The Spirit of the Hive: The Mechanisms of Social Evolution

  • Robert E. Page
Harvard University Press: 2013. 9780674073029 | ISBN: 978-0-6740-7302-9

In his 1901 book The Life of the Bee, philosopher, poet and Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck mused over the “spirit of the hive”. How, he wondered, do many thousands of social insects organize themselves into a cooperating colony? In the fascinating The Spirit of the Hive, eminent bee geneticist Robert Page demonstrates how science is answering that key question.

Honeybee (Apis mellifera) workers busy themselves on their comb. Credit: SIMON COLMER/NATUREPL.COM

The book — representing a lifetime's research for Page — illustrates just how far we have come in dissecting and reconstructing the myriad factors responsible for colony-level functions. Page stands on the shoulders of, and acknowledges, bee geneticist Harry Laidlaw, who unravelled many basic aspects of honeybee genetics and mating behaviour. But Page chronicles the expansion of methodologies over many decades, from behavioural and hormonal analyses to neurochemistry, and eventually DNA sequencing. We also learn how researchers working with honeybees pioneered many techniques. An example is genetic mapping with quantitative trait loci, which can identify the multiple linked genes that determine complex behaviours such as pollen foraging.

The Spirit of the Hive hinges on the simple question of what causes honeybees to collect more or less pollen and nectar. Individual worker bees were once viewed as behaviourally identical, but Page and others have demonstrated that there is significant variation in individuals' responses to stimuli that determine the level of nectar and pollen foraging, such as the amount of pollen stored in the nest. Furthermore, each queen mates with an average of 12 drones, whose sperm mixes in her sperm sac. Each colony's worker bees thus present a distinctive mix of genetically influenced tendencies for foraging.

Page then tackles how individual bees with differing genetic backgrounds create flexibility in the colony to regulate tasks — including pollen, nectar and water collection, defence and the removal of dead bees from the nest — in response to environmental conditions. This collective effort is one of the best examples we have of the relative significance of genetics, environment, nature and nurture for social organisms. The colony's needs turn out to be the main driving factor in pollen collection, emphasizing the importance of environmental factors. Page says that the bee's genotype explains just 8–25% of behavioural variance, and usually closer to 8%. This is a comforting concept for those who prefer nurture to nature.

The Spirit of the Hive is pitched at Page's fellow evolutionary biologists, and in places requires some understanding of Boolean logic, binary behaviour and basic genetics. But the book is at its best when Page uses story and description rather than models and mathematics. He clearly has considerable affection for his co-workers and for bees, and provides marvellous glimpses into how research is conducted. He opens that world to us through descriptions of his own elegant experiments, such as those exploring the genetic component of pollen collection.

I would have liked to hear more about the people he worked with and his relationship with his insects after so many decades in the field. Page finishes abruptly, with a too-short chapter that brings us back to Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee. I missed the soaring language of the poet here, which would have beautifully completed the circle — for instance, Maeterlinck's description of the hive as containing “the enigma of intellect, of destiny, will, aim, means, causes; the incomprehensible organization of the most insignificant act of life”.

Still, Page's book is a delightful example of how one dedicated career in science can dramatically deepen and broaden our perceptions of the world around us.