Writing Spaces

Read this book if you want to keep honey bees. Read this book if you like honey. Read this book if you want to know more about pollinators and how they’re important to the planet. Read this book if you want to ‘save the bees’, but aren’t sure how to do it. This is a long review of a short and thoughtful book, so if you want to skip all the words below, just read this book!

Making the world a more bee-friendly place is shorthand, to me, for a crucial goal to increase biodiversity on our planet. Biodiversity benefits all of us, from CEOs to farmers to red foxes to monarch butterflies to the almost-uncountable species of native bees in the world, and to the plants and water systems that support us all. Lack of biodiversity harms us. But putting a honey bee colony in our yard does not automatically serve biodiversity and, big-picture, is not what makes the world more bee-friendly. 

As Dana L. Church shows in The Honey Trap, the presence of managed colonies of bumblebees and honey bees in cities and other areas is not in itself a problem for other species. The rapidly increasing numbers of these colonies, though, may overwhelm the habitats they’re entering, making survival difficult for other pollinating animals, and plants. Biodiversity is fragile and crucial, and increasing honey bee density in a region is not the same as preserving biodiversity. Humans crave abundance. But our desire for more of what’s easy too often creates problems for the world we rely on to house, feed, and support us.

As a rural beekeeper myself, who’s done advanced studies in the biology, behaviour, health, and nutrition of honey bees, I am glad Dana L. Church has written this book. Her science is sound, her explanations clear, and her conclusions reasonable. We need to continually ask ourselves what our goals are with our animal husbandry, and what our limits are. How do we know when we are harming, rather than helping? 

Honey bees are not an endangered species, and the factors that have made their survival difficult in some regions of the globe are complex but not universal. In my opinion honey bees are popular, as are bumblebees, because they’re easy to spot, easy to recognize, and relatively easy to study compared to solitary bee species. Plus, honey bees feed the human hunger for honey, and there’s a romance around these bees—how many novels with “bee” in the title can you find with a simple web search? 

But how honey bees live in the wild is very different from how we expect them to live in apiaries, or as single-crop pollinators being trucked from crop to crop. There’s much about our current management of honey bees that doesn’t serve the bees as much as it serves human convenience and profit. One of my own frustrations is that well-meaning individuals do get into beekeeping without doing any prior studies, and without seeming to understand that honey bees are animals, and beekeeping is animal husbandry. If we take on livestock, we have a responsibility to the animals we manage to care for them properly, to be aware of best practices and latest research, and to continue a constant re-examination of our beliefs and biases so that we evolve as beekeepers.

Saving the bees won’t be achieved by having a hive at home, but by examining our own preoccupation with getting more and more and more of a good thing. As a start, read this book.