Great fall reading with Renie Smith

by Renie Stag Smith

Bees have been on my mind lately.  I’m a new-to-gardening fanatic, and I realize now how important bees are to the entire cycle of agronomy – without them, most plants wouldn’t be pollinated and many of our grains wouldn’t be produced.  Bees enable 20% of the world’s cultivated crops and 90% of our wild plants to thrive.

I’m also a voracious reader.  And lately, many of the books I’ve read either have bees as a subject or bees in the title or both.  With fall upon us, and time for reading a bit more ample than it was in the summer because of all of our gardening chores, I’ve come up with list of books that I’ve enjoyed that deal with bees:

Little Bee by Chris Cleave.  It’s been years since I’ve devoured a book as interesting as this one.  It’s not about a little pesky insect that flies around a bountiful hive, although the symbolism is adept. It’s about a young woman from Nigeria coming of age in England in a detention center for refugees, with a tragic past that she’s trying to come to terms with.

I found this one riveting because I teach Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, a novel about the English missionaries coming to Nigeria and interrupting the Ibo culture. In Little Bee, an Ibo girl from Nigeria is trying to assimilate into the English culture – an antithesis.  Her story is intertwined with a family from England who had visited Nigeria and encountered her there.

It has themes from another book that I teach, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (and if you haven’t read this one or his other, A Thousand Splendid Suns, you have missed treasures!). One of my favorite quotes from The Kite Runner is “A boy who cannot stand for something becomes a man who will not stand for anything.”   Keep this quote in mind while reading Little Bee.  The members of the English family and their problems intertwine with Little Bee and her dilemmas.  If you don’t love this, you haven’t an understanding of English colonization.

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd  (who also penned The Mermaid Chair).  This is not a new novel (it was published in 2002), but certainly ranks up there as one of my favorites.  It’s a coming-of-age story about a girl of the South during the early 1960’s.

Lily, the novel’s white teenaged protagonist, runs away to a bee-keeping farm after a tragic event that overshadows her entire young life.  Lily escapes the brutality of the South with a friend who’s taken care of her for some time, a middle-aged black woman.  The two encounter prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and danger in the small town near where they live. Eventually Lily, whose mother has died, travels to a black sisters’ enclave to be taken in by three sisters, May, June, and August.  The sisters have a family business, raising bees and cultivating the honey.

Their quirkiness, their honest views of life, their acceptance of any and all, should be a shining beacon for us to emulate.  While the story certainly caught my attention, it was the bee-keeping details preceding each chapter that piqued my interest. What was going on in the hive was paralleled in the plot – bees are social just as humans are and their intricacies of life are just as daunting as Lily’s and the other characters of this book.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver (another of my favorites by her is The Poisonwood Bible).  This nonfiction, 2007 book put me on my path to gardening and my interest in bees.  Barbara Kingsolver and her family take a year out of their lives in an attempt to live off of the land, growing and consuming only food produced within a 100-mile radius of their new home in Virginia.

While they move from arid, hot, barren Arizona to an area of the country with more abundant rain, the trials and tribulations of someone who is trying to grow food are more than just a lack of moisture and the Kingsolvers’ true commitment to the locavore cause was an interesting read.

The spring after I read her book I began my own, modest sojourn into growing food, even though my plot is very close to dry Arizona!  I even created the easiest cheese there is to make, mozzarella, based on the chapter on making cheese (the most difficult part of making cheese is finding non-ultrapasteurized milk!).  Her chapter on roosters had me hooting with laughter, her recipes galore for her plentiful produce were easy to follow, and the descriptions of backbreaking labor weren’t daunting enough to sway me from beginning my own garden.

Kingsolver’s daughter and husband not only give her a hand on the gardening duties, but also in writing this book.  She fashions a solid argument for buying and eating locally and one that I’m trying to emulate.

Beekeeping for Dummies by Howland Blackiston (Beekeeper and cofounder and President of bee-commerce.com).  This book told me more than I ever thought I would need to know in order to become a beekeeper.  How to build hives from scratch or buy already-made; how to order a new queen bee and colony; how to check for diseases and pests; how to smoke a hive for retrieving honey; how to capture, bottle and sell the honey – all these topics are gloriously illustrated for the novice in the iconic “for Dummies” fashion.

This book let me know that the best bees for my region were Russian or Italian (I thought all bees were the same) and I discovered where to buy and why you should buy a beekeeper’s helmet and outfit. The book does delve into why we need bees (see the stats above) and what the problems our world is encountering because of decreased hive activity.

I learned enough that even though I visited the Savannah Bee Company the last time I was in Georgia and fell in love with the IDEA of keeping bees, I’m not quite ready for the actual act of KEEPING bees.   Keeping bees is not physically demanding, but the time constraints of my teaching job preclude my keeping bees.

My mind’s buzzing with more books that could “bee” on my list, but the above is a good start.  Relax with one of these books and a cup of tea and honey — enjoy!