A World Without Bees

If climate change doesn’t get you, the disappearance of the honeybee will – this is the rather gloomy message of Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum’s well researched and engagingly written new book on Colony Collapse Disorder – a honeybee ‘plague’ which has already killed millions of bees worldwide. Some 90 commercial crops owe their continued existence to the pollination services provided free of charge by the honeybee so its fair to say that A World Without Bees is an important book. For it to succeed in its mission it has to put the fear of God into us without losing us to jargon. It does so admirably, taking us through the rather complicated but interesting world of honeybee health, politics and economics and delivering us to a conclusion which lays the blame firmly on our own shoulders. Time to start talking about bee rights? Could be.