Bees of the World (Of the World)

Rating:
Summary: good information, but. . . .
Review: I like this book a fair amount. It's an overview of the bees of the world, with good no nonsense information about miners, masons, carpenters, and so on as well as the more social bees. I especially loved their effective use of diagrams for the shapes of various bees' nests.

The thing I didn't like was their intrusive and oftentimes nonsensical (and certainly slavish) adherence to the nonsensical notion that the natural world is based on strict competition. They bend over backwards to try to show that the activities of all bees are based on competition, and they strain to use crazy metaphors to support this view. Instead of perceiving bees and flowers as a wonderful example of the way that different members of natural communities work together for the benefit of the larger community, they actually resort to citing Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations as bee/plant interactions being a form of selfish capitalism!!![.] It's nonsense.

One other problem, and this is one reason I hate science. I'll just give a quote. Speaking of a bee being driven to extinction by logging, they say, "Recent reports of forestry activities on Bacan give rise to concern that the bee might become extinct before yielding up the secrets of its biology." If the authors weren't "free market scientists" they would be ashamed of this statement. It implies: Who cares if the creature goes extinct for its own sake? We just need to mine the knowledge before it does.

Once again, all this said, the book does provide some good information.