world's foremost experts on honey bees and his monograph "The Biology of the Honey Bee" (1987) summarizes well over a 100 years' worth of research into the Apis mellifera species. While the index contains almost 1,000 references to scientific articles and books on bees, the volume is easily accessible to nonspecialists in the field, to ordinary people curious about this fascinating animal, which provides such huge economic benefits to mankind. According to the government sources, in the United States economy "honey bees account for more than 15 billion dollars through their vital role in [crop pollination]". For me, personally, bees are important in yet another way - they are my favorite animal species.
Honey bees are in grave danger: all over the world bee populations are rapidly declining due to various factors, but mostly because of a recent phenomenon called "colony collapse disorder", characterized by "a rapid, unexpected, and catastrophic loss of bees in a hive." We need to try harder to save the bees. Pandas and dolphins are perhaps cuter, but bees are way more important!
The monograph, whose first sentence serves as an epigraph to this review, presents the evolutionary history of bees, the bee anatomy and resulting functions, the bee development cycle, the three bee castes (workers, queens, and drones), the nest architecture, the age-related activities of worker bees (there are well over twenty typical activities that bees are involved in), the collection of food, the world of bee pheromones (chemicals used for communication among members of a species), and the complicated system of mating. The two chapters that are by far the most interesting to me are dedicated to the language that bees use to communicate finding food sources and the phenomena of swarming and supersedure.
I do not think there exists a more fascinating marvel of nature than the dance language of the honey bee. Forager bees who have discovered a new source of food (nectar or pollen) come back to the hive and using several different types of dances, communicate to other bees the existence of the new source of food as well as its profitability, and provide exact directions to that source. Since the bee dance is performed in a vertical plane of the comb, and the directions need to be given in the horizontal plane of the terrain, the bees are able to translate the dance angle from the gravitational vertical into the solar angle (the azimuth of the sun when they exit the colony). Even more extraordinary is the bees' ability to compensate for the movement of sun during the day. They seem to be doing quite advanced computations!
Swarming is the way of bees (macro)reproduction. "In this type of colony division a majority of the workers and the old or the new queen leave the nest to search for a new home." Research into what exact factors cause swarming is still ongoing. Being a math person I am in awe of the fact that forager bees - when searching for a place to establish the new colony and estimating a cavity size - use a process similar to one applied in integral calculus. The precision with which bees build the hexagonal cells in the comb and the accuracy of comb spacing are stunning.
Everybody can and should read "The Biology of the Honey Bee", a serious yet easily accessible research monograph about humans' best friends in the animal world. And please help save the bees!
Four stars.
September 17, 2018
Winston's Biology of the Honey Bee, though dated given the mass volume of new information concerning honey bees available today [2018], provides an excellent overview of the biology and life history of honey bees. Well worth reading if you are a beekeeper.
March 6, 2016
Extremely informative, well written, and well cited.
January 26, 2011
an early christmas gift from Faith :)
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews