Endless Forms
by Seirian Sumner · first published 2022
4mentions
2recommended by
3HN commenters
2023–2026first – last mentioned
67% recommend33% neutral
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A recent popular science book I'd recommend is "Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps" by Seirian Sumner. It speaks to wasps' utility as pollinators, pest eaters and how bees and ants are descendants of wasps. After reading it I turned over a dirt dauber next…
on “Is Beekeeping Wrong?” ↗…in recent decades, if not one seeing the concomitant level of investment. If you find the subject compels, the next place I'd point you would be Seirian Sumner's quite recent and frankly outstanding Endless Forms, which offers both a worthy successor to Evans' perspective on the hymenopterans, and a view of the astonishing breadth of the field's development since Evans' own day - and no shortage of remarkable…
on “Here a Bee, There a Bee, Everywhere a Wild Bee” ↗…social wasps exercising a constructive theory of mind for a species deeply dissimilar to themselves, ie we H. sap. A good lay overview, written much from a love which I recognize, is Seirian Sumner's 2022 Endless Forms. I forget offhand if she is as explicit as I'm being, but that's okay; no one really of whom I'm aware is really making the kind of (what is arguably a) leap that I am, to treat consciousness in this…
on “Thoughts on Slowing the Fuck Down” ↗…Science and Nature Writing 2024, edited" by McKibben, Bill "The English Abbey: Its Life and Work in the Middle Ages" by Crossley, Fred H. "The Stereoscope in Ophthalmology" by Wells, David Washburn "Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps – Why Nature's Maligned Predators and Pollinators are Essential to Planetary Health" by Sumner, Seirian "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jacobs, Jane <--- best…
on “Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?” ↗