A Short History of the Honey Bee

Starred review from May 15, 2009
The world has somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 species of bee, and yet out of those multitudes, only 7 make honey. The preeminent of those 7 is the honey bee, subject of this lyrical new work on Apis mellifera and our relationship with heryes, the vast majority of honey bees are female. Readicker-Henderson introduces us to the honey bees world and a fascination for honey, the product of thousands of bee hours and thousands of miles of bee flights. Whether describing the life of an individual bee from her start as an egg to her death from hard work roughly six weeks later, or how honey is made from flower nectar by the alchemy of the bees, the authors passion for the subject shines through. On the topic of honey, he fairly waxes poetic, eschewing the supermarket blended honeys as bland copies of the much more flavorful regional, single-flower varieties. Mixed in with the deeply felt paean to honey bees are some cold, hard facts about human dependence on bees for the pollination of important food crops and the devastation caused by modern bee ailments such as mites and colony collapse disorder. A bibliography steers interested readers to the old and new literature of beekeeping.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)