Form and Function in the Honey Bee

  • Lesley Goodman
International Bee Research Association (http://www.ibra.org.uk ): 2003. 220 pp. £25 (pbk), £55 (hbk)
Touchy-feely: the antennae and hairs of honeybees are equivalent to human fingertips.

The best-studied of all the millions of insect species in the world is the honeybee, Apis mellifera, particularly with regard to its sensory physiology and functional morphology. Since the pioneering studies of Karl von Frisch and Robert E. Snodgrass in the early part of the twentieth century, several generations of biologists have carefully measured the powers of discrimination of worker bees in every known sensory modality, analysed the mechanisms underlying these abilities with behavioural and electrophysiological techniques, and used light and electron microscopy to explain the anatomical bases of the bee's behaviour. As a result, the honeybee provides a solid baseline for comparative studies of most aspects of insect behaviour, physiology and morphology.

The composite picture assembled from all this work is one of highly developed sensory capacities and motor performances. Honeybees see the world in colour, perceive shapes and patterns, and can resolve rapid movement. Their olfactory sense is almost identical to ours, and their sense of taste is similar but generally less sensitive. Mechanosensory perception — including touch and sensitivity to airborne and substrate-borne vibrations — is also extremely rich as the bees have thousands of sensory hairs all over the body (even on the compound eyes) and stretch receptors inside the body, giving information on position, movement and orientation relative to gravity. Honeybees even have at least a limited responsiveness to Earth's magnetic field.

These impressive sensory abilities are used for sophisticated manipulatory behaviours such as building beeswax combs and negotiating complicated flowers, flying over distances of several kilometres to reach flower patches rich with nectar and pollen, and communicating with hivemates by means of diverse shakings, tappings and buzzings, and puffings of chemicals.

Form and Function in Honeybees by the late Lesley Goodman is a modern synthesis of honeybee sensory physiology and functional morphology. The last attempt at a comprehensive treatment of the sensory basis of this insect's behaviour was von Frisch's classic The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees, published in 1967. Not only has the literature on the subject increased enormously since then, but there is now a greater sophistication in understanding the ecological significance of each sensory ability. For example, it is now known how the bee's colour vision system, which renders bees maximally sensitive to differences in light at wavelengths of about 400 nm (violet) and 500 nm (blue), has fostered the evolution of flowers with pigment combinations that have sharp rises and falls in reflectance in these two regions; such combinations are most easily discriminated and recognized by the bees. There can be no doubt that this book addresses an important need — and meets it beautifully.

Goodman started planning this book in 1996 with the ambitious goal of producing a volume on how bees function that would be both scientifically rigorous and yet readable (and also affordable) to a broad audience of beekeepers, undergraduate biologists and research scientists. She was unable to finish this project before her death from lung cancer in 1998, but did set up the L. J. Goodman Insect Physiology Research Trust to ensure that the book was completed posthumously. Thanks to the dedicated work of Richard J. Cooter, one of her first PhD students, and Pamela Munn, deputy director of the International Bee Research Association, this final wish was fulfilled magnificently.

The book is utterly gorgeous: each page is lavishly illustrated with beautiful coloured diagrams, specially commissioned paintings and superb micrographs. Such a beautifully crafted book is rarely seen in science. Given its large format (24 cm × 34 cm) and its opulent contents, it can be valued as much as a work of visual art as an informative work of biological science. But I wish to emphasize that this is a rigorous scientific monograph. The contents are well referenced to the scientific literature (up to the mid-1990s), and the writing is clear and crisp.

It provides a wide audience with an astoundingly beautiful and admirably accurate account of how a worker honeybee smells and sees, tastes and touches, feeds and breathes, flies and stings, secretes wax and releases pheromones. Goodman has given all who are interested in the behaviour and physiology of bees an amazing gift.

More on bees

Bumblebees: Behaviour and Ecology by Dave Goulson Oxford University Press, £55 (hbk), £27.50 (pbk)