Lars Chittka

This is a fascinating examination of everything we currently know about how bees' minds work. Chittka explains how bees senses work, especially their vision, which is very different from ours, to get an idea of how bees process the world around them. He describes many of the studies that have been done to test bees' cognitive abilities, including their ability to communicate with each other, build mental maps of the world for navigation, make decisions as a group, learn from experience, and show more make reasoned decisions about what actions are most likely to yield rewards. I appreciate that Chittka not only describes what we know about bee cognition, but also goes into detail about the studies that have been done to give us this understanding. He also offers little mini-biographies of some of the scientists who have studied bees over the past two centuries, which are often pretty interesting. The book makes some very complex topics, such as the structure of a bee's brain, surprisingly accessible. This is a fascinating and engaging read about a really interesting topic. show less

What an amazing, well written and incredibly informative book!

This is the first non fiction science book (that I've read for myself and not for my students) that I've read in years. Lars Chittka manages to write in a way that is not only entertaining and informative, but also easy to follow and understand.

I think this book has changed my life? I loved bees before reading, but understanding how they sense and view the world around them has truly opened the floodgates in how I'll perceive show more them, and the other little guys around us.

I also really appreciate the afterword and the highlighting the importance of our native bees. They are beautiful insects who we really do depend on, and we ought to do right by them.

If you love bees, or have any interest in them I highly recommend this book! If any of my friends want to borrow this book, I'm more than happy to lend it to you show less

So much is out there, necessarily, about colony collapse disorder and other way bees suffer in their critical ecological role due to human folly that it is refreshing to read this exuberant, researched celebration of might bee's talents. Author Lars Chittka is so pro-bee, I feel some of the hype should be taken with a grain of salt. For instance, he mentions nothing of the waggle dance controversy when speaking in awe of the behavior as an accurate information-sharing behavior.

One of the show more fascinating things to me in biology is epigenetics. Epigenetics is about heritable traits triggered without changes to the DNA sequence. Epigenetic modifications play an important role in the queen–worker differentiation of honeybees with feeding larvae influencing caste differentiation.
In honeybees, feeding of newly hatched larvae destined to become queens with royal jelly results in morphological changes due to epigenetic mechanisms. show less

Three years ago I read Laline Paull’s THE BEES, a novel about the life of a hive which I found fascinating and enjoyed very much. From time to time, I have thought about that book and wondered how accurate its scientific underpinnings actually were. So when I happened to run across this nonfiction accounting of current knowledge and speculation to inspire future research, I immediately put it on my TBR list. It was very interesting and affirms the science behind Paull’s inventive story. show more Bees learn, can use tools and solve problems, and certainly seem to have at least some rudimentary consciousness. show less