Book #8/2019 The Honey Bus: A Memoir of a Girl Saved by Bees

The Honey Bus: A Memoir of a Girl Saved by Bees by Meredith May
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Everyone should read The Honey Bus, a parable for our time, a beautifully composed memoir of, for the most part, a young girl - Meredith May - who, with her younger brother Matthew, experiences the despair of a broken home, separated parents and a dysfunctional mother. Moved away from their father and Rhode Island to live with grandparents in California. Step-grandpa is a beekeeper, has been for many years. A fount of knowledge about honey bees and their invaluable contribution to life. Uses an old military bus converted for use to harvest honey. Meredith is captivated and comes to learn everything about the husbandry of bees from grandpa, who loves her and her brother, unconditionally. Meredith's personality will be shaped by the life lessons learned in a bee yard. Every child should have that same opportunity to grow.

A story of love, hope, despair, redemption - a wake up call to help honey bees live closer to the way nature intended - bees that are threatened with Varroa destructor and a host of newer diseases such as Nosema gut pathogen and the Slow Bee Paralysis virus.

Meredith does her small part - she owes her Grandpa at least that much to continue his work - and she owes it to the bees...

The Honey Bus has left a lasting impression on me and has been an education about the vital need for us to help honey bees survive. Without them we are lost...

The highest possible recommendation from me. I urge you to read The Honey Bus.

My thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC.

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Horizon: What's Killing Our Bees?

This documentary aired last night on BBC2 and was presented by Bill Turnbull who has been keeping bees for 12 years. It was excellent, a well balanced and thought provoking documentary concerning the plight of our bees. Bill said that for many beekeepers the main challenge over the past few years hasn't been harvesting honey, but simply keeping their colonies alive.

Honeybees are the only insects that produce food for us in the form of honey and the work they do in pollinating our crops is vital. One mouthful in every three that we eat we owe to the work of bees, but their numbers have been falling for decades.

The list of suspects that has contributed to this alarming decline is several:

• the weather. This year's cold spring could have been fatal for many colonies weakened by the wet summer of 2012.
• the varroa mite, a pernicious little pest that sucks the bee's bodily fluids and in return injects it with fatal viruses. The varroa mite can wipe out a colony in a matter of weeks.
• the most controversial suspects are the modern systemic pesticides known as neonicotinoids. The EU has imposed a two-year ban on the use of three of them.
• the effect of modern agriculture on habitat. Scientists have started to show a link between the decline in bee numbers and the practice of using vast fields to grow single crops. And here is the environmental Catch-22: by boosting agricultural production to feed our growing world population we are threatening the bees on which we rely to produce those same crops.

Simple things can be done however to help turn things around and as was well illustrated in the programme. Farmers can sow wildflower strips on the edge of fields, which would give bees somewhere to feed all through the summer. And we can all do our best to plant bee-friendly flowers in our gardens - or even just in window boxes. 

It is up to us to make the changes that can save bees.