Bee Knowing

This book will buzz your world. Pollinator ecologist Buchmann has put together a very readable compendium of what we have learned about the “thoughts, memories, and personalities of bees.” Every word in that subtitle except “and” will probably come as a surprise to many people not keeping up with the scientific literature. Bees and other insects have long been thought of as instinctive, even robotic, but since we’ve really started to observe and test them, we’ve discovered that they can learn, solve problems, and remember (in both the short and long term). Small, even tiny, brains do not mean dumb.

While the commercial farm workers called honeybees have been studied the most because there’s money in the subject, this book is about bees in general, both the social ones (Apis, Bombus, and the hundreds of stingless bee species of the tropics) and the non-social, who make up the great majority of all bee species.

This is absolutely fascinating stuff, which also touches on insect biomes (yes, them, too).

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A sign of spring migration? Though pointing south, this old SST is being barged north to the Intrepid Museum complex after a refreshing paint job.