“Human beings and honey bees are almost the same word.”
According to Prof. Thomas Seeley, the Horace White Professor in Biology Emeritus, in addition to these phonetic similarities, honey bees also possess a communicative ability that no other species besides humans has — the ability to direct their hive mates to rich food sources by giving them direction and distance information.
Seeley presented his latest book, Piping-Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners: 20 Mysteries of Honey Bee Behavior Solved in a Nov. 21 book talk organized through Mann Library’s Chats in the Stacks — a series featuring the recent publications of Cornell faculty.
Seeley is an Ithaca native and has been a regular at Mann Library since he was a high schooler, around the same time that he began keeping bees in the late 1960s. Seeley said that the first rigorous studies of honey bee behavior were done in the 1910s by Karl von Frisch, who identified similarities between human beings and honey bees.
Devoting much of his career to studying honey bees’ behavior, Seeley said that many of the seemingly mysterious movements and buzzing of bees are actually communication methods. During his talk, he highlighted five bee behaviors that direct others to forage, wake up, warm up their flight muscles, prepare for takeoff and help unload nectar.
Seeley structured his talk in two parts, first discussing the historical context of his investigations, then looking at five of the 20 now-solved mysteries featured in his book on the behavior of worker bees.
Following the book talk, Seeley took several questions from professors and students alike.
One audience member asked whether bees had a communication method for error correction, or if a bee could tell another bee that it was wrong and how to fix its mistake.
“Bees have a self-correction technique, so if they find a mediocre [foraging] site, they won’t do a strong [behavioral] dance for it. If it’s a humdinger of a site, they’ll dance for a long time,” Seeley said. “I wouldn’t say they make errors — they may have just come back with poor information.”
Seeley’s talk prompted plenty of engagement. After most of the audience had left, he praised the remaining attendees for asking “some of the best questions I’ve had.”
Regarding Seeley’s audience reception, book talk attendee Anyerys Diaz, a first-year Ph.D. student studying molecular biology, expressed appreciation for the new perspectives she gained.
“I’m not in the field of entomology, but I’m generally curious, so I’m very thankful for access to this type of information,” Diaz said.
David Sosa, who has lived in Ithaca for the past seven years and pursued beekeeping, previously attended one of Seeley’s book talks.
“When I came five years ago, my English was not as good, so I could not understand a lot of the talk, but I feel I’ve learned so much from Seeley, and I’ll bring what I learned about beekeeping when I return to Colombia,” Sosa said.
For Seeley, Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners marks his sixth published book throughout his long career studying bees.
When asked about a potential seventh book, Seeley said that while he does not currently intend to write another book, if he did, it would build upon his sixth. When Seeley initially listed what he wanted to cover in his book, he came up with 35 topics. After his editor told him he could include “20 tops,” he had to cut his list.
“I have a lot more research regarding behaviors that I investigated,” Seeley said.
Kaitlyn Xia ’28 is a Sun contributor and can be reached at [email protected].