One of the starting facts Thomas Seeley, the Horace white professor of Biology at Cornell University, cities in his comprehensive and essential, The Lives Of Bees is that "the honey bee provides nearly half of all crop pollination services world wide. The importance of the honey bee to the Earth and humans is undeniable and many volumes have been written about the subject. The differentiating factor of this book is that unlike previous works, The Lives Of Bees focuses primarily on how colonies of honey bees live in the wild.

The book both celebrates and Chronicles the natural history of the honey bee, using his own experimental research and drawing on numerous studies, Seeley provides an in depth scientific look at honey bee colony nests, food collection, temperature control and more.

Seeley identifies and explores twenty one distinct differences between the living conditions of each. As the book compares and contrasts honey bee colonies in the wild with those controller by humans, it becomes clear that honey bees lives can be enriched or endangered by human beings. Seeley urges bee keepers in particular to focus " less on treating a honey bee colony as a honey factory or a pollination unit and more on admiring it as an amazing form of life.