Following the wild bees The craft and science of bee hunting

Honey tree hunting, or bee lining, is an ancient art (or sport) that consists of capturing, marking, and releasing wild honeybee workers to establish location and distance of colonies, which are frequently found inside hollow trees. Unfortunately, practitioners of this once-popular activity left little, impractical, or even questionable written information. Thomas Seeley (biology, Cornell Univ.) has studied honeybees for decades and is a successful, respected honeybee researcher. Here, he writes about his early interest in hunting honeybees and his nearly 40 years of bee lining experience--mainly along the forests of upstate New York. This nice book presents readers with interesting insights and memories of Seeley's life as a honeybee hunter. He provides readers with a plethora of information: instructions for bee box building, how to use the boxes, and materials needed to build other necessary utensils. The book has numerous beautiful photographs of equipment, honeybees, flowers, and bee trees. It also contains diagrams and drawings explaining bee lining procedures, bee biology and behavior, and other related issues. This is a refreshing book with a message on conservation; it is absolutely appropriate for current times, when many worry about honeybees and their existence. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Jorge M. Gonzalez, California State University, Fresno

A honeybee behaviorist takes a break from hard science to introduce the sport of bee hunting. Seeley (Biology/Cornell Univ.; Honeybee Ecology: A Study of Adaptation in Social Life, 2014, etc.) has been studying honeybees in the wild for decades and in the course of his research has made something of an art of findingand leaving undisturbedferal colonies. That he's had a grand time doing so is abundantly clear in this slim volume, and he does his level best to make squadrons of converts: "afterfinally spying the glitter of the bees' wings as they dive inside their tree-cavity home, I always experience soaring feelings of successeven triumph!" In similarly enthusiastic, almost antique prose, the author describes the necessary equipment, the most important being a custom-built "bee box" for capturing foraging bees; while the book's photographs are largely negligible, aspiring bee hunters will be grateful for the cutaway diagram included with its description. Seeley proceeds to outline successful bee-hunting strategy, from choosing the optimal moment through establishing a "beeline" (a delightful etymological lagniappe) to homing in on the bees' tree-trunk home. While he emphasizes that bee hunting is a sport anyone can pick up, it's hard not to suspect that without the author's specific advantagesa professorial job with plenty of unrestricted time and apparently unlimited access to an expansive swath of wilderness, in this case, Cornell's Arnot Forestmost will experience frustration rather than soaring triumph. Seeley confirms this with an admittedly tongue-in-cheek statement that a bee hunt can take "somewhere between 58 minutes and 3 years." Still, the author knows his stuff, and he shares his research accessibly and generously along with his enthusiasmarmchair hunters are almost certain to learn something, be it how bees navigate or flashes of hope amid news of massive bee die-offs. Motivated readers may well find themselves setting aside sunny weekends to go tromping in the goldenrod, hoping to "engage the most intelligent insect in the world." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.