A worthwhile book for all audiences: it is well formatted, educational and enjoyable.
Are you worried about the plight of bees or curious about their involvement in our food supply chain? Perhaps you are interested in their continued existence yet find the idea of reading about or raising them all a bit tiresome and difficult? Perhaps you are an amateur or expert beekeeper in need of further guidance?
Regardless of your standpoint The Honey Bee answers all of your queries in a most appealing way. Author David Cramp talks about the pollination role of bees in our food supply, how bees have evolved over time and in turn, how flowers have symbiotically adjusted.
The roles of workers, drones, the Queen Bee and how her hive are established are described. The cleverness of bees in navigating landscapes, scouting for new hive homes, and their refined language skills, induces enchantment in any reader.
Author David Cramp’s fascination with bees began when he held a very different career in the UK Royal Air Force. A swarm of bees as a gift from his wife in 1991 spurred him onto a lifetime of cultivating bees, producing honey, and researching bee behaviour. This included the completion of a post graduate thesis on Drone Congregation Areas awarded by the Cardiff University Bee Research Unit and in 2017, a Masters Degree in Zoology furthering this initial thesis.
With David’s extensive knowledge base, The Honey Bee is an invaluable guide for anyone toying with the idea of beekeeping as well as for one existing experts. It is practical and easy to read despite the complexity of many of the concepts; this makes it unique from other instructional texts.
There are minimal photos – in fact only thirty pages of them exist within the 200-plus pages of text – and they are concentrated in the middle. Whilst the number of photos were apt for the text, the format could have been improved if the photos had been placed in the relevant text sections as a small reprieve from the ongoing text. It can be too much hassle to scroll back to the relevant photos when reading.
Nevertheless, the author is still relatively attuned to what is necessary to keep all audiences engaged as he includes many personal anecdotes, the spacing of which are aptly timed. Personal disasters he encountered as a beekeeper are sprinkled throughout this book and are an effective tool used by the author to create an amusing interlude from what could otherwise be an intense read. As a result, The Honey Bee is a suitable read for everyone – the curious reader, the bee hobbyist and, the bee guru.
Reviewed by Rebecca Wu
Distributed by: New Holland Publishers
Released: September 2019
RRP: $29.99
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