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IF IT wasn鈥檛 for the honey and the fragrant, versatile wax, we would probably have steered well clear of bees. Early humans are thought to have discovered the delights of wild honey some 2 million years ago, with bee domestication dating to 9000 years ago in what is now Turkey and North Africa.

Initially, the result was a lot of stings and destroyed nests. But the keeping of bees evolved, with advantages for both parties.

So claim the authors of The Honey Factory, J眉rgen Tautz, a bee researcher at the University of W眉rzburg in Germany, and Diedrich Steen, a beekeeper for over 20 years. They have joined forces to write a fascinating book that explores hive life, from the roles of honeycomb cells to bee communication. They show how 300 years of hive use has helped keepers hone the craft. Artificial chambers now allow us to extract bee products but leave the colony relatively intact, for example.

There are misconceptions to correct, say Tautz and Steen. For example, the saying 鈥渂usy as a bee鈥� is far from the truth. The authors say honeybees are quite lazy and achieve great feats only by teamwork; some experiments show foraging bees make three or four flights per day. But if 25,000 foragers bring 50 milligrams of nectar per trip, that still makes an impressive 5 kilograms daily.

Their famous waggle dance is misunderstood, too. It has long been seen as a sophisticated form of communication used to convey the exact location of food to their hivemates. But recent work by Tautz and others shows that, while the dance may tell the bees where to head, it isn鈥檛 that precise. In fact, when a food source is remote, bees rely on experienced foragers carrying the scent of the flowers they are seeking to guide them.

Fortunately, our understanding of bee behaviour is good enough for keepers to tweak it. In the wild, honeybees start a new colony by swarming when their home gets overcrowded. To prevent this, keepers realised all they had to do was increase the size of a hive by adding a special box. New colonies can also be formed by removing the queen, thereby tricking bees into rearing a new queen, which can then be given its own hive.

Over the past 40 years, though, domestication has faced a new challenge 鈥� varroa mites, parasites that feast on bee 鈥渂lood鈥漚nd bee larvae. As the unwelcome guests reproduce and cripple more bees, the colony eventually collapses. The insects don鈥檛 seem to have a way to tackle the mites. But beekeepers now know the power of formic acid, produced by ants. Birds get ants to squirt it at them, since it keeps parasites at bay. The same trick seems to work against mites when formic acid vapour is spread through a hive.

If they weren鈥檛 domesticated, honeybees might have evolved ways to protect themselves, Tautz and Steen tell us. They advise studying them in the forests where they originated, as we know little about their lives in the wild and how they coexist 鈥� and perhaps even cooperate 鈥� with fungi, bacteria, arthropods and animals that share their hives. 鈥淭he rediscovery of wild bees may reveal a way to construct honey factories of the future that at the moment we can鈥檛 imagine,鈥� they write. Good news for us, but better for bee survival strategies.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淟iving the hive life鈥�