Bookshelf

Where honeybees thrive – stories from the field

Heather Swan

2017 162 pages softcover

A pleasing and beautifully published book: fantastic artwork combined with bee essays, to achieve a serious theme. Eight chapters are full of interesting and informative text on different bee motifs, for example examining colonies, beekeeping in China, problems caused by our love for lawns. Each chapter has its own Gallery of beautiful art featuring bees in special ways. The essays show how people from many sectors: artists, beekeepers, entomologists, ecologists, and farmers, are working to slow down the effects of habitat reduction, industrial agriculture and pesticide misuse. This is a very special and encouraging book - a great gift for anyone with concern for bees.

Next steps for the thinking beekeeper – advanced top bar beekeeping

Christy Hemenway

2017 159 pages, softcover

In 2013 The thinking beekeeper, a very useful guide for beginners starting out with keeping bees in top-bar hives was published. We know that many of these beekeepers, reaching their second or third years, now have many more questions, and here is the book they have been waiting for. This new guide covers swarming and splitting, issues like what is and is not robbing, grouchy bees, and lots more information about the best resource not available to the beginner beekeeper: natural beeswax comb. Christy makes compelling arguments for the top-bar hives’ foundation-free beekeeping, by publishing here the laboratory results showing that beeswax from her top-bar colonies, unlike all the other samples of commercial foundation, contained no detectable pesticides. The thinking beekeeper thinks again, and decides that she is on a good path, making a difference.

The Australian native bee book – keeping stingless bee hives for pets, pollination and sugar bag honey

Tim Heard

2017 246 pages, softcover

This is a gorgeous new book all about Australian bees, of which there are around 2,000 species. It features the social stingless bees, because these are the ones currently of great interest to a new wave of Australian beekeepers, keeping them in their gardens for small scale home honey production and pollination. They are being increasingly used for commercial scale crop pollination too. The first part of the book is devoted to bee biology, Part 2 covers beekeeping with stingless bees and Part 3 is pollination. Every one of the books’ 246 pages carries excellent images - photographs and diagrams. If you are living in a world region with tropical climate and stingless bees, then this book will help you to look after them well. And this is a fabulous book for those of us living elsewhere too.

Tim Heard has spent a lifetime working with and researching stingless bees, and he has generously shared all that experience in this beautiful new work.

Craeft – how traditional crafts are about more than just making

Alexander Langlands

2017 344 pages hardcover

The author, a well-known British archaeologist and broadcaster, has investigated the Old English meaning of the word craeft which is defined: “possessed of an almost indefinable sense of knowledge, wisdom and power”. Of course, one of the chapters is on beekeeping. It explains in detail the history and development of the use of skeps (basket hives) made of wickerwork or straw stems. Langlands’ desire was to make a skep entirely from materials grown in his own garden – this labour of love took 18 months to achieve: “The bees thrived in the skep and continue to do so ... I have absolutely no doubt that the bees in the skep fare the best. Without fail they’re the first colony to get going in early spring, they produce an adequate surplus, and they are entirely capable of looking after themselves”.