KU News Release

July 9, 2007
Contact: Brendan M. Lynch, University Relations, (785) 864-8855.

Legendary KU researcher updates his classic book ‘The Bees of the World’

LAWRENCE — When Charles D. Michener first published a major work on bees, the vital pollinators were not making many headlines. The year was 1939.

Now, Michener, professor emeritus of entomology and of systematics and ecology and curator emeritus at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at the University of Kansas, and his eight decades of research have shaped a new, much-anticipated reference work on bees, titled “The Bees of the World, Second Edition.” The book was just published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

“I started at a very early stage,” said Michener. “When I was a kid in southern California, first I drew pictures of flowers, then of insects. By the time I reached the university stage I was already fairly sophisticated at identifying California bees. I published papers — I really got into them.”

Michener’s 992-page tome is an extensive rework of the celebrated first edition, which Science magazine deemed a “magnum opus” and the American Association of Publishers gave a coveted R.R. Hawkins Award in 2000.

But the new book catalogs more bees — 17,000-plus species — and contains many new facts, classifications and revisions. Additionally, the work includes 48 color photos, 40 black and white illustrations and 434 line drawings.

“For a revision, an author has to keep up with the literature and with what other people are doing all over the world, so as to have an up-to-date job,” said Michener. “The new edition also contains illustrations of fossil bees and information about bee origin and evolution. Researchers like me have changed ideas about relationships between groups and found new species and new genera.”

Michener has been hailed as one of the greatest entomologists of the 20th century. His bee collecting and studies of bee behavior have taken him to Panama, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Australia, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Java, China, Australia and many African counties.

Michener’s lifetime of research into bees gives him insight into issues making news today. For instance, he said the introduction of the African honeybee to Brazil has resulted in the migration of the sometimes-aggressive pollinator into the United States’ southwest and beyond. In fact, he has encountered agitated African bees firsthand in Brazil.

“One of our tests was to see how far a disturbed colony of African bees will follow a person walking away,” Michener said. “And sometimes, it was like a kilometer. They keep buzzing you and hitting you and trying to sting. So they can be very aggressive. On the other hand, other colonies of African bees are very gentle — and there are strains of European bees that can be very aggressive.”

According to Michener, there is still no definitive explanation for colony collapse disorder, the mysterious bee disappearance now decimating commercial hives.

“For some reason not yet known, the honey bees in North America and also some other places are abandoning their colonies and dying,” said Michener. “Beekeepers put their colonies up for winter, and come back and think they’ll have hundreds of colonies in the spring. But they wind up with a few dozen, and otherwise empty hives. Nobody knows if it’s a disease or some reaction to pesticides or something else.”

Indeed, the entomologist said colony collapse disorder is only one aspect of a larger challenge faced by bees — wild bee populations are in decline around the world.

“It’s not always for the same reason,” Michener said. “In some cases, the reason is fairly obvious — the destruction of natural habitats where the diversity of flowers on which they’re dependent has disappeared. If you plant square miles of corn, there are very few flowers for bees to feed on.”

Despite dropping populations, bees are still characterized by their vast variety. According to Michener, the work of bee discovery and classification is never done.

“There are new species all over the world, even in well-studied areas like Europe and North America,” he said. “And in little-studied places like the Amazon valley, there are many species that have never been collected or described. In the collections of the world, including the one here at the University of Kansas, there are many new species of bees. It’s just a case of people having time to study their characteristics and decide if they really are new, considering what’s been described before.”

The entomologist estimates that he personally has discovered and published about 100 new species of bee, although he has not devoted his time primarily to finding and describing new species. His efforts have been toward clarifying bee evolution and classification, and investigating social behavior, especially that of primitively social species that live in colonies of only a few bees.

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