Tom Seeley is a Professor of biology at Cornell University. He is also a beekeeper. I just finished his book, Honeybee Democracy. Over many years, since high school, he has been examining the swarm behavior of bees. He learned what made an ideal hive, which bees scouted for a new home,how they communicated its location to the other scouts, how they reached a consensus and then informed the rest of the swarm that it was time to go and then led them to their new home. He had to come up with many ingenious experiments and I'm sure there was a lot of tedium.
In one experiment, about 3,000 bees were individually and uniquely marked.At the end, he relates all this to human interaction and group decision making. Here are the five effective habits he learned from the bees: 1. Compose the decision-making group of individuals with shared interests and mutual respect. 2. Minimize the leader's influence on the group's thinking. 3. Seek diverse solutions to the problem. 4. Aggregate the group's knowledge through debate. 5. Use quorum responses for cohesion, accuracy and speed.
This book was full of fascinating bee facts and history of apiology. I liked it.
I have lots of questions about bees that I think are pretty basic. I figured that a basic apiology text book would answer many of them. I tried to find one by looking at bee classes at Davis and Cornell as well as an online textbook site; no luck. So I emailed Professor Seeley. He responded the next morning with two recommendations. What a nice guy.
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