Bookshelf

BEE’S EYE VIEW OF FLOWERING PLANTS Nectar and pollen source plants and related honeybee products

Masami Sasaki 2010 413 pages Hardback £115 (€175) S905

This gorgeous book presents a lifetime’s study of honey bees by Professor Masami Sasaki of Tamagawa University, Japan. Each page contains many perfect pictures of bee plants, foraging bees, flowers or fruit. There are also pictures of honey, pollen grains, other insects, (a few) birds, and of beekeeping and horticulture, with several thousand pictures in total. The main part of the book details the 647 plant species occurring in Japan that are utilised by bees for nectar, pollen, propolis or honeydew: 57% are indigenous to Japan. Also provided are floral calendars, colours of pollen, and scientific explanation of some topics such as pollination, the honey bee species present in Japan, and honey bee foraging. The text is in Japanese language, with an English summary. However all the plants are listed by their Latin names, together with common names in English, therefore this book can be of great interest for people interested in honey bee plants of any temperate zone. There is in existence no comparable English language book covering temperate zone bee plants so extensively.

HONEYBEE DEMOCRACY

Thomas D Seeley 2010 273 pages Hardback £22.95 (€33) S910

A wonderful new book by Tom Seeley. Contained here is explanation of how honey bee colonies reach consensus to make the right decisions, and hence the title: Honeybee democracy. Understanding how a honey bee society (i.e. one colony) collects facts, debates them and then acts upon the majority decision, will enhance your appreciation of bees: by taking information from a large number of individuals, the best decision is made. There is guidance here for running our own societies and how groups can best achieve optimal decision making. The book explains the recent work of many researchers, which together with Seeley’s own research, provide excellent insight into how simple but ingenious research can be designed and then interpreted. The book contains much information about natural nesting of honey bees, and this is used to explain how swarms arrive at decisions on nest site selection. This involves accumulating a diversity of knowledge, enabling a competition between the variety of ideas (the different nesting places identified by the scout bees), and voting by the population.

The book contains an extensive notes section that provides further helpful explanation of many topics. Seeley’s compelling writing style, combined with a beautifully produced and illustrated text, make this a highly attractive and informative new work that will deepen your admiration for honey bee societies.

HONEY NATURE’S GOLDEN HEALER

Gloria Havenhand 2010 160 pages £13.99 (€21) H800

Another beautifully produced book with excellent pictures of bees and their products. It describes the links between the products of honey bees and good human health. As the book describes them, bee products are ‘a treasure trove of foods, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and industrial processes that bees have freely offered to our human population for thousands of years’. Full of recipes, remedies, hints, and information about bees and their products.

SMART SWARM

Peter Miller 2010 283 pages £20 (€30) M800

Peter Miller uses examples from nature - ants, fish, starlings, termites - to show how good decisions are made and communicated, and proposes that smart humans can learn from these methods that have developed over millennia. From the bee world, he cites Tom Seeleys’ work (see above) describing how bees use consensus. Miller explains how this type of behaviour, tapping into the wisdom of crowds, enabled a huge organisation like Boeing to develop the complex distribution logistics required for manufacture of the new Dreamliner aeroplanes. This book enables us to gain a little more awareness of the intelligent life surrounding us on earth.

STOREY’S GUIDE TO KEEPING HONEY BEES

Malcom T Sanford and Richard E Bonney 2010 244 pages £14.99 (€22) S915

A new text for beekeepers in North America. This book is very clearly laid out and describes all that a beginner beekeeper needs to know: installing a colony in the hive, keeping bees healthy, understanding and preventing disease (with excellent coverage of Varroa ) and harvesting honey. It is up to date, with line drawings of city roof top hives, listings of blogs, and discussion of small hive beetles. The text is interspersed with interesting case studies, hints, letters and facts.

WHY DO BEES BUZZ?

Elizabeth Capaldi Evans and Carol A Butler 2010 229 pages £20.50 (€30) C800

A fun question and answer format offers easily accessible information. More than 100 questions such as ‘can a bee hear?’, ‘do bees forage at night?’, ’what is bee venom?’ The answers are scientific, with extensive references. An easy way to learn facts about bees.

THE BEE-FRIENDLY BEEKEEPER – A SUSTAINABLE APPROACH

David Heaf 2010 160 pages £25 (€37) H805

The book begins with the story of two swarms, one natural and one artificial. This comparison between what the bees do when left to themselves, and what ‘is done to them’ by the beekeeper, runs through the whole book. Later sections expand on the differences, pointing out the impact of, or sustainability of, the two different approaches. Heaf makes use of a matrix to introduce agricultural and environmental ethics into his argument, fitting the fundamental attitudes of beekeepers into four types of relationship between beekeeper and nature – that of dominator, steward, partner or participant. Sustainability is environmental, economic, social and – vitally – bee-friendly. He then goes on to discuss the three primary needs of a bee colony: shelter, seclusion and sustenance. Two chapters on disease and making increase answer to modern concerns. Finally, two chapters on the People’s Hive of Abbé Warré describe in detail Heaf’s own use of the hive, and tips on management.

This is very much a beekeeper’s guide: it assumes a good working knowledge of conventional frame hive management processes. Heaf’s own choice is for the People’s Hive – a vertical top-bar hive – being simpler to build and manage than conventional frame hives.

Heaf backs up his call for more ‘natural’ conditions in the brood nest with extensive research into the literature of beekeeping, acknowledging the bee colony as a superorganism, and principally as a warmth organism.

Intensification, regular opening of the hive, stress from lack of forage diversity or poor management, and pesticides are all practices which create conditions for disease. The book’s underlying theme is that problems with colony losses are nature’s response to inappropriate beekeeping.

It takes us a huge step forward towards a focus on the bee colony itself, inside the box: bee health and perhaps ultimately our own sustainability will depend on beekeepers’ better understanding of what it means to be bee-friendly.

Dr Monica Barlow (see full length review at www.beesfordevelopment.org/catalog)

THE ROSE HIVE METHOD

Tim Rowe 2010 128 pages £16 (€20) R800

Tim Rowe manages 100 colonies of bees in Ireland. Like Abbé Warré and David Heaf (see above), he has considered the way bees live in nature and endeavoured to create a simpler hive, enabling better and simpler management of honey bees. As the author says of Langstroth–style hives: ‘They are restrictive and awkward and difficult to keep clean and healthy’. Instead the Rose hive uses boxes that are all of the same size (when full they are the maximum weight that can be carried comfortably), each containing 12 frames. These boxes are added or removed from the colony, above or below the brood nest, or between two occupied boxes, according to the season and cycle of the colony. This book describes the method very clearly indeed, and like Warré beekeeping, Rowe advocates that bees overwinter only on their own honey. Plans for the Rose hive are included in the book, and have been downloaded by people in more than 40 countries. You can do so too at www.rosebeehives.com

INSIDE A BEE HIVE

Valerie Rhenius 2010 36 pages £10 (€15) V805 French translation Audrey Langlassé; Spanish translation Laura González

This book shows close up pictures of frames and combs with bees, inside a brood box, in August in London. Turn the page, and you see the other side of the frame. Good for teaching about life inside a honey bee nest.

The brief text is provided in English, French and Spanish languages.

HONEY IN THE KITCHEN

Joyce White 2010 updated edition 54 pages £10 (€15) W800

This book was first published in 1978, with a second edition in 2000, and is now reprinted. A wide range of recipes using honey.