by Thomas D. Seeley
Princeton University Press, 2019
The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild
Tom Seeley is an authority on honey bees. His wonderful book Honey Bee Democracy describes how bees decide on a new home and Wisdom of the Hive is about the decisions foraging bees make to optimize nectar and pollen collecting. This new book is equally fascinating.
Honey bees have been living under some kind of human supervision for roughly 10,000 years and yet, in Seeley’s study area, when a swarm of bees peels off, leaves the care of the beekeeper, and sets up house in a cavity in a tree, the bees do better than when they were sheltered and cared for by humans. Despite having been semi-domesticated for millennia, when on their own they behave much as they did 30 million years ago. Although we’ve had a long history together, honey bees have “never yielded their nature to us.”
I kept bees for 50 or so years and until recently it never occurred to me that the bees I spent so much money and time on might have been better off without my loving care. Surely, I thought, they benefitted far more than I did, even taking the harvested honey into account. But no. I now know that I unintentionally offended their nature in many ways, and that I could have had happier, healthier bees had I read this book at the beginning.
Tom Seeley examines the differences between kept and wild honey bees and, in the end, figures out a lot about what is right with their wild lives, and what the problems are with the bees that are manipulated and managed in apiaries. Presently, 40 percent of the bee colonies managed by beekeepers perish each year, so anything that can improve these grim odds is well worth looking into.
The bees he has studied since the 1970s live in the Arnot Forest, a 4,200-acre preserve not far from Ithaca, New York. He began working with them before Varroa destructor, the aptly-named mite, arrived in that area from Asia, bringing with it a coterie of viruses. Initially, the wild bee population in the Arnot Forest took a big hit, but in a mere 20 years it has rebounded, unlike the population of managed bees that are usually treated with chemical miticides. How can this be?
Seeley goes all out to find the answer. He counts and records everything and investigates everything, too. He spent the winter of 1975-76 building 252 nest boxes with different attributes to see which characteristics – entrance size and direction, hive size, and shape – appeal to bees that are looking for a new home. Turns out that bees have strong preferences, and know just what they need and what doesn’t matter. Leaks and dampness, for instance, don’t deter them as they can fix these things after moving in. But tree cavity size, height above ground, and the direction the entrance faces, are all important considerations.
Bees prefer the colony entrance to be small and high off the ground. They like a small, thick-walled home with its rough insides covered with an envelope of antimicrobial tree resins. Colonies are spaced about a half-mile apart in nature. Anyone who has seen an apiary will see that the two environments have little in common.
Frequent swarming, which beekeepers go to great lengths to discourage, is highly adaptive for bees; newly mated queens provide opportunities for genetic diversity. Plus, the bees in a swarm have no larvae, and so Varroa mites, which are larval parasites, are at least temporarily markedly reduced. In the wild, the distance between colonies discourages the transmission of pathogens and parasites.
The work of many other researchers is described, too, and after looking at bees’ preferred approaches to such things as nest building, colony defense, and colony reproduction, Seeley lists the desirable features of what he calls “Darwinian Beekeeping,” with suggestions about how to integrate the conditions in which bees truly thrive into a honey-producing business. Beekeepers have unwittingly been competing with their indentured insects for many millennia, but understanding their needs as well as ours can lead to a more collaborative and successful outcome. While reading this book I felt a lot of remorse about my own beekeeping, but Seeley’s interesting and inspiring discoveries about the free and wild bees of the Arnot Forest easily swamped my regrets.