Bookshelf

The tears of Re Beekeeping in ancient Egypt

Gene Kritsky, 134 pages hardcover, Oxford University Press

According to ancient Egyptians, the god Re (pronounced Ray) was the sun and he created honey bees when his tears touched the earth. This reveals the precious nature of honey bees to people of that time. Gene Kritsky is an entomologist and Egyptologist whose two interests have merged to enable him to explore the role of honey bees in so many aspects of ancient Egyptian culture. The honey bee featured regularly as a motif – the first hieroglyphs with honey bees date from 3050-2850 BC., and the author gathers together many pieces of evidence that show the importance of bees and how they were embedded in Egyptian society. Full of interesting illustrations – this book will be treasured by those interested in culture and bees.

If bees are few A hive of bee poems

Edited by James P. Lenfestey, foreword by Bill McKibben and afterword by Marla Spivak 225 pages hardcover, University of Minnesota Press

This is a collection of poems written across the millennia about bees, from Virgil, past Shakespeare and right up to now with Carol Ann Duffy imagining of bees sucking up neonicotinoids. The anthology takes its title If bees are few from Emily Dickinson’s poem To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.... This is an apt quote for a fresh and marvellous collection of poems, and proceeds from its sale support Dr Marla Spivak and the work of her bee lab at the University of Minnesota in USA. Highly recommended for bee admirers everywhere.

Heather honey

An anthology of works by Francis Sitwell, Rev. Brother Adam, Colin Weightman, William Hamilton and Peter Schollick. Compiled by Ian Copinger. 124 pages softcover, Northern Bee Books

Heather honey is today one of the most delicious and highly regarded honeys that can be harvested from high altitude areas of the UK and other northern European countries. It was a different situation a hundred years ago, when beekeepers in the south of England claimed that honey off the heather moors was the food of peasants, and were most contemptuous of the product in conversation and writing. How things have changed! The first paper on heather honey presented here was by Francis Sitwell of Alnwick, who in 1912 travelled south to London to participate in a British Beekeepers Association Conversazione. From then onwards the harvest of heather honey from British moorlands was viewed in a different light, and as can be seen from the other works presented here, has become a special challenge for expert beekeepers, including Brother Adam. All share their different heather moorland beekeeping, honey skills and secrets, compiled here in this single volume, which will appeal to enthusiastic beekeepers everywhere.

Pollen microscopy

Norman Chapman, 132 pages softcover, CMI Publishing Ltd

The first twenty pages provide a perfect, clear, very well illustrated explanation of how to collect pollen samples and how to examine them with a microscope. Details are given of how to obtain pollen from plants, from a pollen trap fitted to a frame hive, or from honey. The following hundred or so pages are each devoted to one plant species, where Mr Chapman has drawn the pollen grain and provided photographs of the flower. Most species are indigenous plants or garden plants common to the UK.

The sting of the wild

Justin O Schmidt, 257 pages hardback, John Hopkins University Press

If you are fascinated by insect stings, then this is the book for you. Justin Schmidt has been stung by dozens of different stinging insects, and according to his scale, the worst came from the Tarantula hawk solitary wasp ‘Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric’ and the Warrior wasp ‘Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano’. Compared with these, honey bees are much less worrisome ‘Burning corrosive, but you can handle it’. In this entertaining text he describes his career as a biologist, encountering social insects, including honey bees in many different countries.