Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #368 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-01
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Synopsis
The strange case of the vanishing western honeybee has led to fears that we are dangerously out of kilter with nature. This important and compelling book by journalist and fledgling beekeeper, Alison Benjamin, will dramatically examine the environmental, political and economic forces shaping the honeybee's fragile existence - and why the world can't survive without it. Well-researched and artfully written, "A World without Bees" is part eulogy to the honeybee, part mystery story explaining why the global bee population is diminishing and part call to arms to ensure their survival.

Customer Reviews

Timely, persuasive and necessary
If climate change doesn't get you, the disappearance of the honeybee will - this is the rather gloomy message of Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum's well researched and engagingly written new book on Colony Collapse Disorder - a honeybee `plague' which has already killed millions of bees worldwide. Some 90 commercial crops owe their continued existence to the pollination services provided free of charge by the honeybee so its fair to say that A World Without Bees is an important book. For it to succeed in its mission it has to put the fear of God into us without losing us to jargon. It does so admirably, taking us through the rather complicated but interesting world of honeybee health, politics and economics and delivering us to a conclusion which lays the blame firmly on our own shoulders. Time to start talking about bee rights? Could be.

Unique, valuable, objective; a fantastically GOOD book
I read this wonderful book in one very long sitting; I really could not stop once I started. Having grown up surrounded, in my immediate family, by the 1950's acute nature-awareness of the early Soil Association days of Bob Waller and Harold Horne et al, it was like deja vu to me.
The authors have been very disciplined in producing a really worthwhile book; it is almost perfectly objective, and therefore above cheap criticism. They have worked immensely hard to source a huge amount of sound material, and they have taken the trouble to understand it thoroughly before using it in their book. And the mystery at issue is no less than how terrifyingly detached from truth we are becoming, and how little we now understand our own misery and poverty of life in the midst of all our illusion of ease; how deprived of reality we have already become.
Read it! In the morning, the evening, on the train, in the bath, but read it. It is more real than most other stuff you will find on printed paper or glowing on a monitor any day of the year.