THE BEEKEEPERS

An enthusiastic celebration of the bumble bee.

There’s no question Church knows bumble bees; whether the intended audience of 8- to 12-year-olds will be so eager to read 300-plus pages on her “tiny furry friends” is, however, quite another. Her disquisition opens with a history of human-assisted bumble bee movement around the globe, from their appearance in Iceland in the 17th century to large-scale breeding and transportation for specialty greenhouse-crop pollination today. Church also covers bumble bee biology and spends a great deal of time on bumble bee intelligence. Her enthusiasm is so exhaustive it risks losing all but the most dedicated readers—a chapter on the effect of invasive commercial bumble bees on native populations is thick with descriptions of experiments and laundry lists of species’ names, both common and Latin. This granularity is out of sync with a text larded with exclamation points in a seeming attempt to engage an audience of young readers, one also presumed to be unfamiliar with terms such as decline or the reasons why pollination is important. Peculiarly absent is an explanation of single-crop farming and how that affects bumble bee populations, though there is extensive discussion of the impact of pesticide use.

Everything you never knew you wanted to know about bumble bees...and may still not.