Mark Winston has spent 30 years studying and working with bees. His book is a passionate celebration of bees, apiaries and honey, as well as a calmly reasoned critique of industrialised farming and a plea to halt the dramatic decline in bee numbers. Sixty five per cent of plant species depend on bees for pollination: “a world without bees would be almost impossible to contemplate”. And yet in the last decade there has been a “precipitous drop” in the number of bees, with US beekeepers now losing 850,000 of their 2.6 million colonies each winter.
Winston blames a perfect storm of factors from the spread of the varroa mite, the over-use of antibiotics and pesticides on colonies, as well as the spraying of neonicitinoids and other chemicals on crops. Research has found 121 different pesticides within the wax combs of hives, a toxic cocktail that has weakened the immune systems of bees. Winston sees their demise as a sign that our food systems are on the brink of collapse: “bees may be the canary in the agricultural mine”. A wonderfully rich insight into the imperilled world of the bee.
