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How the lives of wild honey bees offer vital lessons for saving the world's managed bee coloniesHumans 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.Seeley, a world authority on honey bees, sheds light on why wild honey bees are still thriving while those living in managed colonies are in crisis. Drawing on the latest science as well as insights from his own pioneering fieldwork, he describes in extraordinary detail how honey bees live in nature and shows how this differs significantly from their lives under the management of beekeepers. Seeley presents an entirely new approach to beekeeping -- Darwinian Beekeeping -- which enables honey bees to use the toolkit of survival skills their species has acquired over the past thirty million years, and to evolve solutions to the new challenges they face today. He shows beekeepers how to use the principles of natural selection to guide their practices, and he offers a new vision of how beekeeping can better align with the natural habits of honey bees.Engagingly written and deeply personal, The Lives of Bees reveals how we can become better custodians of honey bees and make use of their resources in ways that enrich their lives as well as our own.



About the Author

Thomas D. Seeley

Thomas D. Seeley is the Horace White Professor in Biology within the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, where he teaches courses in animal behavior and does research on the biology of honey bees.He grew up in Ithaca, New York. He began keeping and studying bees while a high school student, when he brought home a swarm of bees in a wooden box. He went away to college at Dartmouth in 1970, but he returned to Ithaca each summer to work at the Dyce Laboratory for Honey Bee Studies at Cornell, where he learned the craft of beekeeping and began investigating the inner workings of the honey bee colony. Thoroughly intrigued by the smooth functioning of bee colonies, he went on to graduate school at Harvard University where he was supervised by two "ant men" (Drs. Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson) , began his research on bees in earnest, and earned his Ph.D. in 1978. He then taught at Yale for six years, before working his way home to Ithaca/Cornell in 1986, where he has been ever since. In recognition of his scientific work, he has received the Senior Scientist Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany, been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) .His research focuses on the behavior, social life, and ecology/natural history of honey bees and has been summarized in five books: Honeybee Ecology (1985, Princeton) , The Wisdom of the Hive (1995, Harvard) , Honeybee Democracy (2010, Princeton) , Following the Wild Bees (2016, Princeton) and The Lives of Bees (2019, Princeton) .



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