Hive talking

Do bees dream? That sounds like a da question to ask an eminent entomologist. Phil Lester, a professor of biology at Victoria University of Wellington, is delighted to be asked. He did, after all, pose that very question in his new book, Healthy Bee, Sick Bee, which despite the prosaic title is an engaging, occasionally whimsical and learned slim volume. His first book, The Vulgar Wasp, was similarly delightful.

All worker bees are female, and Lester likens the drones, male bees, to Japanese men – a simile that occurred to him after reading a article that “suggests that men in Japan do nothing about the house. Instead of washing the dishes,