Product Description

A brief look at a complex and intriguing topic, this book takes a look at bees from a variety of perspectives, from the physiology of individual bees of different species to analysis of their complex behaviors and social interactions. Written by an eminent entomologist and apiculturist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #767023 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 152 pages

Beekeeping, February 2003
"...a treasure trove of information about species of bees...I rapidly became absorbed in its content!"

From the Back Cover
DRONE, WORKER, QUEEN...

The more we learn about bees, the more extraordinary they seem. They have five eyes. Their fertilized eggs hatch as females; unfertilized eggs become males. They beat their wings at a rate of almost 200 cycles per second, but fly at only 10 or 15 miles per hour. In the course of a lifetime, a typical worker bee will produce less than a tenth of a teaspoon of honey, yet a single hive's population can produce as much as 2 pounds of honey a day. A queen bee, in a single day, will lay her weight in eggs- as many as 1500 in an uninterrupted 24-hour period. And to communicate with each other, bees do sometimes make sounds, but mostly they dance in order to share information on the distance and direction to the nearest food source.

Karl Weiss and Carlos H. Vergara provide the newcomer with a startling view into the surprisingly complex and highly organized world of bees. The Little Book of Bees describes not only the evolution of our honeybee, but also of dozens of types of wild bees. It sheds light on bee society, with its amazing rituals related to work, reproduction, defense of the hive, and, most amazingly, communication, and it even provides helpful advice for those interested in helping bees nest.

About the Author
KARL WEISS is an entemologist and the director of the Bavarian Beekeeping Institute at Erlagen, Germany. He is engaged in theoretical as well as applied apicultural research. Weiss is the author of numerous scientific and popular publications on bees and is considered one of Germany's foremost authorities on apiculture.

CARLOS H. VERGARA is an entomologist and professor at the Universidad de las Americas, Puebla, Mexico. He has worked and published about stingless bees in several countries of the Americas, as well as about bumblebees and the pollination of wild and cultivated plants.

Customer Reviews

The Little Book of Bees
For many people there are just two kinds of bee, honey bees and bumble bees. In fact there about twenty thousand different species of bee worldwide and this Little Book seeks to describe the various different lifestyles found within this large group.

One of the most striking features of honey bee behaviour is the highly organised nature of their societies. This sophisticated social organisation represents one end of a spectrum within the bees, with solitary species at the other end and various gradations in between. Weiss guides us through this range and describe the increasing degrees of sociality leading up to the honey bees with their large colonies and clear divisions of labour between colony members.

Another well known feature of the biology of bees is their relationship with flowering plants. We are familiar with the fact that bees visit flowers to obtain pollen and nectar to feed their brood and, in so doing, assure the polllination of the plant. Weiss describes a whole variety of other ways in which bees use plants. For a start, many species nest within hollow plant stems and colonial species often use hollow trees to establish their colonies. The poppy mason bee, Osmia papaveris, uses the petals of poppies to wallpaper the individual cells in her nest, whilst leaf cutter bees use leaves for the same purpose. Males of the orchid bees (Euglossinae) even collect perfume from certain kinds of orchid and then use this to attract females for mating.

The author has a deep knowledge of his subject and the book is packed with such interesting facts. It is a pity, therefore, that the book is not written in a more readable style, suited to the non specialist reader at whom it is aimed. In places the prose is decidedly clumsy and the cataloguing of facts may put off some readers. Nevertheless, for anyone with a more than passing interest in natural history, the book is worth persisting with as an informative introduction to this interesting group of insects.

For those who wish to become further acquainted with bees the book concludes with a chapter that describes ways of encouraging wild bees to visit and nest (solitary species!) in your own garden or yard. There is also a bibliography suggesting further reading on the subject.