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Annual Review of Entomology

Volume 67, 2022

Remembrances of a Honey Bee Biologist

Abstract

Thomas Seeley's research has focused on analyzing the collective intelligence and natural lives of honey bees. This account describes how the author encountered honey bees as a boy and became a beekeeper; how he switched his career path from medicine to biology to study the behavior and social life of honey bees; and how he focuses on understanding how a honey bee colony functions when it lives in the wild, rather than in a beekeeper's hive. He has shown how a honey bee colony works as a single decision-making unit to adaptively allocate its foragers among flower patches and to choose its nesting site in a hollow tree. These findings buttress the view that, in some social insect species, the colony is a group-level vehicle of gene survival. Beyond his research, he has written three books to synthesize these findings for biologists and share these discoveries with beekeepers.

Keyword(s): Apis mellifera, autobiography, collective intelligence, entomology, honey bees
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2022-01-07
2024-04-19
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Remembrances of a Honey Bee Biologist
Annual Review of Entomology 67, 13 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ento-033121-100228
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-ento-033121-100228
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-ento-033121-100228
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