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A beautiful book and one that hums with good life. Brigit Strawbridge Howard came late to bees but began noticing them at a time when their going was being widely announced. Her attention has been clear-sighted but also loving. By looking closely at the hummers and the buzzers, she has begun to take in the whole of what Charles Darwin called the 'tangled bank' of life, where there are bees (and Brigit's winning descriptions will help you know them) and there are plants, and there are other pollinators and nectar-seekers, including Homo sapiens. No other insect – surely no other animal – has had such a long and life-giving relationship with humans. Bees may well have shaped our evolution; our continued well-being is certainly dependent on them. Bees have long been part of our consciousness and art, buzzing in parables and fables and ancient and modern poems made out of their industry and their organisation and their marvellous sweet products. All that is in this book: It is ambrosia." Ultimately I think I went into this book expecting more bee facts and more introspection on our relationship with nature. I think this is overall a relaxing and quaint book that fills a niche.
A beautiful book and one that hums with good life. Brigit Strawbridge Howard came late to bees but began noticing them at a time when their going was being widely announced. Her attention has been clear-sighted but also loving. By looking closely at the hummers and the buzzers, she has begun to take in the whole of what Charles Darwin called the ‘tangled bank’ of life, where there are bees (and Brigit’s winning descriptions will help you know them) and there are plants, and there are other pollinators and nectar-seekers, including Homo sapiens. No other insect—surely no other animal—has had such a long and life-giving relationship with humans. Bees may well have shaped our evolution; our continued well-being is certainly dependent on them. Bees have long been part of our consciousness and art, buzzing in parables and fables and ancient and modern poems made out of their industry and their organisation and their marvellous sweet products. All that is in this book: It is ambrosia.” —Tim Dee, author of Landfill The book discusses issues facing bees, including colony collapse, climate change and invasive species (which can in fact include honey bees, which compete with native bumblebees and other pollinators). Changing land use is another issue that can negatively impact bee populations (writing below of potential changes to agricultural land around Sedgehill in the English county of Wiltshire):A naturalist's passionate dive into the world of bees of all stripes – what she has learned about them, and what we can learn from them. The remarkable impact that seemingly passive or insignificant living things have upon the world around us: As a naturalist I found the material interesting — certainly with its human touch more engaging than the dry scientific papers I try to keep up with. My fear though, is that the level of detail will be a limiting factor in attracting readership. Sales may be enough for the publisher, but I don't see that many delving into the contents. it angers me, also, when people talk of 'biodiversity offsetting' as though somehow promising to plant an equal number of trees somewhere else makes it acceptable to destroy old woodlands and the ecosystems that have grown up around and within them." Embarking on her studies, Brigit found that in some cases, it could take a whole day to identify one single bee and so a deep dive into biological taxonomy followed. Here we learn much about the way species are categorised, providing a fascinating insight into the meaning of names given to different species and how they are broken down and organised. Drilling down to the minutiae of every single bee, however, proved to be a somewhat laborious task and another more immediate and satisfying solution for bee identification came to the fore.
As my interest in bees has grown, so has my awareness of everything that surrounds them or connects them to the web of life they exist within. I feel as though I have embarked on a never-ending journey, a journey that spirals continuously outwards, gathering momentum and taking on a life of its own as it sweeps up all the wondrous, wild things that fly, swim, walk, or crawl in its wake.”
A joy-filled voyage of discovery through the wonderful world of bees.” —Dave Goulson, author of Bee Quest and A Sting in the Tale I personally appreciate that Howard talks about her own rented home and how she has made pollinator friendly improvements to it. As a renter, so much of the advice for pollinator friendly gardens is outside my scope and I often feel demotivated instead of motivated by the time I finish the book. So I was very pleased and excited to hear how Howard has turned her small rented spaces into a pollinators paradise and I have now started to research how to turn our own little rented yard into a pollinator friendly environment. Another strong theme of the book is just how much influence these modest insects have on the natural world and, by extension, our own lives. It is only by watching bees and other insects visiting flower after flower, hour after hour, day after day, that you realise the mind-boggling enormity of the task of pollinating the flowers, trees and crops around us. Of course I ‘knew’ they did this, but somehow reading a detailed account of exactly how they did this revealed another stratum of nature which I too had ignored.
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