The Art of the Bee
Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:17th Sep '20
Should be back in stock very soon
The impact of bees on our world is immeasurable. Bees are responsible for the evolution of the vast array of brightly colored flowers and for engineering the niches of multitudes of plants, animals, and microbes. They've painted our landscapes with flowers through their pollination activities, and they have evolved the most complex societies to aid their exploitation of the environment. The parallels between human and insect societies have been explored by countless sociobiologists. Traditional texts present stratified layers of knowledge where the reader excavates levels of biological organization, each building on the last. In this book, Robert E. Page, Jr., delves deep into the evolutionary history and the sociality of bees. He presents fundamental biology-not in layers, but wrapped around interesting themes and concepts, and in ways designed to explore and understand each concept. Page uses the social contract as a way to examine the complex social system of bee societies, a contract that has been written over millions of years of social evolution on the fabric of DNA. The book examines the coevolution of bees and flowering plants, bees as engineers of the environment, the evolution of sociality, the honey bee as a superorganism and how it evolves, and the mating behavior of the queen. The resulting book explores the ways human societies and bee colonies are similar-not from a common ancestry with shared genes for sociality, but from shared fundamentals of political philosophy.
[I] recommend this wonderful volume unreservedly to students of bee biology, naturalists, gardeners, and anyone with a desire to know more about the fascinating world of honey bees. * Stephen L. Buchmann, University of Arizona, Arizona, The Quarterly Review of Biology *
Bees as artists or engineers? With deft use of metaphor, Page, one of our most eminent honey bee biologists, skillfully offers readers a down home, yet lyrical, romp through some of the most important topics in contemporary bee biology. But don't be fooled by the amiable and personal style--the book is comprehensive--from colony collapse disorder to colony-level evolution--and chock full of the latest results, presented with clarity and depth, leavened with razor-sharp insights into social evolution. * Gene E. Robinson, Director,Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and Department of Entomology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign *
This wonderful book contains all the information expected from a textbook on honeybee biology, but beyond textbook style, Page presents this information in a series of sparkling essays built around particular views--e.g., honeybees as environmental painters and engineers--that read like mystery stories. With these lucidly written stories Page takes us on a delightful journey through the many biological traits that on the whole constitute the honeybees' social contract. * Rüdiger Wehner, Professor and Director Emeritus of the Institute of Zoology, University of Zürich *
Drawing from his distinguished career studying honey bees, Robert Page reflects on the adaptations of social organisms that yield contracts through which their societies function through both harmony and discord. His journey into the hive, like Alexander von Humboldt's global explorations two centuries ago, stimulates and inspires us to ponder our own place in nature and within our human societies. * Mark L. Winston, Professor and Senior Fellow, Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, Simon Fraser University *
ISBN: 9780197504147
Dimensions: 236mm x 163mm x 20mm
Weight: 499g
256 pages