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The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America Paperback – May 24, 2011

by Hannah Nordhaus (Author)

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“You’llnever think of bees, their keepers, or the fruits (and nuts) of their laborsthe same way again.” —Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters

Award-winning journalist Hannah Nordhaus tells the remarkable story of John Miller, one of America’s foremost migratory beekeepers, and the myriad and mysterious epidemics threatening American honeybee populations. In luminous, razor-sharp prose, Nordhaus explores the vital role that honeybees play in American agribusiness, the maintenance of our food chain, and the very future of the nation. With an intimate focus and incisive reporting, in a book perfect for fans of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire,and John McPhee’s Oranges, Nordhaus’s stunning exposé illuminates one the most critical issues facing the world today,offering insight, information, and, ultimately, hope.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publication date

May 24, 2011
Dimensions

5.31 x 0.65 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

006187325X
ISBN-13

978-0061873256
See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A fascinating read from cover to cover.” — Associated Press

“Bees are amazing. That’s the first reason to read The Beekeeper’s Lament, journalist Hannah Nordhaus’s rewarding account of migratory beekeeping and the mysterious scourge stalking the domestic bee population… It’s metaphorical and poetic, elegiac and somehow sad.” — Christian Science Monitor

“The Beekeeper’s Lament is at once science lesson, sociological study, and breezy read….A book about bees could easily descend into academe, but the author settles for nothing less than literature.” — Boston Globe

“Nordhaus, an award-winning journalist, weaves a dramatic tale of how and why beehives and bees themselves are threatened by everything from mites to moths to bee thieves.” — Washington Post

“The book is a rich mix of head and heart.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Echoing Rachel Carson’s 1962 attack on the effects of pesticides, Silent Spring, Nordhaus explores this fascinating subject, providing long overdue recognition to the beekeeper and their task as stewards of a species.” — Financial Times

“A fascinating peek into the precarious business of keeping the nation’s crops pollinated.” — Smithsonian

“Some of the best narrative and storytelling I’ve had the pleasure of reading since Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks...You must read this book.” — Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing

“A remarkable book….Nordhaus uses a somber, lyrical writing style to make bees into just about the most fascinating subject you’ve ever encountered while at the same time crafting an elegiac metaphor for the contingency of modern American life.” — The Millions

“A graceful, informative, and engaging book.” — Hill Rag

“Her book is extraordinary in its breadth and depth, and most of all, it is exquisitely written….The Beekeeper’s Lament offers us a fascinating peek into the diverse, interrelated, and worrisome aspects of the beekeeper’s world....Enjoyable and enlightening.” — AlterNet

“A crackerjack story…the author struck gold….Nordhaus is a lively writer who…ably conveys the economics of the trade…and is just as able to describe the romance and miracle of honey….A smooth-as-honey tour d’horizon of the raggedy world of beekeeping.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“In this revelatory, bittersweet investigation into the state of commercial beekeeping in the 21st century, Nordhaus follows the migratory life of a commercial beekeeper, John Miller, as he trucks his bees between California and North Dakota...and, against all odds, keep[s] his bees and his business alive.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Miller is a complex and colorful man, and his story, along with the story of the bees, is an engaging read.” — Booklist

“Highly recommended as both a character study and a compelling popular science work for interested readers.” — Library Journal

“This book is a terrific read.” — American Bee Journal

“I loved The Beekeeper’s Lament. With great reporting and great writing, Hannah Nordhaus gives a new angle on an ever-evolving topic. You’ll learn a lot.” — Bernd Heinrich, author of Winter World and Mind of the Raven

“Hannah Nordhaus has written an engaging account of the men and insects who put food on our tables. The Beekeeper’s Lament is a sweet, sad story.” — Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe

“Rollicking, buzzing, and touching meditation on mortality....You’ll never think of bees, their keepers, or the fruits (and nuts) of their labors the same way again.” — Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters and The Story of Sushi

From the Back Cover

The honey bee is a willing conscript, a working wonder, an unseen and crucial link in America's agricultural industry. But never before has its survival been so unclear—and the future of our food supply so acutely challenged.

Enter beekeeper John Miller, who trucks his hives around the country, bringing millions of bees to farmers otherwise bereft of natural pollinators. Even as the mysterious and deadly epidemic known as Colony Collapse Disorder devastates bee populations across the globe, Miller forges ahead with the determination and wry humor of a true homespun hero. The Beekeeper's Lament tells his story and that of his bees, making for a complex, moving, and unforgettable portrait of man in the new natural world.

About the Author

Hannah Nordhaus is the author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller The Beekeeper’s Lament, which was a PEN Center USA Book Awards finalist, Colorado Book Awards finalist, and National Federation of Press Women Book Award winner. She has written for the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Outside magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, Village Voice, and many other publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Beekeeper?s Lament

How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed AmericaBy Hannah Nordhaus

Harper Perennial

Copyright © 2011 Hannah Nordhaus
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061873256

Chapter One

Fast Cars and Big Trucks
JOHN MILLER ISN?T FOND OF DEATH. He takes it personally.
Up a few years ago he even bought a Corvette, as if that could
stave it off. It was a red C-5, number 277 produced that year,
brand-new. He purchased it just before he turned forty-six, as
the days lengthened to summer?s zenith. Then he promptly fled
California. East of Reno the highway emptied and he inched
the speedometer faster?90, 100, 120, 170. He passed a souped-
up Cadillac STS as if it were a dawdling tractor; the driver didn?t
even have time to turn his head and gawk. Miller likes numbers,
so he clocked himself and did some silent math. Even going 90,
the sucker in the STS had to wait forty-five seconds for a mile to
pass. Miller? Twenty-two and a half seconds per mile. And just
like that, he was nine hundred miles away, in Hudson, Wyoming.
He stopped there for a meal at Svilar?s restaurant with his
old friend Larry Krause.
John Miller is a migratory beekeeper, and so is Larry Krause.
They travel the country with thousands of hives, chasing blooms
and making honey. Miller and Krause have been friends for a
very long time, as is often the case with beekeepers. They are a
dying breed, figuratively speaking. There are fewer and fewer
of them, and they tend to a breed?Apis mellifera, the European
honey bee?that is literally dying. Yet they persist, against all
logic and pecuniary sense, because beekeepers?who have, after
all, chosen careers involving stinging insects?are not terribly
rational people. They are loyal people, however. Miller loves
Larry Krause. He is the kind of guy, Miller says, that they don?t
make anymore: kind, gentlemanly, solid, unassuming??a guy
you would introduce to your mother.? Krause and Miller help
out with each other?s bees and eat nearly every meal together
whenever they attend the same beekeeping conference.
Once a year, as Miller drives from California via Wyoming
to meet his bees in North Dakota, he and Krause go to Svilar?s
for a good steak. Then they head down the street to a bar
?littered,? Miller says with good-humored disdain, ?with signed,
framed pictures of dead liberals??Roosevelt, Kennedy, even
Truman. They end the night at Krause?s house, where they feed
the leftover steak to the dog and Miller crashes out in the guest
bed. The next day, he continues on to North Dakota. Beekeepers,
like bees, observe predictable rhythms, and the trip on the
cusp of Miller?s forty-sixth birthday was little different: steak,
bar, doggy-bag, bed. Except this time, the car was faster. In the
morning, he hopped back in the Corvette, and by nightfall he
was in North Dakota. Another thousand miles, another day
saved by the speedy sports car, one less calendar square crossed
off on the march to death.
John Miller would probably agree if I said that the Corvette
wasn?t simply a way to go fast, or to intimidate other beekeepers
or to impress women. Rather, it was a symbol?a crude
effort, as purchases made during midlife crises often are, but a
symbol nonetheless: of a life unfettered, an existence unencumbered
by bees and hives, by constant death, by protective suits
and smokers and pasture and comb and feeders and hive tools,
by semis and pallets and forklifts and other utilitarian vehicles.
The Corvette was not utilitarian in the least, although it handled
much more easily than a semi.
Semis are tippy and carry a lot of things. Sometimes they
carry supplies, like corn syrup to feed bees during fallow times,
and forklifts and pallets to lift them, and ropes and netting to
tie them down, and a case of honey ?for goodwill at all times,?
Miller says. Sometimes they carry bees loaded four hives high,
which is too much for a flatbed but is stable enough on a drop-
deck trailer. Most of the time. In 2004, which was the first of a
series of bad years for John Miller, his brother Lane was driving
a truck full of bees on Route 287 near Bear Trap Canyon
west of Bozeman, Montana, when he misjudged a curve, sloshed
side to side, and overturned?512 beehives, 60,000 bees per hive,
30.7 million bees smeared across the pavement. Lane?s elbow
was scraped to the bone and he had to kick out the windshield
to escape. He was lucky, though, because some passing drivers
helped him out before the bees were fully aware of what had
happened. He walked away with the injured arm and only twenty
stings. Soon the bees emerged from their hives and coated the
outside of the truck and its honey-slicked cargo so thickly that
you couldn?t see the wreckage under all the layers of distressed
insects falling to the ground in big black gobs. It would be
fourteen hours before a squad of emergency beekeepers
capture them, the road crew and firefighters could clear the wreck,
the state transportation department could clean up the last pools
of honey, and the road could reopen. Traffic returned to normal,
but the lives lost that day were beyond comprehension.
Miller likes to think he?s equipped to handle death. If he
weren?t a beekeeper, he says, he?d be a mortician, with a ?black
suit and a synthetic smile.? He knows how to deal with human
mortality. When a neighbor dies, he is often moved to write
eloquent if overwrought tributes. When a bee colony dies, though,
he lacks the tools to describe his feelings. The loss is so profound.
Many people believe that a beehive exists to support its queen?
that social insects like bees are motivated by blind, cult-like devotion
to a charismatic leader. But the queen also serves the hive,
chasing some blind imperative to lay egg after egg, thousands a
day, until the end of her productive life, at which point she is set
upon and stung or ripped to death. The worker bees forage for
supplies to keep the queen alive, but their first job is to care for
the young. So really, they are tending to the future.
A typical beehive is a rectangular wooden box, usually
painted white. The top of the box comes off, and that is the way
beekeepers gain access to their bees, though they usually need a
hive tool, a ten-inch, wedge-like steel implement that looks like
a caveman?s crowbar, to disengage the flat wooden top from all
the gunk that has accumulated underneath. Within the body
of the hive?also called the brood chamber?lie ten top bars,
wooden strips that rest across the rimmed edges of the box and
hold the frames, which are rectangular planes of wax comb that
hang like folders in a file cabinet. Each frame is filled with hundreds
of wax cells?small interconnected hexagons in which
queens can lay eggs and worker bees can store honey and pollen.
Because the frames aren?t attached to each other or to the hive,
the beekeeper can easily remove them one by one as a file clerk
would remove a hanging folder, pulling the frames straight up
and out of the hive to examine the bees or harvest honey. When
a colony is healthy, the frames are teeming with thousands of
bees, crawling and hatching and eating and working. The workers-
the female bees who do all the cleaning, feeding, gathering,
storing, and guarding?clamber over and under each other
with purposeful direction; the paunchy drones?larger male
bees whose sole task is to be available to impregnate a queen?
wander around looking for handouts. Amid all this chaos, the
queen sits like a rock star in a mosh pit, laying eggs, encircled by
fawning workers who tend to her every need.
That?s what a healthy colony looks like. But when a colony
collapses?when the population dwindles, when the incubating
larvae get too cold, when the workers expire in a huddled,
fluttering mass inside the hive or crawl out the entrances to die
away from home, and when the queen finally dies, too?then it
is an entirely different scene: empty brood cells, scattered
disheartened survivors, plundering robber bees and mice and wax
moths, filth and rot and ruin and invasion and death creeping
in, like a neighborhood abandoned to the junkies. And when
that happens, the real tragedy is not simply the loss of 35,000
or 60,000 or even 80,000 insignificant and perhaps soulless
individuals, but of the future?the colony?s and Miller?s. That
sort of loss is harder to comprehend. It leaves Miller wordless or,
more accurately, overflowing with words he is not supposed to
use. The death of a hive is both mind-numbingly ordinary and
mind-blowingly sad. How do you describe that sort of bereavement?
It is not so easy.
PREMATURE DEATH is never part of a beekeeper?s plan.
Nonetheless, it is a way of life for him, because the best laid
plans are more like faint suggestions when your livelihood
depends on the well-being of insects. We know this now. In the
last half decade, a third of the national bee herd?about a million
colonies?has died each year, often under mysterious circumstances.
Miller is accustomed to losing bees on a large scale.
?The insect kingdom enjoys little cell repair,? he says. ?Humans
relate poorly to this truth.? If a bee is sick, she doesn?t get better.
If she breaks a leg, it doesn?t heal. If she ruptures her exoskeletal
protection, she dries out and dies. If her wings are too worn to
fly, she dies. Even when things are going well, a hive can lose a
thousand bees a day as a matter of course. So each year, as wings
and bodies wear out and one generation replaces the next, Miller
oversees the deaths of billions of bees.
But the extent of these recent losses has defied even his
insect-borne realism. It began, for him, in February 2005, soon
after his bees awakened from a short winter dormancy to
commence pollination season. He had trucked his fourteen thousand
beehives from their winter quarters in the potato cellars of
Idaho and unloaded them at his farm in Newcastle, California,
as he does every winter. He?d left them alone for a few days
while they dropped three months? worth of ?yellow rain??little
mustard-colored spatters of bee feces that drizzle onto beekeeping
suits and baseball caps and windshields and car finishes and
take three runs through a car wash to remove. Then he?d
delivered the bees to holding yards around Newcastle, and from
there to the almond orchards in California?s Central Valley,
where he?d loaded their feeders with corn syrup and waited for
the trees to blossom. They did, as they do every winter, right
around Valentine?s Day. But then a horrible thing happened: his
bees did not rise to the occasion.
February is the moment commercial beekeepers wait for all
winter, when 740,000 acres of almonds flower simultaneously
in the Central Valley. Almond pollen is too heavy for the wind
to transport, so the trees depend instead on such pollinators
as bumblebees, ground- and twig-nesting bees, beetles, bats,
and especially honey bees to introduce pollen to stigma, male
to female, to create nuts. Three quarters of a million acres of
blooming trees make a lot of flowers, too many for any ordinary
local pollinator to visit, much less for the wild insects and
birds that once lived full-time in the Central Valley but have
been driven to near extinction by pesticides and habitat loss.
Instead, almond farmers rely on beekeepers like John Miller, who
descend with billions of hardworking bees to accomplish the
onerous but glorious task of turning almond blossoms into nuts
and thence into money. Most commercial beekeepers spend the
whole year keeping their bees alive and healthy for this three
week pollination extravaganza. Miller does, anyhow. Farmers
will pay up to two hundred dollars for a hive of bees to visit
their blossoms, and with honey prices depressed, that?s the way
he counts on turning a profit. So February was the time when
his bees were expected to invigorate not only the almonds, but
also his bank accounts. His hives should have been singing with
activity, plump brown bees working doggedly to carry pollen
from blossom to blossom. Instead they emerged sluggish and
wandered in drunken circles at the base of the hives, wingless,
desiccated, blasé.
At the time, Miller had set himself the modest goal of ?total
global domination? of the beekeeping industry. His family?s
business was among the top twenty operations in America, and
he was well on his way to meeting a five-year plan of expanding
his hive count by 50 percent, to fifteen thousand. And then,
suddenly, he wasn?t. In a matter of weeks, Miller lost four thousand
hives? somewhere around 150 million bees, about 40 percent of
his operation. He wasn?t the only one. Some of his colleagues
lost more than 60 percent of their hives. It didn?t seem to matter
whose bees they were, how they?d been nurtured, or where they
came from: ?the population just cratered.? There was nothing
for a beekeeper to do but throw up his hands, take out another
loan, and start again. It was, Miller says, a ?profound collapse.?
Still, nobody outside the bee world really seemed to notice
the frightening decline in the nation?s herd until late 2006, when a
Pennsylvania beekeeper named Dave Hackenberg lost more than
two thirds of his bees. One day in November 2006? November
12, to be specific?Hackenberg, a gangly, dark-haired man with
a weathered face and a pronouncedly beaky proboscis, went
to move 400 hives he had left on a gravel lot south of Tampa,
Florida, and found 360 of them oddly empty. Full of honey, yes,
and wax and honeycomb and brood?bees in various stages of
development from egg to nearly imperceptible worm to white
bee-like mass to baby bee. All that was left in most of them was
a lonely, unattended queen and a clutch of attendants roaming
the empty hives?just a pocketful, a cup of bees, not the teeming
garbage-bin-sized load he expected. There were hardly any
adult bees to be found. Nor could Hackenberg detect any sign
of the opportunists who might under normal circumstances be
expected to raid the honey stores of collapsed colonies: no robber
bees, no wax moths, no hive beetles. There weren?t even any
dead bees at the entrance to the hives. The entire adult population
of the colony had simply flown out en masse and vanished.
Bees don?t do that. They are creatures of routine, sticklers for
order.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Beekeeper?s Lamentby Hannah Nordhaus Copyright © 2011 by Hannah Nordhaus. Excerpted by permission of Harper Perennial. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; Original edition (May 24, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 006187325X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0061873256
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.65 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #575,842 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #297 in Biology of Insects & Spiders
- #554 in Animal Husbandry (Books)
- #1,354 in Environmentalism

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Hannah Nordhaus is the national bestselling author of The Beekeeper’s Lament (HarperCollins, 2011) and American Ghost (HarperCollins, 2015).

American Ghost, her latest book, explores the life and legend of Julia Staab, Hannah’s great-great-grandmother, who traveled the Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico in 1866 as a mail-order German-Jewish bride, and whose ghost is reputed to haunt an elegant hotel in Santa Fe. In American Ghost, Hannah examines Julia Staab’s life and deconstructs her ghost story, tracing Julia’s path from Europe through the American Southwest, rifling through archives and diaries and old newspapers, and meeting with historians, genealogists, aging relatives, and ghost-hunters in order to explore the hazy boundary between history and myth. “Whether you believe in ghosts,” said NPR’s Fresh Air, “or are just intrigued by their persistence in popular culture, American Ghost is itself a haunting story about the long reach of the past.”

American Ghost, a national bestseller, has seen critical acclaim from the People Magazine, Elle Magazine, the Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, the Denver Post, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and many other newspapers and magazines. It received starred pre-publication reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal, and was named one of “20 Books We’ll Read in 2015″ by Entertainment Weekly and one of Elle Magazine’s “7 Must-Read Books for March.”

Hannah’s previous bestselling book, The Beekeeper’s Lament, is a non-fiction portrait of a fourth-generation beekeeper struggling to keep his bees alive in the middle of a strange and sobering honey bee die-off. Said the Boston Globe: “The Beekeeper’s Lament is at once science lesson, sociological study, and breezy read…. A book about bees could easily descend into academe, but the author settles for nothing less than literature.”

The Beekeeper’s Lament was a PEN Center USA Book Awards finalist, a Colorado Book Awards finalist, and a National Federation of Press Women Book Award winner, receiving enthusiastic reviews from the Washington Post, Wall St. Journal, the Associated Press, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Mother Jones, Audubon, Boingboing.net and dozens of newspapers, magazines, and websites, and appearing on a number of year-end “best of” lists. In 2011, the literary magazine The Millions featured this interview with Hannah about the art and craft of writing book-length narrative nonfiction, calling it a “veritable how-to for writing a book of journalistic non-fiction.”

Hannah’s nonfiction writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Outside Magazine, Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Ski Magazine, High Country News, The Village Voice, and many other publications, covering such subjects as litigious prostitutes in Montana; snorkeling salmon-counters in Idaho; wildlife crime investigators in Oregon; and dildo-art thieves and dog-poop mappers in Boulder, Colorado. From 2007 to 2009, she was also outdoors columnist for the Denver Rocky Mountain News.

After receiving degrees in history and American Studies from Yale University and the University of Colorado, Hannah bounced from New Mexico to New York to San Francisco to the Himalayas. She finally settled in Boulder, Colorado, where she lives with her husband, two children, zero beehives, and an unspecified number of ghosts.

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ST

One of the most important books you'll ever enjoy!

Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2011

Verified Purchase

First, this book is NOT just for those who are "into" bees, although after you read it, you WILL be! Here's a question: How much honey does a bee produce in her lifetime, which is about six weeks? (You'll have to wait until the end of the review to find out.) The writing style is engaging and informative without being dry and John Miller, who is the wax that holds the story together, will make you appreciate, if not love, the whole idea of honey and honeybees. Did you know that hives don't just sit in one place all the time, but get shipped all over the country to pollinate all those things you love? I heard the author, Hannah Nordhaus, on NPR and bought the book based on that and it has been a delightful experience, you might even say "the bee's knees"! Seriously, I really think you'll love it and want everyone else to read it, so I hope you'll give it a try. And if you guessed that a honeybee produces a pint or even a cup of honey in her lifetime---sorry. Her life's work adds up to 1/12th of a teaspoon!

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Kilian85710

I've loved bees since I was a child

Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2014

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I've loved bees since I was a child. My grandfather had a small farm in Nevada, and when I was a child we would visit in the summer time. I had free range of the property, and I roamed far and wide with his Australian shepherd Queenie for my companion. When my mother would worry because she hadn't seen me or hours, he would reassure her that Queenie would look after me, and she did. When they would come looking for me, nine times out of ten, they would find me near the bee hives. I would lie for hours feet away from the entrance, just watching the bees come and go. I wasn't worried about being stung, and I never was. When I was visiting my aunt and uncle in California, i learned that one of their near neighbors was a professional beekeeper named Knoefler, and there was a street named for him in the small suburb of Riverside CA where they lived. As an adult in the 1970s I took apiculture classes at the community college near Palm Springs and learned that professional beekeepers were leasing hives for pollination at the rate of $75/month/hive. Hives were visible in the fields and on trucks being moved from crop to crop. When the bees started dying, I followed the story avidly, and the threat of Africanized bees to the entire industry is playing out in the headlines.

When this book turned up on sale for $1.99, I couldn't resist. I'm glad I didn't even try. I was hoping this in-depth examination of apiculture would have some answers. It does, but they aren't simple, easily addressed answers. As with many similar problems, the causes and treatments are complex, multi-faceted and not easily identified. For example, certain pesticides have been identified as the culprit, and there was a Facebook campaign for a while urging people to put pressure on Home Depot to stop selling it and to stop using it in their gardens. This same pesticide is widely used in Australia with little or no detrimental effect on Australian bees. Mites, stress, and poor nutrition have all been identified as contributing to the die off of colonies.

I was pleased to see a passing mention of the old neighbor Knoefler in the book. That sealed my trust in the author's research and increased her credibility with me. This is a writer who has done her homework. I recommend the book highly to anyone interested in these fascinating creatures and their contribution to our food supply.

Words I learned from this book:

fungible: goods or commodities that are interchangeable
gallinaceous: of or relating to an order (Galliformes) of heavy-bodied largely terrestrial birds including the pheasants, turkeys, grouse, and the common domestic chicken
senescent: the state of being old

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Marla Spivak

Faustian Bargain

Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2011

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Throughout this book, I kept exclaiming, "Yes! That is how it is." Hannah Nordhaus has managed to capture the special relationship between bees and beekeepers and the stresses both are experiencing. In the end we come to understand that keeping bees alive and healthy is not easy. Some people are quick to point a finger at commercial beekeepers as the culprits behind bee losses. But all beekeepers care deeply for their bees. Norhaus clearly portrays how beekeepers face a deal with the devil when they move their bees into orchards and other crops for pollination. Everyone that eats almonds, fruits and vegetables needs to understand this vital and ironic situation.

Nordhaus walks us into the world of bees through the eyes and heart of John Miller, a commercial beekeeper who transports his 10,000 colonies of bees between North Dakota and California for honey production and almond pollination. John is wacky, inspired and earth-smart, and he is the perfect person to represent beekeepers in America. The book is hilarious, disturbing, and very accurate; it's the best book about beekeeping I've read in a very long time.

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Joe Traynor

Great book!

Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2011

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A timely and informative book suitable for a wide readership. It could be subtitled The Life and Times of John Miller, Commercial Beekeeper. Miller is a character and his presence breathes life throughout the pages of the book -- Nordhaus must have realized she had a gem in Miller, around which she could build a worthy and entertaining book. Miller is descended from a long line of beekeepers and struggles annually, as do all beekeepers, to keep his thousands of colonies healthy as they face drought, disease and pestilence on a number of fronts. Nordhaus expertly weaves the history of beekeeping into her book -- beekeeping has never been easy, and is far more difficult today than for past generations. All successful beekeepers are hard workers or they wouldn't survive and Miller is no exception. Miller is an atypical beekeeper in that he is gregarious, quirky, smart (both street-smart and book-smart), with an off-beat sense of humor that helps him survive the inevitable mishaps that occur in his profession.
Highly recommneded whether you know anything about bees or not.

24 people found this helpful

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RobertoAS

Lots of information and super well-written

Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2022

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I read this book to help me in my research. The book is super well-written and has lots of information. It focuses mainly in one beekeeper, but you get a broad sense of the industry and the author check information against other sources. The only thing I dislike is that there are too many descriptions of the kind of person this beekeeper is and I was not very interested in it (although he is a very interesting human being).

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LL Pdx

A good read, especially for environmentalists

Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2016

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Very informative, I knew that bees were important to California almond growers, but I didn't realize how the almond boom has totally changed beekeeping. Somewhat TMI, and I got tired go the main character - an interesting man,, but I would have appreciated varied perspectives.

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Top reviews from other countries

Mrs K Walters

Very enjoyable read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 10, 2016

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My husband is relatively new to beekeeping and wanted this book as a Christmas present to add to his collection. It stands out as one of the most thought provoking reads.

Matt

The Beekeeper's Lament

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 18, 2011

Verified Purchase

Good insights into the world of bees in a commercial environment. Draw your own conclusions on the demise of bee populations throughout the world. As someone interested in beekeeping, I now wonder whether it's something I should do. Intervene to do my bit in retaining bee populations around my garden, or let nature take its course?

Mrs Diane Crane

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 3, 2016

Verified Purchase

Bought this for my husband who is a Beekeeper and he has read it, said it was interesting.

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