The Bee Book: The Wonder of Bees – How to Protect them – Beekeeping Know-how

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Seeley’s fifth book on bees illuminates why wild honeybees across the planet are thriving while managed colonies are under threat.

He is also Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, and points out that bees like humans, live in colonies, with a highly developed division of labour and cooperation. However, in colder climates, it seems that cultural evolution stops in the winter because of hibernation. This behavior isn’t seen in agricultural settings so much as in rain forests, where a tree in bloom would be like an oasis in a desert. The author notes than in any experiment with lots of bees, one or two in every group would stand out as particularly clever and teach their tricks to the other bees. Borodale observes the living architecture of the comb, the range and locality of the colony, its flights, flowers, water sources, parasites, lives and deaths in this poem-journal.Essentially, if you’ve never kept bees before and want a good introduction to the hobby, you could do much worse than this book. Bees memorize important landmarks by direction and relative to the sun, so if you go moving bees at night they’ll be totally lost the next day. Definitely read Honeybee Democracy afterwards, though, since it details the waggle dance and the social structure of bees, and it's fascinating. The Lives of Bees answers the complex question that has bugged beekeepers for decades: Why do some wild colonies thrive while their managed brethren collapse?

Chapters describe methods for studying honey bee biology, methods for understanding honey bee pests and pathogens, methods for breeding honey bees, and methods for understanding hive products, including for quality control purposes. More experienced beekeepers will naturally feel the book is a little basic, but then they’re not the target market here. It discusses bees, which play a huge role in pollination, and just about anything written to encourage pollinators will benefit bees. Professor Seeley has turned the idea of keeping bees on its head, pointing out the many indications that our current methods of exploiting honey bees may be quite harmful to them, or at best, not helpful.At first he could follow at a trot, but soon he was off in full gallop and managed to stay with the swarm for four miles, when it finally settled in a neighbours garden in a pear tree. As long as you have space for a hive with a reasonable gap around it (and plenty of flowers to pollinate nearby) you have space to start beekeeping. This charming, informative, and profusely illustrated book is one to curl up with in an easy chair while sipping honey-laced hot tea.

Honeycomb is a marvel of engineering, and if you interfere with the preferred method of placing the hexes, bees adapt in clever and beautiful ways. Not that it is full of complicated mathematical analyses but he does site many scientific studies about bees, including ones that didn't succeed in proving their point. Failing to remember the route back to safety or falling prey to the many birds and spiders are the foremost reasons. It is currently composed of 38 peer-reviewed chapters authored by more than 350 of the world’s leading honey bee experts representing 35 different countries.

The book uses a step-by-step approach to explaining the art and science of becoming a good beekeeper. In short, that probably makes it better for those that see beekeeping as a way to make money as much as it is a hobby. The bee content is focused on the individual bee and does a good job of reining in the "hivemind" myth a bit.