A Yale University podcast devoted to exploring the big questions animals raise about what it means to be human.
Ep. 16 – Thomas Seeley on the Lives of Bees
Dr. Thomas Seeley as a graduate student in 1976. “[When] I started graduate school in 1974 to earn a PhD in biology, and I had to choose a topic for my thesis research, I decided to investigate what honey bees seek when they (not a beekeeper) choose their living quarters,” Dr. Seeley writes. “In doing so, I figured that I could apply to honey bees the ‘know- thy-animal-in-its-world’ rule that I was learning from my thesis adviser at Harvard, the German ethologist Bert Hölldobler. I also hoped that I could foster a new approach to studying honey bees, one in which we view them as amazing wild creatures that live in hollow trees in forests, not just as the ‘angels of agriculture’ that live in white boxes in apiaries.” (Photos courtesy of Thomas Seeley)
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?
“If you are a beekeeper, then I hope [this book about] the astonishing natural history of honey bees has inspired you to consider pursuing bee-keeping in a way that focuses less on treating a honey bee colony as a honey factory or a pollination unit and more on admiring it as an amazing form of life,” Dr. Seeley writes in his new book, The Lives of Bees.“More than any other insect, the honey bee has the power to capture our hearts and connect us emotionally with the wonders and mysteries of nature. We love these beautifully social bees, we want them in our back- yards, and many of us cannot bear the idea of living without them.”
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.”
Dr. Thomas Seeley on a “bee hunt,” an outdoor pursuit that was once widely practiced in North America and Europe but is little known today. In his new book The Lives of Bees, Dr. Seeley explains how he uses the craft of “bee hunting” to find the wild bees he studies.
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.
The red arrow in this photo points to the entrance to a wild bee colony’s nest in Cornell University’s 1,700-hectare Arnot Teaching and Research Forest, where Dr. Seeley has conducted many of his studies of wild honey bees for decades.
The entrance to a nest of wild honey bees. During swarming, honey bees carefully choose their homes via an impressive, democratic, collective decision-making process that involves rigorous debate, information gathering, and consensus building. Dr. Seeley discovered that bees in wild swarms prefer certain features of nest entrance (size, direction, height and location) and nest cavities (volume and presence of beeswax combs from a previous colony).
Worker bees filling up on honey. Seeley quotes Charles Darwin: “He must be a dull man who can examine the exquisite structure of a comb, so beautifully adapted to its end, without enthusiastic admiration,” Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species in 1859.
Ancient evidence of beekeeping comes from from the sun temple of the pharaoh Nyuserre, which was built almost 4,500 years ago. “[Already] several thousand years ago, beekeepers in Egypt and the lands east of the Mediterranean Sea were managing colonies in ways that were beneficial for people but were not altogether benevolent for the bees: packing colonies in crowded apiaries, stealing their honey, and manipulating their reproduction,” Dr. Seeley writes in The Lives of Bees.
“In looking at how a wild colony builds its nest, acquires its food, keeps itself warm, rears its young, defends itself from intruders, and passes on its genes by casting swarms and rearing drones, we have learned that a colony of honey bees presents us with countless mysteries,” Dr. Seeley writes in The Lives of Bees.
