What a Bee Knows, with Stephen Buchmann

Inside Ideas with Marc Buckley

Stephen Buchmann is a pollination ecologist specializing in bees and an adjunct professor with the departments of Entomology and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. A Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, he has published over 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers and eleven books, including The Forgotten Pollinators with Gary Nabhan (Island Press, 1996) and, most recently, The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives (Scribner, 2015). Buchmann is a frequent guest on many public media venues including NPR’s All Things Considered, and Science Friday. Reviews of his books have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time and Discover magazines and other national publications. He is an engaging public speaker on topics of flowers, pollinators, and the natural world. His many awards include the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, and an NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book. For many of us, the buzzing of a bee elicits panic. But the next time you hear that low droning sound, look closer: the bee has navigated to this particular spot for a reason using a fascinating set of tools. She may be using her sensitive olfactory organs, which provide a 3D scent map of her surroundings. She may be following visual landmarks or instructions relayed by a hive-mate. She may even be tracking electrostatic traces left on flowers by other bees. What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees invites us to follow bees’ mysterious paths and experience their alien world. Although their brains are incredibly small—just one million neurons compared to humans’ 100 billion—bees have remarkable abilities to navigate, learn, communicate, and remember. In What a Bee Knows, entomologist Stephen Buchmann explores a bee’s way of seeing the world and introduces the scientists who make the journey possible. We travel into the field and to the laboratories of noted bee biologists who have spent their careers digging into the questions most of us never thought to ask (for example: Do bees dream? And if so, why?). With each discovery, Buchmann’s insatiable curiosity and sense of wonder is infectious. What a Bee Knows will challenge your idea of a bee’s place in the world—and perhaps our own. This lively journey into a bee’s mind reminds us that the world is more complex than our senses can tell us. www.stephenbuchmann.com