The Little Book of Bees by Karl Weiss and Carlos Vergara, Copernicus,拢17.50/$20,ISBN 0387952527 Reviewed by John Bonner
DAMNED if you do, damned if you don鈥檛 鈥� it鈥檚 tough being a bloke in the ultra-feminist world of the beehive. The life of a drone may seem like milk and honey (without milk) but is nothing of the sort.
Oddly, male bees are produced from unfertilised eggs 鈥� yet their one and only function in life is to ensure that other eggs don鈥檛 end up in the same state. They hang around the hive being fed and watered by their obsessively diligent worker half-sisters until it is time to swarm, that is, the birds and the bees bit.
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The queen who has spent all summer laying eggs flies out to mate first, followed by the new daughter queens. After they have been fertilised the old queen returns to her hive and the daughters go off with a small band of worker bees to form their own colonies. Queens will mate in turn with many of the drones that buzz around the designated 鈥渄rone congregation areas鈥� but males can mate only once. After that they die and the days of the unsuccessful suitors are also numbered.
Books on the natural history of bees used to maintain that the workers turned on their useless wastrel brothers and killed them. But Karl Weiss, the director of the Bavarian Institution of Bee Keeping at Erlangen, Germany says that is not so. Indeed the virgin males suffer an even crueller fate. In The Little Book of Bees, he says they are dragged out of the hive by the workers and left to fend for themselves. With none of the anatomical modifications needed for collecting nectar and pollen, nor any experience of earning a living, they starve to death.
Weiss is a great admirer of the sophisticated structures built by bees and tries to share his enthusiasm with a broader audience in this dainty, unassuming book co-written with Carlos Vergara. He charts the development of their social systems from the various primitive groups of solitary bees, through the beginnings of cooperative systems in the stingless and bumble bees to the pinnacle of achievement in the honey bee Apis mellifera, whose colonies may contain up to 80,000 individuals.
He also adds a short chapter highlighting the environmental challenges facing most of the wild cousins of the economically privileged A. mellifera, such as habitat destruction, changing agricultural practices and excessive use of insecticides. He says anyone can do their bit to help provide nesting and feeding opportunities for wild bees. Easy for country dwellers and those with extensive suburban gardens, but I鈥檓 not sure that people living in small urban flats might want a wild bee colony nesting on their balcony.