Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14850, USA; email:
Annu Rev Entomol. 2022 Jan 7;67:13-25. doi: 10.1146/annurev-ento-033121-100228. Epub 2021 Sep 28.
Thomas Seeley's research has focused on analyzing the collective intelligence and natural lives of honey bees. This account describes how the author encountered honey bees as a boy and became a beekeeper; how he switched his career path from medicine to biology to study the behavior and social life of honey bees; and how he focuses on understanding how a honey bee colony functions when it lives in the wild, rather than in a beekeeper's hive. He has shown how a honey bee colony works as a single decision-making unit to adaptively allocate its foragers among flower patches and to choose its nesting site in a hollow tree. These findings buttress the view that, in some social insect species, the colony is a group-level vehicle of gene survival. Beyond his research, he has written three books to synthesize these findings for biologists and share these discoveries with beekeepers.
托马斯·西利的研究重点是分析蜜蜂的集体智慧和自然生活。本文描述了作者作为一个男孩是如何与蜜蜂相遇并成为一名养蜂人的；他是如何从医学转行到生物学，以研究蜜蜂的行为和社会生活的；以及他是如何专注于了解当蜜蜂生活在野外而不是养蜂人的蜂箱中时，蜂群是如何运作的。他展示了蜜蜂群体如何作为一个单一的决策单位，在花间自适应地分配觅食者，并选择在空心树中筑巢。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即在某些社会性昆虫物种中，群体是一个具有生存基因的群体水平载体。除了他的研究，他还写了三本书，为生物学家综合这些发现，并与养蜂人分享这些发现。
