In this richly illustrated guide, Bees of Costa Rica, leading bee experts showcase the diversity of bees in Costa Rica and the myriad ways in which they interact with flowers and people. Costa Rica is home to 117 bee genera and approximately 700 bee species. Focusing on the five bee families present in Costa Rica, the authors describe the bees' general physical traits, foraging and mating behavior, and nest characteristics. Chapters cover the relationships between bees and other insects, profiles of plants pollinated by bees, and practical suggestions for bee conservation. With identification keys and more than 150 color photographs, Bees of Costa Rica is essential for anyone looking to learn about and protect these important pollinators in Costa Rica and beyond.

It has often been noted that a kind of double dynamics char- terizes the development of science. On the one hand the progress in every discipline appears as the consequence of an increasing specialization, implying the restriction of the inquiry to very partial fields or aspects of a given domain. On the other hand, an opposite (but one might better say a complementary) trend points towards the construction of theoretical frameworks of great ge- rality, the aim of which seems to correspond not so much to the need of providing "explanations" for the details accumulated through partial investigation, as to the desire of attaining an - rizon of global comprehension of the whole field. This intell- tual dialectics is perceivable in every discipline, from mathe- tics, to physics, to biology, to history, to economics, to sociology, and it is not difficult to recognize there the presence of the two main attitudes according to which human beings try to make "intelligible" the world surrounding them (including themselves), attitudes which are sometimes called analysis and synthesis. They correspond respectively to the spontaneous inclination which pushes us to try to understand things by seeing "how they are made", in the sense of "looking into them" and breaking them into their constitutive parts, or rather to encompass things in a global picture, where they are accounted for as occupying a place, or playing a role, which are understandable from the point of view of the whole.

"Entonces les dijo el maestro: -Aprendan, pues, que ni en la luminosidad absoluta ni en la completa oscuridad el hombre puede ver. Por eso estamos hechos de luces y de sombras, para podernos ver los unos a los otros. Ay de aqu l que no perdone la oscuridad que hay en el alma de su hermano, pues no lo podr ver, y estar solo Y Ay de aqu l que no busque poner luces en su oscuridad, pues a s mismo se perder Y concluy, nosotros estamos hechos de sombras. D nde mejor que en nosotros puede brillar la luz?" An nimo Utop as y Delirios Antolog a? donde se entremezclan el drama, el humor, la sensibilidad y el dolor. No hay justicia po tica, solo experiencias de vida salpicadas con im genes de colores. La perfecci n est en lo simple... Manuel A. Cordero Creci mirando al Oc ano Atl ntico, observando las nubes y las estrellas en el fi rmamento, desarrollando una inquietud por aquello que no se ve, forjando las bases de un so ador.