[...]... Apis is part of apiculture is debatable, but the study of all the other species of bees is not; such studies are subsumed under the term melittology Persons studying bees other than Apis and concerned about the negative and awkward expression “non-Apis bees would do well to call themselves melittologists and their field of study melittology 1 2 THE BEES OF THE WORLD I would include under the term “melittology”... relationships Therefore a group of sisters (workers) may increase their inclusive fitness more by caring for their sisters, younger offspring of their mother, than by producing their own offspring They thus gain in fitness by staying with their mother (the queen) This situation, resulting from haplodiploidy, is presumably a partial explanation of the frequency of evolution of eusociality in the Hymenoptera,... cases of this kind; see also Wcislo and Danforth (1997) 6 Floral Relationships of Bees Wind and bees are the world s most important pollinating agents Bees are either beneficial or actually essential for the pollination, and therefore for the sexual reproduction, of much of the natural vegetation of the world, as well as for many agricultural crops (see Sec 3) The pollinators are primarily female bees, ... eventually, most of the chorion disappears In others the chorion is split but otherwise remains intact Larvae of bees are soft, whitish, legless grubs (Fig 4-1bd) In mass-provisioning bees, larvae typically lie on the upper surface of the food mass and eat what is below and in front of them, until the food is gone They commonly grow rapidly, molting about four times as they do so The shed skins are... aspects of behavior of diverse kinds of bees Specialized papers are cited throughout this book; some more general treatments are the books by Friese (1923), with its interesting colored plates of nests of European bees; Iwata (1976), with its review of previous work on the behavior of bees and other Hymenoptera; and O’Toole and Raw (1991), which offers readable accounts and fine illustrations of bees worldwide... include all of the derived taxa Brief explanations of other terms used by systematists are appended to Section 12 3 3 The Importance of Bees Probably the most important activity of bees, in terms of benefits to humans, is their pollination of natural vegetation, something that is rarely observed by nonspecialists and is almost never appreciated; see Section 6 Of course the products of honey bees i.e.,... 1990, and involved the publication in 1974 of The Social Behavior of the Bees Concurrently, of course, my systematic studies continued; behavior contributes to systematics and vice versa, and the two go very well together Across the years, I have had the good fortune to be able to study both behavior and systematics of bees in many parts of the world In addition to shorter trips of weeks or months,... diversity found among bees Additional information and sources can be found in Michener, 1974a, 1985b, 1990c, d The great abundance of the highly social forms (honey bees, stingless bees) almost wherever they occur suggests that such sociality itself is an enormous advantage in the presumed competition with other bees The great body of literature on the theory of eusocial behavior of insects mostly addresses... Michener and Lange, 1958c 14 THE BEES OF THE WORLD Figure 5-2 Part of an aggregation of nests, each containing a eusocial colony of Halictus hesperus Smith, in Panama The tumuli at the nest entrances make the site conspicuous Photo by R W Brooks or inclusive fitness consists of (1) its direct fitness (its number of offspring and their contributions to subsequent generations; i.e., the fitness resulting from... work on the bees of Baden-Württemberg (Westrich, 1989) Svetlana Novikova and Dr Bu Wenjun provided English translations of certain materials from Russian and Chinese, respectively Their help is much appreciated The text has been prepared with the help of the bees themselves, publications about them, and unpublished help from the persons listed above I have not included here the names of all the persons .