Describes the prominent themes in the ecology, natural history, and evolution of bees, and includes discussions on pollinating behavior, natural enemies, reproduction, social behavior, and maintenance of the diversity of tropical communities. This book is the first to draw together these themes, and covers topics as varied as the evolution of obligate sociality and the reproductive diversity of tropical flowering plants. There are many new examples from the author's research on pollination ecology, mimicry, mutualism, coevolution, and competition.

The first part of the volume deals with general structural and biological features of flowers and shows facets of their diversity. The second part focuses on the flowers of selected tropical plants and emphasizes their structural and biological idiosyncrasies and evolutionary features. The author also outlines new trends in the study of floral evolution and the role of flowers in the study of flowering plant phylogeny.

With detailed information available for perhaps only a few hundred of the many thousand of species that occur, our current knowledge of the ecology of tropical rainforest trees is limited. This book aims to summarize the contemporary understanding of the ecology of tropical rainforest trees. The emphasis is on comparative ecology, an approach that can help to identify possible adaptive trends and evolutionary constraints and that may also lead to a workable ecological classification for tree species, conceptually simplifying the rainforest community and making it more amenable to analysis.