 Hello again. It was pretty clear to me after the month we've had that my focus for this month, my book of the month would be a book that I've had for a while, but it's all about... well there's a lot of books around about bees these days. You can certainly find plenty of books on how to keep bees and different better ways to keep bees. There's lovely books like The Barefoot Beekeeper that explains things like top bar hives and so on, but this particular book I came across a few years ago was recommended to me as many of my favorite books have been, and it's this one. It's called The Buzz About Bees and it's by I would imagine Jürgen Torts and perhaps the cover immediately gives you some sense of what to expect. So a lot of bees, a lot of books about bees are to do with how to look after bees and this book is very much about how the bees live, you know, what do they do, and it's a fantastic thorough scientific investigation of how bees live their lives, the kind of things they get up to what goes on in the hive, and for me it gave an incredibly greater appreciation of what bees are, how they live, what they do, and the photography as you might guess from this cover picture is absolutely astonishing. So it's a German book, it's a little bit I suppose in the realms of an academic book, so it's not a cheap one, but I think if you know somebody who keeps bees or loves bees this will be absolutely fantastic book assuming that they haven't already got it of course because they may well say yes, what an amazing book. There are a couple of books I think with this title, I did come across another one but this is the one that I'm obviously very excited about, just astonishing images, and what it does is it explains how bees live as a colony and how this idea of the superorganism, so a superorganism is where each individual behaves like cells in an organism like ourselves, so the bees behave like individual cells but and they have the ability obviously to go off and do things separately and then come back together again, which is a really helpful behaviour because in a sense it allows them to, when they need to stay safe or to contain themselves because you know food is short so they can cluster together but when it's safe and there's lots to find they can go off and forage around the bout and of course by spreading themselves out then those who find food can come back and tell others and so on and in a sense the the waggle dance that we hear about inside the hive is very much like the way ants communicate with pheromones to communicate, there's what's called an emergent behaviour of the organism as a whole, the colony, and that the wisdom of the colony lives on beyond the life of the individual in the same way that I and the rest of us are watching this now, all of you, you are something that lives on beyond the life of your individual cells, so the lifespan of a worker bee is about six weeks apparently, there's another of those amazing photographs and and during that time the bee does different jobs, it goes from one job to the next within the hive and then eventually becomes goes out to forage and collect food and so on, so it explains the different roles within the hive, what queens do, what drones are, the workers and so on, the way they work with the cells and the fact that the queen will lay different kinds of eggs, so the queen is able to retain the sperm from the drones that she mates with when on her maiden flight and she can keep that for years in her body so that when she's laying eggs she knows whether to fertilize them or not so either produce a worker or a drone which are different genders and she does that on the basis of how big the cells are, so she measures the cell with her mandibles I think and and then lays the right kind of egg in there so because obviously drones get bigger, so yeah it's what to say, I mean it's just a fascinating book, it's full of amazing pictures, it explains how bees are able to navigate using the sun but also taking to account the fact the sun moves, the fact that bees when they're moving quickly they can only see in black and white because their brains are too small they don't have the capacity to see in color at speed but when they slow down they can then see the color of flowers and it will so that they see UV and they see different frequencies of light so they see flowers in a different way to us photographs it's just the photographs are the most astonishing thing about this book and so here we are this is all about the Wengal dance and how they navigate and well how they still navigate, lots of pictures as well as fascinating text now that's the queen, it's been marked are they emerge from their cells, oh yes and that they are lovely things, one of the things that fascinates me is how they create their own plumb line so in order to create what's called bee spacing between their combs, so when they naturally build comb rather than being forced into combs that are fixed into a frame in a beehive they build the comb but they need enough space they want enough crawl space for bees to get between the combs which is called bee space and so in order to create that space accurately they make sure that each comb is vertical and they build vertical combs by essentially a whole collection of you know a bunch of bees chain themselves together and hang down like this acting as a plumb line so that the bees building the comb can see exactly where is vertical to me it's just astonishing, guard bees dealing with intruders and so on and so forth and then actually some bees will bribe and the guard bees of another colony with some pollen to let them in so perhaps a bit like human society in that respect and it's just one of those fascinating books I think I've probably said enough bees we know they're important they're very busy at the moment country is a fantastic flower for bumblebees this is primarily focused on honeybees but it's essentially describes the super organism of all bees that live in community and I'd just like to recommend this as a fascinating read yes lovely book loads of photos really fascinating