I'm so glad you have raised this question. Your instincts about this book are correct in my opinion. You mentioned the claims made about the effect of temperature on brood development. I tracked down all the original papers by Tautz's group on this point.
Tautz implies that bees raised at lower temperatures are more likely to be house bees only and never become field foragers. He apparently wants to "discover" that bee specialization is controlled by temperature in the same way that alligator gender is determined by the incubation temperature of the eggs. There are several problems with this.
He uses a developmental temperature outside the normal range that occurs in the hive. I fail to see the relevance of bees raised at a temperature that is artificially maintained at lower than natural levels.
http://www.pnas.org/content/100/12/7343.full "Measurements of the temperature within individual pupal cells, for example, revealed values that ranged from 32.6°C for the coldest pupa to 35.9°C for the warmest pupa. Taken over a 3-h period, the mean temperatures for these pupae were 33.7°C for the coldest and 35.0°C for the warmest pupa, but no pupae raised in the combs experienced a completely constant temperature (M. Kleinhenz, B. Bujok, S. Fuchs, and J.T., unpublished results)."All of Tautz's cold brood development was carried out at a constant 32C, but the coldest instantaneous natural pupal cell temperature measured was 32.6C and the coldest 3 hour average was 33.7C. So why is he using a much lower temperature that is clearly outside the normal range?
Tautz notes that cold-raised bees have a higher death rate and could not all be accounted for over the course of the experiments. I think the simplest conclusion is that cold-raised bees don't become field bees because they die before they reach that level of development.
I noticed that the book has no real bibliography. There are no references to the scientific literature, only references to books with no page numbers . There is just mention of an associated website that is supposed to provide up-to-date references, but when I went to that website it was just marked "down for update" with no references or data provided.
I really wanted to like this book, but I have been forced to conclude that it is a collection of pretty pictures.
On the issue of workers eating the eggs of other workers (it's called oophagy) that is a common event. Seeley discusses the importance of oophagy in "Wisdom of the Hive". In a eusocial insect colony, the queen has a monopoly on reproduction, and that is essential to the social coherence of the hive. If each worker can lay eggs and prioritizes the survival of her own genes, the organization of the hive would fall apart as the workers competed against each other. Apparently, workers can tell which drone eggs were laid by the queen and which by other workers.
The relatedness of a worker to the drones eggs laid by the queen is .25 while the relatedness of a worker to drone eggs laid by other workers is .125+(.25/N) where N is number of drones the queen mated with. So as long as the queen mated with more than 2 drones, the queen-laid drone eggs are favored over worker-laid drone eggs and therefore workers eat the eggs laid by other workers but not those laid by the queen. This maintains the genetic integrity of the hive. BTW, this is one reason that the queen mates with many drones.
Topic: Opinions on "The Buzz About Bees" by Jurgen Tautz (Read 2155 times)