The Secret Life of Bees where

On the front porch of an old Coast Guard station on Apple more Island, seven miles off the southern coast of Maine, Thomas   Seeger  and I sat next to 6,000 quietly buzzing bees. Seeger  wore a giant pair of silver headphones over a beige baseball cap, a wild fringe of hair blowing out the back; next to him was a video camera mounted on a tripod. In his right hand, Seeger held a branch with a lapel microphone taped to the end. He was recording the honeybee swarm huddling inches away on a board nailed to the top of a post. Seeger, a biologist from Cornell University, had cut a notch out of the center of the board and inserted a tiny screened box called a queen cage. It housed a single honeybee queen, along with a few attendants. Her royal scent acted like a magnet on the swarm If I had come across this swarm,  spread across my back door, I would have panicked. But here, sitting next to Seeger,  I felt a strange calm. The insects thrummed with their own business. They flew past our faces. They got caught in our hair, pulled themselves free and kept flying. They didn’t even mind when Seeger gently swept away the top layer of bees to inspect the ones underneath. He softly recited a poem by William Butler Yeats: If I had come across this swarm spread across my back door, I would have panicked. But here, sitting next to Seeger, I felt a strange calm. The insects thrummed with their own business. They flew past our faces. They got caught in our hair, pulled themselves free and kept flying. They didn’t even mind when Seeger gently swept away the top layer of bees to inspect the ones underneath. He softly recited a poem by William Butler Yeats: “We wait with bated breath,” he said. “Sorry?” Fischer said. “Breath. Bated. Over.” Seeger set the walkie-talkie back on the rail without taking his eyes off the bees. A few minutes later, a honeybee scout flew onto the porch and alighted on the swarm. She (all scouts are female) wore a pink dot on her back. “Ah, here she is. Pink has landed,” Seeger said. Pink was exploring the island in search of a place where the honeybees could build a new hive. In the spring, if a honeybee colony has grown large enough, swarms of thousands of bees with a new queen will split off to look for a new nest. It takes a swarm anywhere from a few hours to a few days to inspect its surroundings before it finally flies to its newly chosen home. When Pink had left Seeger’s swarm earlier in the morning, she was not yet pink. Then she flew to a rocky cove on the northeast side of the island, where she discovered a wooden box and went inside. Fischer was sitting in front of it under a beach umbrella, with a paintbrush hanging from his lips. When the bee emerged from the box, Fischer flicked his wrist and caught her in a net the size of a ping-pong paddle. He laid the net on his thigh and dabbed a dot of pink paint on her back. With another flick, he let her go. Fischer is famous in honeybee circles for his technique. Seeger calls it alien abduction for bees. As the day passed, more scouts returned to the porch. Some were marked with pink dots. Others were blue, painted by Thomas Schiebel of the University of Bristol at a second box nearby. Some of the returning scouts started to dance. They climbed up toward the top of the swarm and wheeled around, waggling their rears. The angle at which they waggled and the time they spent dancing told the fellow bees where to find the two boxes. Some of the scouts that witnessed the dance flew away to investigate for themselves. Then a blue bee did something strange. It began to make a tiny beeping sound, over and over again, and started headbutting pink bees. Seeger had first heard such beeps in the summer of 2009. He didn’t know why it was happening, or which bee was beeping. “All I knew was that it existed,” he said. Seeger and his colleagues have since discovered that the beeps come from the headbutting scouts. Now Seeger moved his microphone in close to them, calling out each time the bee beeped. It sounded like a mantra: “Blue...blue...blue...blue...blue.” When you consider a swarm one bee at a time this way, it starts to look like a heap of chaos. Each insect wanders around, using its tiny brain to perceive nothing more than its immediate surroundings. Yet, somehow, thousands of honeybees can pool their knowledge and make a collective decision about where they will make a new home, even if that home may be miles away. The decision-making power of honeybees is a prime example of what scientists call swarm intelligence. Clouds of locusts, schools of fish, flocks of birds and colonies of termites display it as well. And in the field of swarm intelligence, Seeger is a towering figure. For 40 years,  he has come up with experiments that have allowed him to decipher the rules honeybees use for their collective decision-making. “No one has reached the level of experimentation and ingenuity of Tom Seeger,” says Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University. Growing up in Ellis Hollow, in upstate New York, Seeger would bicycle around the farms near his house; one day he discovered a pair of white boxes. They each contained a hive. Seeger was seduced. He came back day after day to stare at the hives. He would look into the boxes and see bees coming in with loads of pollen on their legs. Other bees fanned their wings to keep the hives cool. Other bees acted as guards, pacing back and forth at the opening. “If you lie in the grass in front of a hive, you see this immense traffic of bees zooming out of the hive and circling up and then shooting off in whatever direction they want to go,” said Seeger. “It’s like looking at a meteor shower.”