A World Without Bees

Following the current craze for bees in London with the Royal Lancaster Hotel and soon Fortnum and Mason keeping bees in their rooftop and serving and selling honey, I thought I would top up my incipient knowledge of honeybees with a bit of extra information on their dwindling numbers by reading A World Without Bees by keen amateur beekeepers Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum.

Published by Guardianbooks, A World Without Bees grabs your attention on the first chapter but after just a few pages the book becomes a long list of facts and stats, going on and on endlessly paragraph after paragraph. It also became repetitive, as some of the facts exposed on previous chapters were recapitulated in consequent ones. It did feel like one of those TV programs which tediously gloss over the basic story after each ad break. The book covers mainly the situation in the States and not so much in Britain or Europe, which was a bit disappointing. I was hoping to find myself in an imaginary world without bees, hoping the book would sting my imagination but it failed to do so.

The only passage remotely interesting was when pear pollination in Sichuan, China, was described. As pesticide abuse killed the entire bee population, pollination has to be done by hand, a process which is costly and time-consuming. The process is described by Simon Eade on his blog:

"By the end of the 1980’s bees were effectively wiped out from this area forcing local farmers to scrub pollen from the pear trees, dry it, and then carefully dust it onto each pear blossom by hand. This incredibly slow, and laborious task is still carried out each spring with thousands of rural residents taking to the trees clutching makeshift step-ladders and feather dusters."

The theme of honeybee extinction is extremely interesting and of immediate relevance, since some 15 to 30 percent of the food we humans eat directly or indirectly depend on the pollination of bees. However, the poor editing of the Guardian newspapers seems to have extended to the pages of this book, making it a bore. Shame.

I did however get a cue to read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, which I hope will enthrall me more.

Further info

A World Without Bees on amazon.co.uk
Edible crop pollination and the decline of bees
In a nutshell - Article on the National Geographic website