Bees are undeniably important to people and to nature. Can they also teach and inspire us to find solutions to complex environmental problems through collective rather than individual decisions? In his new book Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive, Mark L. Winston answers with an enthusiastic yes.
A long-time biology professor and academic director of the Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University, Winston is a world authority on bees and the ways they communicate. His book is in part a backward glance at career high points. While a graduate student in the mid 1970s, for example, he was part of a small team sent to French Guiana to determine whether it was possible to stop a New World invasion of African “killer bees” from spreading as far north as the United States. He describes the myriad reasons why the team failed in its objective at the same time as he and his colleagues unwittingly gained global media attention.
The killer bee episode had a host...
Ernesto Guzman-Novoa is a professor and the director of the Honey Bee Research Centre in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph.
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