Tower and Town, September 2020 (view the full edition)The Good Bee: a Celebration of Bees and How to Save Them, by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallumBees are in trouble: habitat loss, climate change, pesticides, disease, invasive species... the list goes on. But the insects on which our food supply depends have an ally in the form of Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum, who for a decade and more have been writing about bees and what makes them buzz. "Since humankind began honey hunting 20,000 years ago," they write in their introduction to The Good Bee, "bees have provided food, sweetness, candlelight and medicine. Now they are giving us a sign, like the canary in the coalmine, that their future is threatened and, with it, life on Earth as we know it." In this short but sweet book, the authors - they are married - take the reader from the rudimentary (what is a bee?) to the whimsical (a colony producing blue honey after foraging on the waste products of a nearby M&M sweets factory) to uplifting tales of rewilding, improving farming and reintroducing extinct varieties. The pages are peppered with illustrations: body parts, bees in flight, favourite flowers and examples of a few of the 25,000 species in existence, most of which live alone and don't make honey. We learn that the largest, Wallace's giant bee, is 4cm long, while the smallest measures just 2mm. And while much of the book is factual, it is suffused with warmth. As the authors write: "The poet Khalil Gibran beautifully described the symbiotic relationship between bee and flower that ensures both survive: 'To the bee, a flower is the fountain of life; and to the flower a bee is the messenger of love.'" Ben Tarring |