NEW DATE — ASU Book Group: 'The Art of the Bee' by Robert E. Page, Jr.

Cover of The Art of the Bee by Robert Page
**Please note that per updated ASU event guidelines, masks are required for all in-person attendees. We also encourage participants to receive a negative COVID-19 test prior to attending the event.**

The ASU Book Group's February 2022 reading selection is "The Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies" by Robert E. Page, Jr. The book group is open to all in the ASU community and meets monthly from noon–1 p.m. with two different options for attendance: either in-person at the Piper Writers House or virtually on Zoom. In-person attendees are invited to join the author for lunch after at the University Club, no-host.

Haven't read the book? Come anyway! Authors are always present.

NEW: *Attendees must register to receive the Zoom link.*

Synopsis:

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The impact of bees on our world is immeasurable. Bees are responsible for the evolution of the vast array of brightly colored flowers and for engineering the niches of multitudes of plants, animals and microbes. They've painted our landscapes with flowers through their pollination activities, and they have evolved the most complex societies to aid their exploitation of the environment.

The parallels between human and insect societies have been explored by countless sociobiologists. Traditional texts present stratified layers of knowledge where the reader excavates levels of biological organization, each building on the last. In this book, Robert E. Page, Jr., delves deep into the evolutionary history and the sociality of bees. He presents fundamental biology-not in layers, but wrapped around interesting themes and concepts, and in ways designed to explore and understand each concept. Page uses the social contract as a way to examine the complex social system of bee societies, a contract that has been written over millions of years of social evolution on the fabric of DNA.

The book examines the coevolution of bees and flowering plants, bees as engineers of the environment, the evolution of sociality, the honey bee as a superorganism and how it evolves and the mating behavior of the queen. The resulting book explores the ways human societies and bee colonies are similar — not from a common ancestry with shared genes for sociality, but from shared fundamentals of political philosophy.

The book is available on amazon.com and through local bookstores.

Robert E. Page, Jr. is Provost Emeritus at ASU.

About the book group:

The ASU Book Group meetings and selections for 2021-2022 are:

The ASU Book Group is sponsored as a community outreach initiative by the Department of English and organized in partnership with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

Judith Smith
jps@asu.edu
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Piper Writers House