Learning from Honeybees and Tom Seeley
January 15, 2025
By Derek DiMatteo
Author of Honeybee Democracy (2010), Thomas D. Seeley is a professor of biology at Cornell University and has been researching honeybees for decades. This deep knowledge is soaked into every page of the book, of course, but so too is his love of his subject. For Seeley, the honeybee is both object of study and fascinating subject, whose behaviors and traits can teach us things about the concepts of community and democratic decision-making.
One of the most interesting aspects of this book is how it is written. Rather than present a series of facts and anecdotes about honeybees while masking the scientific research that undergirds his knowledge, Seeley places the scientific process at the forefront of the book. He reveals how researchers work by following clues and leads, devising experiments to test hypotheses. He demonstrates the scientific problem solving (the thought process) that leads to new knowledge about honeybees and ultimately to the lessons he extracts for humans. And he does so in digestible language infused with the excitement of researching something he loves.
The book focuses on the types of decision-making processes used by honeybees. These processes are collective and democratic, and they are used for a range of purposes, the most important being where to establish the swarm’s home. This process includes fact-finding, information sharing, corroboration of evidence, evaluation of that evidence, debate, and consensus building. As the book’s title suggests, honeybees can teach humans about successful democratic decision-making processes: “any decision-making group should consist of individuals with shared interests and mutual respect, a leader’s influence should be minimized, debate should be relied upon, diverse solutions should be sought, and the majority should be counted on for a dependable resolution.”
At the core of honeybee communication (and therefore decision-making) is the waggle dance. Bees use the waggle dance to convey the locations of potential new sites for the hive and use it to settle arguments about the quality of the proposed sites. When a scout finds a potential site, it returns to the hive and uses the waggle dance to tell other bees the new site’s location using coordinates relative to the sun. The other scouts will use these coordinates to go visit the site and evaluate it for themselves. If that site is better than the site they themselves had found, then they will adopt the same waggle dance. The scouts come and go, evaluating each other’s sites, until finally they reach consensus. For this to work, the bees have to be willing to change their minds when presented with new facts. From their elders, young bees learn how to conduct the waggle dance through a process of social learning.
Throughout the book, Seeley lets readers peek behind the curtain of the scientific process. A great example of this is the anecdote related to studying where bees prefer to build nests. At first, he thought their preferred location was near ground-level. But in actuality, the ideal location is 21 feet high. The problem, he reveals, was “unintentional sampling bias” caused by having studied nests “that had been noticed inadvertently by a person walking past a bee tree, and because people are much more likely to notice bees trafficking from a ground-level nest entrance than a tree-top one.” This anecdote tells us something about the research process. When presented with contradictory evidence, Seeley had to be willing to change his understanding of what locations bees find optimal for building their hives, rather than stick stubbornly to a disproven belief.
Another aspect of the scientific process that Seeley reveals is the intellectual genealogy of his study of honeybees. He doesn’t present himself as working as the first let alone only person to have studied honeybees. He consistently details the relationships between past researchers, himself, and his students. For example, he tells us that Karl von Frisch, who studied the waggle dance, had taught Martin Lindauer, whose research on how bees choose new homes formed the foundation for some of Seeley’s own research. Seeley in turn gives credit to his own graduate students, such as Juliana Rangel, who helped him learn how scout bees instigate the swarm’s departure from their old nest and move to the next. (In this way, Seeley reminds me of Merlyn Sheldrake, who is similarly generous in describing his intellectual debts in his book about fungi, Entangled Life.)
Ultimately, Honeybee Democracy is a fascinating glimpse into the behaviors of bees and the scientific process, with insights into human decision making. It also dovetails nicely with some of the events in Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx & Crake in which two of the characters, Pilar and Toby, engaged in beekeeping.
References and Resources
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. Anchor Books / Penguin, 2003.
Real Science. “The Power of Bee Democracy.” YouTube. Sept. 18, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDnQ4pAjBUg.
Seeley, Thomas D. Honeybee Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2010.
Seeley, Thomas D. “Tom Seeley: Honeybee Democracy.” YouTube. Uploaded by Cornell University, Feb. 15, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnnjY823e-w