Of the 20,000 species of bees worldwide (most of them solitary), only nine are honeybees, the subject of this book. As the subtitle indicates, the focus is on biology rather than beekeeping. The book's priceyness is justified by the superb colour photos. There's one on nearly every page, and you can preview them in Google Books.
Honeybees live in colonies that biologists now refer to as a superorganism, that is, a group of individuals that acts as a single unit. Such a colony, the author says, is not only a "being," it is equivalent to a vertebrate animal.
There is no hierarchy of authority within a hive, even though its maintenance is a complex business composed of many tasks -- foraging, brood raising, wax making, honey ripening, and temperature control (to name just a few). Each bee simply takes on a task that needs doing.
This ability to self-organize is sometimes referred to as "swarm intelligence" and has interesting technological applications.
Fascinating Details
Each hive has a dance floor.
Honeybees have hairy eyeballs.
A queen lays her weight in eggs every day.
Drones are fatherless; they develop from unfertilized eggs.
The temperature at which bees are raised influences their lifespan.
Don't eat bananas around a beehive. The odour might cause bees to attack.
Honeybees have gravity receptor organs in their legs, and are somehow able to sense the earth's magnetic field.
A colony is potentially immortal.
