Charles Duncan Michener, 1918-2015.

Paul was just 15 when he met Michener (Mich), who was curator of Lepidoptera at the American Museum of Natural History. He seemed to be very old to Paul (Mich was 29) and Paul thought even then that Mich was a great scientist (he was right). Mich was doing research on the taxonomy of butterflies and moths because he couldn’t find employment working with bees, his first and last love. Berry only met Mich once, when Berry came to the University of Kansas in October 2005 to identify bees he had collected in Costa Rica as part of his doctoral dissertation at Stanford. Mich had already shown generosity by arranging for two graduate students in bee systematics to join Berry in Costa Rica to help teach him bee sampling and identification. Mich was a towering figure in Berry’s imagination, for his contributions to bee systematics and the biology of sociality. Berry used his copy (given to him by Paul) of Mich’s sweeping magnum opus on bee systematics and taxonomy, The Bees of the World (1), every day in Costa Rica to key out bees to subgenus. Mich was considered the central figure in bee systematics globally, with the bulk of his more than 500 publications (spanning more than 80 years!) related to that topic. Mich was apparently teased by colleagues upon the publication of The Bees of the World that he had only just finished his doctoral dissertation, which was focused on the morphology, phylogeny, and classification of bees. But Mich’s curiosity extended beyond systematics, and he made central contributions to our understanding of bee behavior, and in particular sociality. Mich particularly exploited the fact that the bee lineage contains a striking diversity of sociality—in contrast to groups like ants that have only highly social forms— and many of his contributions were based on observations of “transitional” taxa that are neither solitary nor eusocial, but instead weakly social. Mich put these studies in a phylogenetic context, in particular examining taxa that, for example, had reverted from weakly social to solitary. Often the taxa he used in studies of behavior and sociality also became the focus of systematic investigations as well. One component of this work was on kin recognition (in particular with David Fletcher), research that contributed to both sociobiologyandalso to chemical ecology, given the central role of cuticular hydrocarbons and macrocyclic lactones in kin recognition. Mich’s work on bee behavior, and in particular sociality, was crystallized in his 1974book The Social Behavior of the Bees (2), which was foundational to later work on sociobiology and the evolution of sociality, by E. O. Wilson and others. It was typical of Mich’s mentoring that he did not try to convert Paul to hymenopteran taxonomy, but instead encouraged his interest in butterfly systematics andallowing him to do volunteer work on them at the AmericanMuseum and steering him toward science, suggesting that he join the then-forming Lepidopterists’ Society. In 1952 Paul was accepted by Mich as a graduate student at the University of Kansas, where Mich had moved so he could return to his bee research. Mich arranged for Paul to have an assistantship with his new colleague, Bob Sokal, and the Michener– Sokal combination would soon transform the ancient field of taxonomy. Paul and two fellow graduate students, Jim Chilcott and Earl Cross (now both gone), were fortunate enough to be in a small seminar where the theory of taxonomy was being critically examined. Bob argued against the rest of the group that statistical techniques could be used to make taxonomy much more Charles DuncanMichener. Image courtesy of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library (University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence, KS).