A Book of Bees
If
I were recommending books for beginning beekeepers, I'd put Sue
Hubbell's A
Book of Bees in the
optional-but-highly-recommended section. The author is a
commercial-scale beekeeper in Missouri, and she writes about her
average yearly tasks with the weight of experience, having kept three hundred hives at a time for fifteen years.
Of course, the reader
has to keep in mind that Hubbell's choices with her bees won't always
match those of the backyard beekeeper, who might choose to be more
hands-on and to delete chemicals from his repertoire. But the
author explains each of her actions so well, I think that even a new
beekeeper could understand why she requeens, lets the bees swarm, and
so forth. And her words about minimizing your intrusions on the
hive seem to mirror modern
natural beekeeping methods.
Meanwhile, A
Book of Bees acts
as an antidote to the factual but dry beginner texts like The
Backyard Beekeeper.
Hubbell slips in explanations of beekeeper terminology, the bee life
cycle, diseases, and much more, so you end up understanding most of the
basics without ever having to memorize a glossary of terms.
But the real reason to
read this book is the same reason many of you picked up The
Dirty Life --- pure
fun. Hubbell lets you into her life, from sipping coffee with her
before heading out to the hives, to asking her chickens to pick wax
moths off ruined comb. It's a fast and fun read for beginning,
intermediate, or advanced beekeepers, but is more of a library
check-out than a purchase. Read it and return it. And, yes,
Ikwig, this is a bathtub book.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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