It is a richly enjoyable selection of novels that scoops you up from 1920s suburban south London to a dig in Turkey in summer 1914; from the deeply imagined inner life of the honeybee to the soup-thick air of an Athens summer to depression-era America.
That may help explain why there have been fewer colony collapses.The rise and fall of the managed honeybee, then, owes as much to the economics of supply and demand as it does to the forces of nature.
Unlike termites, which can simply pick up their vulnerable young and move them to cooler areas when temperatures spike, honeybee larvae are bound to a specific area of comb and cannot be moved.To work around this, the bees engage in a behaviour called heat shielding, in which they push their bodies against hot parts of the hive, absorb some of the heat and then dissipate it.
HONEYBEE colonies, like those of ants and termites, are examples of a "superorganisms"—groups animals that behave, to a certain extent, as if they were a single, larger creature.
Now the Bumblebee Conservation Trust thinks it has worked out how to do it.The key, according to recent work by Jaromir Cizek, a Czech bumblebee enthusiast, is to feed the queens a high-quality mix of nectar and pollen freshly collected by bumblebees, not the low-grade stuff tolerated by their close relatives, the domesticated honeybee.
Unlike honeybee hives, colonies of Exoneura contain several fertile females sometimes as many as eight.
By comparing individual servers to foraging bees, and customer requests to flower patches, the two researchers have developed a "honeybee" algorithm for internet-server "hives".
Bumblebees are less studied than their honeybee cousins, but they also pollinate many commonly eaten crops, including strawberries, raspberries and runner beans.The two researchers and their colleagues raised 75 bumblebee colonies in their laboratory.
A recent suggestion that mobile phones may play a part has also been dismissed.The genome of the honeybee is yielding some clues.
If the traffic became more uniform, then the greedy algorithm began to outperform honeybee.
It divides time into fixed periods and allocates servers to customers for a period by working out what would have been the most profitable arrangement in the preceding one.When internet traffic was highly variable, the honeybee algorithm outperformed greedy by as much as 20%.
