Product Description

Honeybees are dying. In America, one in three hives was left lifeless at the beginning of 2008. In France, the death rate was more than 60 per cent. In Britain, a government minister warned that honey bees could be extinct within a decade. A third of all that we eat, and much of what we wear, relies on pollination by honeybees. So if - or when - the world loses its black-and-yellow workers, the consequences will be dire. What is behind this catastrophe? Viruses, parasites, pesticides and climate change have all been blamed. As has modern monoculture agribusiness. In this timely book, two keen amateur apiarists investigate all the claims and counterclaims with the help of scientists and beekeepers in Europe, America and beyond. They ask the question that will soon be on everyone's lips: is there any possible way of saving the honeybees - and, with them, the world as we know it?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9319 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

About the Author
Alison Benjamin is deputy editor of Society Guardian and writes on environmental issues and social affairs for the newspaper. She took up beekeeping three years ago with her partner, Brian McCallum, who is currently studying to become a geography teachers.
They keep a number of hives in London and are the authors of Keeping Bees and Making Honey.

Customer Reviews

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.

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.

Not as good as I had hoped.
A World Without Bees

I had eagerly awaited this book which I was expecting as a Christmas present and for the first few chapters I wasn't disappointed. The huge industrialisation of the honeybee world, particularly in the US, was a revelation to me as were the myriad of facts about bee behaviour revealed in a further chapter.

However, this is a book primarily about honeybees, not the other bees we regularly see in British gardens, and there does seem to be an emphasis on the problems experienced by American beekeepers. I was left wondering if the problems highlighted in the British press last year were completely unrelated to the problems outlined in this book.

It is obvious that the authors are enthusiastic about their subject, and there is no doubt that it is a subject that needs more attention and publicity, but, for me there was too much repetition in this book. It was like watching a documentary that was made for American television, with the main facts repeated after each advert break in case you forgot them whilst making a cup of tea. Topics covered in earlier chapters were repeated, albeit at relevant sections, but it felt as though the authors were short of things to write.

I wanted to give this book a higher rating, but, although it is an interesting and informative read, I was left feeling a little disappointed.