Download or read book Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz Runners written by Thomas D. Seeley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biologist’s up-close account of how he and fellow biologists cracked long-standing puzzles about honey bee behavior Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners takes readers inside a world seldom seen even by beekeepers, shedding light on twenty of the most compelling mysteries of honey bee behavior. Thomas Seeley has devoted a lifetime to the study of honey bees and their colonies, unraveling the secrets of these wondrous insects in a career spanning six decades. In this book, he weaves illuminating personal stories with the latest science, explaining such mysteries as how worker bees function as scouts to choose a home site for their colony, furnish their home with beeswax combs, and stock it with brood and food while keeping tens of thousands of colony inhabitants warm and defended from intruders. Along the way, he shares the experiences that drew him to these studies, the small observations that led to big breakthroughs, and the sense of excitement that came with probing each mystery. Richly illustrated, Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners provides a rare look at how a singularly passionate scientist and his colleagues deciphered the pipings, shakings, and puzzling tremble dances of honey bees, and how this journey of scientific discovery continues to shape our understanding of these remarkably intelligent and vitally important insects.
Download or read book Honeybee Democracy written by Thomas D. Seeley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-20 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How honeybees make collective decisions—and what we can learn from this amazing democratic process Honeybees make decisions collectively—and democratically. Every year, faced with the life-or-death problem of choosing and traveling to a new home, honeybees stake everything on a process that includes collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, and consensus building. In fact, as world-renowned animal behaviorist Thomas Seeley reveals, these incredible insects have much to teach us when it comes to collective wisdom and effective decision making. A remarkable and richly illustrated account of scientific discovery, Honeybee Democracy brings together, for the first time, decades of Seeley's pioneering research to tell the amazing story of house hunting and democratic debate among the honeybees. In the late spring and early summer, as a bee colony becomes overcrowded, a third of the hive stays behind and rears a new queen, while a swarm of thousands departs with the old queen to produce a daughter colony. Seeley describes how these bees evaluate potential nest sites, advertise their discoveries to one another, engage in open deliberation, choose a final site, and navigate together—as a swirling cloud of bees—to their new home. Seeley investigates how evolution has honed the decision-making methods of honeybees over millions of years, and he considers similarities between the ways that bee swarms and primate brains process information. He concludes that what works well for bees can also work well for people: any decision-making group should consist of individuals with shared interests and mutual respect, a leader's influence should be minimized, debate should be relied upon, diverse solutions should be sought, and the majority should be counted on for a dependable resolution. An impressive exploration of animal behavior, Honeybee Democracy shows that decision-making groups, whether honeybee or human, can be smarter than even the smartest individuals in them.
Download or read book The Lives of Bees written by Thomas D. Seeley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Following the Wild Bees written by Thomas D. Seeley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A how-to book on an exhilarating outdoor activity and a unique meditation on the pleasures of the natural world Following the Wild Bees is a delightful foray into the pastime of bee hunting, an exhilarating outdoor activity that used to be practiced widely but which few people know about today. Weaving informative discussions of bee biology with colorful anecdotes, personal insights, and beautiful photos, Thomas Seeley describes the history and science behind this lost pastime and how anyone can do it. The bee hunter’s reward is a thrilling encounter with nature that challenges mind and body while also giving insights into the remarkable behavior of honey bees living in the wild. Whether you’re a bee enthusiast or just curious about the natural world, this book is the ideal companion for newcomers to bee hunting and a rare treat for armchair naturalists.
Download or read book Honeybee Ecology written by Thomas D. Seeley and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2025-03-11 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Honeybee Democracy, a classic account of the ecological factors that shape the social lives of honeybees For many years, research on honeybee social life dealt primarily with the physiological processes underlying the social system of the bee rather than the ecological factors that have shaped its societies. Thomas Seeley’s landmark book unites the two approaches, emphasizing ecological studies of honeybee social behavior while also offering fresh perspectives on honeybee behavior and communication. It covers a broad range of topics, from adaptiveness of worker sterility and the economics of nest construction to information-center foraging, individual versus colony level selection, sex ratio evolution, colonial thermoregulation, evolution of colony defense, and adaptive radiation in colony design. Honeybee Ecology presents honeybees as a model system for investigating advanced social life among insects from an evolutionary perspective.
Download or read book Better Queens written by Jay Smith and published by X-Star Publishing Company. This book was released on 2011-05-22 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jay Smith was one of the great beekeepers and queen breeders of all time. There are many queen breeding books by scientists or small-scale breeders, but this is by a beekeeper who raised thousands of queens every year. This is much more applicable to practical queen rearing. This is also a method that does not require grafting, good for those of us who can't see well enough to graft, and does not require the purchase of special equipment, good for those of us lacking in the funds to buy one of the graftless systems on the market.
Download or read book The Idle Beekeeper written by Bill Anderson and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From building a hive to harvesting honey, a top urban beekeeper shares how to care for bees the simple, mindful way. Global bee populations have been rapidly declining for years, and it’s not just our honey supply that’s at stake: the contribution of bees to the pollination of crops is essential to human survival. But even in industrial apiaries, bees are in distress, hiving in synthetic and hostile environments. Enter idle beekeeping: the grassroots, low-intervention system that seeks to emulate the behavior and habitat of bees in the wild—and it only requires two active days of beekeeping per year, one in the spring and another in the fall. In The Idle Beekeeper, Bill Anderson calls upon his years of applied curiosity as an urban beekeeper to celebrate these underappreciated insects and show how simple and rewarding beekeeping can be. In this entertaining, philosophical, and practical guide, Anderson shares why and how to build a hive system that is both cutting-edge and radically old. Maximum idleness is achieved through step-by-step directions to help the beekeeper gently harvest honey with minimum effort, make mead and beeswax candles, and closely observe and understand these fascinating and productive social creatures. For anyone interested in keeping bees, The Idle Beekeeper is the definitive guide to getting started, even in a city, and without effort. Includes information on: Building your idle hive Caring for your colony Harvesting honey Making mead Making beeswax candles Being mindful and empathetic while raising bees And more Praise for The Idle Beekeeper “Charming. . . . Anderson . . . lays out a low-maintenance approach to his hobby. . . . Readers keen on actually keeping bees themselves should find this information-packed book’s instructional component particularly useful, and Anderson’s fellow idlers will appreciate his laissez-faire personal ethos.” —Publishers Weekly “Anderson’s love of bees and beekeeping is apparent and creates an effective enticement for readers to become beekeepers. His minimalist approach provides an easy entry to a potentially intimidating pastime.” —Booklist
Download or read book Common Bees of Eastern North America written by Olivia Messinger Carril and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bees play an essential role in the pollination of native plants and agricultural crops across the globe. In North America alone there are more than 4,000 bee species. In spite of their abundance and diversity, there is no accessible field guide for the non-expert. This book will remedy that situation by providing a carefully crafted introduction to bee identification for eastern North America. No portable field guide could include coverage of the myriad species in the region, so the book concentrates on identifying bees at the genus level. It includes information on the 72 different genera that are found east of the Rockies"--
Download or read book Field Guide to the Flower Flies of Northeastern North America written by Jeffrey H. Skevington and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Covers all 416 species of flower flies that occur north of Tennessee and east of the Dakotas, including the high Arctic and Greenland"--Page [4] of cover.
Download or read book Spider Communication written by Peter N. Witt and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concentrating on the complex spider communication system, this book assembles the most recent multidisciplinary advances of leading researchers from many countries to assess the peculiar role spiders play in the animal kingdom. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Asian Honey Bees written by Benjamin P. Oldroyd and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The familiar European hive bee, Apis mellifera, has long dominated honey bee research. But in the last 15 years, teams in China, Japan, Malaysia, and Thailand began to shift focus to the indigenous Asian honey bees. Benjamin Oldroyd, well known for his work on the genetics and evolution of worker sterility, has teamed with Siriwat Wongsiri, a pioneer of the study of bees in Thailand, to provide a comparative work synthesizing the rapidly expanding Asian honey bee literature. After introducing the species, the authors review evolution and speciation, division of labor, communication, and nest defense. They underscore the pressures colonies face from pathogens, parasites, and predators--including man--and detail the long and amazing history of the honey hunt. This book provides a cornerstone for future investigations on these species, insights into the evolution across species, and a direction for conservation efforts to protect these keystone species of Asia's tropical forests.
Download or read book The Art of the Bee written by Robert E. Page Jr. and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of bees on our world is immeasurable. Bees are responsible for the evolution of the vast array of brightly colored flowers and for engineering the niches of multitudes of plants, animals, and microbes. They've painted our landscapes with flowers through their pollination activities, and they have evolved the most complex societies to aid their exploitation of the environment. The parallels between human and insect societies have been explored by countless sociobiologists. Traditional texts present stratified layers of knowledge where the reader excavates levels of biological organization, each building on the last. In this book, Robert E. Page, Jr., delves deep into the evolutionary history and the sociality of bees. He presents fundamental biology-not in layers, but wrapped around interesting themes and concepts, and in ways designed to explore and understand each concept. Page uses the social contract as a way to examine the complex social system of bee societies, a contract that has been written over millions of years of social evolution on the fabric of DNA. The book examines the coevolution of bees and flowering plants, bees as engineers of the environment, the evolution of sociality, the honey bee as a superorganism and how it evolves, and the mating behavior of the queen. The resulting book explores the ways human societies and bee colonies are similar-not from a common ancestry with shared genes for sociality, but from shared fundamentals of political philosophy.
Download or read book Britain s Insects written by Paul D. Brock and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The go-to photographic guide to Britain and Ireland’s insects Britain’s Insects is an innovative, up-to-date, carefully designed and beautifully illustrated field guide to Britain and Ireland's twenty-five insect orders, concentrating on popular groups and species that can be identified in the field. Featuring superb photographs of live insects, the guide covers the key aspects of identification and provides information on status, distribution, seasonality, habitat, food plants and behaviour. It also offers insight into the life history of the various insect groups, many of which are truly amazing. This is the go-to guide for entomologists, naturalists, gardeners, wildlife photographers and anyone else interested in insects, whatever their level of knowledge. More than 2,600 stunning photographs, carefully selected to show key identification features Photo guides to every insect order, covering 316 families and almost 850 genera Covers 1,653 species, of which 1,476 are illustrated Designed to allow easy, accurate comparison of similar species Up-to-date distribution maps and charts summarizing adult seasonality QR codes that link to sound recordings of grasshoppers and crickets Information on photographing and recording insects to help conservation
Download or read book Honey in the Comb written by Eugene E. Killion and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How Birds Evolve written by Douglas J. Futuyma and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-10-29 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Why are male birds often so brightly colored? Why do some birds lay more eggs than others? Will bird species adapt to climate change? In How Birds Evolve, Douglas Futuyma invites readers into the amazing world of bird evolution to answer these and other questions. Futuyma's goal in this book is not to offer a comprehensive evolutionary history of birds, but to explore how the processes of evolution produced the distinctive features and behaviors we observe in birds today as well as their impressive diversity. Using one or two birds per chapters as a lens into broader questions, Futuyma explores how a bird's evolutionary history helps us understand the diversity of species and the bird tree of life and how natural selection explains most of the characteristics of birds from how populations adapt to sexual selection and birds' amazing social behavior. Futuyma concludes by discussing the future of birds, particularly patterns of extinction and whether they can adapt to a changing climate. Ultimately, Futuyman wants readers to see that evolutionary biology helps us to better understand birds, and that the reverse is also true: studies of birds have informed almost every aspect of evolutionary biology, from Darwin to today"--
Download or read book The Book of Frogs written by Tim Halliday and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-01-29 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A huge, beautiful compendium of 600 frogs from around the world, from the famed poison-arrow variety on up to the intriguingly named plaintive rain frog.” —Wired With over 7,000 known species, frogs display a stunning array of forms and behaviors. A single gram of the toxin produced by the skin of the Golden Poison Frog can kill 100,000 people. Male Darwin’s Frogs carry their tadpoles in their vocal sacs for sixty days before coughing them out into the world. The Wood Frogs of North America freeze every winter, reanimating in the spring from the glucose and urea that prevent cell collapse. The Book of Frogs commemorates the diversity and magnificence of all of these creatures, and many more. Six hundred of nature’s most fascinating frog species are displayed, with each entry including a distribution map, sketches of the frogs, species identification, natural history, and conservation status. Life-size color photos show the frogs at their actual size—including the colossal seven-pound Goliath Frog. Accessibly written by expert Tim Halliday and containing the most up-to-date information, The Book of Frogs will captivate both veteran researchers and amateur herpetologists. As frogs increasingly make headlines for their troubling worldwide decline, the importance of these fascinating creatures to their ecosystems remains underappreciated. The Book of Frogs brings readers face to face with six hundred astonishingly unique and irreplaceable species that display a diverse array of adaptations to habitats that are under threat of destruction throughout the world. “If you are a serious (and I mean serious) fan of the frog, you are in for a real treat.” —Boing Boing
Download or read book Europe s Dragonflies written by Dave Smallshire and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La 4e de couverture indique: "Europe's Dragonflies is a comprehensive, lavishly illustrated and beautifully designed photographic field guide to the damselflies and dragonflies of Europe. Written by two well-travelled experts, the book covers all 140 resident and vagrant species recorded, focussing on the field identification of adult insects. Concise species profiles highlight key identification features and provide information on behaviour, habitat preferences, distribution, flight periods, status and conservation. Other sections cover identification tips, conservation status and legislation. Presenting an unsurpassed selection of images of the highest quality, this is the go-to guide for anyone wishing to know more about these amazing and fascinating insects."
