The Buzz About Bees

"Yes. Honeybees have become symbols for different aspects of human culture since we first became interested in them, and often to rather contradictory ends—from Pliny’s descriptions of well-mannered and industrious workers sacrificing themselves for the good of the whole, to post-industrial visions of unindividuated subjects held as cogs in a machine. Tautz’s book makes an effort to blow all this apart with his intensely researched, highly scientific gaze. I thought this book was brilliant, and as in-depth a study of honeybee biology and colony processes as any I came across. I initially borrowed it from a friend, and got so attached that he didn’t get it back until nearly a year later, when I finally got around to buying a copy myself. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter By describing the colony as an integrated and independent being Tautz experiments with the notion that we should understand it as having the same impulses, intelligences and rhythms as a mammal. That’s an exciting and challenging idea, but if I’m honest what I enjoyed most about this book was not the theory so much as the detailing of his investigations into the minutiae of honeybee sensory experience and communication. Did you know, for example, that honeybees’ colour vision comes and goes depending on what they’re doing? In flight, they see in black and white; their colour vision only returns as they approach a landing spot. Their brains are so small they’ve evolved to shut down certain capacities so as to function more efficiently. This gets even more extraordinary when Tautz begins experimenting with different landing spots. He discovers that colour vision is stronger when bees are approaching a flower than when they’re nearing the nest site. Colour vision, it turns out, is important for discriminating between different pollen and nectar sources; it’s less relevant when picking out the hive. Reading the book, one gathers a sense of how all these highly sensitive interactions between bees and their environments are contributing to that emergent group intelligence Tautz talks about, and at times it really does begin to seem quite eerie. Reading this book, I found myself returning to that thought of the in-betweenness of honeybees. A colony is individual and collective—a mass of separate beings and a superorganism. Honeybees both fill and exceed our categories, again and again and again."