In the spring of 1963, when our guest, Dr. Thomas Seeley, was not quite 11 years old, he lived — as he still does today — in a wooded stream valley called Ellis Hollow, which is just east of Ithaca, New York. Dr. Seeley writes: “It is here I first observed a magnificent pileated woodpecker chiseling into a tree for carpenter ants, first watched a steely-eyed snapping turtle laying eggs deep in moist soil, and first showed my pet raccoon how to hunt for crayfish under rocks in little streams… One day, back in early June 1963, I was walking along Ellis Hollow Road, when I heard a loud buzzing sound and saw a bread-truck-size cloud of honey bees circling the ancient black walnut tree that stands beside the road about 100 meters east of my family’s house.” From a distance, Dr. Seeley watched as the swarm of bees took up residence in a cavity in the tree. Why, he wondered, did the bees choose that particular tree cavity for their home?
Humans have lived with bees for our entire existence as a species, but the vast majority of our studies have focused on bees in managed colonies, whether the clay cylinders people used to keep bees in the Iron Age or the white boxes of modern apiaries. But here, in the black walnut tree, were wild bees — living without human supervision or human understanding. How wild bees lived presented great mystery. Dr. Seeley writes, “I visited [the bee tree] often that summer and gradually overcame my fear of the bees, eventually learning that I could watch them close up (while perched atop a stepladder) without being stung. It was a time of wonder…. Watching that swarm take up residence in that tree on that day is the spark that ignited my long-standing passion to understand how honey bees live in the wild.”
That eleven-year-old in Ithaca grew to become the world’s leading authority on honey bees and a magnificently gifted writer about their worlds. For over four decades, Dr. Thomas Seeley has led research on honey bees’ behavior, social life and ecology. He writes about the science, natural history and surprising stories behind how honey bees live in the wild in his new book: The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honeybee in the Wild. Dr. Seeley is the Horace White Professor in Biology at Cornell University and is the author of four other books on honey bees.
In this episode, we speak with Dr. Seeley about the long historical relationship between humans and honey bees (which is as old as humanity itself), how honey bees live in the wild, why wild honey bees are thriving while managed bee colonies are collapsing at alarming rates, and how applying lessons learned from wild bees can improve our beekeeping.
