Dr. Stephen Buchmann is a pollination ecologist specializing in bees and an adjunct professor with the departments of entomology and of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.
Dr. Stephen Buchmann is a pollination ecologist specializing in bees and an adjunct professor with the departments of entomology and of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. He is the author or co-author of more than 150 scientific publications and 11 books. The Forgotten Pollinators (1997, Island Press) with Gary Paul Nabhan won the Benjamin Franklin Award and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.
A fellow of the Linnean Society of London, Buchmann has published over 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers and eleven books, including The Forgotten Pollinators (1997, Island Press) with Gary Paul Nabhan, which won the Benjamin Franklin Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Buchmann is a frequent guest on many public media venues including NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and “Science Friday.” Reviews of his books have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time and Discover magazines and other national publications. He is a public speaker on topics of flowers, pollinators, and the natural world. His many awards include the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award, and an NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book.
He lives in the Sonoran Desert of Tucson, Arizona, with his life partner, estate planning attorney Kay Richter.
For many of us, the buzzing of a bee elicits panic. But the next time you hear that low droning sound, look closer: the bee has navigated to this particular spot for a reason using a fascinating set of tools. She may be using her sensitive olfactory organs, which provide a 3D scent map of her surroundings. She may be following visual landmarks or instructions relayed by a hive-mate. She may even be tracking electrostatic traces left on flowers by other bees. What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees invites us to follow bees’ mysterious paths and experience their alien world.
Although their brains are incredibly small—just one million neurons compared to humans’ 100 billion—bees have remarkable abilities to navigate, learn, communicate, and remember. In What a Bee Knows, entomologist Stephen Buchmann explores a bee’s way of seeing the world and introduces the scientists who make the journey possible. We travel into the field and to the laboratories of noted bee biologists who have spent their careers digging into the questions most of us never thought to ask (for example: Do bees dream? And if so, why?). With each discovery, Buchmann’s insatiable curiosity and sense of wonder is infectious.
What a Bee Knows will challenge your idea of a bee’s place in the world—and perhaps our own. This lively journey into a bee’s mind reminds us that the world is more complex than our senses can tell us.
Consider this: Without interaction between animals and flowering plants, the seeds and fruits that make up nearly eighty percent of the human diet would not exist.
In The Forgotten Pollinators, Stephen L. Buchmann, one of the world's leading authorities on bees and pollination, and Gary Paul Nabhan, award-winning writer and renowned crop ecologist, explore the vital but little-appreciated relationship between plants and the animals they depend on for reproduction—bees, beetles, butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, bats, and countless other animals, some widely recognized and other almost unknown.
Scenes from around the globe—examining island flora and fauna on the Galápagos, counting bees in the Panamanian rain forest, witnessing an ancient honey-hunting ritual in Malaysia—bring to life the hidden relationships between plants and animals, and demonstrate the ways in which human society affects and is affected by those relationships. Buchmann and Nabhan combine vignettes from the field with expository discussions of ecology, botany, and crop science to present a lively and fascinating account of the ecological and cultural context of plant-pollinator relationships.
More than any other natural process, plant-pollinator relationships offer vivid examples of the connections between endangered species and threatened habitats. The authors explain how human-induced changes in pollinator populations—caused by overuse of chemical pesticides, unbridled development, and conversion of natural areas into monocultural cropland-can have a ripple effect on disparate species, ultimately leading to a “cascade of linked extinctions.”
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Stephen Buchmann: “I’ve always loved being outdoors feeling the wind and inhaling the alluring scents of nearby trees and flowers. Living in the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona, I often walk along the washes and desert canyons near my Tucson home. Sitting outdoors on a boulder, I stop and slow my thoughts, taking in all of nature. Insects, including my favorites, the bees, zoom past uninterrupted in their search for floral rewards. Slowly, the larger animals reappear, as rabbits, ground squirrels and birds settle around me. Nearby, I spy a vivid yellow-orange Senna bush. It’s early morning and I hear the bees. They are buzz pollinating, having turned themselves into living tuning forks. They use sonic blasts from their thoracic muscles to harvest the floral pollen.
“In nature I always find inspiration for my writing, and ideas for my scientific research. I’ve never kept a nature journal or sketchbook, but often capture images and memories with a digital camera. My backyard in Tucson’s north foothills provides inspiring views of the rugged Santa Catalina Mountains. I wrote much of The Reason for Flowers while immersed in the riotous yellow blooms of palo verde trees, like eastern Forsythias on steroids, and by the multi-armed giants, the white-flowered saguaro columnar cacti.
“Years ago, I did the same when co-writing The Forgotten Pollinators book while walking the grounds of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, including time spent within the hummingbird aviary watching the small but feisty birds drinking from the many orange and red tubular flowers. I cherish every moment I can spend outdoors, whether those times are outdoors in arid desert lands, Ponderosa pine glades, or tropical forests around the world. Bees and their flowering food plants are usually nearby.”