The Art of the Bee

Download or read book The Art of the Bee written by Robert E. Page and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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 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"--