What a Bee Knows

The next time you hear the low buzzing sound of an approaching bee, look closer: the bee has navigated to this particular spot for a reason using a fascinating set of tools. She might be responding to scents on the breeze as her olfactory organs provide a 3D map of an object's location. She might be tracing the route based on her memories of a particular flower or the electrostatic traces left by other bees. What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees invites us to follow bees' mysterious pathways and experience their complex and alien world. Although their brains are incredibly small--just one million neurons compared to humans' 100 billion--bees have remarkable abilities to navigate, learn, communicate, and remember. In What a Bee Knows, entomologist Stephen Buchmann explores a bee's way of seeing the world and introduces the scientists who make the journey possible. What a Bee Knows will challenge your idea of a bee's place in the world--and perhaps our own.