James C. Nieh's "The Language of Bees"

James C. Nieh is a Professor in the Department of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution and an Associate Dean in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. He is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society and a recipient of the Hambleton Award for his bee research and the Springer Nature Editor of Distinction Award.

Nieh applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Language of Bees, and shared the following:

Page 99 finds me trying to determine how the stingless bee Melipona panamica tells nestmates where to find food. One possibility was “piloting”: perhaps an experienced bee simply flies ahead and leads recruits to the food source. Unfortunately, these bees shoot out of the nest remarkably quickly, making them extremely difficult to follow. We tried large white backgrounds, fluorescent powders, and even an elaborate arrangement of fishing lines and bee-like objects designed to misdirect departing recruits. None worked. The page ends as we turn to a different experiment: separating recruiters from recruits to test whether recruits can still obtain information about distance and direction.

For The Language of Bees, the Page 99 Test works surprisingly well. A reader opening the book to this page would get a good sense of both what the book is about and how I tell the story.

The book is about how bees communicate, but it is equally about how scientists discover what their signals mean. Page 99 captures that process well: there is a biological mystery, a plausible hypothesis, several failed attempts to test it, and then a new experiment prompted by those failures. That pattern recurs throughout the book. Science rarely proceeds neatly from question to answer, and some of the most interesting discoveries arise when an apparently sensible approach does not work. It can be heartbreaking, especially in the tropical heat, but sometimes the sweat is worth it.

It is also appropriate that page 99 features a stingless bee rather than the familiar honey bee waggle dance. One of the book’s central themes (despite its title, and this is deliberately provocative) is that there is no single “language of bees”. Different species have evolved remarkably different ways of sharing information, shaped by their ecology and social lives.

So page 99 is not a summary of the whole book, but it is a good shortcut to its spirit: follow the bees, test the idea, and when an approach fails, try another way of asking the question.

Learn more about The Language of Bees at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue