Tom Seeley on Honey Bees - A Way to Garden with Margaret Roach - June 17, 2019

Honey Bee Hunting: Beekeeping is a “thing” in recent years, an increasingly a popular hobby, but our relationship with honey bees goes back much further to one we had as early human hunter-gatherers,  following wild bees in hope of finding their hives and the honey therein.

This history of the subject of beelining, the other way to connect to honey bees besides keeping hives, is the subject of the book called “Following the Wild Bees: The Craft and Science of Bee Hunting,” by Cornell University biologist Thomas Seeley, just released in paperback edition. Tom is the Horace White Professor in Biology in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell. He's been passionately interested in honey bees since high school, eventually doing his doctoral thesis on them, and his scientific work since has primarily focused on understanding the phenomenon of swarm intelligence with the help of these incredible animals.