Description: Oldroyd and Wongsiri provide a comparative work synthesizing the rapidly expanding Asian honey bee literature. The book provides a cornerstone for future investigations on these species, insights into the evolution across species, and a direction for conservation efforts to protect these keystone species of Asia's tropical forests.
Brief description: Benjamin P. Oldroyd is Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney.
Review Quotes: Our profound knowledge of honey bees, accumulating since Aristotle's time, takes on an altogether different meaning when we realize that there is not just the one extremely well studied European honey bee species but that there are also eight other species of honey bees that occur in Asia. Oldroyd and Wongsiri succeed admirably in assisting the non-specialist by organizing our current knowledge, to which they have made a significant contribution, in an orderly species-by-topic matrix and, at the same time, in laying bare, for the specialist, our profound ignorance of honey bees, taken in the plural sense of nine species. But the real success of their effort will be judged, a decade down the line, by how many honey bee researchers it helps create from among the rich community of Asian biologists--I have great hope.--Raghavendra Gadagkar, Professor, Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science