Bee People and the Bugs They Love

This ranks among the best written books I have ever reviewed. This book includes great humor and a use of allegory that reveals tremendous background knowledge. Beginning as a simple recounting of initial inquiry, coupled with personal conflict, this evolves into in-depth learning, great analysis of personalities, and a revealing of information that is masked finely in narrative.

Bee people are a weird and fascinating lot; the author delves deeply enough into their eccentricities to make for fascinating reading. Also the addition of biology was startling even to this former casual beekeeper. I had long believed that smoking a hive caused the bees to fill up on honey preparatory to hive evacuation, becoming so honey-full as to preclude flexing to deploy stingers; here I was disabused. Smoke blocks the pheromones exuded by alarmed guard bees, avoiding the hive-alarming mechanism that would otherwise make for a sting-worthy scenario.

Personal development, familial evolution, and growth within the beekeeping community are displayed with fine precision. Conflict is resolved thereby.

The author is a very good technical writer. I am a former, pre-Varroa Mite beekeeper; perhaps my grasp was augmented by mental imaging, but illustrations would have been helpful. This is worth reading even if you never intend to hear a buzz.