Thomas D. Seeley
AUTHOR

Thomas D. Seeley

Tap the gear icon above to manage new release emails.
Thomas D. Seeley is the Horace White Professor in Biology Emeritus in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University. His career was devoted to teaching courses in animal behavior and doing research on the behavior, social life, and ecology of honey bees.

He grew up in Ithaca, New York. He began keeping and studying honey bees in the summer of 1969, when he was a high school student. One day, he found a swarm of bees hanging from a bush, shook it into a wooden box, and brought it home. Then every day after work, he sat by his box hive and watched the colony's workers come and go from its entrance opening. He was fascinated by the bees' behaviors. In 1970, he left Ithaca to attend Dartmouth College, but each summer he returned to Ithaca to work at the Dyce Laboratory for Honey Bee Studies at Cornell. Here he learned the craft of beekeeping and he began to investigate the inner workings of honey bee colonies. Thoroughly intrigued by the smooth functioning of these colonies, he dropped his plan of going to medical school at Dartmouth and decided instead to go to graduate school at Harvard. Here he was supervised by two professors who studied the behavior of ants (Drs. Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson) and he began to investigate in earnest the behavior of honey bees. He earned his Ph.D. in 1978. The subject of his Ph.D. thesis was how the nest-site scouts in a honey bee swarm evaluate potential home sites. After earning his Ph.D., he spent two years doing a comparative study of the behavior and ecology of the three species of honey bees that live in the forested mountains of eastern Thailand. He then worked as an assistant professor at Yale University for five years, before returning to Ithaca in 1986, where he has lived and worked as a professor at Cornell ever since.

In recognition of his scientific discoveries about honey bee behavior, he has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the U.S., and the Senior Scientist Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. He has also been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as a Member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina).

To share with non-scientists his findings about the behavior, social life, and ecology of honey bees, he has written six books: HONEYBEE ECOLOGY (1985, Princeton), THE WISDOM OF THE HIVE (1995, Harvard), HONEYBEE DEMOCRACY (2010, Princeton), FOLLOWING THE WILD BEES (2016, Princeton), THE LIVES OF BEES (2019, Princeton), and PIPING HOT BEES AND BOISTEROUS BUZZ-RUNNERS (2024, Princeton).
Read more Read less
Not an Audible member?
Start your free 30-day trial
From £5.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Lives of Bees

Most popular
View Details

Best Sellers

Product list
  • The Lives of Bees cover art
    Preview

    £14.13 or free with trial. Auto-renews at £5.99/month after trial. See eligibility.

  • Honeybee Democracy cover art
    Preview

    £13.09 or free with trial. Auto-renews at £5.99/month after trial. See eligibility.

  • Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners cover art
    Preview

    £13.52 or free with trial. Auto-renews at £5.99/month after trial. See eligibility.

Are you an author?

Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography.
Visit Amazon Author Central