The Idle Beekeeper

April 15, 2019
In this charming anecdotal how-to guide, Anderson, beekeeping columnist for The Idler magazine, lays out a low-maintenance approach to his hobby. Making a distinction between being idle and lazy, he observes that “truly lazy people rarely cultivate themselves or the world around them,” whereas the idle “invest the maximum doing things that interest them, that make them grow.” As a beekeeper and self-proclaimed idler, he believes the insects “know how to do it better than I do” and advises other apiarists not to intervene too much. Anderson describes his personal experiences with beekeeping in London in recent years, from where he placed his first hive, to the mishaps that followed. Though “we might think we’re providing spacious accommodation” to the bees, he notes, “all we’re really giving is an empty space in which they build their home all by themselves.” Topics covered include honey production and harvesting and typical bee behavior. Anderson also dispenses step-by-step instructions on, for example, how to detach the comb from the walls of a hive while keeping it intact. Readers keen on actually keeping bees themselves should find this information-packed book’s instructional component particularly useful, and Anderson’s fellow idlers will appreciate his laissez-faire personal ethos.

May 15, 2019
With the crisis in global bee populations, home beekeeping is experiencing a resurgence. Anderson has been keeping bees in urban London for decades, and has developed his own approach that requires and promotes extremely minimal human intervention. This method is rooted in trying to emulate bees' natural way of being as they would live in the wild, with exceptions only for spring maintenance and fall honey harvest. Anderson uses a Warr� style hive, which mimics the ideal qualities of the cavity of a tree while remaining easy to build and maintain, and offers a few modifications to make it even more conducive to his approach. Anderson's love of bees and beekeeping is apparent and creates an effective enticement for readers to become beekeepers. His minimalist approach provides an easy entry to a potentially intimidating pastime. Appendices detail the process for constructing and insulating a modified Warr� hive; making, insulating, and weatherproofing a converter box to install a colony into the hive; and several other small pieces of equipment specific to Anderson's method.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)