Book | The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild
Thomas Seely
With the growing health issues of managed honey bee colonies, Thomas Seely asked himself the question what bees do when they take care of themselves. He found inspiration in the words of poet Wendell Berry: “We cannot know what we are doing until we know what nature would be doing if we were doing nothing.”
The research of wild bee colonies is applied to management practices for beekeepers who do not have maximising honey production as their goal.
Thomas Seeley started his groundbreaking research in the 1970’s“This is the most important insect in the world to humans, but as a whole we lack the foundation of what its basic biology is… This is a step-by-step look back over 40 years, at how bees live in the wild, comparing it to how they live under management.”
If you are keen on discovering honey bees living in the wild, you might also be interested in his book “Following the Wild Bees: The Craft and Science of Bee Hunting”. Here you find a small video introducing bee lining.