Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners: 20 Mysteries of Honey Bee Behavior Solved

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.

Thomas D. Seeley is the Horace White Professor in Biology at Cornell University. His books include The Lives of Bees, Following the Wild Bees, and Honeybee Democracy (all Princeton). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.