THINK of a bee and you will probably imagine either a honey bee or a bumblebee. But in Buzz, Thor Hanson reminds us that the apian community is incredibly diverse, with most species solitary, without hives, queens and stings.
Hanson, a US conservationist, expertly explores the history and ecology of bees around the world, concentrating on North American species. He regularly returns to his favourite, the alkali bee, a solitary insect with shimmering stripes that nests in salt-saturated ground in the western US.
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Almost all bees are vegetarian, their fate tightly linked to flowering plants. They feed on nectar and pollen (honey is produced only by social bees, which eat it when there are few flowers or it is too cold to fly).
The bees’ ancestors, the wasps, however, are mostly carnivorous. Around 100 million years ago, one group began to eat pollen, feeding it to their larvae. This evolutionary innovation led to the 20,000 species of bee we have today. Bees, it turns out, are just hippy wasps.
The basic deal with bees and plants is that the plant gives the bee some sugary nectar, and the bee gets covered in pollen, some of which it feeds to its young, and some of which pollinates another flower. Despite this apparently fair arrangement, Hanson shows that both sides repeatedly try to gain the upper hand.
Some orchids produce no nectar but fool male bees into rummaging around on the pollen-producing stamens by smelling of female bee pheromone. And some bees will steal nectar hidden too deep for them to reach by biting a hole at the base of the flower and bypassing the stamens.
One aspect of this link between plants and bees that Hanson doesn’t explore is what happened when an asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago, shattering its ecology. Many flowering plants went extinct, and a comparison of modern bee genomes suggests many species went with them, shaping modern bee diversity.
Hanson is particularly interested in the role of bees in human society and evolution, exploring our sweet tooth and the significance of honey in pre-industrial societies, including in Africa, where honey bees originate. He also describes how US alfalfa farmers encourage his beloved alkali bees, which are efficient pollinators, by creating salty mud fields where the bees can burrow, laying an egg next to a ball of pollen that will feed the larva.
“Some bees steal nectar hidden too deep for them to reach by biting a hole at the base of the flower”
The pages of Buzz are full of quotes from bee experts and farmers. This makes for easy reading, and the book can feel like an extended magazine article. I would have liked more science, covering how social bees organise their hives, for example, and the fundamental question of how and why workers in social species give up their ability to mate.
But there are beautiful colour plates of 16 bees (two are shown above), as well as simple descriptions of the seven families of bees. These provide an excellent graphic complement to the text so we can all marvel at the tiny, wonderful pollinators.
The final chapters deal with contemporary threats to bees, describing the complex reality of the “colony collapse disorder” that affected honey bee nests, and taking a balanced view of the factors that led to a decline in both wild bees and farmed honey bees.
Hanson’s son, Noah, appears at various points, getting involved in experiments and observations. A perceptive quote from him closes the book, summing up the significance of these insects: “The world could do without us, but it couldn’t do without bees.”
Icon Books
This article appeared in print under the headline “Amazing apians”
