- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
"EVERYTHING that colonies do when they are living on their own (not being managed by beekeepers) is done to favor their survival and their reproduction, and thus their success is contribution to the next generation of colonies. And I mean everything."
So said bee scientist Thomas Seeley, the Horace White Professor in Biology, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, when he addressed the 2018 UC Davis Bee Symposium on "Darwinian Beekeeping."
Seeley, who studies feral or wild bee colonies in the 4200-acre Arnot Teaching and Research Forest owned by Cornell University, emphasized that "honey bees are superb beekeepers; they know...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
A newly published book, “Honey Bee Biology,” authored by UC Davis honey bee scientist Brian Johnson, a leading expert on the behavior, genomics and evolution of honey bees, will be released June 6 by Princeton University Press.
In the foreword, Thomas Seeley, the Horace White Professor in Biology in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, describes the 512-page book as “the most comprehensive and up-to-date general reference book on honey bee biology.”
Advance orders are underway on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3J0eH1G for both the hardcover...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It happened on Friday the 13th.
It was the first swarm of the season at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, University of California, Davis.
The bees swirled, darkening the sky, and then swarmed from one of bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey's hives around 2 p.m. It was a sight to "bee-hold." At the onset, the bees looked quite confused, as if not knowing what to do. (Well, after all, they'd never done this before!) Most joined the queen in a cluster on a nearby tree branch. A few stragglers touched down on leaves.
Still others headed buzzed over to the empty hive that Cobey had strategically placed below the swarm.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Like to know more about honey bees make collective decisions?
Mark your calendar to attend a seminar this week at the University of California, Davis.
Brian Johnson, assistant professor at the UC Davis Department of Entomology, will speak on "Organization of Work in the Honey Bee" from 12:10 to 1 p.m., Friday, Feb. 17 in 6 Olson Hall. This is part of the Animal Behavior Graduate Group's winter seminar series.
The talk is open to all interested persons.
"I will be speaking on the role of self-organizing pattern formation mechanisms in biology...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Have you ever observed how a honey bee swarm finds a new home? How a few of the worker bees turn into scouts, scour their surroundings, and then return to the swarm and dance to communicate their findings?
Thomas Seeley has. Many times.
"Choosing the right dwelling place is a life-or-death matter for a honeybee colony," he writes in his book, Honeybee Democracy. "If a colony chooses poorly, and so occupies a nest cavity that is too small to hold the honey stores to survive winter, or that provides it with poor protection from cold winds and hungry marauders, then it will die."
Seeley, a professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at...