The Art of the Bee

The impact of bees on the world is immeasurable. Bees are responsible for the evolution of the vast array of brightly colored flowers and for engineering the niches of multitudes of plants, animals, and microbes. They’ve painted landscapes with flowers through their pollination activities and have evolved the most complex societies to aid their exploitation of the environment. The biology of the honey bee is one that reflects their role in transforming environments with their anatomical adaptations and a complex language that together function to exploit floral resources. A complex social system that includes a division of labor builds, defends, and provisions nests containing tens of thousands of individuals, only one of whom reproduces. Traditional biology texts present stratified layers of knowledge where the reader excavates levels of biological organization, each building on the last. This book presents fundamental biology not in layers but wrapped around interesting themes and concepts and in ways designed to explore and understand each concept. It examines the coevolution of bees and flowering plants, bees as engineers of the environment, the evolution of sociality, the honey bee as a superorganism and how it evolves, and the mating behavior of the queen.

The impact of bees on our world is immeasurable.Bees are responsible for the evolution of the vast array of brightly-colored flowers and for engineering the niches of multitudes of plants, animals, and microbes.They've painted our landscapes with flowers through their pollination activities and have evolved the most complex societies to aid their exploitation of the environment.The biology of the honey bee is one that reflects their role in transforming environments with their anatomical adaptations and a complex language that together function to exploit floral resources.A complex social system that includes a division of labour builds, defends, and provisions nests containing tens of thousands of individuals, only one of whom reproduces.Traditional biology texts present stratified layers of knowledge where the reader excavates levels of biological organization, each building on the last.This book [The Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies] presents fundamental biology, not in layers, but wrapped around interesting themes and concepts, and in ways designed to explore and understand each concept.It examines the coevolution of bees and flowering plants, bees as engineers of the environment, the evolution of sociality, the honey bee as a superorganism and how it evolves, and the mating behaviour of the queen.(From the Preface of The Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies, 2020, Oxford University Press, 239 pp).
The Art of the Bee has a companion YouTube Channel, The Art of the Bee, presented by Professor Robert Page and Arizona State University (https://www.youtube.com/@artofthebee).The channel guides you through the fascinating biology and behavior of the bee presented in 38 videos of 4 to 27 min in length.Videos are organized into six series that roughly correspond to the nine chapters of the book, with episodes within series representing different topics presented within the chapters The Art of the Bee.The YouTube channel follows the same holistic presentation model as the book along with a rich set of illustrations, images, and videos, to paint a narrative in the spirit of von Humboldt.

Landscape Artists -Series 1
One hundred twenty-five million years ago, the earth exploded with colour with the rapid evolution of flowering plants.The explosion coincided with a rapid increase of species of bees.The bees and flowering plants were locked in a dialectical dance of coevolution, each becoming adapted to the other.The flowers evolved to exploit the feeding habits of bees, and bees evolved to rob the flowers of their precious loads of pollen and nectar.Bees became social and developed communication and navigational systems to better exploit their environment.They continue to transform our world through their effects on the agricultural landscapes and the food we eat.Honey bees have evolved mechanisms to forage optimally both as individuals and colonies, expending their energy and short lives to maximally provision their nest.Their communication system directs foragers to different floral patches at different times of day reflected in the changing kaleidoscope of colour on the legs of returning pollen foragers.Their pollination transforms the landscape in the spring into splashes of colour resembling a painter's pallet.

Environmental Engineers -Series 2
Bees engineer the environment.Their foraging activities change the floral composition near the nest, thereby changing the niches of other species that depend on the vegetation for food and shelter.Changes in floral abundance and composition resulting from their activities may also benefit them directly, or descendant colonies.Honey bees also engineer their own environment by constructing a protective nest.The nest of the honey bee provides protection from the external environment by providing an insulated shell within which they live, wax comb to serve as a substrate for social interaction, food storage, and a nursery for raising larvae.They have community systems for health care, thermal regulation, and defense.

The Social Contract -Series 3
Animals that live together in a society, like social insects, have a tacit agreement, a social contract of sorts, that guarantees that their reproductive interests are protected in exchange for their social cooperation.This contract isn't written on paper, nor is it expressed in explicit laws or national constitutions, but instead is written into the DNA of populations with the ink and quill of inclusive fitness and natural selection.All social groups share common features of providing for the defence of social members from external threats, internal policing of cheating by those who don't cooperate, and some kind of protection of reproductive rights, either direct or indirect.Social benefits of insect societies include organizational structures similar to our own such as public works, public health, police, and border patrol.Without these features, they would fail as societies.

The Superorganism -Series 4
Insect societies have been likened to superorganism since the early twentieth century because they are organized around defence, nutrition, and reproduction, like our own bodies.Like individual organisms, they undergo development and separate the germ line (eggs and sperm in our case), from the body cells, the soma.In social insects, the germ line is sequestered in the reproductive individuals, queens and drones, while the body cells are the non-reproductive workers.Insect superoganisms are characterized by a reproductive division of labour (drones, queens, and workers) and a complex division of labor among the non-reproductive individuals, the workers.Queens and workers are anatomically differentiated but derived from the same genome.Differentiation is a consequence of differential feeding of developing larvae by the workers.In the honey bee, worker nurse bees manipulate the developing larvae, forcing them into their reproductive roles.The adult workers self-organize into an ordered society, performing all of the functions necessary for colony survival and reproduction.There are no task masters or forewomen directing the workforce.Instead, every individual makes local decisions about their behavior based on their response thresholds to stimuli in their environment.

How to Make a Superorganism -Series 5
Superorganisms are reverse engineered by natural selection.The totality of the organizational structure of a colony, its colony-level phenotype, is exposed to natural selection.Those colonies with phenotypes that are best adapted to their environment survive best and produce the most reproductive offspring.The heritable features of those colony phenotypes increase in frequency in the next generation, and the population evolves a social organization.Natural selection doesn't "see, " it doesn't act on, the individual components of organization, only the gross product.Therefore, the intricacies of the design, such as reduced fertility of workers, nest design and maintenance, defensive behaviour, etc., are reverse engineered.They evolve as a consequence of their effects on the whole colony.

The Song of the Queen -Series 6
The mating flight of a honey bee queen is orchestrated by events that occur days before she actually flies from her nest in pursuit of a gathering of drones, 20 or so of which will get lucky and mate with her.Her mating song begins within the nest while she's still held captive in her royal cell by her worker sisters, quacking and tooting audible sounds to her rival queens and her captors.The song changes pitch and intensity after she's released from captivity and seeks out and destroys her rivals.The orchestra is joined by the workers running through the nest buzzing their wings, exciting the colony and the new virgin, pushing her toward the entrance where she takes flight.When she finds the congregation of drones, they join in with the buzzing of their wings and popping sounds of their genitalia as they find and mate with her.The queen returns to the nest, the heir of the nest and colony, and a new superorganism is born.