BeaconsfieldBiblioBlog2

Staff recommendations   - To Bee or not to Bee

We are all so anxious to welcome the better weather and a new season that we look for signs that give us hope.  Still in winter weather I was startled to see a puffed up robin clinging to a branch outside my window with the snowflakes swirling around.  The expanding buds of the trees as the days lengthen and then the first insects to waken are signs that we have come full circle once again.  To me there is nothing more amazing that the bee, the honeybee in particular, and I am fascinated by what these tiny creatures do.  Others are also taken with the lives of bees from fiction to non-fiction to films, they are a popular topic.  In our collection we have something for everyone.  

The newest additions are wonderful nonfiction books like- The Rooftop Beekeeper: a scrappy guide to keeping urban bees by Megan Paska,  Bees: a natural History by Christopher O’Toole, Oil and Honey: the  education of an unlikely activist by Bill McKibbon and  Les abeilles et la vie  by Didier van Cauwelaert illustrated with gorgeous photographs.  Bee Time: Lessons From the Hive by Mark L. Winston (‘’No other book celebrates the long relationship between humans and honeybees as powerfully, thoughtfully and enchantingly as this one.  Written in lyrical prose, it is a delightful and inspiring read’’ – Thomas D. Seeley- author of the Honeybee Democracy).

On the fiction side we have many books on this theme: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (also a DVD made from the book), Generation A by Douglas Coupland, Telling the Bees by Peggy Hesketh, TheBeekeepers Ball by Susan Wiggs, The Blood of Angels by Johanna Sinisalo and my recent favorite The Bees: a novel by Laline Paul, to name a few.