Product Description

Bill Mares travels the U.S. interviewing hobby, sideline and commercial beekeepers, honey packers and importers, honey bee researchers and scientists and many others related to the beekeeping industry to identify the status of beekeeping in the U.S. and looks for answers to questions on varroa and tracheal mites, resistant diseases, cheap imported honey prices, research problems, the economics of American agriculture, and the decline in the number of beekeepers in America.

During this odyssey, Bill captures the beekeeping industry in its glory and in its wisdom, in its innocence, and with its pants down. He paints the whole picture as no one has done before. He examines, too, the common aspects of the beekeeping industry...its past, the present and even the future, the many personalities, and the diverse parts and pieces and places that make up this tiny, esoteric, but critical cog of modern agriculture.

This snapshot, developed from the perspective of someone who needs honey bees in his life, makes our understanding easier and, perhaps, the troubles less threatening.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #775720 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 220 pages

Kirk Webster
"Bees Besieged is THE record of how economic and political forces wreaked havoc on beekeeping, and our food system."

Sue Hubbell
"A well written narrative that gives an accurate picture of what American beekeeping is like today"

Edward Hoagland
"Good humored, timely, well-paced, torrentially informative...fun and fascinating."

Customer Reviews

Bees Besieged
"Bees Besieged," by Bill Mares is an easygoing romp with Bill Mares into the world of the American beekeeper, as things go in the early 21st century. Bill tells it like a tale, taking the reader on a journey into beekeeping. You do not need to be a beekeeper to understand this book.

Bill talks and meets with all types of beekeepers, large and small, hobbyist, serious sideliner and fully commercial. You'll learn the major issues and the most serious problems in beekeeping today. You'll understand better why honeybees are considered, "the keystone species of production agriculture."

"Bees Besieged," is an easy read for anyone who is curious about the little-known and still a little mysterious world of beekeeping and the beekeepers who do it.

Everybody you always wanted to know about beekeeping
That about sums it up. I've been hobbying with four or five hives for 35 years and have often remarked what a mom & pop industry it is. It makes it fun to deal with, I must say, and in this book you'll meet about every character involved. So if you want the scuttlebutt on the players this is the book for you since the author has strung together interviews with literally dozens of the participants, beekeepers, suppliers, packers, etc.

The interviews are loosely tied together with observations on the current disease, parasite and economic situation. However if you're interested in the facts without the filler there are plenty of books with more direct approaches. If you're a beekeeper you won't learn much new or interesting, I think. It is a quick read, though.

It certainly confirms my initial suspicion that the new problem, whaddatheycallit, Dwindling Hive Disease or whatever, is in fact a matter of large losses due to an astonishing overpushing of these animals in an effort for everybody to financially stay afloat. All the people in the book talk about how much they love their bees. Yeh, like a dairy farmer loves his cows!

This, by the way, was pretty clear from the questionaire Penn State put out this winter which I filled in at the time. It gave the most weight to who had the most hives. Must have been designed by an undergraduate.

A Spiraling Journey
"Bees Besieged" portrays the current state of honeybees and their keepers in America. Hobbyist Mares comes out to his hive one day and finds all his bees dead. His curiosity about what had befallen his bees leads to a spiraling journey to learn about what he describes as "the manifold problems facing bees generally, and their keepers."

Mares is very much the observer, adopting an impartial journalistic stance as his base of knowledge grows. Occasionally, he will venture an opinion or take a stance, but mostly he is content to find the experts and let them be the storytellers.

He begins in Vermont. Each interview points to a new referral, a new perspective, and another piece to the puzzle. The story becomes bigger, more complex, and more important. After a while the author is not trying to understand why his bees died, but what will happen to life on the planet if endangered pollinators become extinct. His circle widens as he travels to the District of Columbia, Texas, Louisiana, and beyond to learn about the current state of bees.

It's not a pretty picture. Bees are besieged from all directions-environmental degradation, insidious mites (such as the ones that caused the author's bees to die), fluctuating honey prices, and aggressive, invasive species such as the much-ballyhooed African killer bees. It's a much larger story than just about bees and honey, as these insects play a vital role in the pollination of many agricultural crops. Threats to the bee population, therefore, are threats to the worldwide food supply.

"Bees Besieged" is a must read for beekeepers, but its also for environmentalists, naturalists, and social observers.