Bookshelf

Buy these titles at www.beesfordevelopment.org/catalog or at our shop in Monmouth, UK

Top-bar beekeeping – organic practices for honeybee health

Les Crowder and Heather Harrell 2012 175 pages £20.99 (€35) C555

An excellent text with information not published elsewhere. Les Crowder writes in the introduction: “Now, after thirty five years of keeping bees, I can state confidently that careful beekeepers can keep bees successfully without using antibiotics to kill bacteria, comb fumigants to kill wax moths, miticides to kill mites, or fungicides to kill chalkbrood fungus”. He goes on to describe in detail his approach, keeping bees in top-bar hives as he has done for 19 years in New Mexico State in south-west USA.

Unique to this book is information about how to configure and manage combs within top-bar hives, and in particular to enable the removal of old combs from the hive. A very useful new work on a natural style of honey bee colony management.

Management of Philippine bees – stingless bees and honey bees

Cleofas R Cervancia, Alejandro C Fajardo Jr, Analinda C Manila-Fajardo & Raymundo M Lucero 2012 71 pages £20 (€35) C560

Another excellent new book with fresh information about stingless bees, and the Asian hive bee Apis cerana, and how to look after them. The book also describes the wild nesting giant honeybees Apis breviligula and Apis dorsata, how to harvest from them in a sustainable way, and how to process the honey and wax. Well presented with many good colour photographs: this is a very useful text for beekeepers working with indigenous bees in Asia.

Keeping bees in towns & cities

Luke Dixon 2012 184 pages £15.99 (€30) D555

A beautiful book in which Luke Dixon describes how to become an urban beekeeper. An explanation of how to obtain bees and look after them towards your first honey harvest. What makes this book special are the 23 stories of other beekeepers from around the world keeping bees in varying urban environments and in all sorts of interesting ways. It is nice to see how popular beekeeping is becoming with new generations living in cities.

Plants for bees – a guide to the plants that benefit the bees of the British Isles

W D J Kirk and F N Howes 2012 Hardback 312 pages £28 (€40) K555

In the UK in 1945 F Norman Howes, a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, published the famously useful, but modestly published, book Plants for bees. This book has now been expanded and modernised by William Kirk, with additional text contributed by experts in their fields and more details about the plant species. There is also an abundance of excellent photographs of bees and flowers.

The BBKA guide to beekeeping

Ivor Davis and Roger Cullum-Kenyon 2012 182 pages £17.99 (€32) D560

A new text for beginner beekeepers in the UK, especially those following the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) Beginners’ course, but also a useful resource for anyone new to the field. Laid out in modern, easy to read style with an abundance of pictures, the book contains all the conventional information for a beginner who will be using European honey bees in frame hives.

Starting with bees

The Beekeeping Club of St Augustine Secondary School, Sirima, Kenya, the Beekeeping Club of St Regina Secondary School, Nairutia, Kenya, and Francesco Nazzi 2012 45 pages £12 (€17) N355

This guide is prepared by students of two secondary schools in the central highlands of Kenya. The concise text was created by ‘collective writing’ whereby students contributed to and revised the text. The outcome is a very clear and understandable introduction to bees, making and using equipment including top-bar hives, harvesting honey and beeswax, and information about local bee plants.

Queen of the sun – what are the bees telling us?

Taggart Siegel and Jon Betzand 2011 144 pages £17.99 (€36) S555

This is an anthology of poems and articles contributed by authors including Carol Ann Duffy, Heidi Hermann, David Heaf, Gunther Hauk, Michael Thiele, Vandana Shiva and many other poets and thinkers, providing philosophical and spiritual insight into humans’ relationships with bees. A beautifully produced book with stunning colour photographs, an excellent, thought provoking Christmas present for any beekeeper!

Having healthy honeybees – an integrated approach

John McMullan 2012 117 pages £16 (€24) M555

Despite its title, this is a book about honey bee pathogens. Most of the text is concerned with very clear descriptions of the major pathogens affecting European races of Apis mellifera. Each pathogen is concisely described: cause, diagnosis, virulence and treatment, together with clear photographs. Chapter 4, Integrated health management, describes good practice for maintaining a well run apiary.