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What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees
For many of us, the buzzing of a bee elicits panic. But the next time you hear that low droning sound, look closer: the bee has navigated to this particular spot for a reason using a fascinating set of tools. She may be using her sensitive olfactory organs, which provide a 3D scent map of her surroundings. She may be following visual landmarks or instructions relayed by a hive-mate. She may even be tracking electrostatic traces left on flowers by other bees. What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees invites us to follow bees’ mysterious paths and experience their alien world.
Although their brains are incredibly small—just one million neurons compared to humans’ 100 billion—bees have remarkable abilities to navigate, learn, communicate, and remember. In What a Bee Knows, entomologist Stephen Buchmann explores a bee’s way of seeing the world and introduces the scientists who make the journey possible. We travel into the field and to the laboratories of noted bee biologists who have spent their careers digging into the questions most of us never thought to ask (for example: Do bees dream? And if so, why?). With each discovery, Buchmann’s insatiable curiosity and sense of wonder is infectious.
What a Bee Knows will challenge your idea of a bee’s place in the world—and perhaps our own. This lively journey into a bee’s mind reminds us that the world is more complex than our senses can tell us.
Although their brains are incredibly small—just one million neurons compared to humans’ 100 billion—bees have remarkable abilities to navigate, learn, communicate, and remember. In What a Bee Knows, entomologist Stephen Buchmann explores a bee’s way of seeing the world and introduces the scientists who make the journey possible. We travel into the field and to the laboratories of noted bee biologists who have spent their careers digging into the questions most of us never thought to ask (for example: Do bees dream? And if so, why?). With each discovery, Buchmann’s insatiable curiosity and sense of wonder is infectious.
What a Bee Knows will challenge your idea of a bee’s place in the world—and perhaps our own. This lively journey into a bee’s mind reminds us that the world is more complex than our senses can tell us.
363 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 7, 2023
47 people are currently reading
977 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Buchmann
15 books32 followersStephen Buchmann is an Adjunct Professor of Entomology and Ecology/Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ. Stephen has published nearly 200 scientific articles and 11 books. His newest book is "What a Bee Knows" from Island Press (DC). He is a pollination ecologist known for his studies of buzz pollination, oil-producing flowers, and the conservation biology of native bees and their flowers. His books include "The Forgotten Pollinators" with Gary Paul Nabhan, "The Reason for Flowers," and his children's book: "The Bee Tree" (Lee & Low Books, NY). Buchmann also enjoys landscape and macrophotography along with creating small fine art bronzes. He's a frequent guest on NPR radio programs including All Things Considered and Science Friday. His literary awards include the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, and the NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students K-12.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
February 11, 2024
I enjoyed delving into this one. The neurological make up of bees is very interesting and you will learn some very unexpected things.
The added appendices have a good guide on bee preservation and how to build bee houses for smaller bees, such as Mason and Leaf Cutter.
Give this one a good and learn some new facts about pollinators.
The added appendices have a good guide on bee preservation and how to build bee houses for smaller bees, such as Mason and Leaf Cutter.
Give this one a good and learn some new facts about pollinators.
May 17, 2023
This is not a simple and direct book to read! It is dense with information about bee habits and abilities, much of it so unexpected, outlandish, and downright elegant, that it leaves you amazed. All is based on sited research and controlled experimentation, and Mr. Buchmann is not writing for the layperson. I waded through the myriad of undefined, multi syllable science words with strange letter combinations, and it was well worth it. I did not understand every term, but I got the idea. Bees are rich with bodily features and tricks. They see and use light differently than we do to get around. They memorize tasty flower locations and go back to the hive and communicate how to get there. They can learn, solve a problem, recognize a human face, and even be trained to pull a string to get a nectar treat. Bees may even be sentient! The author's hope is that his readers will do what we can to save these precious pollinators and their habitats, and he outlines things that individuals can do no matter where and how they live. Put away the chemicals; our lives depend upon it!
November 16, 2023
Didn’t think it was possible to love bees even more than I already did!
Want to read
April 4, 2023I really want to believe in the central thesis of this book, that Bees are sentient!
May 31, 2023
What I liked about this book was not just the interesting information about bees and how they operate, but also about how they relate to us and other animals as well.
July 4, 2023
If you think about consciousness long enough, you either become a panpsychic, or you go into administration. - John Perry
May 14, 2024
This is a really good dive into what science knows about bees, including non-honeybee species. I learned a lot, especially around the physics of the wax and the shape of the hexagon, and this is the first bee book I've listened to that spent any amount of time explaining the lives of non-honey bee species, which I appreciated. The author tended to go off on tangents trying to draw conclusions about the bigger world using bees as the basis for various analogies, or as a starting point for bigger conversations such as the nature of man's place in the ecology of the planet and the nature of consciousness and mind.
I found the tangents to be distracting - the topics are big enough for their own books, and detracted from the infodump about bees, which is what I signed up for when I saw the cover.
I listened to the audiobook version via Overdrive from my public library.
I found the tangents to be distracting - the topics are big enough for their own books, and detracted from the infodump about bees, which is what I signed up for when I saw the cover.
I listened to the audiobook version via Overdrive from my public library.
March 22, 2024
I love bees. As a child, I didn't, being the sort of squirrelly little creature who would run panicked from any potential danger. But as a man, I garden, and bees of all sorts are my friends and allies. My yard is radically bee-friendly, a polyculture of flowering "weeds," grasses, wildflowers, and sunflowers...in addition to the flowers on my beans and squash and okra. Learning more about 'em is always worthy, and so I picked this up.
It's...dense. Buchanan's prose can be blunt and functional, and while he's got an occasionally playful bent, the book often reads like the textbook for a 300-level undergrad course on clade anthophila. Meaning, it's exhaustive and granular in the way of actual science.
It goes waaaay deeper than the title would imply, exploring all aspects of bee evolution and behavior. I'd been drawn to the titular concept, and to knowing more about bee intelligence as both an individual and superorganism level. That is not what you get, not for quite a while.
There were, for a bit, things that bothered me about the book. First, the occasional whispers of Dawkinsian antitheism. Evolution has no purpose, Buchmann reminds, on several occasions. It's utterly random. Which, of course, it isn't, rather self evidently. Mutations are chaotic, but evolution's purpose is adaptation relative to environment. Survival is its purpose, to the point where it is...on a macro level...almost a form of intelligence itself. One can argue about the ground of that, but, c'mon, dude.
Second, and more significantly: if the hypothesis is that bees may have their own particular form of sentience, that they can learn both individually and collectively, and that they can feel pain and have awareness, then much of the experimentation described is a moral horror. Like the scientific vivisection of the early modern era, eh? A little too Count Rugen, to drop a Princess Bride reference. I was just getting royally pissed at Buchmann for the hypocrisy of it all when he got into his chapter about sentience...and shared that he had the same qualms. Ultimately, we ended on the same page, and his recommendations on bee care are both vital and informed.
A little dense, but fascinating...and a necessary reminder of how vital these precious beings are in our catastrophically warming world.
It's...dense. Buchanan's prose can be blunt and functional, and while he's got an occasionally playful bent, the book often reads like the textbook for a 300-level undergrad course on clade anthophila. Meaning, it's exhaustive and granular in the way of actual science.
It goes waaaay deeper than the title would imply, exploring all aspects of bee evolution and behavior. I'd been drawn to the titular concept, and to knowing more about bee intelligence as both an individual and superorganism level. That is not what you get, not for quite a while.
There were, for a bit, things that bothered me about the book. First, the occasional whispers of Dawkinsian antitheism. Evolution has no purpose, Buchmann reminds, on several occasions. It's utterly random. Which, of course, it isn't, rather self evidently. Mutations are chaotic, but evolution's purpose is adaptation relative to environment. Survival is its purpose, to the point where it is...on a macro level...almost a form of intelligence itself. One can argue about the ground of that, but, c'mon, dude.
Second, and more significantly: if the hypothesis is that bees may have their own particular form of sentience, that they can learn both individually and collectively, and that they can feel pain and have awareness, then much of the experimentation described is a moral horror. Like the scientific vivisection of the early modern era, eh? A little too Count Rugen, to drop a Princess Bride reference. I was just getting royally pissed at Buchmann for the hypocrisy of it all when he got into his chapter about sentience...and shared that he had the same qualms. Ultimately, we ended on the same page, and his recommendations on bee care are both vital and informed.
A little dense, but fascinating...and a necessary reminder of how vital these precious beings are in our catastrophically warming world.
December 2, 2024
I just started looking more closely at the bees and other pollinators recently here in Northeast Ohio. I wanted to learn more and found this book. I hike a lot and contribute to iNaturalist. Our local parks use the data in iNaturalist to gather information about what's out there. The past two summers they have had month-long events asking people to try to find and record pollinators. I started looking more closely at the smaller critters that inhabit the parks nearby.
I really enjoyed most of this book. It was a good reference book for bee anatomy, and how bees interact with each other and the world around them. The first eight chapters were very enjoyable, especially reading about the author's experiences in the field. I wanted to read more of his stories. The author clearly enjoys bees. His enthusiasm for studying them and just watching them is obvious in his writings.
The last three chapters covered the topics: "Sleep and Dreaming in Bees", "What do Bees Feel?" and "Self-Awareness, Consciousness, and Cognition". They were more difficult to read. But, they are also very difficult to study for researchers.
I would recommend this book for people with a casual interest in bees and those who want to dig deeper into the research. There are a lot of references given.
I really enjoyed most of this book. It was a good reference book for bee anatomy, and how bees interact with each other and the world around them. The first eight chapters were very enjoyable, especially reading about the author's experiences in the field. I wanted to read more of his stories. The author clearly enjoys bees. His enthusiasm for studying them and just watching them is obvious in his writings.
The last three chapters covered the topics: "Sleep and Dreaming in Bees", "What do Bees Feel?" and "Self-Awareness, Consciousness, and Cognition". They were more difficult to read. But, they are also very difficult to study for researchers.
I would recommend this book for people with a casual interest in bees and those who want to dig deeper into the research. There are a lot of references given.
September 27, 2025
Filled with insightful and intriguing information, the book is nevertheless easy to read. Chapters lead the reader from the bee’s short but remarkable life to its awareness, so different from ours.
I thought I knew something about bees, but it turned out that there was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know that the majority of bees are solitary, ground nesters who do not live in hives. They are the rule, not the exception. I didn’t know that their color vision, being shifted to the ultra violet of the spectrum, bees don’t see reds. I didn’t know that bees (and flies,) easily avoid being swatted because motion doesn’t become motion for them until the rate of 200-250 frames per seconds. For humans it’s 20 fps, which is why motion pictures are run at 24 fps. I didn’t know that there are cuckoo bees that, just like the cuckoo bird, lays its eggs in another bee’s nest, where it will hatch first and cannibalize the host’s young.
I could go on, but best to allow interested readers to find out for themselves.
I thought I knew something about bees, but it turned out that there was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know that the majority of bees are solitary, ground nesters who do not live in hives. They are the rule, not the exception. I didn’t know that their color vision, being shifted to the ultra violet of the spectrum, bees don’t see reds. I didn’t know that bees (and flies,) easily avoid being swatted because motion doesn’t become motion for them until the rate of 200-250 frames per seconds. For humans it’s 20 fps, which is why motion pictures are run at 24 fps. I didn’t know that there are cuckoo bees that, just like the cuckoo bird, lays its eggs in another bee’s nest, where it will hatch first and cannibalize the host’s young.
I could go on, but best to allow interested readers to find out for themselves.
March 24, 2023
Bees use a wide range of senses to navigate through the world, sometimes in ways we can scarcely imagine. As a pollination ecologist with decades of research experience, Stephen Buchmann is an ideal guide to this world, at once both familiar and alien, in our own backyards.
Let’s start with that word “knows”. Buchmann cites his own experience and the work of many other researchers to make the case that bees form, memorize, and use mental maps; they can count; they feel pain; they can react to changes by enacting new plans, even when the plans will not bear fruit for most of a bee’s lifetime; and they can likely pass some cognitive tests that are beyond the ability of dogs and cats.
Full review here:
https://anoutsidechance.com/2023/03/2...
Let’s start with that word “knows”. Buchmann cites his own experience and the work of many other researchers to make the case that bees form, memorize, and use mental maps; they can count; they feel pain; they can react to changes by enacting new plans, even when the plans will not bear fruit for most of a bee’s lifetime; and they can likely pass some cognitive tests that are beyond the ability of dogs and cats.
Full review here:
https://anoutsidechance.com/2023/03/2...
April 8, 2024
I apologise to anyone around me who has to endure my endless bee conversation as I'm reading this book. As a clumsy oaf of a human trying to help out the solitary native bees I've observed nesting in our garden, this book provides a beautiful insight into imagining the world as bees know it (as far as science can so far tell us). It's awe-inspiring that such rich complexity emerges from a brain "the size of a poppy seed". I could write paragraphs about the information in this book but all I can say is that you will love bees more, or start loving them, through understanding them. We have so much to learn about more-than-human ways of knowing this world. Books like this open that hatch of your thinking to other perspectives.
May 4, 2024
Unfortunately, only a very small proportion of the book is spent on exploring the thoughts, memories and personalities of bees.
I learned lots of bee facts like their latin names, the names of their brain parts, the fact that most bees are solitary, that there exists bees with no stingers, etc. However, I was expecting to learn about psychological experiments showing the limits of bee cognition, but was disappointed; these discussions are very few and far between.
I learned lots of bee facts like their latin names, the names of their brain parts, the fact that most bees are solitary, that there exists bees with no stingers, etc. However, I was expecting to learn about psychological experiments showing the limits of bee cognition, but was disappointed; these discussions are very few and far between.
August 25, 2023
Interesting and I learned a few things. The writing style combined with probably unnecessary overuse of scientific language made it a bit difficult to read. Also a bit repetitive, but considering it was not the easiest to read, the repetition of information helped me to pick up on a few more tidbits that didn't register the first time.
December 6, 2023
There is a lot of interesting detail in this book, so I was hoping to like it better than I did. Unfortunately, the author jumps around in the content which tends (at my tender age of 73) to confuse me and make it difficult for me to remember the most compelling facts. It all gets dry and tedious after a while. I stopped reading it and instead added another bee book to my "Want to reads".
December 16, 2023
This book was dense and technical, which made some parts difficult to get through. However, it provided a wealth of information about bees. The two topics that stood out as themes were bee sexual behaviours and the argument for bee consciousness. This was the first book I read about bees themselves; it was fascinating.
November 30, 2023
Lots of great scientific information in here! Would recommend this one to anyone studying bees or curious about what they can do, think, and potentially feel. Dense with information, so it's a longer read.
August 16, 2024
This author LOVES bees. I knew what I was getting into and frankly prefer less specialized nature non-fiction. 3.4 stars for me, but if you truly love bees I don’t think you can do much better than this book.
September 18, 2024
Interesting book, and has the additional attraction to me that it mentions someone I know. The author will give you more information about bees than you ever thought possible, and some real eye openers.
August 15, 2023
Telling fascinating tales of bee biology, What a Bee Knows is a wide-ranging introduction that convinces that bees are sophisticated creatures, even individually. Read my full review at
September 12, 2023
Not a great storyteller. Bees are so fascinating but this book was really dry & hard to get through.
September 13, 2023
Very good book. Interesting, exciting, thought provoking, not boring. Highly recommend
October 18, 2023
educational, easy to read, & lots of info about the sex life of bugs & flowers ;)
Read
November 22, 2023Desisti do audiolivro porque o jeito de falar do narrador era extremamente irritante.
May 4, 2024
cutest book ever. 🐝💛💐
April 4, 2025
I will definitely read this again. Thank you for these insights and thoughts about all creatures but especially bees. This book only deepens the wonder and amazement they inspire.
July 28, 2025
Interesting, but not enough new information, since I've read many other volumes about these pollinators.
September 27, 2025
really opened my eyes about the wonderful world of bees
February 26, 2024
I learned a lot! You will too!
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews