Although Thomas Seeley claims that Honeybee Democracy is a recap of Martin Lindauer’s 1995 research on honeybee swarms, it is much, much more. This beautiful book is teeming with information about honeybee behavior and is filled with lessons about individual honeybees, their colonies, and what actually occurs when bees swarm. Seeley’s love of the topic and of science is evident throughout the book, and the joy of discovery exudes from its pages. His passion for the subject of honeybees is infectious.

Seeley uses Lindauer’s experiments about honeybee swarms as a jumping-off point to write about the important lessons of honeybee behavior and to describe his own lifelong studies surrounding honeybee swarms. In the process, Seeley gives the reader insight regarding the ingenuity that is required to design concrete experiments. The book goes on to discuss how the decision to swarm is arrived at, and how the individual scout bees work...

You do not currently have access to this content.