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Published Oct 2009
336 pages
Genre: Science, Health and the Environment
Publication Information
"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left."—Albert Einstein
From Los Angeles to London, from Slovenia to Taiwan, honeybees are dying. In America alone, one in three hives was left lifeless at the end of 2008; in France, the death rate is closer to 60%. What is behind the catastrophe?
Writers and beekeepers Benjamin and McCallum have traveled across Europe and North America investigating the plight of the honeybee, which is disappearing across the globe at an alarming rate. From commercial almond farmers in California to local honey cultivators in the English countryside, all suffer from lonely hives that are filled with baby bees where all the adults have disappeared.
The loss of our black-and-yellow pollinators would mean the end of agriculture as we know it, threatening our civilization and our way of life, as a third of what we eat and much of what we wear is directly dependent on bees.
"Awkwardly written, but provides dozens of good reasons to care about the disappearance of bees." - Kirkus Reviews
"Benjamin and McCallum, beekeepers both, cover much the same ground as previous books (A Spring Without Bees; Fruitless Fall), but bring the added emotion and urgency of passionate apiarists." - Publishers Weekly
"Now I have nothing against a bit of alarmism to spice up a book, but that is taking things too far. Yes, we have a problem on our hands, but given that our current wave of honeybee deaths is only a couple of years old, the authors are premature in writing off a creature that has survived for tens of millions of years. On the other hand, the authors are correct in pinpointing the roots of the crisis. Pollination has become a global business worth £30bn and honeybees are treated more like machines than animals, particularly in the US, where they are shipped round the nation in lorries like honey-making automata ... So if you want a story that shows how our species is beginning to walk dangerously out of step with the rest of nature, then you need look no further than this highly enjoyable, polished, well-researched homage to the honeybee." - The Guardian (UK)
"Billions of pounds depend on the honeybee's contribution to agriculture, and yet the scientists investigating the new plague struggle by on a few hundred thousand from Häagen-Dazs here, little more than a million from Defra there.... A poorly funded and sometimes partial agricultural science community has a hard job on its hands, at which it can only hope to succeed by using patience, rigorous deduction and independent research. Unfortunately, A World Without Bees poses more questions than it can answer meaningfully, and gives in to the non-scientist's temptation to resort to uninformed 'common sense'." - The Telegraph (UK).
This information about A World Without Bees was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alison Benjamin is deputy editor of Society Guardian and writes on environmental issues and social affairs. Brian McCallum is an apiarist and currently studying to become a geography professor. He lives in London.
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