Hymenoptera

Book review – The Guests of Ants: How Myrmecophiles Interact with Their Hosts

6-minute read
keywords: entomology, ethology

It has to be one of the more delightful details of the natural world: the ecosystem of an ant’s nest is home to its own constellation of creatures that specialise in living within or nearby it. Daniel Kronauer’s book Army Ants first drew my attention to these so-called myrmecophiles and their sometimes bizarre adaptations. I was stoked when Harvard University Press announced it would publish a monograph focusing on just this aspect of ant biology, authored by entomology professors Bert Hölldobler (a frequent co-author to E.O. Wilson) and Christina L. Kwapich. The Guests of Ants gives a beautifully illustrated, wide-ranging, and critical literature review of this delightful corner of myrmecology. Will ants make it to my personal top 5 for a third-year running? This book is a very strong contender.

(more…)

Book review – Ant Architecture: The Wonder, Beauty, and Science of Underground Nests

7-minute read

Making groundbreaking scientific contributions on a shoestring budget has become a challenge in the 21st century. But there are still opportunities. Take American entomologist Walter R. Tschinkel. With little more than scrap metal, homemade portable kilns, and one almighty spade, he has been researching the architecture of ant nests, pouring molten metal into tiny holes in the ground and digging up the resulting casts. The beautifully illustrated Ant Architecture provides a glimpse into his unusual methods but also shows the many fascinating findings and questions his research is throwing up. Supremely interesting, this is unlike any book on insects you have seen before and is already a firm candidate for my top five favourite books of 2021.

(more…)

Book review – Army Ants: Nature’s Ultimate Social Hunters

6-minute read

If ants give you the heebie-jeebies, you will want to turn away now, for this book review will deal with the ultimate arthropod nightmare: army ants. If, however, insects are your shtick, stick around, because German entomologist Daniel Kronauer has written a phenomenal book on army ant biology that is chock-a-block with jaw-dropping, award-winning photography.

(more…)

Book review – Desert Navigator: The Journey of an Ant

7-minute read

When we think of animal navigation, the dramatic comes to mind: globe-trotting birds, migrating monarch butterflies, and ocean-crossing whales. But on a smaller scale, navigation is no less vital and no less interesting. Take the humble desert ant. Desert Navigator is the culmination of a lifetime worth of study by German zoologist Rüdiger Wehner and his many collaborators. It is an astonishing and lavishly produced book that distils half a century of experiments into a richly illustrated narrative.

(more…)

Book review – The Dark Side of the Hive: The Evolution of the Imperfect Honeybee

The honey bee has a very positive reputation: a clever, industrious insect that organises itself in remarkably collaborative societies. But bee researchers Robin Moritz and Robin Crewe want to balance this picture. Yes, bee colonies are a marvel, but once you stop focusing on the level of the colony, all sorts of imperfections become apparent: cheating, robberies, regicide, euthanasia, evolutionary maladaptations, illogical reproductive strategies, etc. Welcome to the dark side of the hive.

(more…)

Book review – Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees

Sure, I have been lectured about the birds and the bees, and yet I learned an awful lot more about the bees from Thor Hanson’s latest work Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees. Hanson has previously written popular works about feathers and seeds, and in Buzz he turns his attention to bees. Already this book has garnered a lot of positive press and was Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4. Most people associate bees with honey and therefore with the honeybee, Apis mellifera, but Hanson specifically wants to talk about all the other thousands of bee species, many of which are as interesting and as important, even though some of them are diminutive and hardly noticed.

(more…)